The Spoiler

by Annalena McAfee

  She glanced at the page proofs of The Unflinching Eye, resting reproachfully on the coffee table. She needed to read through this third—and final, Honor had insisted to her publisher—collection of her journalism. For now, though, she did not have the stomach to revisit old work, casting a jaundiced eye over past triumphs. Instead she picked up her notebook. New work. The coda to her Pulitzer Prize–winning article about the liberation of Buchenwald would be the last chapter of this final book. Here, with a new and expanded version of the original report, was a chance for reparation. Whether she would be able to write it she did not know. But she had to try. She had resisted a return to Goethe’s Oak for too long.

  Buchenwald, 14 April 1945. Liberation Day Four. The survivors, still in their ragged prison uniforms, assembled by the shattered stump of Goethe’s Oak to celebrate their freedom. Each held a national flag. As they waved them, in a show of defiant national pride, many silently wept for their comrades who did not live to see this day.

  The phone rang early the next morning, jolting Honor out of a pill-induced sleep. She lifted the receiver, expecting another silent call, but this time he spoke. His voice hit her like a shock of ice water. Her questions, banal, essential, tumbled out: “Where have you been?” “How are you?” “What have you been doing?” “Where are you?”

  As he hedged and sidestepped at the end of the line, all that had stood between them shrank away.

  “Who else would it be? Another lover?” he said. “I’ve been around, you know … Pretty good … Bit of this, bit of that … Hard to say, right now …”

  She felt the sweet low timbre of his voice reverberate inside her, as if a string had been plucked on an instrument that had not been played for years and was still perfectly in tune. He was pulling her back and, against all reason, she wanted to bind him tightly to her with her questions.

  “But are you well? Where have you been living? How have you managed?”

  She feared that she would drive him away with her questions, and yet she could not stop. She wanted more of that voice, more of him. What he said, or did not say, was irrelevant, just as long as he kept on talking.

  “I got by.”

  She had dreamed of him, in fitful playlets of separation and reconciliation. His voice had also provided a soundtrack for many of her nightmares. She paused to check, passing her hand across her brow, that, no, she was awake, this was really happening and it was him at the end of the line.

  “I got your card,” she said. “You said you needed to see me.”

  “Did I say that? Need? I thought need was more your game.”

  He sounded so close, near enough to touch.

  “And where are you now?” she asked, anxious not to provoke him.

  “I’m around. Back in circulation.”

  “In London?”

  She heard him sigh, a long exhalation of exaggerated weariness.

  “Not a million miles away,” he said.

  “Any plans?” she asked, with a lightness she knew he would detect as fraudulent.

  “You read my card. I thought we might get together.”

  “Get together”—the awful slanginess of the phrase. He was mocking her.

  “Yes … Why not?”

  The tentativeness of her reply suggested exactly why not. And yet, at some level only he knew, though Dr. Kohler and his colleagues might guess at it, she wanted it, craved it, this “getting together.”

  “Only it’s difficult,” he said.

  Naturally it would be difficult. Dangerous, too. He had drawn her in, gained her admission that she wished to see him, and now he was withdrawing. She was feeling light-headed, whether dazed from the effects of the sleeping pill she had taken only two hours ago, or by palpitations brought on by the shock of his call she was not sure.

  “I’m sure there is no difficulty that can’t be overcome,” she said.

  “I’m not so sure. It’s been a bit tricky.”

  She felt a sudden debilitating warmth steal over her; an ambush of tenderness.

  “We can forget all that, surely. Start again,” she said. Could he hear the pathetic note of pleading in her voice?

  “My finances. They’re a bit compromised right now,” he said.

  Finances? Of course. That was what it was all about. How could she forget?

  “Money?” she said, with a blustering laugh. “Look, that’s not a concern. Let me know how much you need, where to send it.”

  He had to go, he said. He would be in touch again, soon.

  “Really?”

  “Really!”

  Was there a bass note of menace in his voice? He was still angry with her.

  And then he was gone.

  Honor pushed aside the bedcovers and walked unsteadily into the kitchen. She poured herself a vodka with trembling hands and pulled back the curtains. Outside the postdawn sky was grey as an army blanket, and the trees were restless, anticipating a storm. A few lights were already on in the flats across the way, and she watched as a young woman brought a baby to the window and looked out, pointing down at the garden. Honor turned away and sank into a chair, overwhelmed by a sense of dread. Sometimes an idle longing for intimacy could become an unseemly hunger, and for her it had always been a hunger that could never be fully satisfied.

  She drained her glass and put it on the table next to Tad’s photograph. Did she miss her husband? Even though their marriage, outwardly successful, had been something of a sham? One could be as lonely in the corporate bustle of coupledom as in a spinster’s bedsit. But intimacy, that was what she missed. The comforting banality of companionship requiring no effort or examination. His body lying next to hers, night after night. Mostly. And sex, not necessarily with Tad—she missed that, too.

  There was a time, in her early fifties, as her body began to undergo the Change—a term that could also do useful service as a euphemism for death—when she hoped that her body’s fluctuating thermostat, the internal wildfires, would burn out her remaining reserves of libido. Lois had always been comparatively sexually continent, and menopause for her had been merely the dying note of a long diminuendo. How Honor had longed for a sudden, permanent arctic winter of passion, for the time that would be saved, the mental energy spared, to devote herself to contemplation and decisive execution of useful projects: to work, without distraction. The Change that would be as good as a rest. No such luck. John G appeared, twenty-two years her junior, dark, intense and not in the least displeased by her ageing body. She had seen him as her last hurrah, her terminal tarantella before the deathbed. And then he was followed by Lucio, and then Bernard … There had been little dimming of desire since, only diminishing opportunity.

  Now this phone call mocked her with a reminder of real, perilous intimacy. He was back, within reach. He had phoned, and he would come to see her. She knew he would. He was angry, yes, but perhaps, even now, it was not too late.

  Five

  Tamara’s desk was already occupied when she arrived at The Monitor on Monday morning. Tania Singh sat there, her face illuminated, like a spotlit Bollywood princess, by the glow from the computer screen. Her child-size fingers flickered over Tamara’s keyboard, and her books and papers were heaped on the desk. “Excuse me?” Tamara said, dropping her bag on the floor by Tania’s feet, which looked preternaturally tiny in their kitten-heel boots.

  “Hi!” Tania looked up and smiled. “I didn’t think you’d be in till later. My computer’s down. I knew you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Well, actually …”

  “Won’t be a moment.”

  Tania gathered up her possessions and exited, her long hair swishing defiantly behind her like a black silk cape. Tamara noticed with irritation that Tania had left a pile of books behind. There would be nothing remotely readable in there; no ghosted pop star biographies, no paperback fiction about a modern woman’s search for love, no quirky detective stories, no jokes. Tania was famously pretentious and was said to spend her waking hours—when not consolidating he
r position at The Monitor—reading educational tracts and going to art galleries, the theatre or the opera.

  She wrote a diary for the Web site, and Simon had seen it. “Waste of time,” he said. “Don’t know why she bothers. The Internet is for losers. Citizens band radio for pseuds and geeks.” Last week, apparently, Tania was “re-evaluating Lévi-Strauss”—not, as Tamara first thought, a reflection on the disappearance of blue jeans from the wardrobes of the fashion-conscious young (a piece Tamara herself had offered to commissioning editors several times without success) but an extended essay on the founder of structural anthropology.

  “I don’t know who she thinks she’s writing for,” Simon said. “The small online community, so-called, seems to be a loose fraternity of lonely masturbators. And I’m not talking intellectual onanism here. On the other hand, as it were, her byline picture is very fetching.”

  In an effort to disseminate that byline photo as widely as possible, Tania wooed commissioning editors in other sections of the paper with a frightening single-mindedness.

  Vida, who stood in for Johnny as features editor when he was away from the office, had commissioned and published two pieces by her—one on a women’s refuge in Baluchistan, the other on an artist who painted “painfully intimate” abstracts using brushes made of her own body hair. Neither would have got past Johnny himself, if he had not been marooned in a Surrey hotel at the time, role-playing trades union negotiation scenarios with other senior editors under the tutelage of a management consultant.

  Johnny had fallen foul of Tania directly when he enthusiastically agreed to commission a piece she had apparently offered on the semiotics of the Simpsons, only to be presented, two weeks later, with a two-thousand-word essay on someone called Barthes. Roland Barthes. Johnny had been avoiding her ever since, taking imaginary calls on his phone whenever she approached. She had written reviews of Eastern European theatre for Arts and of new Scandinavian fiction for Books, covered a curling competition in Blairgowrie for Sports, expounded on flood relief in Benin for Opinion and was said to have petitioned the unassailable Lyra every day for a month, with messages on the office computer, in a desperate bid to break into S*nday.

  How satisfying, thought Tamara, that it should be her—modest, unpretentious, straight-talking, street-savvy, down-to-earth Tamara Sim—rather than the flagrant intellectual snob Tania, who had been invited to join Lyra’s team. Among The Monitor’s senior editors, only Simon remained unsolicited by Tania, who was coolly dismissive of the central subject, the bantering style and debunking japes of Psst!. She rarely lunched and never joined the basement team after work in the Beaded Bubbles, the cellar wine bar that served as an external office canteen, with the additional advantages of alcohol and receipts. Tania was always too busy working, or heading off to some grim poetry reading, or sitting through a new playwrights’ season at the Royal Court.

  “If she’s so brilliant, what’s she doing working on the Web site?” Tamara had asked Simon one evening in the Bubbles.

  “Ambition,” he said. “The new frontier. She wants to be there, planting her flag.”

  “She really believes that?”

  “Definitely. It’s the pioneering spirit, the spirit that saw her choosing to spend her summer holidays in Bosnia a couple of years ago, trying her hand as a war correspondent. She’s omnivorous; she wants to write about the future of feminism, economic crisis in South Korea, vote rigging in Serbia and the exquisite agonies of literary life.”

  “Not much scope for that here.”

  “Not on Psst!, anyway. Or on the Web site. But she must have judged that it’s better to be queen of the cyberkingdom than a serf in the twilight realm of print.”

  Tamara scooped up Tania’s books from her desk. Just as she had thought. A novel whose drab cover matched its unalluring title, a Booker Prize winner, according to the sticker on the front. A two-volume biography of Picasso—really, how much more was there to say about the old lecher? A memoir by a nerdy-looking playwright in Buddy Holly glasses. And, for light relief, a book on the history of British film. There was also a copy of Honor Tait’s Truth, Typewriter and Toothbrush. Tamara opened it. Tania had gone through it, underlining passages and pencilling notes in the margins as if she was cramming for an exam on the subject. So here was Honor Tait’s natural constituency. A perfect match—the bland reading the bland. Tamara scooped up the books and dropped them in the nearest waste bin.

  She had been asked to write the A-List again. This week, it was to be “Top Ten TV Bad-Hair Days.” She would also, discreetly—she did not want to take too much advantage of her friendship with Simon—put in another call to Honor Tait’s publisher, and press on with her S*nday piece.

  This little old lady is indeed her: the reporter who broke some of the great exclusives of the past century—the outbreak of World War Two, the Korean War, (fill in later) … and doorstepped some of the most notorious and celebrated figures of recent history.

  Disapproval is etched on her face but she opens the door a little wider.

  “You’d better come in,” she growls.

  Tamara was ringing Uncumber Press when Simon arrived at his desk bearing two pint-size coffees from the canteen. She cupped her hand over the phone’s mouthpiece. The answering machine again.

  She dialled another number, this time conspicuously, smiling and rolling her eyes in comradely good humour at Simon, who brought over one of the cups and left it on her desk. In her most efficient voice, delivered at broadcast-level pitch, she spoke to a publicity-addicted West End hairdresser who was always good for a quote, and asked him for some pointers on Bad Hair. She took detailed notes, thanked him loudly, replaced the receiver and began to type in a few of his suggestions. She would visit the morgue later and see what pictures they could come up with.

  “Lunch?” Simon called out to her.

  He must have been reading her mind.

  “Sure. Half an hour? Just doing Bad Hair.”

  “Great. Bubbles?”

  “Where else?”

  “Fantastic. Still on for the Press Awards next week?”

  “You bet.”

  She sensed a sudden swell of resentment in the office. Some of her Psst! colleagues, she knew, envied her friendship with Simon, didn’t rate him as an editor and would undermine them both if they had the chance. A seat at the annual Press Awards dinner was a prized ticket—the biggest social event in the newspaper calendar. Courtney, the embittered administrator, who had worked on Psst! longer than any of them and had a hopeless ambition to be a journalist, was staring at the fax machine with an unusual degree of concentration and Jim Frost, chief sub and trades union stalwart, was sucking forcefully at his unlit briar pipe and glowering at Simon.

  Well, Tamara had no need to be defensive. Could she help it if Simon preferred her company? She returned to her work. Johnny sent an electronic message asking for a celebrity vox pop. The shadow chancellor had been spotted eating rabbit stew in a fashionable Islington restaurant and had left his broccoli and carrots untouched on the plate. An hour of phone calls to the usual ring-round tarts—former newsreaders, fading pop stars, media-savvy actors, an outspoken Tory backbencher with a fondness for drink, a ubiquitous agony aunt, a high-profile hedge fund manager and a publicity-hungry novelist—all happy to name their favourite, and least favourite, vegetables in exchange for a mention in The Monitor—produced some serviceable copy, leaving Tamara free to get back to her real work.

  It is then that I produce the bouquet of flowers, pink lilies, and she visibly softens. How many bunches of flowers must she have received in her long lifetime of loving? And where, one is tempted to ask, looking at the withered face of this former intimate of folk-rock legend Bob Dylan, have all the flowers gone?

  By the time they arrived at the Beaded Bubbles the place was as full as a Northern Line tube. Courtney had sulkily rung in advance and reserved the centre booth. They sank into their seats, savouring their first glass of chardonnay in silence, like communica
nts draining a chalice.

  “So Lucinda found out about Serena,” Simon said as he refilled their glasses.

  “No! How?”

  “Serena told her.”

  “No!”

  Tamara sometimes felt she needed a flowchart to keep track of Simon’s adventures. Lucinda was his barrister mistress, who shared a flat with Serena, who worked in an auction house. Lucinda had been at a conference last week when Serena had phoned to suggest that Simon might meet her for a drink. The drink became dinner at Claridge’s (on his expenses, naturally). The following day Tamara had received a thorough debriefing on the menu, the wine list, and the tumultuous sex that followed. But there were new developments.

  “Now Lucinda’s gone ballistic.”

  “I bet she has.”

  “Ordered Serena out of the flat. She won’t go, of course.”

  “Of course not.”

  “So Lucinda’s put locks on the bathroom and kitchen to drive her out.”

  “That would do it.”

  Tamara waved to the waitress and ordered a risotto. Simon said he would have the same, and a second bottle.

  “So Lucinda phoned me at home at midnight last night, hysterical. She kept sobbing and asking if I thought she was crap in the sack.”

  “Is she? I mean, do you?”

  “Of course not. That’s what Serena told her I’d said.”

  He ran his hands through his thinning hair and his bottom lip jutted like a petulant child’s. Not for the first time, Tamara marvelled at his success with women. He was overweight, middle-aged and balding. As a young man he must have been chinless, and maturity, compensating for nature’s earlier oversight, had given him a concertina pleat of flesh at his throat.

  “Blimey.”

  “So there I was, trying to placate a hysterical Lucinda down the phone with Jan lying in bed beside me.”