The Spoiler (3 page)

Chinese history, or history of any sort, had never much appealed to her. Nor, for that matter, had old-school journalistic heroines. In-depth profiles of elderly writers were not her usual beat, and the deadline—three
weeks—was tight. But she had been exhilarated by Lyra Moore’s terse proposal, sent via the office computer, that she “write 4,000 words on Honor Tait’s life and work, deadline 19 Feb for
S
^*
nday
issue of 30 March, to coincide with Tait’s 80th birthday and publication of her new book.”

Tamara worked four days a week on
The Monitor
as a freelance subeditor and occasional writer for
Psst!
, the paper’s Saturday celebrity gossip and TV listings magazine—a leering lout to
S
^*
nday
’s snooty metaphysician. The world described in the primary-coloured pages of
Psst!
, peopled by sex-addicted soap stars and feuding boy bands, footballers’ anorexic molls and drug-taking TV hosts, was as remote from the intellectual aristocrats of
S
^*
nday
as was Pluto, in both its planetary and Disney incarnations. Lyra Moore’s magazine, irreproachably elegant and cerebral, was regarded as the British riposte to
The New Yorker
, with the added appeal of pictures. Its pages, soft and slippery as silk, had most recently hosted a meditation on medieval aesthetics by Umberto Eco, a disquisition on Kierkegaard by George Steiner and an essay by Susan Sontag on the potency of the Polaroid, accompanied by instant photographs—mysterious, personal and touchingly ill-composed—taken one day last March by the recently besieged citizens of Sarajevo. All three writers were strangers to Tamara and, though she did her best to tackle their contributions to
S
^*
nday
, she felt no compulsion to pursue their acquaintance by reading their books. Never mind the inclination, where would she find the time?

She decided against the vampish slash of red lipstick—it accentuated her incipient cold sore—wiped her mouth with tissue, and opted for frosted pink. She had to look the part today. Groomed but unthreatening. A knee-length navy bias-cut skirt and matching jacket, white cotton blouse, beige trench coat and low-heeled court shoes—the sort of unexceptional outfit Princess Diana might wear on an official visit to a children’s hospital.

Tamara knew this commission was going to be a trial of endurance, requiring a long interview and the obligation to write it up, at considerable length and in polysyllabic words, within a bracingly brief span of time. Four thousand words would, she was aware, be a struggle for someone more used to turning in a two-sentence caption story, a twelve-line list or a two-paragraph column on celebrity mishaps. Her occasional interviews might run to eight hundred words, and she had been called
on to produce two pieces of a thousand words each—a chequebook job with a transsexual lap dancer who claimed to have slept with a children’s TV presenter, and an exposé of the drug-taking teenage son of a senior policeman—for
The Sunday Sphere
. But four times that length?

A great deal of typing would be involved, not to mention research.

It was daunting, but a commission from Lyra Moore was the highest compliment any journalist could be paid. Five years after the launch of
S
^*
nday
, its title was still uttered with quiet reverence, despite occasional stumbles over the typographic tic. Snobs admired Lyra Moore’s glossy for its intellectual cachet, while pragmatic hacks envied its lavish budget. And as an ambitious journalist with a wide freelance portfolio, no sick pay, holiday or pension provision, no access to a trust fund and a dependent brother, Tamara could not afford to turn down this opportunity.

She had fretted that her reply, which she’d typed within seconds of seeing Lyra’s message flashing on her computer screen, had been perhaps too effusive—“… I’d LOVE to do her!!! … I SO much admire! … I’m THRILLED to be part of!! … Amazing magazine!!! … Fantastic writers!!! …” Did the editor of
S
^*
nday
prefer an aloofness in her contributors that matched her own? Could this explain Lyra’s failure to respond to that message, or to reply to any of Tamara’s subsequent messages or phone calls? Was it possible that, as with men, one could be
too
enthusiastic?

As a weekly fixture at
Psst!
, Tamara was a “regular casual,” with the job security of a day labourer on a dodgy building site. But as long as she was useful and enjoyed the patronage of
Psst!
’s editor, she had an income and a desk to sit at for four days a week, Monday to Thursday, leaving her three days to find freelance work elsewhere. She had written pieces for
Monitor Extra
, the paper’s daily features section, known as Me2, run by the hollow-eyed adrenaline junkie Johnny Malkinson. These pieces were chiefly lists, ring-rounds and vox pops, but she was getting a reputation—extending beyond
The Monitor
to an encouraging number of copy-hungry magazines and papers—as a reliable supplier of humorous low-cost fillers.

Tamara had done her time—three months—as a junior reporter on
The Sydenham Advertiser
, before moving on to become an adaptable contributor to professional and corporate newsletters, including
Inside the Box: The Voice of the Cardboard Packaging Industry; Glaze: The Chartered Institute of Food Stylists’ Quarterly;
and
The Press: Trade Paper of the Laundry
and Dry Cleaning Industry
. She had graduated to hobbyists’ house journals, addressing weekend mountaineers, ballroom dancers and budgerigar enthusiasts, switched to general consumer magazines—
Glow
and
Chicks’ Choice
—and eventually worked and wheedled her way as a freelancer into news sections, features pages, diary columns, travel sections and weekend supplements on many national and regional papers, tabloid and broadsheet. The process had equipped her with a diverse knowledge base, giving her a familiarity with the advantages of aluminium ice axes and polypropylene pants, the relative merits of carbon tetrachloride and perchlorethylene, the difference between the mambo and the merengue, and the correct spelling of Melopsittacini.

In the course of duty, she had travelled business class and seen the world. In Mexico City, where she had been sent to report on Expo-Pack1995, she enjoyed frozen daiquiris and three days of furtive sex with a big-box retailer from Nebraska; in San Diego she had fallen in love, painfully unreciprocated, with an Italian photographer while covering a three-day Salad Styling Workshop; and in Mauritius she went deep-sea diving for the first—and last—time during an avian veterinarians’ conference on the treatment of clinical megabacteriosis. She took pride in her professional versatility and, reflecting on her “regular casual” role at
Psst!
, saw her working life as a mirror of her love life—she was playing the field, having fun, and felt no pressure to commit until the right publication came along and made an attractive offer. Only then would she be prepared to consider a serious, more monogamous working arrangement. If only Tim Farrow, editor of
The Sunday Sphere
, had delivered, she would be looking at a satisfactory resolution on both fronts. But he had proved a serious disappointment.

She must not think of Tim. It would ruin her mascara. She had sobbed for a fortnight and needed to move on, and up. The
S
^*
nday
commission was timely. One door closes, another opens. She had served her apprenticeship slogging in the foothills of trade publishing, laboured on to do her share of latrine cleaning in the tabloid base camp and now, at this stage of her career, at the age of twenty-seven, she could aim higher and set her sights on
S
^*
nday
, the Chomolungma of British newspaper publishing. With a little perseverance, a staff job or a fat freelance contract with the most admired publication in the UK would be hers for the taking.

She frowned at herself in the mirror. She wished she could afford a
trip to the hairdresser’s. Her highlights badly needed retouching, but the cut—a high-street approximation of Diana’s layered bob—was neat enough. She gathered up her notebook, pencil and tape recorder and stowed them in her bag.

Honor Tait was famously tricky. Even her publisher acknowledged as much, warning that any details of her author’s private life were offlimits. But Tamara would be prepared. She had
The Monitor
’s cuttings library file on Honor Tait’s life and work, printouts from the publishers, an advance copy of the new book, and another unappetising hardback—grim and dense as a sociology textbook—of an earlier collection of Tait’s journalism, which apparently included a Pulitzer Prize–winning article. Though Tamara had not had a moment to look at any of the research material in depth, she had already jotted down some questions in her notebook. As she walked to the bus stop on her way to the interview, she felt armed and ready for combat.

Honor’s energy was fading; the span of alertness between the first cup of coffee and the swooning urge to nap was dwindling daily. But she had to complete this task. Forty-five minutes to go. The picture of Tad on the rosewood side table could stay. As twinkly eyed, white-haired and pink-cheeked as a clean-shaven Selfridges’ Santa, a patron saint of goodwill and constancy: the irreproachable, dead, final husband. He had given the photograph to her, in a typical gesture of ingenuous egotism, as a wedding anniversary present. What could be more uxorious?

The one photograph in the flat that she had framed herself, clipping it between two Perspex squares bought from the stationer’s, was safely out of range of reportorial eyes, on her bedside table. The summer sun had bleached the boy’s untidy thatch of hair, and his shirt was coming loose from the woven belt girding his shorts. Honor, wearing a polka-dot frock cinched at the waist with a patent belt, held his hand a little too tightly. Behind them was the solid Georgian bulk of Glenbuidhe Lodge, with dripping candelabra of fuchsia by the front door and, in full sail in the drawing-room window, a ship in a bottle, another appeasement offering from Tad. Daniel’s head was tipped on one side, shyly challenging the photographer, and his left eye was closed, as if winking, against the light flaring on the loch. It was Lois who took the picture. She had brought Daniel up on the sleeper for the Easter break. Later she sent Honor the photo with a presumptuous note: “Look after him, Honor. He’s more fragile than he seems.” Honor had thrown the note on the fire. In the end Tad had urged her also to destroy the picture, and she had concealed it for years. She could not get rid of it, though she was ashamed of this maudlin attachment. Now Tad was gone, too, and she could do as she liked.

Propped on the sitting-room mantelpiece above the black maw of the coal-effect gas fire was a postcard, a picture of a graceful coolie-hatted figure in a paddy field. It was a dutiful dispatch from Saigon sent by Tad’s goddaughter, who seemed to have spent the last decade on what they called a “gap year.” Honor’s own Saigon gap years had been somewhat different. No blithe backpackers drifting to exotic destinations with the unconscious imperialism of the young, no pleasure trips on the river, stultifying student bacchanals in ethnic bars, no folkloric dancing or crafts markets. It had been noise, mud, bombs, blood and transcendental terror. There had been comradeship, too, and even passion. Watching colleagues die beside you does concentrate the mind, and body, on the pure animal pleasures of being alive. When they were not working, away from the battlefield, it had been one long, orgiastic rout. Back home, she had sometimes felt echoes of that hellish hunger at polite funerals, without the proximate opportunities for satisfaction. The practised poker faces of the undertakers, the whispers and muffled sobs of mourners, the comically slow pace of the cortège, all could trigger inappropriate cravings.

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.