The Spoiler Page 5

  There were no quotes from Honor Tait at all, apart from a sermonising motto: “Through patient observation, the meticulous accumulation of detail and a ravening hunger for truth, the bigger picture will emerge. It is the duty of the reporter to champion the weak and to shine a searchlight in the darkest corners of human experience.” Pompous, too.

  The peg for the article, a pallid excuse, was the inclusion of one of Tait’s dispatches from Korea in a forbiddingly titled anthology, Classics of World Reportage. No wonder The Sunday Correspondent had disappeared.

  There was a more recent news story, seven years old, from The Monitor: VETERAN JOURNALIST’S HOME GUTTED IN BLAZE. The house, not the London flat across the road but a former hunting lodge “on the estate of what had once been her childhood home in the Highlands,” had burned to the ground in an electrical fire. One photograph, the older of the two, showed a smug, substantial building—four storeys high, with a narrow fifth-storey tower at each end—painted stark white, apart from black-rimmed window frames and the dark arched door. If that was a “lodge,” what must the main house have been like? Whatever conclusions might be reached about Honor Tait’s life, this was not a tale of rags to riches. The second picture, of a single charred wall with a glassless window like a blinded eye, rearing against the sky in a clearing of ashes, sticks and stumps, looked like an image of some blighted postnuclear landscape.

  The story included not a word from Tait herself, though she was said to have been “comforted by her third husband, Tad Challis, director of cult comedy films including The Pleasure Seekers and Hairdressers’ Honeymoon,” and a useful “friend” had described her as “devastated.” Tamara gazed across the road at the solid facade of Holmbrook Mansions. She had looked in the estate agents’ windows and knew what these flats could cost. Honor Tait may have been devastated by the loss of her holiday home, but she had not been destroyed. This was not a riches-to-rags story either.

  Other, briefer, clippings gave a flavour of Honor Tait’s life over the last ten years. She was mentioned in passing in some of the broadsheet news pages as a supporter of pressure groups lobbying for children’s rights, against exploitation of third-world labour and against sex trafficking; she had served as a UN goodwill ambassador, campaigned for asylum seekers and, in her spare time, was a regular attendee at book launches, gallery openings and theatre first nights in the company of writers, artists and actors, all of them men, most of them young and highly presentable. There were a number of photographs of Tait at these events, stooped but regal, glowering at the photographer over a glass of champagne, surrounded by handsome acolytes. “Doyenne of journalists” was the most frequent tag, though The Mail preferred “the darling of the chattering classes.” There had been a TV arts programme about her a year ago (Tamara had been sent the videotape but had not had time to watch it), and one of the trails for it from a listings magazine was included in the publishers’ press pack: HONOR BOUND was the headline.

  In a piece from Vogue, Annie Leibovitz had photographed her in black-and-white in a book-lined room, looking affronted, as if the old woman had just disturbed an intruder who, if he had any instinct for self-preservation, would have fled the scene at once. The article, on “salons,” also featured a poet who held weekly picnics and poetry readings on Primrose Hill, and a fashion designer who hosted what he called regular “cake and counselling” sessions for artists in his Thameside warehouse. Honor Tait was described as a “modern Madame de Staël” and was said to have gathered round her a group of admirers comprising “the most exciting young men in Britain’s creative industries.” They met on the last Monday of every month and called themselves, in ironic reference to the right-wing think tank of the same name, the Monday Club. Discussions “exactingly chaired by Tait, doyenne of British journalism, friend of the Hollywood elite, and one-time muse of some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century,” would range from “Hegelian philosophy and aleatoric music to the single European currency and the future of artificial intelligence.”

  Tamara sipped her coffee, by now repellently cold, and hoped that, along with poetry, politics or history, none of these subjects would come up in her interview.

  The girl was late. Honor fetched a drink, settled in the armchair and picked up the plastic folder that Ruth had couriered over: the interviewer’s cuttings. Was their purpose reassurance, indicating that this journalist was not exclusively in the business of character assassination, that she did not habitually ridicule all her interviewees? Honor tipped the articles into her lap. Were they originals or colour photocopies? It was hard to tell. Technology had accelerated so fast since the days of the portable Olympia, flimsy carbons and the chunky telephone with its umbilical ringlet of wire.

  Her own cuttings, scissored and pasted into large red ledgers by countless secretaries over the years, had amounted to fourteen bound volumes of news stories and features, columns and interviews; almost as large as the complete OED. The ledgers, like everything else, had been consumed by the Glenbuidhe flames. In newspaper libraries, the articles, clipped by clerks, were kept in brown envelopes labelled with the writer’s name. Shaking out a collection of your work would always be an intimation of mortality; within months of publication the cuttings would be as sere and yellow as a handful of autumn leaves.

  And this scant, bright package? From a TV listings supplement, an interview with a young actress, unknown to Honor but, according to the piece, renowned for undressing slowly in a recent TV adaptation of a fatuous historical novel, and for the public breakup of her affair with a tattooed pop star. The photograph showed the actress, a spindly blonde, leaning against a marble fireplace. There was an edge of desperation, a plea for approval, in her effortful smile and the faint spidering of lines around her eyes. She looked tired, wrung out, used up. The article carried a photograph of the interviewer too; a postage-stamp-size byline picture of a sharp-nosed blonde affecting a frown while chewing a pencil. They were all blonde these days. Was there something of the woodland creature about her? A spiteful creation of Beatrix Potter? Tamara Town-mouse? Or was she more of a shrew?

  Included in the package of cuttings was a double-page feature on London’s “café culture,” and another on “flyposting,” the practice of illicitly pasting advertisements for nightclubs over lampposts and hoardings. This was billed as an “exclusive in-depth investigation by reporter Tamara Sim.” Not quite Watergate. Honor’s eyes closed slowly and her head bowed, unresisting, towards sleep.

  Minutes later the amplified whine of a car alarm brought her back into wakefulness. She glanced at the clock. The girl was now insultingly late. Massaging her temples, Honor looked again at the articles in her lap. The same silly byline picture accompanied “The Tamara Sim Column,” eight hundred words, many of them in capital letters appended by clusters of exclamation marks, reflecting on the plot of a television soap opera, the bad behaviour of premier league footballers and “the modern problem,” which was apparently neither third-world poverty nor the spread of AIDS but “the dearth of decent, reliable, sexy, solvent single men in London.” The frivolity of the press no longer surprised Honor. But why this particular girl had been sent to interview her she could not imagine.

  Three

  Tamara was startled by a sudden knock on the café window. Bucknell had arrived, out of breath. She glared at him as he walked in.

  “Where have you been?” she asked.

  “Another job. For the news desk.”

  “The news desk? But this is for the magazine! S*nday! It’s a much bigger deal.”

  “Try telling that to the news desk.”

  She shook her head, picked up the bunch of Barbie-pink lilies she had bought as a peace offering from the supermarket on the corner (expenses would cover it and, if she handed in the doctored receipt for the red roses she had sent last week to Tim’s office at The Sphere, she would make something on the transaction). They walked in silence up the steps of the mansion block.

  She felt a spreading ch
ill of apprehension but reassured herself that this story would require only an extension of those skills she had already used many times in the course of her career. She had to approach it methodically. Talk to the woman, get more on her family background, the love life, the celebrity angle, Sinatra, Liz Taylor, a few key quotes, throw in a handful of cultural references (Picasso, a must for S*nday readers, and Marilyn, revered by snobs as well as slobs), a bit of colour—descriptions of her appearance, her flat—coax some sound bites from a few of Tait’s friends and top and tail it with a couple of lines on her work. A quick pass-over with Roget’s would bump up the syllable quotient, and she could season it all with some piquant French gleaned from Larousse. It should not be difficult. Once you cracked the intro, you were there. Tamara was working on her first paragraph already.

  We were three-quarters of an hour late and out of breath by the time we arrived at Honor Tait’s grand mansion flat, and the doyenne of British journalism instantly put us at our ease …

  Bucknell pushed his way through the revolving glass doors of Holmbrook Mansions and walked towards the reception desk, his leather jacket creaking manfully. A doorman, liveried like a down-at-heel South American military dictator, directed them to the lift.

  “Thanks, mate,” the photographer said, giving a condescending thumbs-up.

  Tamara followed several paces behind, a resentful squaw, hoping the doorman did not think they were a couple in the conjugal sense. They ascended in hostile silence to the fourth floor. In the confinement of the lift she held her breath, but there was no defence against the acrid scent of distilled tobacco that seemed to ooze from Bucknell’s pores. As they walked along the corridor to the flat, her heels echoed portentously on the tiled floor. At the door, her finger beat his to the doorbell. Waiting for the old woman to answer, Tamara mentally reworked her intro.

  We’re fifteen minutes late and flustered by the time we arrive at Honor Tait’s lavishly appointed apartment, and the doyenne of British journalism greets us with a welcoming smile …

  There was a jingle and clank of chains and bolts before the door opened and Honor Tait, smaller and more frail than she appeared in her most recent photographs, stood before them.

  “You’re late,” she said.

  Tamara looked reproachfully at the photographer, but he turned away, attending to the clasps and buckles of his bag.

  “So sorry,” Tamara said, addressing the old woman with an apologetic smile. “The traffic in St. John’s Wood was horrendous. We tried to ring …”

  She held out the bouquet of flowers, and Honor Tait accepted them, sighing.

  “You’re here now. You might as well come in.”

  They followed her stooped back into the hallway, stepping over a stack of old newspapers and a supermarket carrier bag filled with books. Under her Mediterranean widow’s drab, her spine jutted like the vertebrae of an ancient sea creature.

  By the time we arrive panting at Honor Tait’s faded mansion flat, we’re five minutes late and the doyenne of British journalism fixes us with a spooky glare. “Do you realise how late you are?” she growls …

  The old woman showed them into the sitting room and left them standing there while she disappeared into the kitchen with the flowers. It was an old person’s flat, unmistakably—shabby, cluttered, faintly grimy, and reeking of the past. Or was it the stench of death? Tamara, on the job already and alert for details, walked towards the book shelf and looked at the photographs. Not the standard family snaps. No gap-toothed children in school uniform, or dizzy graduates balancing mortars on anachronistic hairdos. These were mostly pictures of Honor Tait herself, and taken a very long time ago. The old woman returned and brusquely indicated a flock-covered chair. Tamara smoothed the back of her skirt and sat down with a demure half-smile that she fancied called to mind the biddable charm of the predivorce Princess Diana. Honor Tait gripped the scuffed wooden arms of the chair opposite—her hands were as thin and twisted as chicken’s feet—and carefully lowered herself into it.

  Behind the old woman a tall sash window, hung with green velvet curtains that were coming adrift from their hooks, framed a view of windows in an identical mansion block opposite and, just visible in the gulf between the two buildings, the topmost branches of wintry trees.

  The leafless boughs of the oaks in the garden below flail in the wind like the arms of orphaned children once described so vividly by the doyenne of British journalism …

  Tamara had to get it all down. She reached into her handbag and, after a spell of noisy rummaging, drew out a pencil, a notebook and a miniature tape recorder.

  Honor watched intently, a glint of scepticism in her narrowed eyes. Such a big bag, as capacious as a doctor’s Gladstone, and such a small girl. So many tools and devices. Miss Sim was not unattractive, though she would be prone to dumpiness later, perhaps, and her chemically flaxened hair was scored with a black fault line at the parting. But she had a pinched prettiness, and her perky breasts strained against her blouse in a way that many men with a taste for the obvious would find appealing.

  A faint cough drew Honor’s attention upwards. The photographer was still standing there, looming over the two women, demanding attention without meriting it, a spear carrier with doomed ambitions to play the lead. Honor looked at him with irritation.

  “Yes?”

  He shifted his weight nervously from foot to foot as if surreptitiously scraping dog mess from his shoes.

  “I’ll just set up and fire away, while you two are talking, if that’s okay.”

  “No. It’s not okay,” the old woman said.

  Tamara opened her notebook and stared at Bucknell, incensed. If it was a question of cost and the picture desk insisted on using a staff photographer, why not good-humoured, obliging Tom, whose easy Irish flattery fooled no one but charmed everyone? Or bashful Milly, dim daughter of a titled brewing family, who treated everybody, including Tamara, with a whispered servility? Tom would not have given a thumbs-up to the doorman, and Honor Tait would not be ready to chuck the interview before she had started if little Milly were here, blushing, apologising and dancing deferentially around her.

  “We can get it over with now,” Honor Tait continued. “Then you can go.”

  Bucknell bared his bisque teeth in an abject smile, unfolded his tripod and snapped open the umbrella reflector.

  “Don’t make such a business of it,” Honor said. “All these accoutrements. They’re just fetish objects. Completely unnecessary. You’re not Cartier-Bresson. Just point and shoot.”

  Relaxed and emboldened by her colleague’s discomfort, Tamara made surreptitious notes.

  “What time do you call this?” snaps Honor Tait, the doyenne of British journalism, former femme fatale and friend of the stars, with a menacing growl, when she answers the door of her sumptuously gloomy apartment …

  The photographer rubbed his hands and grinned, broad shoulders hunched, frozen in the act of ingratiation. His ill-shaven face looked damp and grubby, more mildewed than bearded. Looking at him, Honor found herself struck by a rare urge for housekeeping; she must get the maid to clean out the back of her fridge. He avoided her eyes, only looking at her directly from behind the safety of his viewfinder.

  Once Honor had liked to draw men in with her gaze. Their eyes would lock on to hers, startled, and then they would be disarmed. She had first become aware of this power as a young girl in Glenbuidhe, home from the convent for the holidays. The timorous estate manager, the stuttering cousin from Aberdeenshire, the overaffectionate uncle visiting from London—it amused her to disconcert them with lingering looks and careless gestures. Later, sprung from Belgian cloisters and Highland fastness, launched in the racy world of work in Paris, where men were unabashed and insatiable, she perfected this skill. And as a journalist, in filthy dugouts and elegant hotels, during political conferences and at Hollywood parties, in the hush of libraries and the crush of airports, it was sport to her, like deer stalking—a stag cull without the carnage. />
  When did she start to lose that power? In her late fifties? Her sixties? First they failed to return her stare, dropping their eyes and turning away, and the averted gaze had the force of a deliberate affront. Later, most men stopped seeing her at all. She was obsolete, and not just sexually. She could still summon lovers of a sort—the drunk, the inadequate, the kinky masochists and gerontophiles—but it was more an act of reciprocal degradation than of carnal pleasure.

  “Mrs. Tait, if I could just have you standing in the corner by the window.”

  How objectionable, to be patronised by such an unprepossessing simpleton.

  “Mrs. Challis. Miss Tait,” she said. “You can take me here, as I am. No flash. Natural light will be quite sufficient.”

  If necessary she could always pay, she knew. Any service could be summoned by a simple exchange of cash. There was no cause for shame; economic independence meant that, in the latter half of the century, women could enjoy a useful expedient that had been available to men for millennia. But one had to be discreet. Social mores had yet to catch up. The wealthy old man with the glorious girl on his arm might be an acceptable stereotype, perhaps inspiring male envy and defensive female ridicule; one had only to reverse the genders to provoke unanimous disgust.

  The photographer crouched, a troglodyte supplicant, and his knees creaked arthritically.

  “Lovely, that’s lovely,” he said to her as the shutter clicked.