The Spoiler

by Annalena McAfee

  She had handled subterfuge at a far higher level, most successfully when she had snared the drug-taking son of the police chief. She had staked out the media-shy, too, camping on the pavement for three days outside Caleb Hawkins’s flat in Ladbroke Grove after the footballer had been secretly photographed holding hands with a transsexual at a gay nightclub. She had also been with the paparazzi when they had snapped Pernilla Perssen checking into a Hampshire rehab clinic. But Tamara’s new assignment would not be straightforward doorstepping. There would be no foot stamping in the cold outside Honor Tait’s mansion block, waiting to ambush her with a few questions. There was little point in bringing a photographer along. There would be nothing to see. Not yet, anyway.

  She paced the area that was to be her patch for the next three days, sizing up the small parade of shops and the pub, the Gut and Bucket, next door to the café where she had waited for Bucknell before the interview. The café would be her base. One of its vinyl tables, set at a wide window, gave a clear view directly across the road to the entrance of Holmbrook Mansions. But first she needed to talk to a few locals. She crossed the road to the small supermarket and picked up a can of cola from the fridge. Sitting behind the till, the shopkeeper, so luminously pale and obese that he appeared to be crafted from melted candle wax, was breathing heavily and leafing through a tabloid.

  “Been here long?” Tamara asked brightly.

  “Since seven this morning.”

  He yawned, illustrating the point.

  “No. I mean the shop. How long has it been here?”

  “Dunno. I only work here.”

  “You must have lots of regulars. Customers, I mean.”

  He looked up from his newspaper, then stared at the drink in her hand.

  “You paying for that, or what?”

  She handed over the coins. There was no point in pushing it. She would build the rapport later. She walked back to the café. It was run by two middle-aged Eastern Europeans, brothers, she would have guessed: one genial, one sullenly preoccupied, both broad and moustached. Their business was not sufficiently brisk to require a high turnover of tables. Tamara smiled at them, and they seemed happy to let her sit in a window seat, sipping at an infrequently replenished cup of weak coffee.

  She opened her notebook and, occasionally turning her head to check on the main entrance of the mansion block, continued with her revisions.

  Honor Tait doesn’t like to talk about her background. This champion of the poor was born and raised in a big country house in Scotland. She is discreet about her past, preferring to talk about her work, but with her crisp English accent she’s a House of Windsor sound-alike.

  It was easy to get swept away with the prose. She accepted another grey coffee from the glum brother and gazed across the road at Holmbrook Mansions. There was not a lot going on. She could just make out the figure of the doorman, who seemed to be slumbering behind his desk in the foyer, his peaked cap tipped over his eyes.

  Honor Tait, former Press Corps Golden Girl, was born and raised in aristocratic splendour in Scotland. She is discreet about her background, “It’s the work that matters,” but with her crisp upper-class English tones she could plausibly read the Queen’s Christmas Message if Her Majesty ever threw a sickie.

  Half an hour later, the doorman stirred. A woman, fiftyish, brittly thin, wearing a silk headscarf knotted under her chin, pushed through the revolving doors and picked her way carefully down the wide stone steps into the street. She hesitated, looking left and right, as if unsure of her next move, then hurried away in the direction of the tube.

  Honor Tait, friend of the stars, once the Marlene Dietrich of the newsroom, would never be a GI’s pin-up these days, but, for all her years, she is still what Humphrey Bogart would call a fine-looking woman. Under her corrugated skin, the cheekbones, once no doubt rendered in paint by artist lovers, are still visible, the hair, a formerly lustrous strawberry blonde, now a handful of white feathers scattered over the rosy dome of her scalp.

  Outside the mansion block an elderly man, plump and florid, in houndstooth check, walked up the steps into the foyer.

  Her voice testifies to a life of comfort, propriety and innumerable servants bustling about a grand stately home.

  If the old bat refused to come across with the biographical details, she could not blame Tamara for taking a few poetic liberties, drawn from her familiarity with BBC costume dramas.

  In this crepuscular world of governesses, hunt balls and muslin frocks, little Honor’s ambitions must have seemed deeply transgressive.

  Now the miserable brother was standing over her with a glass jug of vile coffee. She held out her cup and smiled. Perhaps she should order a sandwich to appease them.

  At Honor Tait’s hermetic mansion block, residents and visitors are clearly top drawer and strangely ageless. There, in her crepuscular fourth-floor apartment, the doyenne of journalists exerts a chthonic hold over her followers.

  The smiling brother brought over her sandwich, a fibrous flap of chicken breast, garnished with a yellow pickle, which oozed like industrial effluent through the spongy casing of bread.

  Residents and visitors alike have a timeless, unmistakeably patrician air at Holmbrook Mansions. She presides there, a secular guru, a gnostic of news, whose hermeneutic mission has been to carry the flickering candle of truth into the world’s darkest corners.

  She bit into her sandwich, then regretted it. Ah—the first sighting of someone under fifty! A small boy in a maroon cap and grey school uniform, like an extra from a made-for-TV heritage film. He was carrying a violin case and skipping down the steps accompanied by a sturdy teenager in a denim skirt, presumably his nanny. Neither, Tamara guessed, would be on nodding terms with Honor Tait. Somehow she could not imagine the old woman with children—they would be too chaotic, too noisy, too demanding. Tamara had some sympathy with this view. Gemma’s pair of squabbling toddlers were always poking their grubby fingers into orifices—noses, mouths, bottoms, electrical sockets—while their mother looked on with an indulgent smile. Tamara had invited them round to her flat only once, and it was like being besieged by a horde of unhygienic dwarves. It had taken weeks to clean the finger marks from the walls.

  The good-natured brother was signalling to her.

  “Delicious, thanks,” she said, taking an enthusiastic bite of her sandwich and dabbing with a napkin at the yellow slime trickling down her chin.

  Honor Tait maintains a tight-lipped silence on the subject of her background. Perhaps understandably, because this firebrand champion of the underprivileged was born and raised in a Scottish castle. With her crisp English accent she’s the aural Doppelgänger of Her Majesty the Queen.

  Reluctantly, and with a sense of grim duty, Tamara put aside her notes, opened Tait’s first book and returned to the Pulitzer Prize–winning essay.

  According to survivors I spoke to, once the air raid was over, guards and prisoners joined in a frantic scramble for surviving splinters, looking for souvenirs of that shattered tree. For the Nazis, those charred fragments represented the ancestral dream of German supremacy; to the prisoners, too, Goethe’s Oak had assumed a sacred status. The shady bower where the poet, scientist, playwright, musician and novelist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had sat and contemplated “the kingdoms of the world, and their glories” had come to represent for the captives, even in their despair, the enlightened humanism of pre-Nazi Germany. And there it stands today, mutilated, in the midst of horror.

  Exasperated, Tamara closed the book and turned back to her own work.

  On the subject of her illustrious forebears, whose portraits glowered from the panelled wall of her ancestral castle in Scotland, Honor Tait maintains an omertà. But this silence itself is, perhaps, hermeneutic …

  It was getting dark outside now, and the smiling brother was lifting the chairs onto the tables while his moody brother swept the floors.

  She sits in the centre of the room like an empress, surrounded by her courtiers. Th
e brooding Jason Kelly, fresh from his blockbuster screen triumph in Faraway Tree, kneels adoringly at her feet. Ruth Lavenham, publisher and earth mother, whips ups some exotic delicacies in the kitchen. A loquacious Scot …

  If Tamara had not been so absorbed in her work at that moment, she might have seen the bent figure of an old woman walking slowly up the steps and through the doors of Holmbrook Mansion.

  In the café the shutters were lowered, and the miserable brother rang up the till and counted out the cash. Tamara paid her bill, adding a generous tip, and they handed her two blank receipts. She would be back.

  It was dark when Honor got home. She switched on the wireless. Bach. Like Inigo’s smile, Bach’s music was a sound barometer of Honor’s emotional weather. In spells of good cheer she thought the partitas and fugues, even the inventions, offered rational mortals the most persuasive glimpse of paradise they were ever likely to be granted. On darker days the keyboard pieces could sound as trite and mechanical as a child’s music box: a hellish hurdy-gurdy. She turned off the radio. Silence was preferable. But she felt an urge to talk, to describe today’s hospital visit, to describe the Lois she had known and in describing her, to bring her back to life. Honor poured a glass of vodka and reached for her address book. So many names crossed out, some excised by the attrition of feuds and fallings-out, so many arbitrarily annulled by death. One day soon the book would be as obsolete as its owner.

  And her Boys? Ideally Honor liked to see them singly, to eke them out. That way she could maximise her pleasures—have each one all to herself—and minimise any treacherous suballiances. They fought one another for the scraps of her approval, knowing that there would never be enough to go around, and she encouraged their competitiveness. The idea that they might talk about her in her absence, pity her, laugh about her, have fun without her, was loathesome to her. Though she had no concept of an afterlife, she sometimes imagined that death would be like this: lying mute and immobile, listening to the muffled sounds of a merry party next door.

  There would be tears, at first. Ruth might wail the loudest. She had the physique and dress sense of a professional mourner, the beefy Greek chorus sort, born to hurl herself, shrieking, over the passing coffins of strangers. Bobby would sob more fastidiously and lean on his latest young friend for support, and Inigo would weep into a large silk handkerchief and drink too much—“If you can’t binge at a dear friend’s funeral,” she could hear him saying, “when can you?” Aidan would be silent and inconsolable, shrugging away his frightful boyfriend, while Clemency would probably set up a trust fund in her name: The Tait Award for Young Journalists. Honor shuddered. And Paul? Well, Paul was like her. She could see him facing news of her death with virile gravity. But tears? She doubted if he had ever shed them in his life.

  There would be the respectfully inaccurate obituaries and a memorial service, in which weeping false friends, distant associates and old rivals—who would claim victory at last by simply outliving her—would utter humbug from the pulpit about her exemplary integrity and professionalism. She had no illusions, least of all on the question of mortality. Soon, even to her regular intimates, her Boys, the Monday Club, she would be reduced to an amusing anecdote, a murmur of regret and, with time, would become the butt of black humour. Inigo, she suspected, would crack the first postmortem joke, and the others would laugh with gratitude and relief. Then the party would go on, without her. It might even be jollier in her absence.

  Only now it occurred to her that the person she really wanted to talk to about today’s hospital visit was Lois herself. She closed her address book and picked up her pen. Despair could be as good a provocation to work as any. While she still had her wits, she must write her coda.

  Buchenwald, 14 April 1945. Liberation Day Four. Still in the striped uniforms of the concentration camp, the survivors lined up by the shattered stump of Goethe’s Oak to celebrate their freedom, each holding a makeshift national flag. They had come to celebrate, but also to grieve for their fellow prisoners who did not survive the brutal regime. Many wept silently, and some of their liberators, the soldiers of the American Third Army, who had seen the evidence of Nazi barbarity with their own eyes, wept with them.

  In the acrid warmth of the pub, where the staff and patrons were gaping glitter-eyed at a football game on a vast TV set, Tamara ordered a large gin and tonic and took it outside. This vantage point was going to be a lot less comfortable, but she could put another tape in her recorder and use it to dictate her copy.

  I ask about her childhood and the octogenarian Honor Tait, once known as “the high IQ in a low-cut gown,” fixes me with a basilisk stare. She maintains a chilly omertà on the subject of her childhood, spent in a rambling Scottish castle. This champion of the world’s downtrodden spent her early years waited on hand and foot by servants and, with her crisp English accent, she’s Her Majesty the Queen’s sound-alike twin …

  At 11 p.m., as the pub closed, it started to rain. She had not brought an umbrella, and her tape recorder was getting wet. She stowed it in her backpack and moved across the road to stand sentinel outside Holmbrook Mansions. The foyer seemed ghostly in the bluish light. The doorman was sleeping again.

  Twelve

  Honor finally rose from her bed at 7:30 a.m. on Monday, drew back the curtains and, if she was not quite ready to embrace the day, felt more prepared to face it than she had been when she closed the curtains on Saturday, after visiting Lois. She had not stirred from the flat for the rest of the weekend, turned off the phone, cleared out more junk, ate half a packet of oatcakes and drank one and a half bottles of vodka. Clemency would tut over the empties.

  Now she bathed to the sound of Radio 3—some playful harpsichord music by Rameau—and dressed in her silk-lined grey skirt and mulberry cashmere cardigan; their softness against her skin was pleasing, a kind of intimacy. The radio news came on. What had she missed? Not much. Labour pledging a national trust for culture in the event of their election victory; a former soldier charged with the murder of his missing stepdaughter; accusations of “ageism” at the BBC made by middle-aged male presenters. She reconnected the telephone and checked her diary in the hall. Yes, her Wimpole Street appointment was at 9 a.m. No breakfast was the stipulation. This suited her. And then there was the lunch. She must steel herself.

  Tamara was in the window seat on her third cup of coffee. Today was her last chance—she could not afford to take more unpaid leave from Psst!—and, after spending Sunday in the same café without a single sighting of Honor Tait, she had dragged herself to Maida Vale at an absurdly early hour on Monday anticipating a third day of fruitless observation. Even the good-humoured brother had muttered ungraciously when she walked through the café door at 8 a.m. She would have to order another sandwich, and the prospect depressed her further as she stared blankly out of the window.

  When it finally happened, she thought for a moment that it was a mirage, conjured by hope. She wiped the misted window and looked again. Honor Tait! There she was, emerging from Holmbrook Mansions at 8:30 on Monday morning. Tamara leapt up, scattered some change on the table, turned up the collar of her coat and ran into the street. She need not have hurried. The old lady was still standing on the pavement, timorously scanning the road, looking as tiny and vulnerable as a child who had slipped her mother’s hand. Tamara slowed her pace, keeping to the opposite pavement, and stopped outside the estate agent’s on the corner. There she pretended to examine photographs of expensive flats while keeping an eye on her target, reflected in the shop window. Suddenly, Tait raised her arm. A black taxi came into view and stopped. As the old woman stepped into it, Tamara scanned the road for one of her own. She was in luck. It swerved obligingly into the kerb and she got in, indicated Honor Tait’s cab, idling at traffic lights one hundred yards down the road and, shrinking from the cliché—but what else could she say?—commanded: “Follow that taxi!”

  The driver shot her a quizzical look in the rearview mirror. The traffic lights were in their favo
ur, delaying Honor Tait long enough for Tamara to catch up.

  “What’s your game?” he asked.

  “Game?”

  She craned her neck to keep sight of the other cab, which had shot ahead.

  “Tax inspector? Disability fraud investigator?”

  “No. No. I’m a journalist.”

  “A story! Used to be in the print myself. Old Fleet Street. Happy days.”

  Soon they were in the Marylebone Road.

  “Ever drink in the Stab in the Back?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “You missed yourself there, love,” he said, shaking his head at memories of better times, as he nipped between a couple of idling double-deckers.

  “We’re losing them!” she said.

  He cut up a post office van, and the other taxi was back in view.

  “Keep your hair on, Sherlock.”

  At the next set of lights they drew alongside Honor Tait’s taxi, and Tamara shrank into her seat. Her cabbie wound down his window and gestured to the other driver.

  “All right, John?”

  “Yeah. Not so bad.”

  Honor Tait’s strained little face was clearly visible, staring ahead at the broad neck of her cabbie. Tamara, pressing herself against the far door, slid further down the seat.

  “Haven’t seen you down the clubhouse in months.”

  “Rotator cuff tendinitis been playing up.”

  “Tough one. You want to watch that. Can lead to excessive anterior translation of your humerus head.”

  “Got an ultrasound Monday. Checking for calcification.”

  “Nasty. Could play havoc with your follow-through.”