The Spoiler Page 3

  She should have thrown the postcard out months ago; it was only accumulating dust. She tore it up and reminded herself that she should dispose of another, more recent, card, still in its envelope in the hall. It was a crude Donald McGill caricature, of ogling boors and oversize mammaries, with a jeering note on the back, part summons, part begging letter, that might raise an inquisitive journalistic eyebrow. She would deal with it later. Her attention must not wander from the sitting room. This was to be the only theatre of action.

  Coiled around the base of an ormolu clock on the mantelpiece was a string of jade komboloi, worry beads, a souvenir from the Cyclades. They could stay, surely, along with Tad’s Staffordshire kiltie—it would take a severely inflamed imagination to make anything of either of them. The death mask of Keats, a present from Tad after their reconciliation in Rome, and a little nun in snow globe—a jokey trifle from Lois—were, surely, also unexceptional. But the winged marble phallus, a replica of a Pompeian household god—a votive offering from Lucio, the skittish Tuscan youth, which Tad had, in a benign moment, found droll—could be more problematic. She cradled the cool stone in her hand. Was she being overscrupulous? Best to play safe. She scooped up the Little Sister of the Snows, too. Nuns and penises: a desperate journalist might make something of the pairing. Honor might have done so herself in similar circumstances.

  She had cleared a space—an oubliette—in the utility cupboard in the hall. What rubbish you can accumulate in a lifetime; vast midden mounds of it, trash troves, even with natural wastage and an abhorrence of bibelots. It seemed that after all, despite her efforts and inclinations, she had ended up as a full-time curator of “stuff.” A rag-and-bone woman. That most of it had once been Tad’s was irrelevant. It was hers now, this little museum of nostalgic juju, and dismantling it entirely would require an effort of will that was beyond her.

  Sometimes, on those days when she left the flat, for a publishing lunch with Ruth, perhaps, or a vernissage with Clemency or Inigo, or an evening of chamber music or theatre with Bobby or Aidan, she had an urge to keep walking, to take a taxi to the airport, fly to a city she had never been to in a country she barely knew, and start again. Rented rooms, few possessions, no damned pictures, books or worthless trinkets. Maybe she would find that, along with the jetsam, she had also discarded the wasted years and the physical shame of old age. She could have another go, and get it right this time.

  As she placed her haul on the deep shelf behind the vacuum cleaner, it occurred to her that she might never retrieve this clutter. Only a residual fondness for Tad, who found her periodic purges of possessions physically painful, stopped Honor from throwing the lot down the garbage chute.

  Now the books. She dragged a footstool to the shelf and sat down to consider them, resisting the urge to close her eyes even for a second. She had to concentrate. Was she succumbing to paranoia? She was always alert to the possibility of incipient dementia now, having barely noticed the memory lapses and confusions that had signalled the early stages of Alzheimer’s in her friend Lois.

  Once, when Honor was too young to know better, she had bought the line that old age had its compensations, among them an indifference to the opinions of others. But here she was, scurrying about, fussing, tiring herself out, in the hope of making a good impression on Tamara Sim and her readers. Was this a reasonable defence against ridicule? No one relishes humiliation, whatever their age. Or was she losing her grip? A recent spate of silent phone calls had unsettled her. There had been crank calls in the past, and she and Tad had changed their number twice. It was a straightforward matter. But now, instead of taking action, putting in the necessary request to British Telecom, she did nothing and found herself eyeing the phone fearfully, starting whenever it rang.

  Only last week she had read in the paper of a condition in the elderly called paraphrenia, whose symptoms—delusions of persecution, the obsessive sense that neighbours, friends, family, strangers, were out to get you—seemed resonant. She knew that her story was of accelerating decline, even if she was lucky enough to retain her wits. The inexorable dwindling, the grotesque cascade of infirmities, had started years ago. Some days Honor felt like Job, waiting for the next plague of boils. Unlike Job, though, she knew there was no one to blame. She had become resigned to her role as a reluctant archivist of the physical afflictions of age, burdened with the wearisome naming and shaming of parts. But madness? That would be intolerable.

  She picked out a handful of books from the shelf, cradling them awkwardly in the crook of her arm. Whenever she was beset by anxieties, she forced herself to step back, to examine her hold on reason. She knew her concerns about allowing the interviewer into her flat were sound; as ghillie-turned-grouse she knew the tricks and could set the traps herself. She had evaluated many men and a few women, personally and professionally, on the basis of their bookshelves. Raoul Salan’s incongruous copy of Le Petit Prince, for example. Maybe she had made too much of Harold Wilson’s Naugahyde-bound set of Catherine Cookson. They had not, he complained after her article was published, belonged to him. More satisfyingly, the Vatican had launched a minor inquisition after her glimpse, reported in Collier’s, of The Story of O alongside The Cloud of Unknowing in the Apostolic Library. And the sight of a first edition of Winnie-the-Pooh on the bedside table of a fifties matinee idol had sent her scrambling for her clothes and fleeing into the Santa Monica night.

  Today she faced a reckoning of her own. Graham’s novels: first-edition hardbacks, signed. There was no point in dissembling, and she was not going to carry all thirty-four volumes to the utility cupboard. But Isadora Talbot’s Snatch the Hour? How did that get in here? Tamara Sim might assume she subscribed to Talbot’s lurid brand of feminism, though Honor had no wish to read any of her books. Why would she choose to spend time in the company of a shrill blowhard who had made a manifesto out of menopausal self-pity?

  Honor was constantly sent unsolicited books, which she automatically put in a pile by the front door for disposal, along with old newspapers and magazines. The maid, an uncommunicative refugee from Rwanda, must have thought this hardback had been cast out in error with all those pastel softback proofs. There were few more depressing sounds than that of a weighty Jiffy bag squeezing through the letterbox, then thudding onto the doormat. Publishers seemed to assume that Honor’s remaining years could be usefully occupied reading feather-brained fables and supplying superlatives—free of charge—to be quoted on their jackets.

  Now, she scolded herself, where was she? Poetry: Aidan’s three collections, Eliot, MacNeice and Larkin. A BFI-sanctioned critical biography of Tad’s work, dull as an instruction manual for a washing machine. Some photography books: her own collaborations with Capa and Bown—the Magnum era. Ah! What was this? The Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Plans for Physical Fitness, an old orange-spined Penguin promising health, beauty and eternal life in exchange for fifteen minutes of boredom and degradation each day. Tad, who had never consciously taken exercise in his life, had said he felt immeasurably leaner and healthier just seeing it on the shelves. There could be few more comic aspirations than fitness in the over-seventies. You were not supposed to care that your body had become a sack of putrefying flesh, and the hope that you could arrest the process and avert imminent extinction with a few daily physical contortions was the highest folly. Out with it, along with R. D. Laing, Alan Watts, Carlos Castaneda—hokum Tad must have picked up in his Haight-Ashbury days.

  She slung them on the reject pile. She needed to rationalise her shelves anyway. They could bypass the storage; straight down the chute with them. She would put them in a bag by the front door with a note for the maid, along with the bundle of largely unread Christmas and New Year newspapers—so much television trivia; why would she ever want to read a supplement with a picture of Bing Crosby on the cover? And did they seriously think a free packet of poinsettia seeds or aspirin would entice new readers?

  She had a last look around the room. The maid, sent to buy flowers, had
come back with some sinister pink lilies, their inflamed throats exhaling a scent that made Honor’s eyes water, and placed them in a vase next to the photograph of Tad. The table now looked like a wayside altar, and the copy of her new book, Dispatches, lay there like a mockery of a sacred text: Miserere mei. Still, the bouquet might usefully insinuate an element of femininity into the flat. She could not abide cut flowers of any sort herself; they reminded her of funeral parlours. Friends knew better than to bring them but, occasionally, new initiates to her suppers would present an elaborate bunch in an attempt at ingratiation. She would feign enthusiasm and leave the flowers soaking in the sink, saying she would find a container for them later. It was always the maid who rescued them, snipping the stems and arranging them carefully, and throwing them out when the petals shrivelled and the water began to stink like a latrine.

  Honor paused by the window, drawn by the sound of an infant’s shout, like the call of a seabird, from the communal garden below. A young mother, or possibly a nanny, was pushing a small child on a swing hitched to the bare lower branches of a plane tree.

  The garden was technically owned by the residents of the four mansion blocks in whose back courtyards it lay. The residents’ committee, a collection of time-rich busybodies, had recently, after energetic lobbying from the young parents who had flooded the neighbourhood, installed the children’s swing in the garden, disregarding the hundred-year-old bylaw forbidding ball games and amusements.

  The scrubby circle of green was ringed by a black wrought-iron fence which gave an imperilled air, like an enclosure of endangered species at the zoo, to its alopecic grass, dormant flowerbeds, sooty shrubs and cluster of threadbare beeches shivering in the shade of two menacing plane trees. There was another yelp from the child, a two-tone klaxon of protest, and he slipped off the swing into his mother’s arms and out of Honor’s view. Time was running out.

  She went into the bathroom to check for stains and smells; she had no wish to confirm stereotypes about elderly incontinence and knew that for an unfriendly reporter, a quick mid-interview trip to the lavatory could be fruitful. Even in featureless hotel suites, sans stray underpants, there can be choice pickings for the inquisitive in the bathroom. She remembered the satisfying discovery of a bottle of Grecian 2000 in Saigon, by the sink of Nguyen Van Minh, the monosyllabic Vietnamese army commander. Here, the Lowe cartoon, above the cistern, of Honor as a young Brünnhilde dragging Hitler and Stalin by the hair was inoffensive, but the athlete’s-foot powder and haemorrhoid cream (more legacies from Tad) by the bath were ripe for ridicule. As was the jar of Youth Dew face cream, an unconsciously cruel present, probably bought in an airport duty-free shop, from Tad’s beautiful goddaughter.

  The bathroom cabinet in particular could yield a hoard of unsavoury truths. Hers contained a miniature pharmacy of prescription pills, ointments and tinctures, each preparation telling its own squalid story. Honor doubted whether Tamara Sim could distinguish between benzodiazepines and nicardipines, but she could not be sure. She swept the lot into a plastic bag to be stowed away, leaving a toothbrush (her teeth were, mostly, her own, though some were brown as shards of sucked toffee), a modest bottle of scent, a packet of aspirins and a box of plasters.

  Ten minutes left. She was beginning to feel breathless again, and the pain was becoming more insistent. She fetched a glass of water, retrieved her pills and swallowed two. She should sit down, but it was time to turn attention to herself. Clean, kempt and dignified was the best one could hope for these days. She once had, when younger, a weakness for clothes: clever cuts, sensual fabrics, muted colours borrowed from the autumnal Highland landscape, witty details. In her fiftieth year, staring into the brimming chasm of her Glenbuidhe dressing room, a comprehensive museum of mid-twentieth-century fashion gently rotting in the Scottish damp, she realised that, from this point on, even if she were to choose a different ensemble every day, she could never live long enough to wear it all. She was subsequently proved wrong, and had long outlived her wardrobe; the purge, started that afternoon, was decisively completed almost a quarter of a century later by the fire. Now her single closet in Holmbrook Mansions would not disgrace a nun.

  She chose a black jersey dress, recently dry cleaned: a simple draped column, square necked with bell sleeves, worn with black tights to conceal the Stilton marbling of veins, and grey patent pumps, wide enough at the toes to accommodate the bunions. She looked down at her stockinged feet, as unsightly as lepers’ stumps. What joker had turned this Miranda into Caliban? Fumbling with the catch, she fastened a necklace of freshwater pearls round her neck, then secured a gold watch, its face ringed by marcasite, round her wrist. Even at its tightest notch, the watch hung loose as a charm bracelet.

  She went back into the bathroom and peered into the misted mirror on the cabinet. It was the only looking glass left in her flat since she had the liberating realisation that the best way to combat anguish at one’s deteriorating appearance was to stop gazing at it; if she wished, she could look at the monochrome photograph of her Dietrich days and remember. Even then, one had to be careful. In certain lights the glass in the photo frame could play tricks, superimposing the reflected silhouette of her shrunken self onto the insouciant belle.

  She pinned back her hair, grey and insubstantial as cigarette smoke, into an approximation of a chignon. Lipstick? Eyeshadow? She decided against them. Better to face the camera barefaced than with the skewed clowns’ daubs conferred by shaky hands and failing eyesight. From the cabinet she took the bottle of scent, brought from Budapest by Aidan, and sprayed it behind her ears. Then she sprayed it round the bathroom. She was ready for her interrogator.

  Sitting in a café opposite Honor Tait’s Gothic red-brick mansion block, sipping a lukewarm coffee, Tamara looked through the cuttings. Bucknell was late. When The Monitor’s picture desk told her he was the only photographer available for the interview, she had been furious. Why not Snowdon? Or Bown? Once Lyra Moore learned that the lowly Bucknell had been entrusted with a S*nday job, she would be livid. Tamara had tried to alert her, but Lyra never replied to her electronic messages and, whenever Tamara phoned her, she was always in a meeting. Bucknell was charmless, awkward and surly, a clammy-handed chain smoker whose pictures were flat, straight-to-camera portraits as dreary as police mug shots. He was the worst possible collaborator on a sensitive interview like this.

  There was no way of contacting him; Tamara was too junior at The Monitor, and Bucknell too unpopular, to be allocated one of the rare company mobile phones. She could try to find a public call box and ring the office. The picture desk could page him (Bucknell at least had a pager—hers had been pickpocketed on the bus before Christmas), and they could also ring Honor Tait’s publisher to apologise and warn her of their late arrival. But the chances were that Tamara would spend twenty minutes trying to find a call box, only to discover that the booth had been used as a wino’s toilet and the handset had been vandalised. She cursed Bucknell. Then again, the delay would give her time to mug up on her research.

  Honor Tait had been prolific. Tamara wondered what an envelope of her own clippings would look like twenty years from now. She was, at this stage, more resourceful than prolific, an expert recycler of her own work. The green lobby might learn from her energy conservation techniques. Sometimes she would rewrite and re-angle the same story four or even five times, selling it on to different outlets. Her interview with Lucy Hartson, for example, had been commissioned last year by Psst!, and set up by the TV public relations company to publicise Lady of Quality, the new prime-time costume drama. It was a straightforward puff—“ ‘I’ve always admired Georgette Heyer’s writing,’ says Lucy … ‘It’s such a privilege to work with such a talented cast … Next, I’d really like to get my teeth into a tough modern role, maybe an edgy detective series.’ ” Frustratingly, the actress refused to be drawn on her former boyfriend, Tod Maloney, narcophiliac bass player with the Broken Biscuits, saying only that “we were very different people,” “it
was time to move on” and claiming that the split had been “entirely amicable”—a wan euphemism belied the previous month by paparazzi pictures of their fistfight outside a Soho nightclub. But Tamara had managed to siphon off a few quotes for an article about the actress’s new flat in Islington—“The bathroom, a cool haven of limestone and brushed steel, aspires to a luxury spa aesthetic”—for the Telegraph property pages; wrote the caption story for a picture spread on doomed rock ’n’ roll romances for the features pages of The Courier; and padded out Hartson’s confessional aside about her trips to Los Angeles for injections of a muscle-paralysing toxin—“everyone in the business out there has had a face-full of the stuff, believe me”—turning it into a full-page exposé in The Evening Standard.

  Most lucrative of all was the follow-up. Before the interview appeared in Psst!, Tamara called Maloney, out on bail following a drugs raid at a recent gig, made a few flattering remarks about his latest album, informed him that Lucy Hartson had “told us everything” about their break-up, and offered him a chance to tell his side of the story. Usefully, he seemed high, and on uppers rather than downers. His tirade lasted forty-five minutes. Cleaned up, with some of the more rambling and paranoid assertions removed, it made a double-page spread in The Sunday Sphere, headlined SLAPPER OF QUALITY: “Saucy Lucy broke my heart,” says Biscuits’ hard man. It was this interview that first brought her to the attention of Tim, then newly installed as The Sunday Sphere’s editor. He had been “on the lookout for new talent,” he said on their first night two months later, after her successful TOP COP’S SON sting, when she had gone wired up to offer cannabis to the police chief’s son.