The Spoiler

by Annalena McAfee

  “Not bad. Not bad at all.”

  “Want to tell me all about it over lunch?”

  Half an hour later, in their booth at the Bubbles, Tamara gave a swift summary of last week’s Kids’ Crusaders meeting, and described the enigmatic figure at the back of the hall.

  Simon was puzzled.

  “Didn’t you tell me about this meeting already?”

  “Yes, but I missed out the bit about this fantastically handsome latecomer.”

  “Okay,” Simon said, reaching for his pager. “So you fancied him? And then he disappears? Shame for you, on a bad night out, I can see that. But I’m not getting much of a picture of Honor Tait here.”

  “Wait …”

  Tamara, too excited to eat, gripped the edge of the table and described what she had seen in the restaurant. Simon did not interrupt, even when his pager went off. Keeping his eyes fixed on hers, he silenced the machine, put down his sandwich and reached for his glass.

  “The old hypocrite!” he said finally. “She’s toast. A cradle-snatching, toy-boy-humping, gigolo’s paymistress. What a story! Deep smut and high culture—an unbeatable combination.”

  In the warm glow of the bar’s simulated candlelight, Tamara felt anointed, illuminated by success, as Simon signalled for another bottle to celebrate and, when he diverted the conversation to Serena (on again) and accepted a call from Jan (a question of table decorations), she smiled benignly. It was the most convivial few hours she’d had in weeks.

  Their walk back to the office was high-spirited and unsteady, and her attempt to generate an A-List stockpile, a stash that she could call on when time was pressing, was unproductive. She sketched out a few themes—“Fashion Faux Pas,” “Ugly Babies,” “Tiffs ’n’ Rifts”—and ransacked the picture library to illustrate them but, though the research was diverting, when she actually tried to compile the lists, she found them strangely taxing.

  As the afternoon wore on, however, the effects of the wine receded, and the office sprang into focus. There were seditious stirrings in her gut, and her right temple was throbbing. She longed to lie down. Simon was suddenly at her shoulder.

  “One other thing, Tam. Valentine’s Day on Friday week.”

  This was cruel, particularly from Simon, who would regard a night in with his wife as a night spent alone and would have to draw lots to determine his Valentine’s Day date. She bristled, before she realised he was talking about work.

  “Think we’d better slip something on the love theme in the issue this Saturday,” he said.

  “Of course. ‘Celebrity Snogs’ do the trick?”

  She shuffled a stack of photos of kissing couples. It was remarkable, the infinite variations of that simple human gesture, and what an unhygienic exchange of bodily fluids it looked to the nonparticipant. She yawned and glanced down at the patch of carpet tiles on the floor under her desk. Would anyone notice if she slipped under there and stretched out for half an hour? She could use a couple of padded postal bags as pillows. Fifteen minutes would do it. But Courtney was giving her a look of bottomless loathing, and Tania was prowling their corner of the office, on the lookout for transgressions of taste.

  Courtney’s departure at 6 p.m. would normally be the signal for Tamara to put on her jacket and head out, perhaps with a brief diversion to the Bubbles before going home. Tonight all she wanted was a lie-down with a cold compress on her forehead and a bucket by her bed. Instead she faced another demanding night’s work. Truth was a hard taskmistress, and the possibility of another sighting of Honor Tait’s plaything was an irresistible incentive.

  The party was well under way when she arrived at the Rodel Gallery, tucked at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac off Old Compton Street. The press of bodies spilled into the gallery’s shopfront window, and from the street you could be mistaken for thinking that the revellers, rather than the paintings, were for sale. And what would you bid for this lot? A large woman in bright ethnic prints, her earrings swinging like chandeliers against her jowls, loomed over a small man with dark ringed eyes who was cowering like a cornered marmoset. Wedged in behind a framed cartoon, which depicted two dishevelled, bare-bottomed schoolboys joyfully administering canes to each other, a faded roué in a velvet suit and a beret—an artist, clearly—was thoughtfully rolling the stem of his wineglass between his fingers. He nodded gravely as an ancient buccaneer in an eye patch gesticulated with ink-stained hands. Another artist. Or maybe a critic. The place must be full of them.

  As she pushed open the door and made her way through the noisy crowd, Tamara felt giddy at the thought of so much pretentiousness crammed into such a confined space. Intuition, and sickening thirst, led her through the crush to a small table at the back of the gallery where a harassed boy in shirtsleeves was pouring wine. She took a glass of white, gulped it down, held it out for a refill and then forced her way into the throng.

  Though little old ladies appeared to be out in force tonight, along with lecherous old men—she was sure she felt a hand lingering on, if not actively caressing, her rump—she could not see Honor Tait. Tamara recognised the artist, Inigo Wint, flushed, animated and mobbed by admirers, in the centre of the room. The Scottish poet was there, too, buttonholing a man wearing glasses with such thick frames that he looked like a welder on emergency call-out. A group of young girls in skimpy party frocks, publicity girls presumably, huddled in another corner, giggling like a crowd of sixth-formers at a school dance. No sign of the brooding gigolo. Tamara’s disappointment was not simply professional.

  Slowly, keeping to the walls, she circumnavigated the room. There was more space there; in fact, there seemed to be a cordon sanitaire around the exhibits. Everyone was avoiding them, as if to do otherwise would be bad manners. Tamara studied the pictures closely: more schoolboys doing unspeakable things—oral sex, dope smoking, bondage—in primary colours. Might there be a story in this? In her weekly paper days she had wrung a front-page lead out of the local students’ rag-week magazine, the usual compendium of puerile cartoons and obscene jokes, sold in aid of charity and paid for by adverts from local shops and businesses. In a slow news week, she had taken the trouble to ring round all the advertisers. She had a hunch that none of them—all civic-minded members of the local Chamber of Commerce—had actually read the magazine.

  “So, Mr. Higgins, could you tell us your views, as a ‘long-established high-street family butcher,’ on the subject of bestiality? … Sexual congress between humans and animals? … You’re against it? … Strongly? … I just wondered about your decision to place an advert on page sixteen, just opposite the joke about the lonely sheep farmer and his obliging flock.”

  The advertisers withdrew their money, the rag week was cancelled, the student editors were suspended from college and Tamara’s front-page bylined story attracted brief national interest and a jokey aside from Chris Evans on The Big Breakfast.

  Similarly, she could, if she had the time, track down the Rodel Gallery’s sponsors, past and present (there was always corporate money behind commercial arts organisations, even if it was only the local off-licence providing free booze), and ask them whether they endorsed cannabis, bondage and underage sex. The Mail would snap it up. The prospect of mischief enlivened her further, and she waved at the boy with the wine.

  Raised voices and a flurry of action by the door alerted Tamara to the arrival of Ruth Lavenham and, behind her, Honor Tait on the arm of Paul Tucker. The crowd parted deferentially before them. Using her elbows like oars to make her way through the reconfiguring mob, Tamara advanced towards Tait’s group. Inigo Wint was kissing and fussing over the grande dame, as if she were the artist and this was her party. They were joined by the poet and the glum Twisk heiress. As Tamara squeezed her way into the inner circle, she was startled by the sight of Tania Singh gliding towards them through the crowd, a killer shark in a silk sheath. What did she want? Was this part of her networking strategy? She ignored Tamara and headed straight for Inigo Wint, congratulating him loudly on his “grou
ndbreaking exhibition.” Next, in an expert move worthy of a chess grandmaster, Tania homed in on Honor Tait, blocking Tamara’s route to the old woman. Tamara was going to have to wait her turn.

  A teenage girl in braids and braces was forcing her way through the party with a tray of canapés. The guests surveyed the food—grey paste and sliced green olives on diamonds of toast, mashed egg and parsley in pallid pastry cups, asparagus spears peeking obscenely from pink cylinders of compressed meat—as they might a questionably attributed work of art, and continued their conversations without a pause.

  Tania’s moment with Honor Tait was over, and she was now expressing her admiration for the poet. But Tait’s little upturned face was still receiving kisses, and her right hand was still bestowing benedictions. Tamara took her place in the queue and absently grabbed a canapé from the tray. She raised the savoury lozenge to her lips and, as she took an exploratory bite, the scent of fish paste reached her nostrils. She felt a sudden swell of nausea and spat the mouthful, as discreetly as possible, into her hand along with the uneaten remains of the gobbet. But it was too late. The swell, just above her solar plexus, became a wave, alarmingly crested with flecks of foam, and was in danger of becoming a geyser. She had two thoughts: the first, how to get rid of the horrible mush in her hand; the second, more urgent, could she get out of there before disgracing herself?

  Some Samaritan had anticipated her problem and was offering a perfect receptacle: an outstretched hand. Tamara dropped the unpleasant mush into the kindly cupped palm before rushing for the door.

  As she retched, exhausted, in the street outside, she became aware of a figure loitering in the shadows by the entrance to the gallery. She looked up to see Honor Tait’s lunchtime companion staring into the window. If only Tamara had not been feeling so ill, this would have been her moment. She would have leaped on him and guided him to a wine bar round the corner for a long chat, beneficial to them both, and a couple of bottles of champagne (expenses would cover it). He turned away from the window and was walking towards her. Here was her chance. But her stomach had not done with her yet. She doubled over once more and heaved loudly as he walked past her towards the nighttime crowds of Old Compton Street.

  It was then that she heard the approaching click of stilettos on cobblestones. Wiping her mouth on her sleeve, she was startled to see that the sharp-suited silhouette stepping round her and making its way into the gallery belonged to Lyra Moore. Had she recognised Tamara? This would not be the moment to return to the party and press the editor of S*nday to expand on her commissioning requirements. Vomiting in a gutter was not the conventional precursor to a serious conversation with a prospective boss. Tamara wondered whether she could invent a pregnancy as a plausible excuse. But then pregnancy, she remembered, entailed morning sickness.

  To return to the gallery was out of the question, and her quarry, Honor Tait’s gigolo, had eluded her. At least the abasement of nausea had passed, but as she turned into Old Compton Street she confronted a new horror. Of course! The outstretched hand! Her perceptions in the last fifteen minutes had been distorted by physical turmoil. Now, as her stomach settled, the mirage was clearing, but in its place was something far worse. The Samaritan’s hand had been wormy with veins, swollen-knuckled and arthritic. The hand of an old woman. It was Honor Tait who had offered her palm to Tamara. Honor Tait, kissed and fussed over to full mutual satisfaction by her groupies, had magnanimously extended her hand in greeting to the next person queuing to pay court. Tamara was meant to shake that hand, not fill it with bread and fish paste.

  In the end it had been, as Honor had anticipated, another futile evening. The gallery had been too crowded, and she had endured much jostling and fawning. Her feelings about finding herself once more, so many years after her prime, an object of popular curiosity and affection, were no longer so ambivalent. Age had conferred on her an unfamiliar aura of sanctity. She was, said Inigo after the South Bank Show, and an approach—rebuffed—by the producers of Desert Island Discs, in danger of becoming a “national treasure.” And she didn’t like it one bit. At the gallery an importunate Asian girl had detained her with overweeningly respectful details of her personal response to Dispatches, then Honor had turned from her, relieved, to shake another hand, only to find her palm inexplicably filled with a mound of foul-smelling grey paste. The donor of this disgusting offering, whom Honor recognized only as she turned and left the gallery without a word, was the dim young woman who had interviewed her for The Monitor and had later come to supper uninvited. Was it some kind of joke? Was Tara Sim’s real mission not to profile her but to insult her?

  Honor had insisted on leaving immediately and was then obliged to sit through a dismal meal between Inigo, inflated as a dirigible with first-night grandiosity, and Aidan, spraying caustic asides over Inigo’s boasts like a crazed tail gunner. Ruth was unable to persuade Paul to stay beyond the first course: He had a story to file. And how Honor had wished, as he scraped back his chair and rushed self-importantly to the waiting taxi, that it had been she who was fleeing this table—the smeared wineglasses, the blasted landscape of soiled china and half-eaten food, the ring of tired familiar faces, the din of small talk and mindless conviviality rising from it like noxious fumes—and rushing off to deliver her account of grave matters, of war and strife, hunger and pestilence.

  Alone in her flat, she poured a drink. She was not done yet. No one was clamouring for it, but she had one more piece to file.

  Buchenwald, 14 April 1945. Liberation Day Four. As I walked alone outside the perimeter fence of the camp, I was alerted by a sound in the undergrowth. I heard him before I saw him.

  Fifteen

  Pernilla Perssen was back on the bottle. She was photographed in the early hours of the morning, puking outside a nightclub in the West End, hair tumbling over her face, looking up at the camera with a perplexed squint. That settled the question of this week’s A-List: “Losers and Boozers—Top Ten Rehab Write-Offs.” Caleb Hawkins, recently suspended from his Premier League side, and Tod Maloney would also make an appearance. Tamara just had time to put in a quick call to Ruth Lavenham before Simon got back from Morning Conference. There was a chance that no one had recognised Tamara in the melee at the gallery, but if they had she needed to get in her apology before any complaints reached Lyra Moore or Austin Wedderburn.

  The publisher’s phone switched immediately to the answering machine.

  “Got your glad rags for the awards tonight?” Simon called out as he walked into the office.

  Courtney scowled.

  “You bet,” Tamara said.

  They left the office early. Courtney had grudgingly arranged a fleet of cabs to take the basement invitees to the dinner. Tamara found it as soothing as intravenous Valium to sit in the taxi in her scarlet halter neck, abandoning anxieties about last night’s setback, anticipating an evening of excitements, and vaguely listening in passive silence to Simon’s latest plot summary. Lucinda was out of the picture, and he was tiring of Serena, who was making unreasonable demands about holidays, flats and divorce. She was a lovely girl, he conceded, but the spark had gone. Davina, however, was another proposition. Had he told Tamara about Davina? The polo-playing blonde in food PR he had met last week at a Thames Valley pork-pie launch?

  “She’s really something, Davina,” he said, shaking his head in pleasurable despair over the impossibility of summoning sufficient superlatives to describe her. “Ravishing. A free spirit. Great form. And we’ve got so much in common. She makes me laugh like no one else. Plus which, she’s loaded.”

  “Sounds great.”

  He shook his head again and whistled softly.

  “Amazing. I tell you. The real thing.”

  Right on cue, his mobile phone rang. His eyes widened and, looking over at Tamara, he pointed at the phone.

  “That’s her,” he mouthed, as if Davina might overhear him before he had even answered the phone.

  “Go ahead,” Tamara whispered.

 
; Even more restful than vaguely listening to Simon talking to her about his love life, was the prospect of vaguely listening to Simon talking to someone else. She did not even have to make the effort of nodding and smiling.

  It had been two decades since Honor attended one of these events. Then she had been presented with a lifetime-achievement award—a clunky tangle of copper, supposed to represent a pen and notepad, which looked like a distressed sundial by that old fraud Dalí. Did it seem indecent, or even ghoulish, to return to the press awards, albeit in a non-speaking role as Bobby’s companion for the evening? She must have been the oldest person in the room, and she was unsettled by the glances of apparent recognition and the deferential smiles she received as they made their way into the Belvedere Park Hotel.

  The ceremony was held in the ballroom, an impersonal arena framed by smoked-glass mirrors, with brutalist chandeliers cascading from the ceiling like shards of ice. Sixty circular tables radiated from the stage in a mandala of fractured light—silver cutlery, glinting glass, winking bottles—and were gradually filled by journalists and executives, the women rustling self-importantly in taffeta and silk as if at a Glyndebourne first night, the men swaggering in tuxedos like hired thugs.

  The Bishop of Limehouse, in a crimson robe almost identical to the floor-length gown worn by The Sphere’s bosomy agony aunt, stood to say grace, and Honor watched the heads of atheists, blasphemers and habitual sinners bow respectfully in prayer for truth and integrity and give humble thanks for the gifts that were about to be bestowed.

  The food was execrable, served by anxious illegal immigrants costumed like footmen and parlour maids, and the wine was poisonous and plentiful. Bobby’s table was relatively temperate, but waiters struggled to keep up with the demand for more bottles elsewhere as the evening began its slow unravelling. Honor, pushing aside her smoked salmon parcels, pink as prostheses, wondered whether it was her emeritus presence that was restraining Bobby’s colleagues.