The Spoiler (7 page)

She felt a spreading chill of apprehension but reassured herself that this story would require only an extension of those skills she had already used many times in the course of her career. She had to approach it methodically. Talk to the woman, get more on her family background, the love life, the celebrity angle, Sinatra, Liz Taylor, a few key quotes, throw in a handful of cultural references (Picasso, a must for
S
^*
nday
readers, and Marilyn, revered by snobs as well as slobs), a bit of colour—descriptions of her appearance, her flat—coax some sound bites from a few of Tait’s friends and top and tail it with a couple of lines on her work. A quick pass-over with
Roget’s
would bump up the syllable quotient, and she could season it all with some piquant French gleaned from
Larousse
. It should not be difficult. Once you cracked the intro, you were there. Tamara was working on her first paragraph already.

Bucknell pushed his way through the revolving glass doors of Holmbrook Mansions and walked towards the reception desk, his leather jacket creaking manfully. A doorman, liveried like a down-at-heel South American military dictator, directed them to the lift.

“Thanks, mate,” the photographer said, giving a condescending thumbs-up.

Tamara followed several paces behind, a resentful squaw, hoping the doorman did not think they were a couple in the conjugal sense. They ascended in hostile silence to the fourth floor. In the confinement of the lift she held her breath, but there was no defence against the acrid scent of distilled tobacco that seemed to ooze from Bucknell’s pores. As they walked along the corridor to the flat, her heels echoed portentously on the tiled floor. At the door, her finger beat his to the doorbell. Waiting for the old woman to answer, Tamara mentally reworked her intro.

There was a jingle and clank of chains and bolts before the door opened and Honor Tait, smaller and more frail than she appeared in her most recent photographs, stood before them.

“You’re late,” she said.

Tamara looked reproachfully at the photographer, but he turned away, attending to the clasps and buckles of his bag.

“So sorry,” Tamara said, addressing the old woman with an apologetic smile. “The traffic in St. John’s Wood was horrendous. We tried to ring …”

She held out the bouquet of flowers, and Honor Tait accepted them, sighing.

“You’re here now. You might as well come in.”

They followed her stooped back into the hallway, stepping over a stack of old newspapers and a supermarket carrier bag filled with books.
Under her Mediterranean widow’s drab, her spine jutted like the vertebrae of an ancient sea creature.

The old woman showed them into the sitting room and left them standing there while she disappeared into the kitchen with the flowers. It was an old person’s flat, unmistakably—shabby, cluttered, faintly grimy, and reeking of the past. Or was it the stench of death? Tamara, on the job already and alert for details, walked towards the book shelf and looked at the photographs. Not the standard family snaps. No gap-toothed children in school uniform, or dizzy graduates balancing mortars on anachronistic hairdos. These were mostly pictures of Honor Tait herself, and taken a very long time ago. The old woman returned and brusquely indicated a flock-covered chair. Tamara smoothed the back of her skirt and sat down with a demure half-smile that she fancied called to mind the biddable charm of the predivorce Princess Diana. Honor Tait gripped the scuffed wooden arms of the chair opposite—her hands were as thin and twisted as chicken’s feet—and carefully lowered herself into it.

Behind the old woman a tall sash window, hung with green velvet curtains that were coming adrift from their hooks, framed a view of windows in an identical mansion block opposite and, just visible in the gulf between the two buildings, the topmost branches of wintry trees.

Tamara had to get it all down. She reached into her handbag and, after a spell of noisy rummaging, drew out a pencil, a notebook and a miniature tape recorder.

Honor watched intently, a glint of scepticism in her narrowed eyes. Such a big bag, as capacious as a doctor’s Gladstone, and such a small girl. So many tools and devices. Miss Sim was not unattractive, though she would be prone to dumpiness later, perhaps, and her chemically flaxened
hair was scored with a black fault line at the parting. But she had a pinched prettiness, and her perky breasts strained against her blouse in a way that many men with a taste for the obvious would find appealing.

A faint cough drew Honor’s attention upwards. The photographer was still standing there, looming over the two women, demanding attention without meriting it, a spear carrier with doomed ambitions to play the lead. Honor looked at him with irritation.

“Yes?”

He shifted his weight nervously from foot to foot as if surreptitiously scraping dog mess from his shoes.

“I’ll just set up and fire away, while you two are talking, if that’s okay.”

“No. It’s not
okay
,” the old woman said.

Tamara opened her notebook and stared at Bucknell, incensed. If it was a question of cost and the picture desk insisted on using a staff photographer, why not good-humoured, obliging Tom, whose easy Irish flattery fooled no one but charmed everyone? Or bashful Milly, dim daughter of a titled brewing family, who treated everybody, including Tamara, with a whispered servility? Tom would not have given a thumbs-up to the doorman, and Honor Tait would not be ready to chuck the interview before she had started if little Milly were here, blushing, apologising and dancing deferentially around her.

“We can get it over with now,” Honor Tait continued. “Then you can go.”

Bucknell bared his bisque teeth in an abject smile, unfolded his tripod and snapped open the umbrella reflector.

“Don’t make such a business of it,” Honor said. “All these accoutrements. They’re just fetish objects. Completely unnecessary. You’re not Cartier-Bresson. Just point and shoot.”

Relaxed and emboldened by her colleague’s discomfort, Tamara made surreptitious notes.

The photographer rubbed his hands and grinned, broad shoulders hunched, frozen in the act of ingratiation. His ill-shaven face looked
damp and grubby, more mildewed than bearded. Looking at him, Honor found herself struck by a rare urge for housekeeping; she must get the maid to clean out the back of her fridge. He avoided her eyes, only looking at her directly from behind the safety of his viewfinder.

Once Honor had liked to draw men in with her gaze. Their eyes would lock on to hers, startled, and then they would be disarmed. She had first become aware of this power as a young girl in Glenbuidhe, home from the convent for the holidays. The timorous estate manager, the stuttering cousin from Aberdeenshire, the overaffectionate uncle visiting from London—it amused her to disconcert them with lingering looks and careless gestures. Later, sprung from Belgian cloisters and Highland fastness, launched in the racy world of work in Paris, where men were unabashed and insatiable, she perfected this skill. And as a journalist, in filthy dugouts and elegant hotels, during political conferences and at Hollywood parties, in the hush of libraries and the crush of airports, it was sport to her, like deer stalking—a stag cull without the carnage.

When did she start to lose that power? In her late fifties? Her sixties? First they failed to return her stare, dropping their eyes and turning away, and the averted gaze had the force of a deliberate affront. Later, most men stopped seeing her at all. She was obsolete, and not just sexually. She could still summon lovers of a sort—the drunk, the inadequate, the kinky masochists and gerontophiles—but it was more an act of reciprocal degradation than of carnal pleasure.

“Mrs. Tait, if I could just have you standing in the corner by the window.”

How objectionable, to be patronised by such an unprepossessing simpleton.

“Mrs. Challis.
Miss
Tait,” she said. “You can take me here, as I am. No flash. Natural light will be quite sufficient.”

If necessary she could always pay, she knew. Any service could be summoned by a simple exchange of cash. There was no cause for shame; economic independence meant that, in the latter half of the century, women could enjoy a useful expedient that had been available to men for millennia. But one had to be discreet. Social mores had yet to catch up. The wealthy old man with the glorious girl on his arm might be an acceptable stereotype, perhaps inspiring male envy and defensive female ridicule; one had only to reverse the genders to provoke unanimous disgust.

The photographer crouched, a troglodyte supplicant, and his knees creaked arthritically.

“Lovely, that’s lovely,” he said to her as the shutter clicked.

Free from the taint of money, Honor had had no shortage of “admirers,” though for her that term, once a euphemism for licentious petitioners, had largely reverted to its literal meaning. The exhilaration of boundless physical profligacy, the delicious sense that one could seduce the world if one wished, had vanished. All part of time’s cruel process of de-pleasuring.

“No need to humour me,” she said.

Bucknell worked swiftly, with the cold-eyed hostility of a sniper.

It must be a chemical signal, or its absence—the musk of fertility had evaporated long ago—that now rendered her invisible to most men. On occasions, though, she had felt that she was not invisible enough; once or twice she had found herself watching an attractive young man, a stranger, imagining his smooth body unclothed, the swells and hollows of his musculature, the silky tuber stirring in its nest, willing the warmth of his breath on her cheek and his cupped hands at her breasts, when the focus of her idle yearning, sensing that he was being observed, had looked up and, at the sight of her, shrunk back, unable to conceal his horror. Did they fear that old age might be contagious? She had news for them: it was. Early death was the only way to avoid it.

At least in the case of this dolt kneeling by her chair, the revulsion was mutual.

Tamara watched as Honor Tait faced the lens with an enigmatic smile, like a fossilised Mona Lisa. Was that a smile of self-satisfaction or contempt?

Bucknell, back on his feet, made several tentative suggestions with the air of someone, arms aloft, attempting to reason with an armed assailant. Would Miss Tait consider, perhaps, resting her cheek on her hand?
Might she see her way to holding up her book? Would she possibly, for a second, contemplate posing with the deerstalker hat hanging on a peg by the door?

“Do you expect me to make a total fool of myself?”

He took a few more token pictures and sullenly began packing his cameras away.

“The trouble is,” Honor said, talking over him conspiratorially as he crouched by his bags, “they all think they’re artists these days.”

Tamara smiled. The difficult business with Bucknell was over, and Honor Tait was acknowledging her, woman to woman, as a fellow professional. Tamara allowed herself a certain pride. Her status had soared because of her association with Britain’s most respectable glossy magazine.

The old woman looked at Tamara with a wily smile: “I hope you don’t think you’re an artist too, dear. There’s nothing more absurd than a reporter who thinks she’s an artist.”

Was Bucknell sniggering? Tamara murmured a denial, bent over her notebook and worried her pencil across the lined pages: “Face-lift?” she wrote. There was an unnatural silvery sheen across Honor Tait’s cheeks, and she appeared to have difficulty smiling. But that could be down to temperament.

“A voice recorder
and
a notebook?” Honor asked, arching her sparse eyebrows at the tiny machine.

The old woman could raise her eyebrows anyway, which was more than Lucy Hartson could do.

“Belt and braces. If one fails, the other won’t let me down,” Tamara said.

Honor leaned towards her, as if she was about to share a confidence.

“Very wise, dear,” she said. “It would be disastrous if one of your stories were to be lost to the reading public. Like Alexandria’s library all over again.”

Tamara caught the hostility but not the reference and smiled—a jaunty, dishonest grin—right back. Okay. She got the picture. Honor Tait was not going to make it easy, or pleasant. But Tamara was a professional. She had come here to get a story, to advance her career, not to make a friend.

“Yes. I suppose so,” she said, with a light laugh intended to suggest that she got the joke but was generous enough to let it pass.