The Spoiler (11 page)

The task of extricating a lively article from this self-congratulatory litany would have defeated even one of
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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
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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 that
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.”

Honor hesitated.

“Phone my publisher. We’ll see what can be arranged.”

As she closed the door on her visitor, securing the chain and sliding the bolts, Honor sighed. A Pyrrhic victory. They had parted on good terms. Ruth would be pleased. And Honor had betrayed no confidences, given nothing away. She had, though, come perilously close—a lonely, foolish old woman blethering away to anyone who listened, or gave the appearance of listening. Such an idiotic girl, too. Tara Sim had not read the book. That much was clear. Elizabeth Taylor’s name had not been taken in vain in
Dispatches
; it had never been cited. Honor glanced down again at the Christmas newspapers, piled up for the rubbish chute. And references to Bing Crosby, the oleaginous Republican tenor pictured on the cover of the TV supplement at her feet, were far from baroque; they were nonexistent, which was unsurprising, since Honor Tait had never met him, or written about him, in her life.

The Monitor
was a broad-church broadsheet, a daily and Sunday operation embracing a tabloid robustness in its gossip and celebrity coverage and a rigorously cerebral approach in its opinion pages and its
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colour magazine. While other newspapers, as the new millennium approached, might cling to old-fashioned, monocultural notions of their readership, the pioneering
Monitor
swung both ways. It was founded in the nineteenth century by an aristocratic Whig who hoped the enterprise would make him a rapid fortune. He went bankrupt within a decade, and the newspaper, in keeping with its tradition, had been losing money ever since. In the early years of the twentieth century, in the hands of a social-climbing northern industrialist, it had restyled itself as a “paper of record,” hoping to woo the Establishment readers of
The Times
and
The Courier
. But in its most recent incarnation, under a new proprietor from the former Soviet Union,
The Monitor
had energetically set about broadening its appeal in an effort to boost dwindling circulation. Politically, too, though its current editor’s personal inclination was rightwards, the paper hedged its bets, judging that if the tired Tory government was defeated by fresh-faced New Labour—or vice versa—in the coming elections,
The Monitor
should not be too closely identified with the losing side. In this spirit it attacked MPs on both sides of the house with a high-minded evenhandedness. Its aim was to be all things to all men and women and, like a twentieth-century Tower of Babel, the paper accommodated many competing voices in its five-storey ramshackle block of dun concrete.

The precise structure of
The Monitor
’s intellectual hierarchy was reflected in the layout of its office, a poorly converted former printworks a mile up the road from its old Fleet Street base—now the opulent,
marble-pillared headquarters of a firm of libel lawyers.
The Monitor
’s basement bunker, which accommodated
Psst!
, its gossip and TV listings magazine, edited by the affable Old Etonian waster Simon Pettigrew, was a windowless corridor, comprising the largest portion—the long vertical stroke—of an L-shaped arrangement of desks that had been carved out of a segment of the canteen, and was separated on the left side by a partition wall from a suite of chronically malfunctioning lavatories.

Psst!
’s neighbouring office—the short horizontal stroke of the L—was occupied by the paper’s Web site, a fledgling, experimental operation run on a twenty-four-hour basis by tireless teenagers, their faces studded with piercings, and edited by Tania Singh, an Oxford graduate with tiny fairy features and the incandescent ambition of a young Bonaparte.

Above them, on the ground floor, with windows opening onto the thrum of gridlocked traffic shimmering in a haze of fumes, were the ashen-faced toilers of
The Monitor
’s newsroom. Here, against the background blare and flicker of half a dozen TV sets, the home desk rewrote the wire stories and worked the phones and fax machines, searching for news of political scandals, serial killers and freak weather incidents in London and the remote regions of the UK.

The foreign desk inhabited the same floor, against a phalanx of clocks that displayed the time in New York, Los Angeles, Sydney and—after the efforts of one joker, on the day he received his redundancy cheque—Stoke Newington. In this corner of the office, telephones and fax machines rang and squealed in pursuit of stories of war, political scandals, serial killers and freak weather incidents overseas.

Around the corner on the ground floor—separated from News by the reception desk, where importuning members of the public were kept at bay by bouncers in business suits—was the mail room. Here ex-printers, redeployed as messengers by the advent of new technology, shared cigarettes, tea and sporting gossip between genial forays into the building’s further reaches with sacks of post. On the same floor was Advertising, whose staff were distinguished from their newsroom colleagues by the fastidiousness of their dress and the bright-eyed, undifferentiated enthusiasm usually associated with revivalist sects of the American South.

Above them, on the first floor, was Sport, edited by Ricky Clegg, whose recent hiring from
The Sunday Sphere
had provoked the tabloid’s retaliatory poaching of
The Monitor
’s eminent political editor, Bernice Bullingdon. Sport shared a third of an acre of soiled grey carpet tiles—and
an occasionally rewarding view into the bathroom windows of the flats opposite—with Human Resources, and with Circulation and Marketing. Here, too, was located Miles Denbigh, the managing editor, a haunted figure rarely seen outside his office, a glass box like a see-through confessional marooned in the centre of the open-plan sports department. He was responsible for expenses, budgets, administration and staffing matters—he was currently meant to be addressing demands for a multifaith prayer room, which the new politics editor, a recent convert to Catholicism, insisted should replace the third-floor smoking room. Instead Denbigh was reputed to sit all day in his cubicle, his telephone switched off, translating the plays of Aristophanes into unperformable contemporary dramas. In conversation he was a man of few words, most of them synonyms for “sorry.” He was said to have had a catheter fitted to avoid inconvenient encounters in the men’s room with expenses claimants, smokers and recent converts to Catholicism.