The Spoiler

by Annalena McAfee

  Walking, alone, outside the camp’s perimeter fence, I was alerted by a noise in the undergrowth. It was then that I saw him.

  Sixteen

  Tamara had no idea how she had managed it but, after last night’s triathlon of excess, she had wrested herself from the bed at the Belvedere, leaving Alistair snoring like a sluggish starter motor, dashed back to her flat to change and hauled herself in to work. It was some comfort to know that she was not alone in her agony. The office was like an emergency department, with stricken figures sprawled around the building, quietly groaning.

  Alistair had called in sick, and Simon arrived late, still in his tuxedo, with a wad of surgical gauze taped to his ear—he had tripped on a paving stone, he said. No one in the building who had attended the awards ceremony, with the exception of Tania, spoke above a whisper all day and, as if to compensate for the unusual silence, Courtney’s voice seemed amplified to a megaphone blare. Tania, the personification of good health and clean living, walked among her distressed colleagues, a gleaming rebuke to debauchery.

  Simon proposed an early lunch. The wine bar was filled with afflicted colleagues, though the virtuous Tania was there—again—in animated conversation with the books editor, Caspar, who had also escaped the effects of last night’s bacchanal, on account of not being invited. Over two healing bottles and a basket of bread, Simon confessed to Tamara that he had not sustained his injury on an inadequately laid pavement. After leaving the awards dinner he had gone round to Lucinda’s flat, using his old key, which he had neglected to return. He had wanted to surprise her.

  “The thing is, it hit me suddenly, with the force of divine revelation: It’s got to be her. I realised I’d been messing around—Serena, Davina—just killing time. It’s so obvious. Lucinda is the one.”

  She was also the one for Wayne, her personal fitness trainer, who happened to be sharing her bed when Simon let himself into the flat. Wayne had not appreciated the surprise visit. Simon thought there had been a triumphant light in Lucinda’s eyes as she watched, arms folded, looking delectable in the satin baby dolls that Simon himself had bought her, while Wayne attended to the personal fitness of her ex-lover.

  “So it hit you, this revelation. Then he hit you,” Tamara said.

  Simon tentatively nibbled his baguette and ignored the remark.

  “Now I know I’ve got to get her back. Somehow.”

  His mobile phone rang. It was Jan, with more news of plans for Dexter’s birthday next weekend. The catering company had gone bankrupt.

  “Well, find another one,” Simon said, rolling his eyes at Tamara. “No … I don’t know,” he snapped. “Try the Yellow Pages.”

  He switched off the phone and poured another glass.

  “What’s the point of keeping a dog and barking yourself?” he said.

  “I know,” Tamara mumbled, though she wasn’t entirely clear what he meant.

  “That was some night last night,” he said, ruefully patting his surgical dressing.

  “You’re not kidding.”

  “Massive punch-up in the bar later, while you were upstairs in the victors’ suite discussing the finer points of paparazzi photography with our mutual colleague.”

  She flushed. She was beginning to regret last night’s impulsiveness.

  “What was the fight about?”

  “The Courier news desk weighed into our boys over some spoiler, Ricky Clegg had a scrap with his old deputy from The Sphere and someone from The People took a swing at the compère. It was pure Dodge City.”

  “So when did you leave?”

  “Can’t exactly recall. I remember having a full and frank exchange with The Courier sports desk about their FA cup supplement—no sense of humour, that lot. And then everything’s a blank—until Lucinda’s.”

  “See any sign of Tim Farrow later?”

  Simon suddenly brightened at the memory of someone who had come off worse than him and whose disgrace had been so public.

  “Completely banjaxed, wasn’t he? Carried off on a palanquin, apparently. Who’d have thought? Little Al, eh.”

  “Mmm.”

  “So how was your night?” he asked, with a music-hall leer.

  “Fine,” she said, anxious to change the subject. “Better than Tim’s, anyway.”

  “Best not to gloat too openly over the misfortunes of a potential employer,” Simon said with sudden seriousness. “Tim may be a prat, but he’s a useful prat. You never know when a staff job on The Sphere might come in handy.”

  Tamara snorted.

  “The Sphere? I’m finished with that dross, remember? I’ve got S*nday in my sights.”

  Simon gestured for the bill, then clasped his hands and leaned towards her with avuncular concern, though his authority was undermined by the bandage.

  “Tam, look, you should know by now that you can’t count on anything in this business.”

  “There’s no need to be patronising. I’m allowed to aim a little higher than The Sphere, aren’t I? Lyra thinks so, even if you don’t.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he said, getting to his feet.

  “Thanks for your concern.”

  He patted her shoulder, anxious to restore the lighthearted mood.

  “Come on, Tam. Right now we both face the highest calling of all—a restive public awaits its weekly Psst!. What’s this week’s A-List?”

  “Corkers to Porkers—From Fab to Flab.”

  Back at the office, Tamara retrieved the results of this morning’s research and handed him the bundle of photographs.

  “Take a look at the recent picture of Pernilla Perssen,” she said. “She’s piling on the pounds. She’ll be modelling for Weight Watchers soon.”

  Simon laughed.

  “Not exactly tubby by normal standards, but definite signs of a beer gut there. Fantastic. And next week?”

  “The Pits—Underarm Hair Horror of the Stars.”

  “Cracking. You’re the star, Tamara. You’re not going anywhere. Psst! needs you.”

  This was exactly what she feared.

  She looked through the evening papers to see if Tim’s disgrace had made the diary pages yet, tidied up her “Porkers” list, sent it over to Simon, sketched out a draft of the “Pits” list and spent much of the afternoon harvesting background material for the next few weeks’ A-Lists: “Top Ten Soap Star Love Rats”; “Telly Catfights”; “Best and Worst Boob Jobs.” Johnny sent a message asking her to do a ring-round for Me2 on “Deadbeat God-dads”—one of the tabloids had run a piece on a septuagenarian soap star whose middle-aged godson, an unemployed plumber with mental health problems, claimed the actor had never sent him a birthday card or postal order in forty years. Calls to the usual suspects harvested a workable yield of confessions and complaints.

  It was, in the end, a satisfactory day’s work and, considering her condition, it was remarkable that she had managed to report for duty at all. She yearned for a quiet night at home, but duty called.

  She took the tube to Maida Vale and arrived to find the café still open. But someone was sitting in her seat, his broad shoulders maddeningly obscuring her view of the entrance to Holmbrook Mansions. With a loud sigh, which she hoped would unsettle him, she sat down at the next table. She looked across at the trespasser and felt a charge of shock. It was Honor Tait’s male escort. He was preoccupied, delicately sipping a small cup of black coffee while sorting through some coins. Close up he was even better looking: a rangey, lightly tanned, soft-eyed metropolitan hippie in a white T-shirt under an artfully creased linen jacket. Around his neck was a loop of brown beads, and a plaited leather cuff was fastened round his wrist.

  Tamara willed him to look up but when he did, and shook back his dark tangle of hair, it was to signal one of the brothers for the bill. He did not notice her. His face had the wide-jawed symmetry of a stained-glass saint, a fine, aquiline nose that could have been chiselled by Michelangelo, and lips designed for more than prayer. He pushed back his seat, dropped a h
andful of coins by his cup and left the café, calling “Thanks!” over his shoulder to the brothers.

  Tamara picked up her bag and moved to claim his chair. The warmth of the seat seemed an intimate gift, something to bask in. As she watched him jaywalking across the road and running up the steps into Holmbrook Mansions, she felt the high of total engagement. After all her work, and several false starts, everything was falling into place. But his work? She gazed up at the fourth-floor windows of the building. What was going on up there? It was unfathomable.

  It had never occurred to her that old people could have sexual feelings, but she guessed it might be technically possible. When the elderly, particularly old men, displayed an interest in sex, she had always assumed that other forces were at work. It was a statement of potency, loudly asserted in the season of impotence. Her father, though fifteen years younger than Honor Tait, was a case in point. He couldn’t see how foolish he looked, scrawny and hairless, cravated and cologned, arm in arm with the pearl-skinned, lanky Ludmilla, a gargantuan swan to his miniature bald eagle. Although Tamara had tried, fighting her natural squeamishness, she could not envisage the physical act that brought sturdy Boris, a freakish miracle of hybridisation, into the world. It was an affront to nature, like interspecies copulation, surely only possible under laboratory conditions. And Honor Tait and her escort? It was beyond bestiality.

  But for Tait, unlike Tamara’s father, the element of display was absent. Women were not so easily fooled into believing that the company of a younger lover, particularly one who had been bought, lent any kind of status or glamour to the senior partner. Honor Tait’s escort was not squiring her around town; other young men volunteered that service for free. He was hired by the hour. This was a private transaction, a source of mutual shame as well as mutual convenience. Tamara was sickened by the thought of the old woman’s appetites. How unjust it was that a shrivelled pensioner should be enjoying regular sessions with a striking specimen of manhood while she, young, pretty and in her prime, should lie alone and unmolested each night in her king-size bed. These days, her vast white duvet called to mind an Arctic snowfield—deserted and miserably cold. And under her bed, in an improbable variety of shapes, and in colours that owed little to nature, were the unwieldy fruits of her latest consumer report for Oestrus magazine: her hoard of vibrators, her cock stock, still in their boxes, keeping company with her slippers and mocking her loveless nights.

  She accepted a mug of watery coffee from the surly brother, ordered a sandwich—anything but chicken—opened her notebook, took out her thesaurus and the clippings, and got down to work.

  The conversation at her salons is of world affairs and Russian literature, Hegelian philosophy, aleatoric music, the single European currency and the future of artificial intelligence. Paul Tucker, fresh from the battlefields of Eastern Europe, is a favourite. His macho style and line-of-fire reminiscences set Honor Tait swooning like a lovesick teenager. Aidan Delaney, the award-winning poet, provides a seasoning of wit and erudition—and not a little blarney. But there is one young man whose company she prefers above all the others. Tall, Hollywood-handsome (name to come). And when he pays his discreet late-night calls, conversation is the very last thing on Honor Tait’s mind.

  By the time Honor Tait’s visitor finally left Holmbrook Mansions, the café had closed and Tamara was sipping a gin and tonic at her chilly berth outside the Gut and Bucket. Did she imagine the hurried furtiveness in his manner as he walked away, head bowed, from the building, as if he were escaping the scene of a crime? If crime it was, he was the victim rather than the perpetrator. She left her drink and ran across the road to follow him. Too late. He got into his van and drove off. Was he returning to a communal squat in Hampstead, or an austere bachelor flat in Ladbroke Grove? Perhaps there was a wife in Clapham. Kids too—and Honor Tait’s tainted money was putting them through private school. This seemed the least plausible scenario. He was too attractive to be a family man.

  As he drove away, an ugly vision took shape in her mind of the old woman’s passion and his cold resignation. Tamara asked herself once more if she could have got it wrong. Could he be a member of Honor Tait’s salon after all? One of her platonic pals, an out-of-work Shakespearean actor, perhaps, or a hopeless but charming playwright? None of these explanations could account for the cash, the furtiveness of their meeting or the intimacy of their kiss. And besides, Honor Tait had history in this area.

  Behind Tamara there was an outbreak of rowdy laughter as a young couple left the pub, pushing open the door, arm in arm, and releasing a blast of catcalls on a current of rank air. There was little point in standing here alone in the cold. The real prize had slipped away. He had fulfilled his task. He would not be back tonight, and Honor Tait would be lying in the dark, exhausted, her grisly desires sated. Tamara struggled to banish these thoughts. She was working at Psst! tomorrow, then she had to spend most of the weekend writing up another overdue travel feature for Mile High—on the Krakelingen live-fish-swallowing festival in Belgium—and the editor of Oestrus was pressing hard for the vibrator report. She needed to focus. The S*nday article had to be delivered in less than a fortnight, and Lyra Moore, elusive on so many matters, was unambiguous in this area at least; she would give no quarter on deadlines.

  He had come, as he said he would. That was something. That, in the end, had to be everything. This bitterness was becoming habitual. Today’s visit was less hurried. He had observed the proprieties, expressed interest in her, asked her what she had been doing, whom she had been seeing, how she felt. To an outsider his embrace could have looked like tenderness. But it was a simple transaction. For him it was about money. It had always been about money. Why, then, did she feel such anguish at the thought of him walking away? The boy—yes, he was still a boy—was unfinished business. Her feelings for him were dark, primordial; the sediment shifting at the bottom of her stagnant heart. Stir it up at your peril.

  There had been many people in her life. In her darkest moments she counted them up, looking for embers in the ash pit. Sometimes it seemed those old loves, those long friendships, had generated barely enough heat to warm her hands. She thought again of Lois. Honor could not shake off this new sense that she had deserted her. Had she started pulling away, quietly appalled, distancing herself, inching out of the picture, as soon as she realised what was happening, and what lay ahead? In Mantua, on what was to be their last trip together, they had spent one morning apart; Lois was touring the churches with the dogged attention only a lifelong atheist could give, while Honor, ironically, given the perilous state of her marriage at that time, was visiting the Camera degli Sposi. When Lois failed to turn up for their lunchtime rendezvous, Honor had gone looking for her. She had been horrified, fifty minutes later, to find her fearless, clever and resourceful friend, lost and weeping in the Piazza Sordello. It had taken a shared bottle of prosecco to calm her down, and later that evening they had laughed about it. But no one was laughing now. Least of all Lois.

  The night chorus had started in the garden. Honor did not mind the ululating tots so much, or the self-righteous parents with their geometric haircuts and fancy baby carriages. It was the teenage boys from the council flats behind the tube station who caused the problems. They had no right to use the garden but they got in somehow, climbing the railings after dark, trampling on the shrubs, baying and hooting into the early hours. Sleep was difficult enough.

  It was worse in the summer, with the long hot nights, when the denatured vegetation struggled to reenact some species memory of lushness and fragrance, and the boys—where were the girls?—lay around on the grass, bantering and smoking, marijuana no doubt, between bouts of soccer that laid waste to the flowerbeds and lasted until dawn. Forced to close the window against the cacophony, Honor would lie all night, breathless and alert, longing for a downpour. Like Glenbuidhe midges, London teenagers could not take the rain.

  She looked up at the clock. It was late. Almost too late. Work was all she had. Mor
e unfinished business.

  Buchenwald, 14 April 1945. Liberation Day Four. We wept as we watched them, these gaunt survivors—those strong enough to stand—as they gathered in their prison uniforms by Goethe’s shattered oak. They shed their own tears, for their compatriots who did not live to see this day of freedom, and there was pride as they waved their national flags—fashioned from coloured paper—in the cold spring air.

  More than a century ago, here in the beech forest—the Buchenwald—on Ettersberg Mountain, the poet Goethe had rested his broad back against a mighty oak tree as he picnicked in the golden autumn light, gazing out over the city of Weimar below and exulting in the glory of nature and the greatness of man. “Here he feels great and free—great and free as the scene he has before his eyes, and as he ought properly always to be.”

  This tree had become a dual symbol, representing to the Third Reich an ancestral dream of fascist supremacy and, to its prisoners, signifying the enlightened humanism of pre-Nazi Germany.

  And standing in what would once have been the shade of its branches, I witnessed—no, participated in—a scene which demonstrated that cruelty was not the sole prerogative of an evil regime, that it could be, given certain conditions, a human universal.

  The clamour of an alarm pierced Tamara’s dream—her mother, smiling in chef’s whites, was serving her in The Monitor canteen. Fire or theft? It was the telephone. Tamara drowsily reached for the receiver.

  “Tam?”

  “Ross.” She stirred into consciousness. Her mouth was parched, filled with a foul toilet-bowl tang, and dried spittle sealed the corners of her lips.

  “You okay, Tam?”

  Well, here was a rare moment of role reversal.

  “I’m okay. Are you okay, more to the point?”

  He said he was, but he clearly was not. He sounded shivery and afraid.