The Spoiler

by Annalena McAfee

  Ruth shook her head at the girl’s effrontery, but there were no other volunteers. She thrust a plate at Tamara and nodded towards the door.

  Tamara approached the blond Viking first, bending low over him with the canapés. He declined with a shake of the head.

  Paul Tucker was holding Honor Tait’s hand with a new intensity and seemed to have paused for breath. The Scots poet was sounding off on the subject of “Telstar” now. Or perhaps it was Tolstoy.

  “The extraordinary thing was his transparent admiration for Murat,” he said.

  Tamara hovered, hoping to make herself inconspicuous and to keep track of the conversation. The tubby smoker intervened, waving his cigarette like a fairy wand to make some point about St. Petersburg and the Caucasus, confirming that they were not, after all, talking about the hit single by the Tornadoes, pioneers of electronic pop, but about the author of the blockbuster War and Peace.

  “Stuffed vine leaf?” Tamara asked, leaning into Tucker’s weather-beaten face.

  The room fell silent. He gazed at her cleavage, as if it was that intriguingly contoured arrangement of flesh, rather than the mouth located some way above it, that had addressed him.

  Honor Tait appeared to wake from a pleasurable dream and took in Tamara properly for the first time since her arrival.

  “Are you still here?”

  “Yes. I just—”

  “I don’t remember inviting you.”

  Honor sipped her drink meditatively, as if the glass itself was the repository of her memory. Seated next to the bulk of Paul Tucker, she seemed absurdly tiny and wizened, like an ancient relict of Tamara’s childhood doll’s house.

  “I thought we might have the chance of another chat? For my feature?”

  Tamara heard a polyphonic gasp.

  “This really is an unpardonable intrusion,” Honor said.

  Ruth appeared in the kitchen doorway, holding a roasting fork.

  “I just thought …” Tamara continued.

  “You just thought,” Honor said.

  Was she mocking Tamara, elongating the vowel in a bad impersonation of her London accent?

  “I doubt,” the old woman continued, “whether you’ve ever had an original thought in your life.”

  “I think you’d better leave,” Ruth said, escorting Tamara down the hallway. “You’ve completely ballsed it up now,” she added in a whisper.

  Tamara glanced around her, frantic for one more chance, something to hang on to, one thing that would save this evening, this story, her contract. On the hall table was a stack of mail and a small pile of invitations.

  “Just one thing. Could you tell me? Please?” pleaded Tamara, backing towards the table as Ruth opened the front door. “The boy in the corner? The good-looking blond one who didn’t say anything. Was that Moon-face from the Faraway Tree?”

  Ruth threw up her hands in exasperation before grabbing Tamara’s left arm, firmly leading her into the corridor, closing the door on her beseeching face and securing the bolt behind her.

  Nine

  She returned to her flat, threw down her bag and walked to her desk with the heavy tread of a condemned woman approaching the gallows. Only 3,800 words stood between her and a contract with the most distinguished magazine in British journalism, between success and failure, recognition and loveless obscurity. But the terrible truth was that she had nothing to say. It was not just the job she needed; it was the life. And not just her life; her brother’s, too. With a little money she might be able to reintroduce Ross to other possibilities: to happiness without chemical assistance; to the fulfilment of work and the satisfactions of independence; to the attractions of a pleasing, ordered home; to personal hygiene. Ross could start again. It was not too late.

  Tamara had dreamed of putting a deposit on a rented cottage for him, somewhere safe and remote, beyond the reach of his low-life friends. Maybe Cornwall. Ross liked Cornwall. They had gone on holiday there with their parents before the divorce, and Ross had talked about going back—“reconnecting.”

  He would probably never hold down a job again, in the conventional sense. He had dropped out of school and worked in a record shop for a while, but his shoplifting convictions (he was not acquisitive, just feeding his habit) ended any prospect of a career in retail. The routine, the requirement to get up in the morning and be in a certain place at a certain time, would be too much for him now, though when it came to scoring and making assignations with dealers, he hared about London with a determined speed-walker’s gait. Maybe he could take up something creative, a job where you could choose your own hours, work through the night and sleep through the day if you wanted. Candle making, perhaps. There was a lot of candle making in Cornwall. There were a lot of dealers there, too, she supposed, but if the cottage was sufficiently isolated, it might take Ross a while to track them down, long enough for him to get clean, wake up and realise what he had been missing all these years.

  Upstairs the solicitors had turned on their music. The whole house shuddered to the sound—Tod Maloney, a suburban boy in mascara, yowling about “Life on the Dark Side.” Tamara reached for her earplugs. She loved her flat, and worked hard to pay for it. She would not be driven out. The rent was a struggle, but most nights, after hurrying along the tapering corridor of her street, stealthily feeling her way down the unlit external stairs and turning her key with fumbling haste, she felt a rush of pleasure once she closed the door and stepped inside. This was her sanctuary, her place of safety. The neighbours were an occasional nuisance, certainly, but nothing bad could ever happen here, within the confines of her flat. Except, perhaps, failure and a silent phone.

  She leaned across her desk to check her answering machine. The display was flashing a mocking red zero, but she wanted to be sure. She pressed the replay button.

  “You have no new messages.”

  Was there an element of malice in the digitalised female voice, a hint of jubilation in the emphatically lilted “no”?

  “And if you think anyone—a single person in the whole world—cares about you,” was the subtext, “think again, sweetheart.”

  Resisting misery, she looked around at the sitting room, which also served as an office, and was comforted. With its blue walls, green sofa and aquamarine rug (the colour scheme copied from The Monitor’s monthly Dé-COR! supplement), and the strings of conch-shell fairy lights over the mirror, it looked like a mermaid’s pied-à-mer, twenty thousand leagues under the sea. Here were her treasures: souvenirs of family holidays (the tube of coloured sand, in layered stripes, from the Isle of Wight, and the chipped plaster cat won at a Dorset funfair on the mantelpiece, the panting-puppy pyjama case, bought in a St. Ives gift shop, at the foot of her bed next door); every letter and birthday card she had ever received; every Christmas card since she had left home at eighteen; and family photographs, in labelled, colour-coded box files stacked in a corner, as carefully catalogued as anything in the British Library.

  Gemma, her old flatmate from Brighton Poly, had said that Tamara’s mementoes of her mother, laid out on a small bamboo table in her bedroom, were “a bit creepy.” But Gemma had never been bereaved. There was an irreparably broken coral necklace that Tamara’s mother had worn as a teenager, a Waterford crystal vase she had kept on her bedside till the end, some of the little glass animals she had collected—two horses, a poodle and a fragile-necked giraffe—which seemed to have been chipped from ice by tiny elves, a larky red feather boa, a silk scarf edged with sequins that she had used to cover her thinning hair during chemotherapy, and a photograph of her in her twenties, sitting on a beach, her pin-up’s curves challenging her modest swimsuit, her head thrown back in laughter, arms enfolding two wriggling children who stared at the camera with frank hostility.

  The religious would have called Tamara’s collection a reliquary, but it was precisely because she was unsure about the existence of life after death that these souvenirs were precious. They had been chosen by her mother, cherished and touched by her. Whe
n Tamara traced a finger along the rim of the vase or held the scarf to her face, sniffing the sweet, mossy smell no bottled fragrance could capture, she was holding her mother. Tamara had been comforted by that scent, which lingered like an afterglow for months following her mother’s death. And then one day when she picked up the scarf the reassuring smell had vanished, and she realised she could no longer accurately recall it. She had wept helplessly. These keepsakes, meaningless to everyone else, must still bear traces of her mother’s DNA. And that was all that was left of her.

  Tamara went to her kitchenette, an alcove just off the sitting room, and opened the fridge. It was empty apart from a tub of low-fat yoghurt, two weeks past its sell-by date, a pint of skimmed milk and a bottle of wine, half empty, vacuum sealed with a rubber stopper. She opened the wine, filled a glass and watched the liquid shivering to the vibrations of the upstairs din before she raised it to her lips. Didn’t they have law books thick as London telephone directories to memorise?

  If she really could have everything she wanted, she would dig a trench round her flat and prise it out from under this ugly villa, slide it onto a gurney and wheel it from hard-pressed Hornsey to a better, grander part of town, say Holland Park. She would slot it beneath a big white Regency house garlanded with wisteria. She could take to life in a peaceful haven of gardens, lush with lilac and roses, among wide avenues and interesting little boutiques, a place of silence and contentment where a single woman could turn her key in her lock at night without glancing over her shoulder and gripping her rape alarm.

  She went back to the sitting room, clamped the padded headphones from her stereo over her already plugged ears, picked up her bag and returned to her desk. There was always the possibility that with S*nday’s reputation, once her piece had been published she could break into the American market: Vanity Fair, Time, Esquire. Then there were the women’s glossies: Sassy, perhaps Vogue. And she could always write features for Entertainment Weekly. They liked lists. It was, as Tania Singh demonstrated, all about spreading yourself as widely as possible.

  Tamara opened her bag and took out her swag. This was tonight’s sole haul: a handful of letters, the product of what Simon would call “a little light larceny,” a legitimate tactic in pursuit of a story, especially when the subject of the story was so obstructive. She had not taken too many; she did not want to arouse suspicion.

  So what had her lucky dip yielded? An electricity bill. This could be of use only if it revealed that Honor Tait was mired in debt: “Tragic end of top journalist, friend-of-the-famous, ex-beauty, debt ridden and alone, shivering by candlelight?” But no, Tait seemed to have paid her unexceptional bills, which was more than Tamara herself had done lately. She wrote a reminder on a Post-it note and stuck it on the phone. There was a bank statement, by the look of the envelope, and a doctor’s bill for a “consultation,” which could mean anything, from ingrown toenail treatment to a post-face-lift follow-up. The face-lift option would obviously make a better story. There were also three letters, hand-addressed, as well as a circular for stair lifts. Promisingly, one of the letters had already been opened. It contained a postcard. A dated saucy seaside cartoon depicting a pair of leering spivs in striped bathing trunks eyeing up two women in swimsuits who were holding large ice-cream cones. One woman was bent, toothless and decrepit, a withered granny in a floral rubber cap. The other was a pouting blonde doll with enormous upthrust breasts. Both men, the double speech bubble indicated, were speaking at the same time. And both said the same thing: “I don’t fancy yours.” Tamara turned the card over. The handwriting, in purple ink, was spiky and affected, with open, forked e’s and fat-bellied printers’ a’s, and the message brief and cryptic: “Surprise! Need to see you soonest. No cheques this time. Cash will do. Your Darling Boy.” That was it. No “Dear Honor,” or “all the best.” No signature. It must be a private joke. One of her posturing groupies. Tamara puzzled over the picture again. It was amazing what used to pass for humour.

  The bank statement, though oblique on details, was more interesting—Tait seemed to be nudging the outer edge of her four-thousand-pound overdraft limit. She was broke, and she needed her book to be a success. She needed the publicity, which made her sabotage of the interview more perverse. But for all Tamara could tell from the cryptic lists of numbers, the standing orders and cheques could be made out to massage parlours, casinos or cat-rescue charities. She turned to the two remaining letters. They turned out to be annoyingly impersonal: an invitation to an art exhibition in Soho and a brochure advertising a string quartet series at a London concert hall. She threw them theatrically into the wastepaper basket.

  She was angry with herself for being so cautious and wished she had been more professional. She should have scooped up a bigger handful of Tait’s post. The risk would have been the same, but the outcome would have been more rewarding. She went over to the wastepaper basket and fished out the invitation; its bright lettering, printed over cartoons of old-fashioned schoolboys in caps and crumpled shorts waving catapults, announced a party next week to mark the launch of the exhibition. Of course. The painter, Inigo Wint, with the falsetto laugh, had been at Tait’s flat tonight. Tamara sifted through the cuttings again; there he was, cited in Vogue as a “flamboyant draughtsman using seminal images of British popular culture to interrogate conventional mores” and a “prominent member of Honor Tait’s Salon,” along with Bobby Ward-Moore, “waspish literary journalist and flaneur” (the frog-featured smoker), and Aidan Delaney, “writer of verse as satisfyingly mordant as fifteen-year-old malt” (the Glaswegian leprechaun). In addition, there was a thumbnail picture of one of Wint’s pictures, which the caption described as “a witty postmodern take on the stories of Richmal Crompton.” Whoever he might be.

  In the absence of anything else, the exhibition might provide some sort of lead. As Tamara turned to her keyboard, she felt a slowly percolating optimism.

  I step into the dimly lit corridor and enter not so much a flat as a hermetic casket of memories; the walls lined with pictures, photographs and paintings, exquisite landscapes of her beloved Scottish countryside, old master portraits, the shelves stacked with an eclectic collection of books and souvenirs of a long and exotic life at the heart of a century’s action.

  She indicates a chair in the crepuscular drawing room and goes into the kitchen to fetch a vase for my lilies, which she lovingly places alongside the photograph of her late husband, Tad Challis, director of classic Ealing comedy films. Finally, she sits down and I can study her features more closely.

  Tamara wrote another Post-it note and stuck it on the phone: chk Challis films. Her memory of Ealing comedies—glimpsed on Sunday-afternoon TV when she was too hungover to reach for the remote—was that they were black-and-white and distinguished by an absence of humour and a lack of stars: the leading men were unappetising baldies, and the actresses were either busy old trouts like Bernice Bullingdon or frigid English roses. She should take another look, get a few videos, maybe buy a boxed set on expenses. But she must not be distracted. The goal was clear. Nothing must stand in her way. Not four thousand words. Not anything. She picked up Tait’s first book and turned again to the Pulitzer Prize–winning essay. She could at least filch a few chunks from it to pad out her article.

  One hundred and ten years later, in July 1937, Goethe’s transcendental picnic spot was chosen as the site of the concentration camp the Nazis called Buchenwald. The prisoners forced to clear the area and prepare the ground to build the camp were ordered by their guards to leave one tree standing as the citadel of misery was erected around it; that tree was Goethe’s Oak, seen by Hitler’s troops as “die Verkörperung deutschen Geistes”—the embodiment of the German Spirit.

  This week, I stood in that camp, newly liberated by the U.S. Third Army, and saw grim evidence of the barbarity of the Nazi regime and the sickening debasement of that spirit.

  For Honor Tait, rich girl with a charmed life, the shock must have been great. At the time she was wr
iting, the liberation of the camps, the enormity of Nazi crimes, must have seemed like the ultimate scoop. But from this end of history, the hard fact was that it was stale news, almost cliché. Accounts of Viking raids or the activities of Attila the Hun would have made riveting reading in the Middle Ages, but their impact these days was minimal. Besides, coverage of atrocities was best left to television.

  Tamara had never seen a corpse in person—she couldn’t, in the end, face seeing her mother’s lifeless body in the funeral parlour—but she had attended several harrowing inquests for the Sydenham Advertiser and imagined that for her, from a background far less sheltered and privileged than Honor Tait’s, the professional reflexes would soon kick in. And she was certain that when she came to write up such a story, she would not have wasted space on the insipid musings of a long-dead nob in a frock coat.

  Damn. The phone. Its piercing ring in the silence of her flat jolted her, irritated, back to the present.

  And then she remembered that she had been willing it to ring all week. It must be Tim. He wanted to see her again after all. This was just the sort of interruption she needed. With a smile of triumph she picked up the handset. But instead of Tim’s teasing plea for forgiveness, she heard urgent mechanical pips followed by the rattle and clunk of a coin. A phone box. She knew, before a word was spoken, that it was her brother.

  “Ross?”

  Silence. Tamara’s heart faltered. She had to calm herself, take a deep breath. She needed to be in control.

  “Ross?” she tried again.

  Had she got it wrong? Was it a crank caller? She felt the familiar churn of self-loathing; would she rather it was a crank caller instead of her brother?

  “Sis!”

  It was Ross, and he was excited. High. But not on heroin. Too alert for heroin. Maybe too alert altogether. Was he back on amphetamines?

  “You okay?” Tamara asked.

  “ ’Course I’m okay.”