The Spoiler

by Annalena McAfee

  The lights changed, and both taxis turned companionably in parallel into Harley Street and then into Wimpole Street. There Tamara’s driver finally had the wit to hold back, waving on his colleague with a genial “Be lucky!” Tait’s taxi pulled in thirty yards ahead, outside a grand house with wide stone steps and two prim topiary trees flanking double doors.

  “Here’s fine,” Tamara said, watching the old woman mount the steps and ring the bell.

  As soon as Tait disappeared inside, Tamara paid her driver, giving him a generous tip.

  “You’re in luck, Sherlock,” he said, handing her a book of blank receipts. “I usually charge extra for undercover work.”

  The double door was black and glossy, framed by strips of beveled glass whose facets sparkled in the winter sunlight. The polished brass door knob was as big as a cantaloupe. Tamara squinted through the glass into the entrance hall. It was tiled in black and white like a chessboard, and she could make out the curved wooden banisters of a stone staircase. Outside, to the right of the door, was an entry phone with a brass nameplate, engraved with the perplexing consonant clusters that declared this was a warren of private doctors’ consulting rooms.

  She made a note of the names and initials: “Professor Hereward Browning MBChB FRCS(Plast); Miss Isabella Kerr MBBS FRCS(Glas); Rose A. McCotter MBBS FRCS(OFMS); Dr. Didier Mooney MBChB FRCP; Mr. F. Bose Dch DGM FRCOG; Mr. Eliot J. Tregunter BDS FDSRCS.”

  Now all Tamara had to do was wait. As she turned from the door an elderly woman in a fur coat, her snowy hair as stiffly peaked as meringue, brushed past her with a lofty tilt of the head and pressed the buzzer for Professor Browning. Another candidate for cosmetic surgery, innately hostile to the young and attractive.

  There was something especially repugnant about these ancient women who allowed white-coated mercenaries to dismantle and rearrange their faces, like tailors altering an ill-fitting suit. All the pain, the blood, the bruising, the money. And for what? No one would actually fancy them, no matter how much surplus skin had been sheared off or fat had been sucked out. They were beyond desire. Their own, or other people’s. They should take up lace making, cultivate their grandchildren, or their gardens. They had had their go; it was someone else’s turn. My turn, thought Tamara.

  It was not entirely rational, but she could not help thinking that the visible effects of extreme old age—the withered skin, the drooping jowls and shrivelled lips—were the result of simple carelessness. The crones had not paid attention. They had let themselves go. Though discipline was not her strongest suit, Tamara was scrupulous about her beauty regime. She cleansed, toned and moisturised regularly, and never left the flat without applying SPF15 sunblock. Honor Tait was reaping the consequences of a lifetime’s negligence—Tamara guessed the old woman had never used sunscreen and had probably washed her face with soap and water all her life.

  Across the road a smaller, shabbier and vaguely municipal building, a visa office for a former Eastern bloc country, would serve as an observation post. They were not exactly queuing up here. Tamara leaned against the wrought-iron railings bordering the steps and got out her notebook.

  Honor Tait’s face is a palimpsest of experience. Beneath the folds and wrinkles conferred by her extended existence that no amount of cosmetic surgery can ever quite eliminate, there are the remnants of the glamour girl, the high IQ in a low-cut gown who charmed her way to some of the greatest scoops of the last century.

  As she lay on the bed and closed her eyes, Honor considered the pain to come. There had been many worse pains, psychic and physical. And in the scale of things—say, compared to the sufferings of an average citizen of sub-Saharan Africa—her travails were nothing. Less than a pinprick. To make the comparison was an indulgence. No, she did not feel calm in the face of this little laceration. She was anticipating it with pleasure. At least her neural pathways were in working order, unlike those of poor Lois. Prick me and I will bleed, and I will also wince with pain. She welcomed the insults to her body as a reminder that she was alive and of this world. Pain was also an apt punishment for the cowardly impulse that had brought her here, rather than to the workhouse democracy of an NHS clinic. The cost was preposterous. For the same sum she could have supplied clean water to an African village for a year, financed three hundred eye operations for the third-world blind, funded a small field hospital in Kurdish Iraq. Perhaps she should have forgone the anaesthetic altogether. She deserved to suffer. But it was too late.

  Mr. Bose, in mask and gloves, leaned in on her, his implements glinting in the overhead surgery lights. His eyes, their lashes fluttering above the starched yashmak, looked startlingly girlish.

  “Are you ready for this, Miss Tait?”

  She nodded.

  Pain. This is how it begins, the brutal clamour of life. And how it ends.

  Thirteen

  Lulled by boredom after three and a half hours, Tamara did not immediately recognise the small figure pausing in the doorway of the clinic. She was wearing unseasonal dark glasses, and her scarf cocooned her face in the style of an incognito fifties starlet. She was unsteady, too, grasping the railings as she descended the steps to the street. She regained her poise—whatever procedure she had undergone, it must have been comparatively minor—and walked, slowly but purposefully, towards Wigmore Street, passing Tamara on the opposite pavement without turning her head.

  Tamara had to slow her pace, in a careful game of grandmother’s footsteps, to avoid overtaking Tait, and was led, fifteen minutes later, down a narrow side street to the exterior of a small Italian restaurant. As Tait went inside, Tamara hovered by the window, pretending to examine the framed menu while watching the stooped figure, still wearing sunglasses, talking by the door to a waiter. The restaurant was cramped and obligingly overlit. The waiter led the old woman to a table in the corner. If she moved closer to the window, Tamara would have a clear view of it. Someone was waiting for Honor Tait. He was in his early thirties, shabbily bohemian—faded denims, fashionably unkempt hair, creased linen jacket—and there was something familiar about him. Was he one of the Monday Club? One of her writers? Tamara shaded her eyes and pressed herself against the window. No. Too good-looking to be an intellectual, too dark and curly-headed to be Jason Kelly. Another actor? He rose to greet the old woman, who took off her scarf and sunglasses and accepted his embrace stiffly. As they sat down he reached for a bottle of red wine and poured her a glass. It was then, with a cardiac jolt, that Tamara recognised him: the handsome hero of the Strict and Particular hall.

  Was it for this encounter, and others like it, that Honor Tait had endured scalpel and stitches? Today’s visit to the cosmetic surgeon must have been one of many similar visits, an express repair—a quick stitch—or perhaps a preliminary consultation before a major refit. They were leaning towards each other, talking intently, when the waiter reappeared with his pad. The frail octogenarian—looking, from Tamara’s vantage point, no more youthful than she had done at their interview—glanced at the menu, a glossy card the size of a tabloid, and raised her glass to her lips. The old woman’s chief interest was not the cuisine. Her companion was still deliberating, massaging his forehead, lips pursed, as the waiter impatiently jiggled his pen. Finally they gave their orders and, alone again, began to talk, huddled together, their profiles almost touching, the sculpted angles and planes of his face an unkind contrast to the collapsed asymmetry of hers.

  Their exchange was quick-fire and fervent, then the old woman pulled away from him and leaned back in her seat, silent, as he continued to talk. There was something of the eco-warrior about him; a cleaned-up, Armani version of those tunnelling protesters who’d just been evicted from the Devon road protest. His brow was furrowed and his animated features suggested anger or complaint. It was hard to read Honor Tait’s expression as she suddenly reached down for her handbag. Now he was silent, watching her, pushing back his hair with his fingers, as she produced a brown envelope, which she slid across the table. He opened it and rifle
d through a thick sheaf of banknotes. Then he closed the envelope, put it in his jacket pocket and took a quick swig from his glass.

  Tamara’s eyes widened. “Yes!” she whispered. This was better than she could have hoped for. The old woman’s body language, intimate and defensive, and the intensity of the conversation, did not suggest that she was here to pay her builder on the quiet, tax-free, for a new bathroom suite. What other services could a freakishly good-looking young man plausibly provide to a lonely old woman that would merit a discreet lunch and cash-stuffed envelopes?

  The waiter returned to the table with a plate of pasta for Tait’s companion. She had settled for a bowl of soup. “Fluids only for the postoperative plastic surgery patient,” Tamara wrote.

  He was talking again. Honor Tait listened, immobile, her lips parted, as if breathing in his words, then she reached across the table and stroked his fingers. He looked from her face to her hand. He must be feeling disgust, Tamara thought, but he let her crabbed claw rest there. A corner of the envelope was just visible in his jacket pocket. It could not be plainer. He leaned towards the old woman and gave her a complicit smile.

  “Make your mind up, love.”

  Tamara started. It was the waiter, standing in the doorway with a gingham cloth over his arm.

  “Do you want lunch?” he asked. “Or are you going to move away and let someone else take a look at the menu?”

  She stammered an apology and walked down the street to the doorway of a piano showroom. From here she still had a view of the restaurant entrance. The waiter stood scrutinising her for a moment longer, then shook his head and went inside.

  After fifty fretful minutes, Tamara was rewarded. The pair emerged into the silvery winter light, and there it was: proof. He bent his face to Honor Tait’s, and Tamara thrilled to see her story confirmed. He had pocketed the money, and now this striking young man was kissing his eighty-year-old benefactress full on the lips.

  The truth was revealed—“through patient observation, the meticulous accumulation of detail and a ravening hunger for truth”—just as Honor Tait said it would be. They stood, the oddest of couples, talking intently and then, as if suddenly aware of being watched, they parted. The old woman walked towards Oxford Circus while he turned and headed in the opposite direction.

  Tamara felt a leap of dismay. She had to let one of them go. But which one? Of course. She should go after him. She needed to know who he was, where he lived. How he made a living, she had a pretty good idea. She had to talk to him. Without him there would be no story. Honor Tait could wait. By the time Tamara had caught up with him in Marylebone High Street, he was stepping into a taxi. And this time there was no other cab in sight. She cursed herself as he was driven off, who knows where. She had let the key player in the story slip away. Perhaps Honor Tait’s lunchtime envelope had been a final settlement, severance pay, and neither of them would ever see him again.

  Honor let herself into her flat. The moment of relief at arriving home was fleeting. Her flat was dark and cold, more sepulchre than sanctuary. She hung her coat behind the door and went straight to the kitchen to fetch a drink. Now the pain was kicking in—the physical pain, which had been temporarily diverted by the other sort. And sleep would be impossible. She had generated an overdraft of sleep over the weekend. Chastened and scarified, she had emerged from Mr. Bose’s suite, after a light doze induced by local anaesthesia, longing for nothing more than to lie down in a darkened room. But the lunch had to be endured.

  To yearn for something and yet to fear it. Love—in its fiercest and most destructive form—could be like that. Childbirth too, she supposed. For the foreign correspondent in an overlooked region, the local skirmish that becomes an international war brings guilty exultation. The higher the body count, the bigger the story, the greater the glory. And the personal engagement with death? You could want that, too, seek it out, the infinite peace, while fearing the moments of terror you know will precede it.

  The restaurant had been brash and uncomfortable. But if it had been the Galérie des Glaces at Versailles, the effect would have been the same. It had all faded away; the setting, the other diners, the clatter and murmurs. He was all she had seen and heard. His beautiful face, though webbed by a faint tracery of lines, was still beautiful. He still had his curls, though there was now an early frost of grey at the temples. She had suppressed the urge to touch him, to gently push his hair from his face. He was not in bad shape either. A little leaner, maybe, more weathered. More manly. But not drawn and devastated, as she had feared. He was fit and handsome, heading towards disreputable middle age. And where did that leave her? Where, precisely, was she heading?

  “Let’s get business out of the way first.”

  His first words to her. Had his voice, still sweetly resonant, acquired a demotic tinge, an elision of consonants, which she had not picked up on the phone? He could never quite conceal the unfashionable patrician accent conferred by a costly education. He must have really worked at it, but he could never shake off the mantle of privilege, the public schoolboy’s permanent ermine.

  She had ordered soup—it was pleasant to use her Italian again, even for this simple transaction—to keep him company as he forked his way through a plate of pasta. And, as he talked, that familiar threnody of complaint, she found herself, irrationally, longing to be sitting with him under a hot blue Italian sky, at a harbourside restaurant in some chic little port.

  The darkness of the flat was not helping her mood. She went to the window and looked down on the scrubby disc of garden, where one of her neighbours, a senior civil servant, was averting his face, arm outstretched, as his terrier strained at its lead and squatted to defecate in the hellebores. There was a sudden incongruously blithe clamour of birdsong. The leafless trees usually harboured only wheezing pigeons—shabby vagrants who would, if they could, badger passersby with requests for spare change—but these were songbirds. What had lured them here, of all places, when they could be nesting in the oaks of the Tarn, or the chestnut woods of Monte Falterona, or even among the spectral beeches of Ettersberg? Spring was a long way off. Were they—blackbirds? thrushes?—serenading lovers or warning off rivals?

  How strange it was that it should be here, in glum London, that she had ended up. “End” was the word. It could have been Rome. Or Paris. Or New York. It was in postwar Berlin, improbably, that she had been happiest, living in unexpectedly festive comfort after the privations of war, in a requisitioned lakeside villa with a cellar of good wine and a German cook. She had shared the villa with two Americans, who introduced her to the witty young interpreter Lois Meyer, and the rivalries and intrigues of the press corps had been innocent variations of the greater game of deadly realpolitik playing out around them.

  She switched on the light, and the portrait of Tad sprang into relief on the rosewood table. “For all its bleakness,” he had said once, “London is more accommodating to its old, particularly its female old, than New York or Paris.”

  There was some truth in that, though at the time she had disliked his assumption that she would ever belong to that particular interest group. Since then she had seen wealthy women of her own age in Paris and New York, living alone (except perhaps for an odious small dog), wearing couture designed for girls a third of their age, hair curled or wigged, glossy as a vinyl doll’s, and under it their faces, after years of intervention, as taut as Munch’s Scream, the embodiment of affluent urban fear: death’s-heads in designer wear. Perhaps there were simply better cosmetic surgeons in London. What did it matter? If he had been shocked by her deterioration today, he was not letting on. So much to talk about, so little to say.

  Enough. Old age was a discrete dystopia; there was nothing communal about it, no shared experience. It was your own personalised, monogrammed hell. In London or Limavaddy, Paris or Poughkeepsie, your sixties and seventies were bad enough, but beyond that you were trapped like a wasp in a bottle, alone and raging, with the world outside a swirl of colour and distant no
ise.

  Buchenwald, 14 April 1945. Liberation Day Four. I watched the camp survivors, still in their prison uniforms, line up by the shattered stump of Goethe’s Oak to celebrate their freedom and mourn their fellow prisoners who did not survive the brutal regime. Many wept silently, and some of their liberators, the soldiers of the American Third Army, who had seen the evidence of Nazi barbarity with their own eyes, wept with them.

  I left the camp to gather my thoughts, and walked alone in the woods outside the perimeter fence …

  Fourteen

  “Celebrity Cellulite” was the theme. Tamara spent an undemanding morning looking through the picture library’s shiny haul: photographs of off-duty models, actresses and singers, including two Spice Girls, Lucy Hartson, Liselotte Selsby and Pernilla Perssen, wearing short skirts or swimwear that revealed, in close-up, an unsightly dimpling of thighs and buttocks. The pictures of Liselotte had to be spiked because of her connection with The Monitor, but, even so, there were enough pictures of flaccid female flesh to fill a double-page feature. As Tamara showed the results of her morning’s work to Simon, Tania walked by and looked over their shoulders at the vibrant paste-up centre spread, with its bold headline set at a cheeky angle: ROCK BOTTOM! STARS AND THE CURSE OF CELLULITE! Tania groaned and walked on.

  “Just a bit of fun, Tania!” Simon called out to her retreating back. “Prig,” he muttered, when she was out of hearing.

  “Actually, it’s more than fun,” Tamara said. “It has an important social purpose, too.”

  “Oh yeah? How’s that, then?”

  “I’m serious,” she said. “By demonstrating that even the most glamorous stars, without the airbrush, are flawed, it makes ordinary women feel better about themselves. It’s kind of levelling, like communism.”

  “Hmm. Sounds like you’ve been spending too much time in the company of Honor Tait’s pals. How’s all that going anyway?”