The Spoiler (44 page)

Tamara’s fee for the obituary was disappointingly small but, as a mark of respect and by way of recompense, she spent it on a large wreath of Honor Tait’s favourite pink lilies, to be placed on her coffin. The card pinned to the wreath read simply: “To the doyenne of journalists. From your greatest admirer.”

The research for this book gave me a pleasurable pretext to read, or reread, the work and memoirs of many distinguished women journalists, none of whom bear any resemblance to my fictional war correspondent, Honor Tait. Only Marguerite Higgins, the courageous and beautiful American reporter whose career path would have crossed Honor’s, might legitimately raise an eyebrow. Higgins’s description of an incident after the liberation of Buchenwald has some parallels with my story, but the details of her account, her response and the outcome, are markedly different. I am, however, indebted to Higgins’s memoirs,
News Is a Singular Thing
and
War in Korea
, and to her biography,
Witness to War
, by Antoinette May. Thanks are also due to Isabel Fonseca and Jane Maud, who read my early drafts and were generous and perspicacious in their suggestions; to my editor, Rebecca Carter; and above all to Ian McEwan for his unfailing support and loving counsel.