The Spoiler

by Annalena McAfee

  When was Inigo’s opening? Ruth had put a three-line whip on it. Honor knew she had to get out, overcome this reclusiveness—a dry run for the grave—and see people. In the same spirit, she had accepted Bobby’s invitation to the Press Awards dinner next week. She should find Inigo’s invitation and transfer the date to her diary. She must not forget. Lately, she was becoming more absent-minded, she was sure of it. Losing things. Missing appointments. That was how it had started with Lois.

  Honor sifted through the mail in the hall on the small tiered table that Tad had insisted on calling an étagère. She was sure Inigo’s invitation had been here—she clearly remembered the moment she had opened the envelope—but there was no sign of it. Had she imagined it? Had she also imagined the taunting postcard, in an envelope bearing a London postmark? And the phone call, which had robbed her of the few hours’ sleep that was her nightly allocation these days?

  It was getting light now. The strip of sky visible above the flats opposite was saturated with a fleshy glow. Dawn. The loveliest, loneliest, hour. She summoned her most recent memory of Lois, dozing in a wheelchair, her toothless mouth open. Lois’s course, so hard to discern at the beginning, had been as clear and true as a Roman road. First she lost things, keys, spectacles, occasional words, and then she began to lose herself. There was a brief period of religiosity, painful to watch in such a rationalist, before she succumbed to full-blown visual and aural hallucinations. Daniel was there, restored, and then he would be gone again, a cause of consuming anxiety. The dead returned to her, the living ceased to exist. Was that, Honor wondered, the way ahead for her, too? And her dead? Were they waiting for her?

  She picked up her notebook.

  Buchenwald, 14 April 1945. Liberation Day Four. In that defiant parade, surviving prisoners waved the makeshift flags of their nations—Russia, France, Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, Hungary, Great Britain and Germany—the flag of the Weimar Republic …

  She could not work. Nor could she sleep. Insomnia was another curse of age. How cruel that you needed less sleep as you got older, leaving more waking hours to contemplate encroaching oblivion.

  Ten

  Tamara murmured a polite greeting to Courtney and walked towards her desk. She could not believe it. Tania was sitting there again and had arranged another pile of books on top of Tamara’s back copies of OK! and Hello!.

  “Oh, sorry!” Tania said, with a vixen’s smile. “Computer’s down again.”

  “Shouldn’t you be doing something about it? Isn’t that your department, computers?”

  “Well, no, actually. We’re not technicians. We’re journalists. If you’d like to spend a morning on the Web site to see what we really do, I’d happily show you around.”

  “No thanks,” Tamara said airily, reaching for a copy of OK! and upsetting Tania’s stack of books. “I gave up Space Invaders years ago. Strictly for spotty teenagers.”

  “But that’s where you’re wrong,” said Tania, whose blemish-free complexion was a radiant rebuttal. “It’s the future. For all of us.”

  “That’s what they used to say about unisex silver jumpsuits and time travel.”

  Tania laughed, a tinselly chime, and gathered up her books. Tamara looked at the spines: one by Martha Gellhorn—Tamara squirmed at the memory of her recent gaffe with Honor Tait. One by John Pilger, the Australian yachtsman, and a history of World War Two. Didn’t she ever relax?

  Seated at her reclaimed desk, Tamara drew out her notebook from her bag. There were captions to be written—Tod Maloney and Pernilla Perssen, the Swedish supermodel–turned–lingerie-designer, had been pictured squint eyed outside a West End nightclub—and she still had to finish this week’s A-List: “Skinny Minnies and Manorexics.”

  First, though, she needed to write up her notes from Honor Tait’s salon. Then she would put in another call to Uncumber Press. Discretion was essential. Courtney and Jim were conspiring in a corner again.

  Paul Tucker, macho newsman, a cut-price Robert Redford, has returned with news from some far-flung battlefront. Honor Tait sits in the centre of the room like Queen Guinevere, surrounded by her knights of the realm. Jason Kelly, fresh from his blockbuster screen triumph in Faraway Tree, adorns the evening with his smouldering presence. Ruth Lavenham, publisher and bustling Mrs. Tiggywinkle, knocks up some canapés in the kitchen. A small German with hyperthyroidic eyes (fill in name later) …

  Across the top of her screen, a message flashed. It was from Simon: “Lunch?”

  She typed: “Great! Just finishing the A-List.”

  He called over to her, “Fantastic. Half an hour?”

  Ignoring Courtney’s scornful stare, she got down to work.

  If looks could kill, there would have been a massacre in Maida Vale on Monday when Jason Kelly attended one of Honor Tait’s famous salons. As she clasps the young heartthrob to her bony chest, a small, grinning Scot, the well-known versifier Aidan Delaney, sits around quoting Tolstoy; a sniggering dandy, the artist Inigo Wint, and an overweight German exchange brilliant aperçus on the meaning of Shakespeare and swap witticisms while knocking back fine wines.

  Meanwhile, Honor Tait sits inscrutably in the centre of the room like a spider in the heart of her web. All around her, lesser insects hang, transfixed.

  They took their table in the centre booth at the Bubbles. Simon needed to unburden himself.

  “So Lucinda’s thrown Serena out of the flat.”

  “Well, it was bound to happen,” Tamara said. “I mean, once Lucinda found out you were sleeping with her flatmate, what else could she do?”

  “And now Serena’s homeless, she’s threatening to come round and confront Jan.”

  “What’s she meant to do about it?”

  “Quite.”

  “I mean, it’s not as if your wife’s going to say, ‘You’re welcome to move into the spare room,’ is she?”

  “No. Plus which, she’s got her hands full with Dexter’s eighteenth coming up.”

  His mobile phone rang.

  “Yes, darling … Of course … No one …” he said.

  Tamara bit viciously into a breadstick. Perhaps she could insist on a mobile phone as part of her S*nday contract.

  “Look, Serry …” Simon continued, “I know how awful this is for you … I’m doing my best to sort it out … I’m getting the deposit together this afternoon … What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger … It’s going to be fine, darling …”

  At a nearby table, Tania, a rare visitor to the Bubbles, was in animated conversation with Vida over a shared bottle of sparkling water.

  “Byee … Love you … Byee,” Simon cooed into the phone.

  He turned it off and Tamara pounced.

  “So I went to the salon.”

  He looked at her blankly for a moment then sat back, smiling.

  “Of course. I meant to say. Nice. Really suits you.”

  “No,” she said. “Not the hairdresser’s. Honor Tait’s salon. The Monday Club.”

  “Oh, right.”

  His phone rang again.

  “Thank god …” he whispered into the receiver, turning his face towards the wall. “I’ve been so worried about you, darling … No … No one … I’m on my own … Of course not … You know it was all a terrible mistake … It’s you that I love … No really, Luce … I need to see you. We can work through this … What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger … Okay, sweetheart … Call me later … Please … Love you …”

  He switched the phone off and pensively poured himself another glass, reached for a breadstick and then looked across at Tamara with a start, as if surprised to find her there.

  “Lucinda,” he said, nodding towards the phone.

  Tamara’s face was tense and unsmiling.

  “Where were we?” he said. “Ah yes, Honor Tait’s harem. Did you get the goods on her gigolos?”

  “Not exactly. I got in, but there didn’t seem to be much going on, apart from a lot of drinking and high-flown talk.”

&
nbsp; “Who was there?”

  “A few queeny nonentities. And Paul Tucker … Jason Kelly.”

  Simon whistled softly.

  “Kelly. Now, he’s hot. That would make a tasty front-page splash. Especially if he’d do a kiss-and-tell.”

  “I didn’t see any kissing.”

  “No problem. It’s all in the telling.”

  “He didn’t say much either.”

  “It’s not talking he’s famous for. Tucker might make a para or two, depending on quotes. No one wants to hear him on famines and genocide anymore—not even the readers of S*nday. But Kelly …”

  “Well, it was all very sedate. Nothing of interest to report.”

  “Don’t tell me they remained fully clothed all evening.”

  “I couldn’t say. They threw me out.”

  Simon laughed.

  “Well, I’d take that as an admission of guilt—and a declaration of war.”

  His phone rang again.

  “Hello, darling … Yes. Fine … No. On my own … Sounds good … Did you get the quote from the other caterers? … Of course. Up to you, sweetie … Yes … See you later … Bye, Jan … Love you.”

  Tamara folded her arms huffily. If he answered his phone again, she would snatch it from him and hurl it across the room. If it hit Tania Singh, so much the better.

  “The thing is,” she continued, “I don’t know how to take this piece further. I drew a blank at her little party last night, and she’s unlikely to let me cross her threshold again. What’s my next step?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  Simon groaned. “Look, if she won’t give you another interview, if you can’t get what you need legitimately, then you’ve got no choice but to raise your game. Follow her. Dog her footsteps. Get your colour that way,” he said, looking up at the passing waitress, his finger miming a signature in the air. “You’ve done that often enough before. Watch her in her unguarded moments, gather details of her daily life, find out more about her young men. Stake her out.”

  He tucked the receipt into his pocket. Lunch. Contacts. Features ideas.

  They pushed their way out through the bar, nodding to colleagues who were suffused with a second-bottle glow. Tania and Vida had already left.

  As they walked back to the office, Tamara asked him the question she had been reframing all morning.

  “Do you think you could have a word with Lyra?”

  He stopped in his tracks and looked at her sharply.

  “What sort of word?”

  “I just wanted a firmer briefing from her on this article. I’ve been trying to talk to her, phoning, sending messages, but she’s impossible to get hold of. I thought you might mention it casually when you saw her at Morning Conference or a features meeting.”

  “What exactly do you expect me to say?”

  “You know: ‘About that commission you’ve given my writer, Tamara Sim. She’d really like to know what angle you’re looking for, exactly. Are you thinking more Hollywood? Love life? Or fancy arty friends? Or is it the war stuff you’re after?’ ”

  “I really don’t think that would be very helpful.”

  “Well, what do you suggest?”

  He shook his head.

  “Haven’t the faintest.”

  “I thought you knew her pretty well.”

  “We’ve crossed paths, yes. Swords even.”

  Had he made a pass at Lyra?

  “Well, maybe you can advise me on the best way of approaching her.”

  “Approaching her?”

  Now she thought about it, Simon had been curiously unsupportive when Tamara had first told him about the S*nday commission. She knew that his time at S*nday had ended swiftly and badly with the Aurora Witherspoon debacle. Was he concerned that Lyra was trying to poach Tamara from Psst!? Surely he didn’t see S*nday as a threat. Jealousy would be out of character. He had reservations about Tamara writing for Me2, concerned that Johnny would use her inside knowledge to plunder Psst! stories for his daily pages, but Simon had been generous to her. It was he who had first introduced her to Tim, brokering her Lucy Hartson exclusive and suggesting that she might do some shifts for The Sunday Sphere.

  “I just need more clarification about what exactly Lyra wants on Honor Tait,” Tamara said.

  “How much more clarification do you need? It’s an interview, isn’t it? Publicising a book? And if you can get the goods on the toy boys, you’re looking at an exclusive everyone, not just S*nday’s toffs, will want a piece of. It’s pretty elementary—hardly stem cell research.”

  That was unfair. Tamara had spent most of the last year listening to the plot summary of his love life, an X-rated TV sitcom set in countless London flats and hotel rooms. Five minutes of his time was all she asked. Occasional advice on her career, in exchange for unflagging, nonjudgemental attentiveness on the subject of his sexual adventures, that was the deal. That, and her solitary evenings spent forging receipts for his expenses claims.

  “I just want to know what angle they’d like me to go on.”

  They reached the pedestrian crossing opposite The Monitor. Simon seemed irritated as they waited for the lights to change.

  “Just write it all up and leave out the boring bits.”

  Tamara turned to him.

  “Simon, please. You know this S*nday job means a lot to me.”

  “I know. I know. Look, don’t take Lyra’s silence personally. You know she doesn’t answer her messages—unless you’re Austin Wedderburn or you’ve shaken hands with the king of Sweden.”

  The lights changed, and they started to cross.

  “What if I just went up to the fifth floor, hung around her office until she was free and had a word with her in person?”

  Simon’s step faltered. He laid his hand on Tamara’s arm. Was he restraining or reassuring her? Perhaps he was simply trying to steady himself after all that wine.

  “No. I wouldn’t do that, Tam, if I were you. Take it from me, any approach to the fifth floor could be counterproductive right now. Just get on with the piece. Go and see Lyra when it’s done and dusted. Present it as an irresistible fait accompli.”

  His pager bleeped as they walked into the building.

  “Sorry. Just got to make a call.”

  Eleven

  The walls were decorated with bright frescoes, painted in a more deferential and stoical era, showing pink-cheeked maidens in virginal white ministering to the picturesque sick. Glimpsed through mullioned windows, a bucolic Olde England—towering elms, thatched cottages, cheerful labourers, sturdy children dancing round maypoles—beckoned the lovingly tended infirm back to health.

  As Honor walked along the hospital corridors, late-twentieth-century reality played out in drab vignettes all around her. A woman in soiled overalls was ineffectually mopping the rusty smears—blood? viscera? excrement?—on the floors, as nurses, not so young, some of them male, all tired and unkempt, few if any virginal, hurried by in what looked like pastel-hued nylon housecoats and slacks. They could have been chicken pluckers or fish gutters. And the sick? Like the old and the poor, they were never picturesque. Even ethereal consumptives, dying for love and too beautiful for this world, as the Romantics had it, coughed up gouts of blood and were reduced to double incontinence. Ill health was a great leveller. No one looked dignified in a dressing gown wired up to a drip, surrounded by the squalid clutter of convalescence and life support, the engorged bags of blood and saline solution, the bedpans and the sick bowls.

  And Lois, beautiful clever Lois, was down among them now, her body racing to catch up with her disintegrating mind. Cancer. Of course. They said she was at her best in the morning, so here was Honor at 8 a.m. on Saturday, standing over her friend’s hospital bed wondering what Lois’s “worst” would be like. Her eyes were open and remarkably clear. Open and unseeing. They scanned the ward, Honor’s face, the nurse adjusting her drip, with what could have been mute amazement, like a newborn taking in the shi
fting shapes and shadows around its cot. Or it could have been simple animal restlessness, a meaningless flexing of the orbital muscle. Behind the inky blue depths, there was no sense of any intelligence.

  From some corners of the ward there were occasional outbursts of merriment and—how Lois would have loathed this—the debilitating drone of a television set. Other visitors, husbands, dutiful adult children, families with unruly toddlers, came and went to neighbouring beds, bearing fruit and chocolates and flowers, wholesome emissaries from a promised land of peak health and cast-iron constitutions. Honor suspected that there was an element of display, triumphalism even, about this parade of robust family life, and the cheery greetings cards around the ward. “Get Well Soon!” Was there a greetings card to cover the other eventuality? “Die Swiftly!” Honor had come empty handed, and on her friend’s bedside table there was only a stainless-steel vomit dish containing a used syringe. It occurred to Honor that, for form’s sake, she should have brought the garish bunch of flowers—another one—that arrived this morning from the foolish reporter. Honor had thrown them straight down the chute. But Lois, if she still had her senses, would have loathed them too.

  A nurse, a boy with pitted skin and an earring, came to check the drain that led from Lois’s wound into a bottle below the bed.

  “All right, Louise?” he said, and then he turned to Honor and winked. “Doesn’t understand a word we say, poor soul, but every so often she gives a little mumble.” He leaned over the bed again and Honor thought she saw her friend’s eyes widen in terror as he added: “Don’t you, Lou darling?”

  Tamara stowed her thesaurus, tape recorder, cuttings, notes and printouts of her early drafts of the S*nday article, along with Tait’s two books, in a small backpack, and caught a tube to Maida Vale on Saturday morning. The jumbo bouquet of pink lilies, enough to fill a hearse, sent with an apologetic note to Holmbrook Mansions, had gone unacknowledged, and Ruth Lavenham had not returned her calls. What else could Tamara do?