The Spoiler

by Annalena McAfee

  Around them, greetings and insults were roared to friends and rivals, faces grew ruddy, bow ties slipped their horizontal axes and stilettos dangled absently from stockinged feet. Impossible to tell the tabloids from the broadsheets. Shouting over the boisterous din, Bobby, sitting by Honor’s good ear, gave a commentary. That braying popinjay, an old Harrovian with a first from Cambridge and a doctorate in Gaelic panegyrics, was chief leader writer on The Daily Mirror. The hefty skinhead with a diamond stud in his ear was a comprehensive-educated Dagenham boy, said to have worked as a merchant seaman before turning to journalism. A first-rate sub, he edited The Times’s Court Circular page. The scowling girl in lawyer’s monochrome, resentfully cradling a glass of mineral water and looking at her watch, put Honor in mind of the young Margaret Thatcher, with her bright centurion’s helmet of lacquered hair. A former head girl of Cheltenham Ladies’ College and an Oxford economics scholar, this formidable young woman was now the disciplinarian foreign editor of The Guardian.

  The volume dipped again, and there was applause as the compère took the stage. He was a plump little man with a Midlands accent and an emphysemic laugh.

  “Jimmy Whipple,” Bobby explained to Honor. “TV comedian. Got a gong in the New Year’s honours.”

  He was savagely cheerful, and his patter was coarse, derisive and tailored for his audience. He had been well briefed, and there was strident appreciation for his insiderish references to a sports desk coup at The Monitor, a news desk punch-up at The Courier and the expenses claims of an unnamed features editor on an unspecified paper for weekly sessions at a Mile End massage parlour.

  “No, but seriously,” was his catchphrase, greeted each time he said it with an outburst of inexplicable laughter from the audience. Bobby pointed out The Monitor table, where its editor, Austin Wedderburn, presided warily over his disorderly charges like an elderly virgin at the Feast of Lupercal.

  There were whistles and whoops as Whipple was joined on stage by four young vamps in brief, low-cut black frocks and fishnet tights. Honor assumed they were there to hand out the awards, like mutely decorative game-show hostesses, until musical instruments were produced. They were members of a string quartet, winners of a recent television talent contest. This was clever programming—Haydn for the broadsheets, played by page-three girls for the tabloids. The ballroom fell silent as the musicians sawed with grim competence through a single movement of Opus 33, no. 1. The applause was appreciative. Whipple sighed and said: “In my next life, I want to come back as a cello.”

  The puddings, vivid gelatine squares, like miniature Mondrians on a slick of crimson sauce, were toyed with, the espressos poured and the chocolate mints distributed. Some tables were becoming raucously impatient, demanding arcane liqueurs, and Whipple departed from his script and began to taunt the rowdier male elements.

  “No, but seriously. You lot. Big noise, small members. Saw it with my own eyes in the john just before I came on. Microtechnology isn’t in it.”

  Several men, including The Mirror leader writer, stamped their feet and whistled. It was time for the prizes.

  Honor had anticipated a childish element of intertable barracking as the winners were announced and they stepped up to the stage to receive awards—for Scoop, News Reporter, Sports Writer, and Feature Writer of the Year. There had been some mild, affable heckling twenty years ago, though a respectful silence had fallen when she had walked onstage to receive her own prize. But she was unprepared for this degree of hostility. Acceptance speeches were shouted ineffectually against a storm of boos and catcalls, while more belligerent winners semaphored their success with raised fists, or two fingers thrust defiantly at their rivals.

  Bobby, who thought the evening far more diverting than his usual high-table dinners or poetry book launches, registered Honor’s astonishment.

  “Cocaine,” he whispered.

  Twenty-two tables away, towards the back of the hall, by the kitchen’s swing doors, Tamara Sim sat with her elbow on the table, fondling her wineglass. The evening was not panning out as she had hoped. The food was elaborate and tasteless and they’d just had to endure some pompous classical music played by Goth schoolgirls. She had spotted Tim earlier in the foyer with an anorexic nymphet, and she was sure he had dodged into the Gents to avoid her. Now she was straining to give the appearance of rapt interest as Alistair Porter, the weasel-featured picture editor of Psst!, described the latest managerial outrage.

  “Thing is, you know we’re fully stretched already and once Jamal goes …”

  Tamara frowned sympathetically over her Merlot—at least the wine was not bad, and the supply was limitless—and silently cursed Simon. Why had he sat her next to this earnest creep? On her other side was Tania, whose tawny back, visible through an artful slit in her lime silk dress, was eloquently turned. She was lecturing Simon on the relative merits of various Web browsers, about “the greenhouse effect,” and about Kosovan politics. Treacherously, he seemed to be enthralled.

  All the interesting and useful people were on The Monitor’s main table, 150 feet away. Tamara had located them by taking a circuitous route to the Ladies before dessert. The head of Circulation and Marketing, Erik Havergal, was confiding in Lyra Moore, aloof and impeccable in pristine navy, while Johnny Malkinson, in fuchsia cummerbund, matching bow tie and grey tails, market-testing a fashion special on “The New Formality,” was gesturing vigorously at the managing editor, who was staring aghast at his untouched plate. Austin Wedderburn was listening with apparent interest to the paper’s majority shareholder, a pock-faced property millionaire from Vilnius who owned a string of Isthmian League football clubs. These were the career makers, yet here she was, marooned at the back of the room, in career-breaking social exile, listening to the feeble complaints of no-hoper Alistair Porter.

  He drank greedily as he spoke.

  “Thing is, they can’t just take my parking space away …”

  As he droned on, Tamara clung to the hope that there would be opportunities for networking at the bar later. The decibel levels were rising again. There was a fanfare—a blast of recorded trumpets—and on stage, Jimmy Whipple said, “No, but seriously, the moment you’ve all been waiting for …”

  Relieved, Tamara turned from Alistair to the stage.

  All around the ballroom, men—and some women—were heckling now, stamping their feet and whistling at the tiny figures on the distant stage. The scarlet-cheeked northerner, stout as a circus strongman, who was crowned Regional Journalist of the Year, had apparently prepared his speech on the train down from Doncaster. Prevented by the din from delivering it, he turned his back on the howling audience, bent over and dropped his trousers. He received another distinction: the loudest cheers of the evening.

  “The Fall of Rome,” Honor said, nodding vigorously. The strain of the evening had set off her tic.

  “The tenth circle of hell,” said Bobby. “I’m sorry I put you through this.”

  The scene at the next table, occupied, according to Bobby, by the tabloid Sunday Sphere, could have been painted by Hogarth. One man, bald and violet-cheeked, was drinking straight from the bottle, apparently unaware of the rivulet of red wine running down his shirtfront, and another seemed to have fallen asleep on the table, like the Dormouse in Alice in Wonderland, while next to him a woman with a sulfurous suntan and wrinkled décolletage was silently weeping. A wan girl in a pink slip sat on the lap of an overweight executive and looped her bony arms round his neck. His extravagant froth of grey hair resembled an eighteenth-century periwig and he seemed to be fellating an oversize cigar.

  Honor was tired. She knew Bobby’s colleagues would interpret her disapproval as old-maidish prudery. But even in terms of debauchery these people were amateurs. How would they have fared at Henry’s Laurel Canyon parties in the 1950s? It was the vulgarity that was so repellent. Once she might have felt dishonoured by association, experiencing a sense of collective disgrace in the company of colleagues capable of such boorishness. Now she
felt no connection at all with these people, and her exile from the trade that had once defined her suddenly seemed like liberation.

  It was easy to lose track of the events on stage from this distance, but Tamara echoed the cheers and taunts of her colleagues. The compère was racing though them now; he had reached the bottom of the list, the sediment—Sports Headline of the Year, Layout Sub of the Year, Business Reporter of the Year—and the audience was beginning to lose interest.

  Alistair resumed his inventory of grievances.

  “And now they’re rearranging our shift system so—”

  Suddenly the Psst! team were on their feet, roaring their approval. Tamara pushed back her chair and whooped. It was Alistair, the parking-space soliloquist. Her dull dinner partner was the toast of the ballroom, king of the moment. As he stood up, acknowledging the shouts and cheers of congratulation, Tamara saw that she had been unfair. His modesty was attractive—he was more surprised than anyone else in the room by the announcement—and as he walked towards the stage to pick up his award for Picture Editor of the Year (Supplements), his slight frame and awkward smile seemed endearingly boyish. He really was not so bad looking.

  The prize giving was winding down. The shouts and whoops had died away as diners moved among tables, congratulating winners they had mocked from the floor only half an hour ago and embracing old enemies, on their way to more unbuttoned celebrations at the long bar outside the ballroom. The real business of the evening was about to begin. Bobby offered to escort Honor to the hotel entrance and put her in a taxi.

  “I’m fine. I really am,” she said. “Just exhausted.”

  As they filed out of the room a photographer, taking group pictures of tonight’s prizewinners, called out to Bobby.

  “Would the lady mind coming on to the stage for a couple of photos?”

  “The ‘lady’ can speak for herself.”

  Honor affected weariness as she was helped up the steps.

  “Is this really necessary?” she asked.

  Her picture was taken in various combinations with the winners and then with the compère, who put his arm around her and mugged to the camera. Though she protested, she submitted, flattered to be remembered.

  One of the younger prizewinners, a sweet-faced boy who looked barely old enough to be out of school, asked her for her autograph.

  “You’re a real heroine,” he said, holding out a pen and the back of the evening’s menu. “That stuff you did in Spain was brilliant. And your Vietnam coverage was amazing.”

  She signed the menu and handed it back with a gracious smile.

  “Thanks very much, Martha,” he said. “That means a lot.”

  Bobby did not hear the exchange, but Honor’s face was expressive.

  Tamara watched Tania break away from her Psst! colleagues and head straight for The Monitor’s main table, where she tried to engage Johnny Malkinson, who was now wearing his fuchsia bow tie round his head like an Alice band. She had more luck with the Latvian shareholder, who beckoned her to sit next to him in the seat vacated by Austin Wedderburn.

  Never mind Tania. Linking her arm proprietarily in Alistair’s, Tamara made her way to the bar with the victorious Psst! team for some celebratory champagne. Was it good timing or bad that Tim should be standing in the corner, rumpled, perspiring and momentarily alone? His schoolgirl companion was giggling in a corner with the Mirror leader writer. Alistair extricated himself from Tamara, squeezed her hand to reassure her he would be back, and turned to place his order at the bar.

  It happened so quickly, and the wine had already taken such a toll, that it was only the next day, after talking to a number of witnesses, that Tamara was able to piece together the sequence of events. The only moments she remembered with any clarity were the overture—the sensation of a cool finger tracing a line down her spine—and the triumphant finale. At first she had assumed the hand belonged to Alistair and she shivered with pleasure, but when she turned round, smiling, she found herself facing Tim, whose face was crumpling in a series of grotesque winks and pouts.

  “What the hell …?” she asked.

  “Don’t be like that, Tamara.”

  “You’ve got a real cheek. Blanking me for weeks—what was it, pressure of work? Family crises?—then spending the evening pawing your underage lingerie model over there.”

  He was not going to give up.

  “Come on, Tammy. You weren’t so unfriendly in Paris, were you?”

  He reached out and cupped her right breast in his hand, as if testing ripe fruit on a greengrocer’s stall. She brushed him away angrily.

  “You can’t just—”

  She did not finish her sentence because Alistair was there, holding an uncorked bottle of champagne.

  “Back off, granddad,” he growled at Tim.

  Tamara was beginning to see just how much she had underestimated Alistair.

  “What you going to do about it?” Tim slurred. He was swaying now and seemed to be having difficulty focusing.

  “This!”

  In a single swift and fluid move Alistair passed the bottle to Tamara with one hand and jabbed his other fist at Tim’s leering face. Tamara’s ex-lover, about whom she was sobbing only yesterday, toppled slowly backwards, rigid as a felled oak, and crashed to the floor. There were yelps of surprise from the crowd.

  The head barman squeezed through the throng and rushed to feel Tim’s pulse. Satisfying himself that the victim was still alive, and judging that the loss of consciousness had been caused by alcohol, he tutted loudly and went to fetch the hotel doctor. Tim’s jaw slackened, and he began to snore loudly. The crowd around him laughed, relieved yet disappointed, and began to disperse. Someone took a playful kick at the recumbent figure while senior editors from The Sphere stood around awkwardly, trying to gauge the acceptable response. Should they defend their boss’s honour and take out the wide boys from Psst!, or should they laugh it off and order another round? None of them really had any taste for action. The boss would get over it, if he even remembered it. The night had only just started, the bar was still free and there were some likely girls around clearly looking for action of another sort.

  At the bar Tamara fussed over the fine spray of blood—Tim’s—stippling Alistair’s white shirt. Arms linked, they walked towards the hotel reception to book a room for the night, and as they passed Tim, still stretched out on the floor, she upended the bottle she was carrying, sending a stream of champagne splashing over his sleeping head.

  It was late but, back at her flat, Honor felt an urge to continue the purification ritual she had started on the morning of that dreadful interview. Was it a fortnight ago? She turned on the radio—a documentary about preparations for the handover of Hong Kong—and turned it off again, then went to the bookshelves and upended a pile of books and magazines: a Christie’s catalogue for a photography sale, a critical study of Lucian Freud’s work, a couple of New York Reviews. More candidates for permanent exile. She gathered up a history of the Scottish Enlightenment, the latest New Statesman, Ian Crichton Smith—generating a light shower of bills, receipts and, aptly cruel, an old card from Lois, who had bought the book on the Enlightenment when history, her own included, was still accessible to her.

  Honor poured herself another drink and sat down by the fire, the scattered books still lying at her feet. She picked up the card. Graphology was obvious tosh but in Lois’s large-looped handwriting Honor had always seen the mark of her nature: optimistic, impatient and avid for experience, excitement and answers. Lois had been a great encourager, too, and had followed Honor’s career with an attention that it had never occurred to Honor to reciprocate.

  Lois would send detailed and critically intelligent letters about each of Honor’s articles and had suggested several of her best stories, tipping her off about Mme Chiang Kai-shek’s whereabouts, setting up her interviews with MacArthur, Henry Wallace and Dominic Behan, proposing her report on the return trip to Weimar, on the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of
Buchenwald, and arranging the visit to the orphanage. She had even brokered that article’s publication in Time, through an old neighbour from her Brentwood days, when Honor was in the wilderness, personally and professionally. Lois had been her supporter and her sounding board. There was so much to tell her, and ask her, now. The squalor of the evening seemed a reflection of Honor’s personal disgrace. It wasn’t until Lois became so definitively unavailable that Honor realised how much she had depended on her. She put down her glass. This was a pain she could choose to indulge, or not. She tore the card in two, poured another drink and picked up the proofs of The Unflinching Eye.

  More reports on Korean skirmishes. The Kŭm River … Sumgyo … Amsong … Pusan … Advance … Retreat … Attack … Counterattack … She closed her eyes. This faithful accounting of troop movements and battle positions had once mattered so much to her. Now it seemed as effortful and pointless as one of those dreadful dances she had been forced to endure as a child. Pointless and murderous—a deadly Dashing White Sergeant.

  She was exhausted but knew she could not sleep. She was beating her own ignominious retreat. In the time that remained she should get her affairs in order. She reached for her notebook.

  Buchenwald, 14 April 1945. Liberation Day Four. They gathered in their prison uniforms for a liberation parade by the stump of that great symbol, Goethe’s Oak, and waved their national flags.

  It was under this once mighty tree on Ettersberg Mountain that the poet was said to have picnicked in the golden light of an autumn day in 1827, gazing out over the city of Weimar below and exulting in the glory of nature and the greatness of man. This tree had become a dual symbol, representing an ancestral dream of fascist supremacy to the Third Reich and, to its prisoners, signifying the enlightened humanism of pre-Nazi Germany.