The Spoiler (10 page)

Honor watched as the girl lowered her head again. Was she fighting tears? Honor had sometimes wondered what it would have been like to have had a daughter. She was sure she would have been singularly ill
equipped—the soft toys and fairy talk, the pastel frocks and glitter, the grooming and hair care, the histrionics …

The girl looked up, and there was a flare of what could have been hatred in her eyes. Well, Honor thought, that was more interesting.

“I’m not the subject of this interview. You are,” Tamara said in a dull whisper.

She could see her
S
^*
nday
contract slipping away. As if the double blow she had recently suffered—dumped by her lover and a prize job on
The Sphere
snatched from her grasp—was not painful enough.

“Really? This isn’t about you?” Honor tilted her head and gave Tamara a penetrating look. “I thought the papers liked nothing better than interviews with nonentities, by nonentities, these days.”

It was the wrong moment and entirely the wrong place, but Tamara could hold back no longer. The awful truth struck her like a whip across the face—her escape route was barred, she would have to go on compiling cheery lists for
Psst!
and grubbing for work in ever-more abstruse regions of the trade press, she would be unable to help her brother and he would sink further, out of sight, and she would end her days, alone and broke, in a shabby rented flat. It was unprofessional, she knew, but she could do nothing about it as the tears seeped from her eyes, spilled down her cheeks and dripped onto her notebook, where they trembled in little quicksilver pools.

Honor was alarmed. Faced by tears, she had always felt revulsion. Tad had been comically lachrymose. He would weep over television adverts—haiku biopics for building societies or insurance companies, in which implausibly handsome young families romped through life to graceful maturity and silvery senescence in soft focus. Maybe she was deficient. She had sometimes wondered whether her apparent lack of tear ducts represented weakness rather than strength. Did it indicate a kind of emotional colour blindness?

The girl was shuddering softly now as she tried to compose herself. What exactly had prompted this fit of weeping? Was something else troubling her? Honor felt embarrassed on her behalf; to be so reduced, in the course of one’s work, too, amounted to a kind of incontinence. Whatever the cause of this display, Honor wanted it to cease at once.

“What would you like to know?” she asked gently.

Tamara looked up, wiping her eyes on the cuffs of her blouse.

“Sorry?”

“Shall I just talk?” Honor asked. “And you can tell me if it’s the kind of thing you want …”

Tamara sniffed. Had she gained some advantage here?

“Could we start with your Hollywood experiences?” she tried tentatively. She saw Tait’s sudden scowl, and her voice grew more faint with every syllable: “Marilyn? Or Sinatra?”

Honor Tait put her hand to her brow.

“Liz Taylor?” Tamara hazarded, pulling a pack of tissues from her bag and dabbing at her notebook.

The old woman’s Gorgon stare was unnerving, but she was also nodding vigorously.

Encouraged, Tamara added, “Any reminiscences of the stars would do, really.”

Though the old woman continued to signal her apparent approval of Tamara’s questions, she remained silent.

“Your circle of young male friends?” Tamara asked.

Honor was relieved to see that the girl had finally composed herself. Only two panda patches of pink around her eyes betrayed her lapse. But her questions? If this had not been so intrusive, and such a waste of precious time, it might have been comic.

“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.

“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!”

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!”

“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. Honor 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.

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.”