The Spoiler
Page 9
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.
Four
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 S*nday 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.
The second floor accommodated the features desk, run by the quixotic Johnny Malkinson. The prevailing atmosphere here was a grudging hush—as in a sixth-form crammer the week before exams—but the team’s youth and native high spirits would occasionally find madcap release in the pursuit of work. Then unwary visitors to this floor could be forgiven for thinking they had wandered into the company crèche, or an outreach course for teenage sufferers from attention deficit disorder. Visitors might have to negotiate nodding thickets of red balloons, say, or shout to make themselves heard over a fusillade of Mardi Gras whistles, on the day Monitor Extra was producing a special issue on power-broking party organisers. Or they might have to address Malkinson as he held a parasol aloft while gingerly attempting to negotiate a tightrope strung between the subs’ desks, for a double-page spread on the democratisation of circus skills.
Occasionally a representative from Human Resources would be sent upstairs to ask Features to keep the noise down. In the midst of these jamborees, Vida Waldman, Johnny’s grouchy deputy, would sit frowning at her keyboard in the corner, her workstation an islet of quiet disapproval as the party raged around her.
A more persistently serene atmosphere prevailed on the third floor, with its view of the topmost branches of a row of blighted sycamores. Here the scholarly denizens of the arts and books pages coexisted peacefully, if uncomprehendingly, with the bizarrely costumed members of the fashion department. This floor was the main staging post for the messengers who, when not sharing cigarettes, tea and sporting gossip, spent most of their day in convoy from the ground-floor mail room, like an endless column of ants, bringing sacks of books to the books editor and bags of frocks to the fashion editor. Twitters of pleasure, like spring birdsong, greeted every new delivery to Fashion. In Books, each fresh sack would generate sighs and groans and once, in the case of a distressed temp who was finally escorted from the building, the rending of garments.
On this floor, too, was the library, also known as the morgue, the busi
est department in the building, a maze of tightly packed floor-to-ceiling metal shelves crammed with hanging files containing envelopes of photographs and wads of cuttings on everyone who had ever appeared in a newspaper.
“Here is the compost,” Simon had said when he showed Tamara around the building on her first day at The Monitor, “which nourishes our freshest blooms; the poop behind the scoop.”
The turbine hum of great minds at work on momentous matters was almost audible as you stepped out of the lift onto the fourth floor, where the windows gave on to views of a multistorey car park, whose interlinking ramps and walkways resembled an etching by Escher. On this floor men and women in their serious middle years, their days of Mardi Gras and circus skills long behind them, were said to live by the broadsheet journalists’ Law of Gravitas: “Every article in the Opinion Pages attacks every other article therein with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them …” Only those who fully understood this law, and could write its algebraic formula from memory, it was claimed, were permitted to work on the opinion pages.
They shared their suite with Politics, a team with a more diverse age range than Opinion, encompassing youthful prodigies with a passion for the statistics, form and league tables of party politics, and august greyheads—like the recently departed Bullingdon, and her successor, Toby Gadge—with failing memories and bulging contacts books, who only truly felt alive in Westminster (in Gadge’s case, the purlieu now extended southwards, to encompass Cathedral as well as Palace). On this floor, too, behind superfluous soundproof screens, was located the Obituaries and Crossword department, whose venerable members operated in such silence, and paid so little heed to directives from other departments, that they were widely believed to be deaf mutes employed under one of Denbigh’s equal opportunities schemes.
Above Opinion, Politics and Obits and Crosswords, and high above the traffic, the flats, the shrivelled trees and the multistorey car park, on the fifth floor, the view was of untrammelled skies and cloudscapes. Here the elegant Lyra Moore presided over the S*nday team, screened from her staff by constantly replenished urns of flowers, discreetly soliciting the finest prose from the world’s most renowned writers, teasing and titivating those words to even greater perfection, and matching them with photographs of such beauty and economy that they demanded to be scissored from the magazine’s pages, framed in limed oak and mounted on the wall of a Docklands loft.
Here, too, behind a portcullis of polished chrome, through a double door of reinforced glass, beyond the searchlight glare of his secretary, Hazel, sat The Monitor’s editor in chief, Austin Wedderburn, when he was in residence. Hazel controlled Wedderburn’s diary and could delineate his daily trajectory through London and the Home Counties, minute by minute, more efficiently than any military satellite tracking system. This was no mean task, since Wedderburn was a man for whom the vexations of office life were an inconvenient interruption in an abundant social calendar. The Monitor was read, as it had always been read, by captains of industry and politicians, cultural grandees, senior figures in the judiciary, archbishops, and the rackety remnants of the English aristocracy—in short, the people of influence whom Wedderburn liked to meet at dinner parties. That the paper was now also read by hairdressers and shop assistants, taxi drivers and policemen, cleaners and canteen workers was a source of quiet satisfaction to Circulation and Marketing, but it was unwise to remind Wedderburn of the fact.
For his personal use he had commandeered an old service lift, which had once conveyed pallets of paper from the print-plant basement to the upper-floor presses. Its utilitarian aluminium walls were covered with suede-effect vinyl, and the lift now served as an insulated capsule which propelled Wedderburn straight from his chauffeur’s parking space to his fifth-floor office, so that he could arrive at his desk uncontaminated by chance sightings of the rabble from Psst!, or the drudges from News, or the thugs from Sport, or the excitable children from Features. Thus he was able to spend his time at the office in exclusive contiguity with the cerebral labourers of S*nday and, if he was feeling expansive, engage in Socratic dialogue on the weightier issues of the day—London’s draconian parking restrictions, for instance, or the iniquities of capital gains tax—with deputations from Opinion and Politics. Those from other floors who did manage to secure an audience with Wedderburn—and there were only a handful—attested that he was very like an Eskimo: he had fifty words for no.
Most employees of The Monitor, except for those already comfortably seated on the fifth floor, aspired upward. But some, like Simon Pettigrew and Miles Denbigh, were downwardly mobile. As former head of Magazine Project Development, Simon had once been Lyra Moore’s boss, until an unfortunate incident with the newly appointed agriculture correspondent, Aurora Witherspoon, a snooty beauty from the shires. Simon had propositioned her on the office’s new computer messaging system, and pressed “send” before he had realised that, thanks to the predictive text programme, which filled in “best fit” addresses as the sender began to type the recipient’s name, it was Austin Wedderburn who had received the eulogy to his impressive chest and spectacular legs, and the suggestion that he might like to “get down and dirty with some farmyard action” and “play bulls and heifers all night long.” “Go on. You know you want to, Gorgeous!” had been Simon’s sign-off, which had signed off his career in Magazine Project Development for the foreseeable future.
Miles Denbigh, who had enjoyed a view of the car park from Opinion for fifteen years, had been rusticated to the first floor when it became clear that, while he was happy to express his views on politics and social issues in Ancient Greece, offering any analysis of more contemporary matters caused him acute anxiety.
Until the unexpected message from Lyra Moore, Tamara had set her sights no higher than the second floor. She had given up long ago on the Stakhanovite sourpuss Vida, who had responded to all her proposals for features with disdainful silence. Johnny had been more amenable. He ran regular articles in his daily Me2 pages on pop music and film, to the irritation of the paper’s Fr!day pop and film section, which he regularly scooped; fashion, to the chagrin of the frequently gazumped Thursday L(oo!)k pages; and cookery, which the furious editor of the Wednesday F
Tamara remained diplomatically neutral on the issue. Her first loyalty was to Simon and Psst!, but Johnny’s magpie borrowings were always supplemented by the sparky fact boxes and celebrity vox pops which were her speciality. She had hoped that, after proving her abilities on Psst! with “Soap Opera Shags,” providing three vox pops for Johnny’s pages (“Stars’ Top Breakfasts”; “Me and My Chair—Furnishing Secrets of the Rich and Famous”; and “My Favourite Celebrity Questionnaire”) as well as a pugnacious, pun-packed Tamara Sim Column, he might offer her a regular berth. But instead Tamara had been fast-tracked. She had stepped into the suede-effect lined lift, figuratively speaking, the doors had shut, the LED display was flashing, the green arrow was pointing skywards and she was on her way up; up beyond Psst! and TV listings and celebrity chatter, up, past News on the ground floor, past Features on the second. Up, up, up.
But first, Tamara had some work to do. The basement office was in semi-darkness and pleasingly deserted, apart from a buck-toothed geek—one of Tania’s Web site drones—gawping at a screen at the far end of the room. Tamara bought a cheese sandwich from the canteen, whose only customers were two refugees from the newsroom late shift, conspiring over coffee. At her desk she lined up her pens on a north–south axis, alongside her notebook and tape recorder.
She had all she needed for an extended bout of work—
solitude, sustenance, stationery and, above all, uninterrupted silence, a necessity so often denied her at home by the upstairs neighbours, two trainee solicitors, weekend Goths with a taste for heavy metal.
Tamara had spent many productive nights at work in the office, not always for The Monitor. She had even, when racing to meet a deadline for The Sphere, slept here, perfectly comfortably, pushing aside her keyboard and resting her cheek on a plump A4 envelope of Simon’s receipts.
But she was going to need more than ideal working conditions to pull this story off. Determination, energy and flair would also be required, as well as a few decent quotes. And this was what was worrying her. Tamara turned to her notes, the written record of the fractious interview, which would serve as her mother lode.
What exactly had the old woman said? Nothing of any value, until the last minute, with her admission of an affair with Bing Crosby, which none of the cuttings had referred to. It would be an exclusive. But what was the quote? Tamara checked the note she had made when she left the mansion block: “Marvellous feet. I felt like a gossip columnist when he held me.” It did not make much sense. But it almost did. And it was original. Apart from that, and the passing reference to Liz Taylor, there was not a single usable line. She would need a further conversation with the old bat, and other interviews would be required, with friends (though it was difficult to imagine that Honor Tait had any) and associates. Then there was the reading—the cuttings and the books—to fall back on, for framework and padding.
At least she had her impressions, rich with detail, telling, and very much her own, to enliven the piece. That was a start. She opened her thesaurus. The substance—facts, quotes—could be filled in later.