The Spoiler

by Annalena McAfee

  “Give me a ring, Tamara. I’ve got a good feeling about you. You’ve got a beautiful aura. There’s a lot of purple in there. It’s the colour of truth. And gold. The colour of strength. Lots of gold.”

  “Wow.”

  He leaned in closer to her, and she looked up, startled.

  “Look, I’ve just had another premonition,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “If you don’t run, you’ll miss the last tube.”

  Eighteen

  Honor had not heard from Ruth or Clemency, and Bobby was not responding to her messages. Inigo, still absurdly puffed up by the success of his show, had flown to New York with a girl he had picked up at his opening. Even Paul had been out of contact. Aidan had gone to France with Jorge for a week, and before he left he phoned to tell her that Paul had been seen at the National Theatre, on the arm of Martha Gellhorn. Paul was just Gellhorn’s type, Honor supposed.

  She stood at the window and watched a young family, a husband and wife in their early thirties, probably American, as they bumped an aerodynamically styled pushchair down the steps towards the garden. These fashionable young people were so preening in their parenthood, as if they had invented the whole arrangement. The carriage lurched towards the pavement, and the toddler, muffled in blankets, hat and mittens, swayed as impassively as a Himalayan idol in a mountainside procession. There was love, Honor supposed, its invisible, indivisible chains clanking behind them.

  Her eye had been drawn in that morning’s paper to a story on Diogenes syndrome. If this was an affliction of age, she thought at first glance, she would welcome it. She had been intrigued by the Greek philosopher ever since she came across references to him when she was a rebellious schoolgirl, at a time when cynicism had seemed the only rational world-view. Diogenes’ choice of poverty and simplicity, his decision to forgo all possessions and to live in a barrel, was particularly attractive to a girl whose home life was characterised by material abundance and intellectual poverty.

  But now she looked more closely at the article and saw that Diogenes syndrome was a misnomer. In fact, the condition was characterised by obsessive hoarding of rubbish and was more properly termed “senile squalor syndrome.” Sufferers turned their homes into midden mazes, stacking piles of newspapers, rags, old tins, food wrappers, even faeces, and they often lay dead and undiscovered in their tunnels of trash for weeks.

  No danger of that here. But there was still some work to do. She switched on the radio. Muslim riots shake China. IRA abandons six-hundred-pound bomb in Strabane. Bosnian Croats open fire on Muslims in Mostar. Ramadan ends in more violence in Algeria. She walked to the window. The news from Mr. Bose had not helped her mood. The colonoscopy had been inconclusive—would she care to submit to another? Outside, against the clear night sky, the moon was a neon crescent and in the garden the slender limbs of the beeches were pale as bone against the prison bar silhouette of the railings.

  Her isolation had an undeniably different quality to the solitude she had once welcomed. Today it drained; then it irradiated. As a young woman she had been filled with a purity of purpose. Work was the thing—the urge to tell, and to tell it first. And friendship and love, if not always the enemies of truth, were not its most assiduous allies. She had worked remorselessly, cultivated a stringent emotional self-sufficiency, and told the truth no matter what it cost her. But her reputation among her colleagues, distilled, in the cheap, reductive way of these things—she became the subject of two silly romans-à-clef by Tribune reporters—was simply for a glamorous ruthlessness. And her reputation now? She should be beyond caring. But still she worried at her work, a terrier with an old bone. She reached for the proofs of The Unflinching Eye.

  The Moslem village of Melouza, south of Great Kabylia in the foothills of the Hodna Mountains, was silent as I walked its dusty streets this week. All the men and youths—more than 300 in total—had been massacred by Algerian rebels loyal to the National Liberation Front (FLN). The women and children were too shocked to weep. Some, it is said, have been driven mad by grief.

  The village was believed to be originally sympathetic to the rival nationalist group the National Algerian Movement (MNA). Despite their common hostility towards France, the two groups deployed their most murderous tactics against each other and their respective supporters. But since the MNA suffered heavy defeat at the hands of the FLN in the region of Melouza, the village seems to have turned to the French authorities for protection.

  The initials were dizzying, and the piece quite unmoving. Her memory of the visit to Melouza had completely vanished as, presumably, had any trace of the murdered boys and men of the village. And if she found the piece arid and unengaging, how was a reader expected to respond? She wondered why Ruth was bothering with this third book. Was it a form of vanity publishing, which flattered the ego of publisher rather than writer? Then let Ruth do the editing. Honor had no wish to look at any of this stuff—old news from a vanished world—ever again. But only she could revisit Goethe’s Oak. Here was a chance to put something right.

  It was, in the end, the Allies who destroyed Goethe’s Oak. A British bombing raid the previous month, intended for a nearby munitions factory, fell on Buchenwald camp. A total of 316 prisoners and 80 SS officers were killed. And there was another casualty; all that was left of Goethe’s symbolic tree was a charred stump and a heap of smoking twigs. When the air raid was over, prisoners and camp guards scrambled to pick up splinters of the tree, souvenirs of a symbol of Germany’s greatness, to fascists and anti-fascists alike.

  After the survivors’ moving parade by the shattered trunk of the poet’s tree, I walked in the forest outside the camp. I heard him before I saw him and ran to alert the American troops.

  The central heating was humming away, consuming money she did not have, and she was cold to the bone. Nothing could warm her, not the blankets she had draped over herself in the chair, not alcohol, not the fake fire twinkling feebly in the grate. She had turned, like a distant relative of Lot’s wife, into a pillar of ice. Was this a similar punishment for the same crime? Had they both looked back, lingering indecently, relishing the details of scenes too brutal for mortal eyes?

  Simon was sulking. He had given up Morning Conference, he said on the phone. Psst! was Tania’s baby now. Let her read the list, and all her other lists, and listen to everyone else’s lists at all the other meetings, and try to wrest a smile from Wedderburn, and laugh at his miserable jokes.

  “But you can’t let her get away with it, ride roughshod over us, just like that,” Tamara said. “We’ve got one more month in reader-friendly full-colour paper format before we vanish into cyberspace. We’ve done all the work and we deserve the credit. Psst! needs proper representation.”

  “You go then,” was his curt reply. “I’m still at Davina’s. I’ll see you at lunchtime.”

  By the time Tamara had printed out the summary of this week’s stories, checked the morning papers and arrived on the fourth floor, all the seats had been taken in the boardroom and she had to stand by the door, next to a couple of nervous teenage interns. She edged discreetly into a corner, a safe distance from the tea trolley.

  Wedderburn, flanked by Tania and Lyra, who were busy making notes, was in a grave mood. He cleared his throat, and the two women looked up sharply and put their pens aside in a synchronised move that could have been choreographed by Busby Berkeley. He moved briskly to business. This morning’s Courier had done a spoiler on The Monitor’s Elite List, the painstakingly compiled pull-out supplement, planned, at great expense, to appear on Saturday week, naming the “Top 100 Figures of Influence in Politics, Arts, Publishing, Business and Sport.” There was a disturbing degree of confluence between The Courier’s list and The Monitor’s own, but there was one flagrant omission: Wedderburn himself had been overlooked in The Courier’s roll call of publishing and media giants, as had Lukas Lukauskis, The Monitor’s leading shareholder. In their place was Neville Titmuss, editor of The Courier, and B
ohdan Bohdanovich, his paper’s Ukrainian proprietor.

  There was more: The Monitor’s his-and-hers Elite giveaway had been trumped by The Courier’s hers-and-his free gifts of a faux-gold tiepin with a faux-gold necklace, both stamped with the letter A, for “alpha.” The Elite pullout had already been printed, ready to go in a fortnight, the TV advertising campaign had been paid for, the faux-gold trinkets had been shipped from Taiwan and were waiting to be bagged up at the printers. The promotion could not be scrapped at this stage. They would have to go ahead on Saturday, 1 March, giving the impression that The Monitor was scrambling to follow The Courier, rather than the other way round.

  “It is irksome in the extreme,” Wedderburn said.

  Everyone, including the teenage interns, nodded grimly. Tapping the table with his pen for emphasis, the editor stressed that the only way of salvaging the costly circulation-building campaign was to ensure that the Saturday edition for that key date would be a “bumper issue.”

  “I’d like all the Saturday editors, when reading their lists today, to also give us advance notice of their plans for the first of March issue. You need to pull out all the stops. Only the best will do.”

  The postmortem on the rest of the morning’s papers was cursory; there seemed to be an unspoken pact that, for today, jokes, or attacks on the competence of one’s colleagues were not required. Wedderburn looked as if he might sack them all if he was irked any further. The home news editor read his list—more Tory sleaze, British Oscar nominations, the postponed Kensit-Gallagher nuptials—as swiftly as a tobacco auctioneer, and the foreign editor was a paragon of icy industriousness as she chanted today’s plainsong of mayhem and murder in distant lands. Politics was not represented—Toby Gadge was attending a mass to mark the feast of Saint Adelaide of Bellich—and Vida, standing in for Johnny, who was attending a course on nonverbal communication, gave a subdued account of the main features planned for tomorrow’s Me2—“Wish You Weren’t Here,” a pictorial guide to the worst seaside resorts in Britain, and “Granny I Hardly Knew You,” an empowering tale of incest survival.

  The money editor seemed to be impersonating a speaking clock as he enunciated details of interest rate rises, retail price index falls and fluctuations in the exchange rate. Ricky Clegg had anticipated the sober mood of today’s conference by wearing a suit and tie. Or perhaps he was going for a job interview later. He spent longer than necessary speculating about the likely performance of David Becking—or was it Beckham?—a twenty-one-year-old London-born Manchester United striker, who would be playing in tomorrow’s World Cup qualifier. Tamara was reassured to see that Wedderburn—scrutinising The Courier’s Alpha list again, as if closer reading might yield up his name after all—seemed as little interested as she was in fledgling footballers. The arts editor gave his account of tomorrow’s lead arts story—a comparison of the poetry of Keats with the lyrics of Kylie Minogue—with an air of wounded self-importance and only a passing reference to the brutal spiking of the review of Monday’s Wigmore Hall recital.

  Then, so swiftly, it was the turn of the weekend sections. Tamara looked down at the printout of the Psst! list. She had an exclusive to announce: Pernilla Perssen was pregnant. That Tamara had got the exclusive as a result of a complaint—the model’s lawyers had not been amused by Psst!’s interpretation of her morning sickness or her weight gain—need not be mentioned here. It was a firecracker of a story. Other papers would stampede to pick it up, and speculation about the identity of the baby’s father would keep the press going for weeks. Perhaps they should save the exclusive for 1 March, which was also the date of the penultimate issue of the genuine, full-fat, carbon-based Psst!. They would go out in a blaze of glory.

  Tamara mentally rehearsed her delivery. Lofty efficiency would be the key.

  Lyra was announcing this week’s contributors to S*nday—two Booker winners and a Nobel laureate, an “elite list” all of its own—with the passionate urgency of a Shakespearean actress auditioning for the part of Portia. One day soon, thought Tamara, her own name would be slipped in among the Greats in Lyra’s stellar S*nday list. The books editor was speaking now, stumbling through his dull catalogue of reviews and literary nonstories—an exploration of the genius of Alexander the Great, long overdue; a global history of colonisation; and a new novel by, or perhaps about, a hard-drinking Bulgarian punk. Caspar Dyson’s manner was apologetic, and Austin Wedderburn’s displeasure, or simple lack of interest, was obvious.

  “… We’ve also got a study of nineteenth-century Portuguese verse,” added Caspar, wiping a glistening moustache of sweat that had formed on his upper lip.

  Tamara looked through her own list again. Should she go with the Pernilla Perssen scoop first or save it till the end of her list? End with a bang, as it were? But Caspar had not finished.

  “… And on March the first our lead review will be Tania Singh’s four-thousand-word essay on the life and work of Honor Tait, in advance of the publication of Tait’s new book, Dispatches from a Dark Place.”

  Tamara rocked back in her chair, appalled. What was he saying? She looked across at Tania, smirking self-importantly, and at Lyra, evasively doodling on the cover of her notepad.

  “You can’t do that!” a voice cried out in impassioned protest.

  Every head turned towards Tamara, stunned at the breach of protocol. The voice of protest, she realised, had been her own; the words had flown from her lips at the speed of thought.

  Austin Wedderburn dropped his pen, which made a guillotine clatter in the silent boardroom. He looked at Tamara directly, probably for the first time since she had started work at The Monitor.

  “Why, precisely, can’t we ‘do that’?”

  She felt a sudden tightness in her throat, which made it difficult to breathe. When she finally spoke, her voice was a strangulated whine.

  “It’s a spoiler,” she said.

  “A spoiler?” said the editor. “Another spoiler?”

  He emitted a bitter laugh, granting permission for the susurration of mirthless hilarity that ricocheted round the table.

  “Surely we’re all for spoilers here,” he continued, “if it means we steal a march on the opposition. Or do you have a moral objection?”

  Tamara tried to ignore the slow smiles spreading across the faces of her colleagues; they knew that as long as someone else was buckling under the heat of Wedderburn’s wrath, they were safe, for the moment.

  “Not the opposition,” whispered Tamara. “It isn’t a spoiler against the opposition. It’s S*nday’s story. One of us.”

  Wedderburn looked to his left at the radiantly innocent face of Tania, then to Lyra, who had resumed her note taking.

  “Lyra? Do you have any objections? This Honor Tait piece in the books section? Does it preempt any plans you have for future issues?”

  Lyra looked briefly at Tamara, then turned back to Wedderburn.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Not at all. No plans.”

  This was treachery on a spectacular scale. All Tamara’s hopes drained away, as suddenly as if a cistern had been flushed. She was left with nothing, humiliated.

  “Glad we’ve got that straight,” said Wedderburn, turning to address the conference. “One spoiler in a morning is unfortunate, two would be careless!”

  His mouth crinkled tremulously, then relaxed into a shallow smile, and dutiful laughter eddied round the table. He gathered up his papers, signalling a move to the next item on the agenda. Only Tania was looking at Tamara now, and her expression—clear-eyed, her head cocked, birdlike, to one side, with a wry twist of a smile—was one of unbounded pity.

  Wedderburn nodded to Xanthippe Sparks, whose appearance today—back-combed hair, flounced skirts, laced boots and torn fishnets—suggested that she had just emerged from the Nancy Sikes Refuge for Distressed Burlesque Artistes.

  “This week,” she said, “we’ve got ‘Catwalk Confidential,’ backstage at the shows; and ‘Sole Sisters,’ a story about sibling shoe
designers. The picture-spread focus is on ‘The New Rococo … Frills and Spills … Tiers for Souvenirs …’ ”

  The news editor and foreign editor exchanged glances. At least, Tamara thought, when it was her turn to speak, she could reclaim some dignity. Compared to the fashion schedule, the Psst! list would sound like Hansard.

  “And for March the first, in our menswear special, we’ll be heralding the return of Medallion Man in our picture special: ‘Chest Hair Chic.’ ”

  Tamara looked through this week’s Psst! list again. Should it be “Inside Baggeley Market: Outrageous Real Life Stories Behind Top Soap” first? Or “The Pits: Underarm Hair Horror of the Stars?”

  Wedderburn looked at his watch.

  “Right,” he said, raising an eyebrow, “we need to cut this short. That’s all we have time for. Tania is going to update us on interweb development. And then we’ve got a paper to bring out!”

  There was another outbreak of approving merriment, which drowned Tamara’s bitter gasp of incredulity. Overlooked again! Had she been of a more paranoid cast of mind, she might have begun to see this as a conspiracy. Her spasm of self-pity was interrupted by the sudden intrusion in her field of vision of a white porcelain jug, which was being waved under her nose by Hazel. Bypassing the teenaged interns, the editor’s secretary had walked across the room to seek Tamara’s assistance in the distribution of tea. There was no way out; Tamara accepted the task with furious zeal. She heaped three spoons of sugar in Wedderburn’s cup and passed a cup to Tania, who looked up briefly and, without pausing in her disquisition on Web traffic and page impressions, raised two fingers at Tamara. It was only by force of imagination, which filled the teaspoon with cyanide crystals rather than sugar, that Tamara was able to finish the job without blundering from the boardroom in a tearful rage.

  The weeping came later, over lunch at the Bubbles. She had spent so much time fantasising about the life of excitement and ease that would follow her official elevation to Lyra Moore’s team that the alternative was unthinkable. Now she had to face it; her future was destined to be a dreary extension of the existing reality, a long grey corridor lit only by the distant glow of the crematorium.