The Spoiler (30 page)

Tamara snorted.

“
The Sphere
? I’m finished with that dross, remember? I’ve got
S
^*
nday
in my sights.”

Simon gestured for the bill, then clasped his hands and leaned towards her with avuncular concern, though his authority was undermined by the bandage.

“Tam, look, you should know by now that you can’t count on anything in this business.”

“There’s no need to be patronising. I’m allowed to aim a little higher than
The Sphere
, aren’t I? Lyra thinks so, even if you don’t.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he said, getting to his feet.

“Thanks for your concern.”

He patted her shoulder, anxious to restore the lighthearted mood.

“Come on, Tam. Right now we both face the highest calling of all—a restive public awaits its weekly
Psst!
. What’s this week’s A-List?”

“Corkers to Porkers—From Fab to Flab.”

Back at the office, Tamara retrieved the results of this morning’s research and handed him the bundle of photographs.

“Take a look at the recent picture of Pernilla Perssen,” she said. “She’s piling on the pounds. She’ll be modelling for Weight Watchers soon.”

Simon laughed.

“Not exactly tubby by normal standards, but definite signs of a beer gut there. Fantastic. And next week?”

“The Pits—Underarm Hair Horror of the Stars.”

“Cracking.
You’re
the star, Tamara. You’re not going anywhere.
Psst!
needs you.”

This was exactly what she feared.

She looked through the evening papers to see if Tim’s disgrace had
made the diary pages yet, tidied up her “Porkers” list, sent it over to Simon, sketched out a draft of the “Pits” list and spent much of the afternoon harvesting background material for the next few weeks’ A-Lists: “Top Ten Soap Star Love Rats”; “Telly Catfights”; “Best and Worst Boob Jobs.” Johnny sent a message asking her to do a ring-round for
Me2
on “Deadbeat God-dads”—one of the tabloids had run a piece on a septuagenarian soap star whose middle-aged godson, an unemployed plumber with mental health problems, claimed the actor had never sent him a birthday card or postal order in forty years. Calls to the usual suspects harvested a workable yield of confessions and complaints.

It was, in the end, a satisfactory day’s work and, considering her condition, it was remarkable that she had managed to report for duty at all. She yearned for a quiet night at home, but duty called.

She took the tube to Maida Vale and arrived to find the café still open. But someone was sitting in her seat, his broad shoulders maddeningly obscuring her view of the entrance to Holmbrook Mansions. With a loud sigh, which she hoped would unsettle him, she sat down at the next table. She looked across at the trespasser and felt a charge of shock. It was Honor Tait’s male escort. He was preoccupied, delicately sipping a small cup of black coffee while sorting through some coins. Close up he was even better looking: a rangey, lightly tanned, soft-eyed metropolitan hippie in a white T-shirt under an artfully creased linen jacket. Around his neck was a loop of brown beads, and a plaited leather cuff was fastened round his wrist.

Tamara willed him to look up but when he did, and shook back his dark tangle of hair, it was to signal one of the brothers for the bill. He did not notice her. His face had the wide-jawed symmetry of a stained-glass saint, a fine, aquiline nose that could have been chiselled by Michelangelo, and lips designed for more than prayer. He pushed back his seat, dropped a handful of coins by his cup and left the café, calling “Thanks!” over his shoulder to the brothers.

Tamara picked up her bag and moved to claim his chair. The warmth of the seat seemed an intimate gift, something to bask in. As she watched him jaywalking across the road and running up the steps into Holmbrook Mansions, she felt the high of total engagement. After all her work, and several false starts, everything was falling into place. But his work? She gazed up at the fourth-floor windows of the building. What was going on up there? It was unfathomable.

It had never occurred to her that old people could have sexual feelings, but she guessed it might be technically possible. When the elderly, particularly old men, displayed an interest in sex, she had always assumed that other forces were at work. It was a statement of potency, loudly asserted in the season of impotence. Her father, though fifteen years younger than Honor Tait, was a case in point. He couldn’t see how foolish he looked, scrawny and hairless, cravated and cologned, arm in arm with the pearl-skinned, lanky Ludmilla, a gargantuan swan to his miniature bald eagle. Although Tamara had tried, fighting her natural squeamishness, she could not envisage the physical act that brought sturdy Boris, a freakish miracle of hybridisation, into the world. It was an affront to nature, like interspecies copulation, surely only possible under laboratory conditions. And Honor Tait and her escort? It was beyond bestiality.

But for Tait, unlike Tamara’s father, the element of display was absent. Women were not so easily fooled into believing that the company of a younger lover, particularly one who had been bought, lent any kind of status or glamour to the senior partner. Honor Tait’s escort was not squiring her around town; other young men volunteered that service for free. He was hired by the hour. This was a private transaction, a source of mutual shame as well as mutual convenience. Tamara was sickened by the thought of the old woman’s appetites. How unjust it was that a shrivelled pensioner should be enjoying regular sessions with a striking specimen of manhood while she, young, pretty and in her prime, should lie alone and unmolested each night in her king-size bed. These days, her vast white duvet called to mind an Arctic snowfield—deserted and miserably cold. And under her bed, in an improbable variety of shapes, and in colours that owed little to nature, were the unwieldy fruits of her latest consumer report for
Oestrus
magazine: her hoard of vibrators, her cock stock, still in their boxes, keeping company with her slippers and mocking her loveless nights.

She accepted a mug of watery coffee from the surly brother, ordered a sandwich—anything but chicken—opened her notebook, took out her thesaurus and the clippings, and got down to work.

By the time Honor Tait’s visitor finally left Holmbrook Mansions, the café had closed and Tamara was sipping a gin and tonic at her chilly berth outside the Gut and Bucket. Did she imagine the hurried furtiveness in his manner as he walked away, head bowed, from the building, as if he were escaping the scene of a crime? If crime it was, he was the victim rather than the perpetrator. She left her drink and ran across the road to follow him. Too late. He got into his van and drove off. Was he returning to a communal squat in Hampstead, or an austere bachelor flat in Ladbroke Grove? Perhaps there was a wife in Clapham. Kids too—and Honor Tait’s tainted money was putting them through private school. This seemed the least plausible scenario. He was too attractive to be a family man.

As he drove away, an ugly vision took shape in her mind of the old woman’s passion and his cold resignation. Tamara asked herself once more if she could have got it wrong. Could he be a member of Honor Tait’s salon after all? One of her platonic pals, an out-of-work Shakespearean actor, perhaps, or a hopeless but charming playwright? None of these explanations could account for the cash, the furtiveness of their meeting or the intimacy of their kiss. And besides, Honor Tait had history in this area.

Behind Tamara there was an outbreak of rowdy laughter as a young couple left the pub, pushing open the door, arm in arm, and releasing a blast of catcalls on a current of rank air. There was little point in standing here alone in the cold. The real prize had slipped away. He had fulfilled his task. He would not be back tonight, and Honor Tait would be lying in the dark, exhausted, her grisly desires sated. Tamara struggled to banish these thoughts. She was working at
Psst!
tomorrow, then she had to spend most of the weekend writing up another overdue travel feature for
Mile High
—on the Krakelingen live-fish-swallowing festival in Belgium—and the editor of
Oestrus
was pressing hard for the vibrator report. She needed to focus. The
S
^*
nday
article had to be delivered
in less than a fortnight, and Lyra Moore, elusive on so many matters, was unambiguous in this area at least; she would give no quarter on deadlines.

He had come, as he said he would. That was something. That, in the end, had to be everything. This bitterness was becoming habitual. Today’s visit was less hurried. He had observed the proprieties, expressed interest in her, asked her what she had been doing, whom she had been seeing, how she felt. To an outsider his embrace could have looked like tenderness. But it was a simple transaction. For him it was about money. It had always been about money. Why, then, did she feel such anguish at the thought of him walking away? The boy—yes, he was still a boy—was unfinished business. Her feelings for him were dark, primordial; the sediment shifting at the bottom of her stagnant heart. Stir it up at your peril.

There had been many people in her life. In her darkest moments she counted them up, looking for embers in the ash pit. Sometimes it seemed those old loves, those long friendships, had generated barely enough heat to warm her hands. She thought again of Lois. Honor could not shake off this new sense that she had deserted her. Had she started pulling away, quietly appalled, distancing herself, inching out of the picture, as soon as she realised what was happening, and what lay ahead? In Mantua, on what was to be their last trip together, they had spent one morning apart; Lois was touring the churches with the dogged attention only a lifelong atheist could give, while Honor, ironically, given the perilous state of her marriage at that time, was visiting the Camera degli Sposi. When Lois failed to turn up for their lunchtime rendezvous, Honor had gone looking for her. She had been horrified, fifty minutes later, to find her fearless, clever and resourceful friend, lost and weeping in the Piazza Sordello. It had taken a shared bottle of prosecco to calm her down, and later that evening they had laughed about it. But no one was laughing now. Least of all Lois.

The night chorus had started in the garden. Honor did not mind the ululating tots so much, or the self-righteous parents with their geometric haircuts and fancy baby carriages. It was the teenage boys from the council
flats behind the tube station who caused the problems. They had no right to use the garden but they got in somehow, climbing the railings after dark, trampling on the shrubs, baying and hooting into the early hours. Sleep was difficult enough.

It was worse in the summer, with the long hot nights, when the denatured vegetation struggled to reenact some species memory of lushness and fragrance, and the boys—where were the girls?—lay around on the grass, bantering and smoking, marijuana no doubt, between bouts of soccer that laid waste to the flowerbeds and lasted until dawn. Forced to close the window against the cacophony, Honor would lie all night, breathless and alert, longing for a downpour. Like Glenbuidhe midges, London teenagers could not take the rain.

She looked up at the clock. It was late. Almost too late. Work was all she had. More unfinished business.

The clamour of an alarm pierced Tamara’s dream—her mother, smiling in chef’s whites, was serving her in
The Monitor
canteen. Fire or theft? It was the telephone. Tamara drowsily reached for the receiver.

“Tam?”

“Ross.” She stirred into consciousness. Her mouth was parched, filled with a foul toilet-bowl tang, and dried spittle sealed the corners of her lips.

“You okay, Tam?”

Well, here was a rare moment of role reversal.

“I’m okay. Are you okay, more to the point?”

He said he was, but he clearly was not. He sounded shivery and afraid.

“Where are you?” Tamara asked.

“Crystal’s.”

Not again.

“Why? What’s happened?”

“I’ve had to leave my place.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing that can’t be sorted.”