The Spoiler Page 8

  “You’re a bit of a role model for younger women journalists,” Tamara said, trying another tack.

  “A crowded field, I’m sure.”

  Tamara pulled back. She had to be more cautious. Play the old woman at her own game. Appeal to her intellectual snobbery and then, when she was relaxed and singing like a linnet, go in for the kill. Sinatra. Picasso. Liz Taylor. Marilyn. She looked over at the photograph of the young Honor with Castro. Or was it Franco?

  “What about Spain?” she asked suddenly. There had been a module on the Spanish civil war at Brighton Poly. Though Tamara had chosen the Hollywood option instead, she had looked at the syllabus, seen the photographs.

  “What about it?”

  Tamara chewed her pencil as she reached for an answer. Then she remembered, and her voice had a bright ring of certainty.

  “Your time as a war correspondent with Ernest Hemingway, for instance!”

  Tamara congratulated herself. Yes. The boozy, bearded big-game hunter, who wrote the screenplay for the Spencer Tracy vehicle, The Old Man and the Sea. They must have made quite a couple, Hemingway and Tait.

  Honor screwed up her eyes as if in pain. She did not know how much more of this she could stand.

  “I think you’ll find that was Martha Gellhorn,” she said.

  “I wonder—” Tamara faltered.

  The old woman interrupted her.

  “I’m sorry. I should never have agreed to this. We’ve been wasting each other’s time. You had better leave.”

  Honor got up and walked down the hallway towards the door. Tamara needed to think fast, retrace her steps. She was not going to let this one go without a fight.

  “Tell me,” she said, twisting in her chair to address Honor Tait’s back, “what questions would you like me to ask?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  She had to hand it to the girl, she did not give up easily. Her stupidity was impregnable.

  “I just wondered what questions you’d be happy to answer,” Tamara said.

  Honor paused by the door. She knew she could proceed in two ways: throw the girl out and be done with it—incurring a poisonous paragraph or two in The Monitor and an institutional hostility from the paper for the rest of her days, and beyond—or sit down and interview herself, using this little goose as an amanuensis. That way there would at least be no awkward or painful questions. She could hear Ruth telling her that, if she wanted to sell any books, she only had one option. So what questions would she like to answer? Liking did not come into it. What questions would she be prepared to answer? If she had been in a polemical mood, if she had not been so tired and sickened by this whole stupid process, she might have seen it as an opportunity to intercede on behalf of the flood victims of Bangladesh, say, or the exploited untouchables, or the street children of Brazil.

  “Questions about the book?” Honor said, checking the terms of the deal.

  “The book. Your life, your family, famous friends. Whatever you’d like to say.”

  Honor looked up towards the ceiling, as if pleading for intercession. She knew the list of inappropriate questions that she herself had asked was long. She had blundered unfeelingly across human tragedies, large and small, in search of a story: the mother with the dead child in her arms in Madrid; the bereaved father in Algiers; the rape victims in Calcutta; the camp survivors. Had she not exacerbated misery, too? She had welcomed and encouraged expressions of distress, knowing they brought her nearer to a story’s nucleus, and she had pressed on, pushing the victims further. The spectacle of human grief became part of the narrative. That each story was important did not lessen the offence.

  “The book, then,” she offered.

  “I wondered, of your many stories, which are you most proud of?”

  Honor turned and walked slowly, as if in a trance, back to her chair. She feared her sense of moral certainty had begun to fade, like so much else. She liked to watch it in her friend Paul; his righteous wrath as he tore around the world seeking out injustice, facing down powerful liars, championing the weak, could make her nostalgic. Had she lost her fighting spirit, too?

  “Pride?” the old woman said, easing herself back into her seat. Her voice was weak, drained of strength and colour. “One must always mistrust pride.”

  Tamara felt a new determination, as if she had shed, along with her tears, her ineffectual, defeated, third-class self and in her place sat a confident, wily star reporter, a keen-eyed contributor to an illustrious journal, an astute seeker of truths and wrester of insights.

  “Which was your riskiest story then? The one that placed you in most personal danger?”

  Honor looked at the girl with distaste, but the irritable spirit of Ruth was hovering. At last, with a heavy sigh of resignation, she bent to the task. Her answer was long and detailed and involved Berlin, Tokyo, Korea, the Thirty-eighth Parallel. (Parallel to what? Tamara wondered.) But there were no personal revelations or worthwhile quotes. Even Lyra’s most erudite readers would be dozing over their cappuccinos by the second paragraph.

  Honor Tait’s tight little mouth pursed and stretched with surprising vigour, and Tamara, hearing the ebb and flow of her voice, felt she had accidentally tuned in to a cheerless current-affairs discussion on Radio 4.

  In the fading light of Honor Tait’s flat, Tamara smiled, nodded and shook her head where appropriate, prompted by the rise and fall of the old woman’s voice, and pretended to take notes.

  Honor Tait, doyenne of war reporters, high priestess of journalists, is far from happy. At eighty, still in possession of her faculties, though with an octogenarian’s tendresse for reminiscence, there are few traces of her once-famed chthonic beauty. Staring at Honor Tait is like looking at the horrifyingly shrivelled former beauty (fill in name) played by (name) in the movie classic Last Horizon.

  “You have to understand that one was working in a vacuum,” Honor said. “There was no reliable information network, there were no other news sources one could draw on. The fear was palpable. One had to truly see, to rely on the evidence of one’s eyes, and record with precision exactly what one was seeing.”

  Tamara, cued by the cracked music of Tait’s voice, uttered exclamations of surprise or admiration, concern or disapproval.

  “Of course!”

  “All around us, mortar shells were exploding as I ran to the jeep.”

  “Terrifying!”

  Most women of her age are doting grandparents and devoted widows, only too happy to pore over photographs of their loved ones with hapless visitors. But for Honor Tait, the indulgent anecdotes, les moments brilliants of her life, her rhapsodies of remembrance, concern not her family or lovers—on the subject of which she is sternly silent—but her work.

  Tara was, Honor observed, a scrupulous note taker. Could she have been too hard on her? The girl was the product of an age in which history had been jettisoned along with seriousness. The young were all gunslingers now, each one a little Goebbels, reaching for their revolvers whenever they heard the word “culture.” And truth had been reduced to the subjective. This is my truth; what’s yours? At least Tara seemed to have some measure of the gulf between them, an instinctive sense of what had been lost, and she showed signs of an ability, or at any rate a willingness, to listen.

  Honor continued: “There was widespread panic. Fleeing South Koreans were pushing past, hoping to get across the river, and the artillery fire started. I grabbed my typewriter and set it up on the hood of the radio truck …”

  “No!”

  Interviewees are warned in advance not to mention her famous amours. Her personal life is strictly off limits. Honor Tait’s response to questions about her upbringing in a château in Scotland is silence.

  “The only option was to walk the fifteen-mile mountain trail to Suwon, further south.”

  “No!”

  Doubled over her notes, Tamara seemed fired up, her hand working frantically to keep pace, inspired by an account of a different, more authentic and vital age. Ho
nor found it almost touching to watch this ignorant child, raised on the intellectual pabulum of the modern media and groomed for mediocrity, respond to the stimulus of real experience, living history. Buried somewhere beneath that commonplace exterior, Honor thought, there were the makings of a decent newspaperwoman who, in a less otiose age, might have been a perfectly efficient reporter of, say, court proceedings.

  On the subject of her three husbands, she is mute. On the subject of her many lovers, her lips are sealed. But when it comes to her work as a frontline journalist, covering the century’s big stories, les contes grandes, you can’t shut her up.

  Tamara covered page after page as the soliloquy continued. She was caught out only once.

  “Really? Fantastic!” she enthused, before realising, too late, that she had misread Honor Tait’s voice; she had been giving an account of the death of the first American troops in Korea.

  “They were teenagers, barely out of high school, and had arrived at the front only hours before. One horribly wounded boy kept begging his comrade to shoot him—” Honor said, before breaking off.

  Had the girl really said “Fantastic?”

  It was touch and go. Honor gave her interviewer a beady look and struggled to her feet to fetch a glass of water from the kitchen. Alone in the sitting room, Tamara stood to look around for some tangible leads to the real Honor Tait, not the grandiose soapbox orator. There was a pile of recently opened post by the vase of flowers. She picked up one card, a child’s garish drawing of a tree, and turned it over. It was a flyer about a meeting on “child exploitation” that was taking place next Wednesday to launch a new charity, Kids’ Crusaders. Honor Tait was listed as one of the speakers. Not exactly revelatory, but it could be useful. Tamara was noting the details when she heard the old woman coming back into the room.

  The monologue resumed. Honor had come too far to stop now. She sipped from her glass and was swept on by the tide of her narrative and a sense of the epic arc of her own life.

  “It was Lieutenant General Walker, Commander of the Eighth Army, who ordered me out of Korea, saying the battlefield was no place for a woman. MacArthur refused to get involved at first, saying it was Walker’s decision. But after I secured an interview with MacArthur in Tokyo, the ban on women reporters was lifted.”

  The task of extricating a lively article from this self-congratulatory litany would have defeated even one of S*nday’s Nobel Prize winners, Tamara thought. What chance did she stand?

  It was getting dark, and Honor Tait did not let up. She was describing the liberation of a concentration camp now.

  “Four days later, the surviving prisoners assembled to celebrate their freedom and mourn their dead. They had each fashioned their national flags from rags or scraps of paper they had somehow procured.”

  Tamara watched as the lights went on, a window at a time, in the building opposite, turning it into an illuminated Advent calendar of domestic interiors. But Honor Tait seemed indifferent to the gathering gloom.

  “You have to understand the chaos of war. Everything we had witnessed. We were all, press corps included, fired up by a monumental anger.”

  Tamara was finding all this bragging exhausting, and the cessation of hostilities between them had left more room for other anxieties. Without a mention of Hollywood, or husbands or lovers, not a hint of indiscretion or a shred of human interest, how on earth was she going to write four thousand words? And she had two freelance features to file this week before she could even make a start on the S*nday piece.

  “I’m really sorry, Miss Tait,” she said, glancing at her watch which, despite its luminous dial, she could barely read in the dusk. “I was so absorbed I completely lost track of the time. I have to go.”

  She closed her notebook.

  Honor felt a tug of disappointment. She had not talked about all this—even thought about it in any depth—for so long. It had been too painful. Under pressure from Ruth, she had rashly agreed to return to the subject and write a coda to her original Pulitzer Prize–winning report on Buchenwald for the next book. The prospect filled her with dread. She had not known where to start and had rehearsed several desperate excuses to get herself off the hook. But somehow the blank-faced ignorance of this girl had drawn her out, and Honor was beginning to see a way of attempting the piece she had avoided writing for half a century. Was Tara really leaving now, just when they were getting into their stride?

  “Already?” Honor said, her hands fluttering. “I was just going to make another pot of tea. I might even have some biscuits somewhere.”

  Tamara slipped her notebook and tape recorder in her bag.

  “I’d love to,” she said, springing to her feet. “Can’t think of anything nicer. But I do have to be off. I’ve got two stories to hand in. The deadlines are tomorrow.” Honor, rebuffed, felt a familiar prickle of scepticism.

  “Stories? So what else are you writing about?”

  “Oh, one’s a piece about culture, a festival really. And the other’s more of a feminist feature.”

  Feminism. That clapped-out old jade. Of course. But Honor would not have had Tara, with her shopgirl packaging, her proffered cleavage, down as a natural Sister, one of Isadora Talbot’s monstrous regiment. Perhaps it was a pose: the ninny wanted to be “taken seriously.”

  “Well, of course. I wouldn’t like to stand in the way of The Cause,” Honor said, prising herself from her chair.

  “It’s been amazing,” Tamara said. “Thank you so much.” She could not wait to leave this cranky old woman and her gloomy flat.

  “I’ll see you out,” Honor said coolly. The girl’s sudden departure felt like an insult.

  Tamara walked briskly to the door, keen to step out of the suffocating fug of the flat into the purer air of the high street below, to hear the reassuring hum of London traffic instead of the old woman’s self-satisfied drone. But she knew her work was unfinished.

  “I wondered, though, since we’ve run out of time, if we might maybe meet again for another chat?”

  “I don’t think that will be possible.”

  “Just another half hour sometime? I’ve learned an awful lot today, but I know we’ve only scratched the surface, and it would be a pity to leave it there. A drink somewhere?”

  “I don’t think so, no,” Honor said.

  “But I found your conversation so instructive, and inspiring. You really are a heroine for young women journalists. For young people who want to make a difference. And I loved the new book so much,” Tamara said.

  “All of it?”

  “Every last word. I don’t know how you do it.”

  Tamara reached for the door handle.

  Honor was smiling again, her falsely modest gaze directed downwards to the bundle of newspapers on the floor by the door.

  “I did wonder about the Bing Crosby story,” she said with a shrug.

  “Oh really?” Tamara was surprised by this outbreak of humility and the tantalising offer of new information—had Bing been a lover too?

  “Why was that?”

  “Didn’t it all seem just a little baroque?” Honor asked.

  This was dangerous ground. Tamara was unfamiliar with architectural terminology and could not think how it might apply to the immortal crooner, beloved of generations of viewers of prime-time Christmas TV classics. She hadn’t seen any reference to Crosby in the cuttings, and once more she wished that she’d had time to look at Tait’s book more closely

  “How do you mean? I thought it worked brilliantly.”

  “That’s kind of you. But I thought it, you know, was a little de trop, you know—too much.”

  “Oh no. So vivid. So vrai!”

  Tamara knew she should be inveigling her way back into the flat, switching on her Sony again and encouraging the old woman’s eleventh-hour indiscretions, but right now all she wanted to do was to run from this cramped mausoleum with its musty smell of neglect.

  Honor leaned towards her and whispered girlishly, “I worried t
hat perhaps I’d said more than I should. Overstepped the mark. With Bing, I mean.”

  “Absolutely not. Pioneering stuff,” Tamara said, shaking her head. “A revelation. One of the best parts of the entire book. By far.” Then, as an afterthought, she added, “What was he really like, Bing?”

  “Divine! Just divine!” Honor Tait’s laugh was a surprisingly merry tinkle.

  Tamara released her grip on the door handle.

  “Did he sing to you? When you were together? Alone?”

  “Oh, all the time. He was a real songbird. Forever trilling. And he loved to dance!”

  Damn, thought Tamara. The first words of any real interest and she had packed her tape recorder and notebook away.

  “Did he?”

  “Did I tell you what a marvellous, fleet dancer he was?” the old woman said, her focus suddenly distant, apparently enchanted by memories.

  Damn, damn.

  “Really?”

  “One felt like a column of gossamer in his arms.”

  Tamara reached into her bag, blindly searching for her notebook. No luck. She leaned against the door and balanced the bag on her knee in an effort to search more thoroughly. She had to get this down. But it was too late; Honor Tait had already lit off in a different direction, bewitched by another apparition beckoning from her scintillating past.

  “Elizabeth Taylor? What about her? Do you think I went too far there in the book?”

  “Oh no, no,” Tamara said, putting down the bag and grasping the door handle again. “Amazing.”

  Another story she’d missed. Again, the cuttings had given no clue, apart from a photo of them together at some Hollywood bash. But now, Honor Tait was finally opening up and if she carried on like this, they could be standing here all night. Tait seemed as reluctant to let Tamara leave her flat as she had been to admit her. This was a kind of progress, thought Tamara. But she had endured enough geriatric simpering for one afternoon.

  “It would be amazing if we could meet up again. It would be so good to learn how you did that, held all that together, pulled it off. I’d really love to go through it with you, break it down—the whole Bing Crosby, Liz Taylor thing. And Berlin, too. Korea … It would be like a master class. I’m sure our readers would be interested, too.”