Memories of last night—a languorous unfolding and entwining and, what seemed like hours later, a mutual climax of raucous intensity—would keep her going for weeks. She turned on the pillow to face him. At this moment, she realised, she had become one of those people who could say with heartfelt honesty, “I love my work.” But there was something troubling her, too; recollections of the night’s pleasures were interrupted by unwelcome thoughts of her new lover’s recent exertions with Honor Tait. She looked at the sweet perfection of his face, at the touching groove above his lovely lips, pursed in sleep—and that was only his face. What a waste.
The principles of female prostitution were obvious. It would not be difficult to keep emotion out of the transaction and, if the client was unsavoury, you could always focus on his wallet. But, in the case of male escorts—masseurs, gigolos—with their inevitably unappetizing female clients, what Tamara could never fathom was the question of gravity; how did they manage to perform?
His back was now turned to her, and his faint snores vibrated like a cat’s purr. She needed to move the story on. Would now be a good time to broach it? She put an exploratory hand on the honeyed curve of his shoulder. He moaned softly and seemed to slip into a deeper sleep. Shrugging herself into him, she ran the arch of her foot down his calf. Now he was groaning, coming to life. He rolled over, stretching his arms as he yawned, glanced at her then stared up at the ceiling.
“Dev?” She stroked his arm.
“Mmm?”
“You awake?”
“I am now.”
“I really enjoyed last night,” she said.
“Mmm.”
She slid her hand down his groin. There was not much going on there either.
“Those healing hands of yours were really something,” she said.
He took her wrist and held it firmly.
“Don’t you have work to do this morning?” he asked.
She could not tell him that this was her work—lingering in bed, exhausted by pleasure, next to a living, breathing, sexually adept version of Michelangelo’s David.
“Got the morning off,” she said, only half lying.
“Right.” He turned towards her, releasing her hand. “Well, we can’t all afford to hang around. I’ve got stuff to do. Clients to see.”
“Some of your famous clients?”
“Maybe.”
“Like who?”
“That would be telling.”
“Like Honor Tait?”
His smile faded.
“You know her?”
She felt a tightening in her throat. Had she blown it? Gone in too soon?
“Vaguely. Every journalist knows Honor Tait. Knows of her.”
He pulled back the duvet and got out of bed.
“So, how did you hear? About her and me?”
He walked towards the kitchen area—two portable gas rings on a pine table by a sink.
“Word gets round,” she said.
“What sort of word?” he asked, filling the kettle.
Tamara sat up and leaned back against the pillow in a show of calm. This was dangerous territory. Maybe he had spotted her at the charity event or in the café after all. Or outside the art gallery.
“Oh, you know, you and her, angels, prisms, auras … that sort of thing.”
“Camomile?” he asked.
“Great.”
“Seriously,” he said, “how did you hear about her and me?”
“Actually, I’ve seen you before. At that meeting in Archway. The children’s charity? I was there, sitting at the back.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I noticed you arrive late.”
He turned his back, reaching for two mugs from a rickety cupboard.
“I just wanted to check her out,” he said. “See her in action. On duty. She’s got quite a following, hasn’t she?”
“Yes. I suppose she has. And then I saw you together,” Tamara continued. “There’s a café I go to in Maida Vale, and I saw you outside her flat there.”
He froze. “Outside Holmbrook?”
“Yes. I’d heard she lived there. Bit of a coincidence, really. I’d been coming to the café on and off for a while to write my book.”
He brought the tea over, got into bed and leaned over to retrieve a red velvet pouch from the floor.
“What sort of book are you writing?” he asked.
“A memoir, sort of,” she hedged.
“You write for newspapers too, don’t you?”
Her heart lurched again. Had Ross told him about her work for The Sphere? Or had she let it out in a moment of drunken indiscretion last night? She sipped the tea and recoiled. Did anyone honestly like this stuff? It was like a microwaved urine sample.
“Now and again. Helps to pay the bills.”
He picked up a hardback—The Tibetan Book of the Dead—and began to roll a joint, licking the gummed edge of the cigarette papers. His tongue was pink and pointed as a sugar mouse.
“Yeah. We’ve all got to pay the bills. What sort of newspapers?”
Her heartbeat was so loud she was sure he could hear it. He was suspicious, and she was absurdly vulnerable—naked and alone with him in a part of London she barely knew. This was frontline reporting.
“Oh, a few papers, and magazines. I do TV listings, that sort of thing.”
He snapped the catch on the lighter and applied the flame to the joint, narrowing his eyes as he inhaled deeply. After ten seconds two plumes of smoke shot from his nostrils like steam from the nose of an enraged bull. When he finally spoke, his voice was a cracked squeak.
“Ever work for the Sunday tabloids?”
This was it. He must have locked the front door when they stumbled in last night, his hands kneading her breasts, hers grasping his cock. Where had he put the key?
“Once or twice. Bits and pieces.”
She checked her exit route, noting the position of her shoes and clothes, heaped where they left them when he stripped her on the sofa last night. Was this a bone fide flat? Or was it a couple of rooms in a badlands squat—the sort of place Ross used to hang around before he plunged downmarket?
“How much do they pay for stories, then?”
Tamara had no memory of their journey here last night, apart from a vague recollection of stumbling upstairs past a punk girl in a plastic miniskirt.
“Not much, really. I might get sixty pounds a shift for doing the TV listings.”
He passed her the joint. She needed a clear head for this conversation. But if she refused to smoke, he might become more suspicious.
“Not you. I wasn’t asking how much you got,” he said. “The people who sell stories, scandals, the dirt on ex-lovers? Don’t they get a fortune?”
She applied the joint to her lips, taking small, shallow breaths. Despite her restraint the smoke unspooled slowly through her system. At least he didn’t seem hostile now. Irritable, perhaps, but not openly hostile.
“They can make a packet, yes. Depends.”
“What are you talking? Five figures? Six?”
Despite his agitation, a delicious calm began to spread through her veins. She wriggled further down into the bed and passed the joint back to him. His urgency was oddly attractive.
“Sometimes six. If it’s a good-enough story involving a celebrity.”
“Would you call Honor Tait a celebrity?” he asked.
“Not really …” If she appeared too keen it would raise his price. “She’s too old to be a celebrity. She’s kind of famous—but only to journalists and pointy-head writers.”
“She was on that TV arts programme,” he said. “And they say she screwed Frank Sinatra. He’s a celebrity, isn’t he?”
“But he’s dead. Where’s the fun in that?”
He pushed his hair back from his forehead. He really was a lovely sight. She wanted to trace her finger across his lips, follow the line of his jaw, then draw her hand down his chest. But this wasn’t the moment.
“There must b
e some mileage in her,” he insisted. “She’s been on the telly. People recognise her in the street. Her husband, Tad Challis, was a famous film director. MBE, the lot. He made The Pleasure Seekers, Hairdressers’ Honeymoon … British comedy classics. There might be something on him. Everyone’s heard of him.”
“Everyone over thirty with a taste for retro comedy. Besides which, he’s dead. Not much of a circulation builder, stories about dead people.”
“There must be something.”
He gnawed at his thumbnail. This was her moment.
“Well, there might be some money in a story about a respectable old woman, recent subject of a TV programme, profiled in Vogue, darling of the chattering classes, et cetera, shares platforms with members of the shadow cabinet, if, for instance, illicit sex was involved.”
Levering himself up on the pillow, he turned to look directly into her face.
“Sex?”
“Yes. Ridiculous, I know.”
“What do you mean illicit?”
“Well, it has to be a bit out of the ordinary … transgressive. If she was doing it with another pensioner, there wouldn’t be a story, and no one would want to read about it anyway. Kinky’s good, but it mustn’t be too gross. No bestiality, for instance. These are family newspapers.”
He began to roll another joint. It was agony to look at him but not to touch.
“What sort of ‘transgressive’ sex would these family newspapers find acceptable, then?”
“I suppose all sex involving the over sixties is transgressive, but if, for example, she were sleeping with someone—same species, alive, obviously—younger, much younger, then that would be the sort of acceptably weird sex story they could carry. Hard to imagine, I know.”
“And they’d pay a lot for that kind of story?”
“Yes. I think you’d find they would.”
He leaned towards her, his lips within kissing distance—she would not even have to raise her head—and passed her the joint.
“Six figures?”
“They might. Depends.”
She held the smoke in her lungs, savouring it, before exhaling slowly with a covert smile. Her job was almost done. He had taken the bait.
“Depends on what?”
“Just how much he’s prepared to say,” she said hoarsely. “Whether there are any pictures—of him with Honor Tait. No porn shots, though. No one wants to see old people with their clothes off.”
He laughed, throwing his head back.
“And you could put me in touch with these papers?”
She reached up and gently stroked his face.
“Treat me nicely and I’ll see what I can do.”
Honor’s life, as much as was possible in this spare final act, had given every outward impression of being fulfilling, or at least interesting. Old and useless as she was, she had at least mastered the illusion of purpose: work, of a kind, friends, music, theatre, an interest in world affairs. She had kept herself busy.
Travel was no longer possible and, though this had seemed the cruelest blow, she resisted bitterness, thinking of Lois, for whom an unaccompanied journey down to the foyer of the hospital, or even to the lavatory at the end of the ward, would be as hazardous, heroic and unlikely as a lone trip up the Amazon. Their world had shrunk. Accept it. And that adventurous spirit she once shared with Lois, their relish for new places, must now be turned inward. Honor was at last entering true terra incognita; there were no maps, no one would follow her precise route to this unknown destination, and she would be making the journey alone.
Until recently, blank days in her diary could make her as panicky as a teenage wallflower. She had meted out appointments, events, dates with friends, even phone calls, spacing them carefully, luminous landmarks in the lengthening dusk. And what, truly, did all this activity amount to? Cheerful tunes, asinine music-hall songs, hummed in solitude to mask the terrible silence. “My old man said, ‘Follow the van, and don’t dilly dally on the way.’ ” The van, it struck her now, must have been a hearse.
Buchenwald. 14 April 1945. Liberation Day Four. In woodland at the edge of the camp, I glimpsed a fugitive Nazi soldier hiding in the undergrowth. Minutes later American troops had captured him and dragged him into the compound. A queue of U.S. soldiers, merry as a line outside a Saturday-night movie, formed to give that young German a savage beating. In the chaos of victory, with the stink of death around them in this terrible place, in the shadow of Goethe’s Oak, the Americans were pumped up with righteous vengefulness.
Twenty
“Tim!”
“Yes?”
He sounded cautious.
“It’s Tamara.”
“Tamara!”
The frisky shout down the line could not mask his wariness.
“How are you?” she asked.
“A bit the worse for wear after last week’s shenanigans.”
“Oh?”
“The Press Awards. Did you hear?”
“I was there.”
“Oh, right …”
He had forgotten her central role in his humiliation. This was a relief as well as an insult.
“What happened?” she asked, testing his memory further.
“A minor scrap with some arsehole. One of your lot, I think, from The Monitor.”
“You okay?”
“Bit of a shiner, bruised pride and all that. But you should have seen the state of the other guy.”
“What was it about, your fight?”
“No idea. You know how it is. Some slapper, probably. Anyway, how are you doing, my darling? To what do I owe the pleasure?”
He had used her, dumped her, broken her heart and insulted her. And now he was talking to her as if they were old friends. She wished Alistair had hit him harder and inflicted some real damage. But this, she reminded herself, was business. Revenge could wait.
“It’s a story. I thought you might be interested.”
“Try me …”
They agreed to meet in a pub five minutes from his office. The Swan was a sour-smelling pit with a neon jukebox playing eighties dance hits. Midafternoon, when Tamara arrived, it was full of men in hard hats and work boots drinking their day’s wages. Hacks from The Sphere would arrive later, and then the real fun would begin. As her ex-lover walked in, she tensed herself for pain but was relieved to find she felt only a cringe of embarrassment. The comparison with Dev was stark. He looked old, puffy-faced and seedy, and there was a dark raccoon circle around his right eye, giving him a piratical look. He ordered their drinks and sat down. He seemed nervous and sat on the edge of his seat, a plastic banquette scarred with a constellation of cigarette burns.
“This had better be good,” he said.
“It is.”
He was silent as she pitched the story. By the time she had finished they had both drained their glasses. There was none of the bluff flirtatiousness of this morning’s phone call.
“Let’s get this right,” he said with sarcastic relish. “Some posh pensioner’s been having it off with a young stud? Unhygienic, I admit. But I think you’ll find that falls into The Sphere’s WGAT category. As in ‘who gives a toss?’ ”
Tamara was indignant.
“But she’s not just any posh pensioner. She’s famous.”
“Listen, Tam,” he said, lighting a cigarette, “she may be famous as far as the unpopulars are concerned—she might pass as a celebrity in your poncey, low-circulation broadsheets like The Monitor and The Courier. But for a mass-circulation tabloid like ourselves, the only posh pensioner we’re interested in is the Queen Mum, and if she was in the sack with a good-looking gigolo, it would be a case of ‘God Bless You, Ma’am!’ ”
Tamara tried to curb the pleading note in her voice.
“But Honor Tait’s different.”
“Look, I’d love to help you, Tam. For old times’ sake.” He winked, then clapped his hand to his bruised eye. Alistair’s handiwork was still giving him trouble. There was some satisfaction in that, any
way.
“It’s really not up our street,” he continued. “I don’t know. This Honor Tait. She’s not some leggy supermodel, is she? No one wants to read about some old bird like that. We don’t want to put our readers off their breakfasts.”
Breakfast? It was not so long ago that this man’s idea of breakfast was a line of coke on Tamara’s breasts. And now he was turning her away as if she were just another desperate freelance trying to flog a duff story.
“But she’s been in all the magazines. Vogue, Tatler …”
He shook his head.
“Sorry, love. We’ve blown our budget on the new promotion campaign—‘Slap a Paedo, Win a Twingo’—and the Pernilla Perssen story.”
“What Pernilla Perssen story?” Tamara asked in sudden panic. Had The Sphere got hold of her pregnancy scoop? That would be all she needed.
“One of her exes is spilling the beans on her drug-fuelled three-in-abed romps,” Tim explained.
Tamara was reassured. Her exclusive was safe—any ménages à trois were likely to have preceded Perssen’s pregnancy. This would be old news. She continued to press her claim.
“The Monitor’s running a four-thousand-word piece on Honor Tait in the books section in three weeks’ time. Here’s your chance for another spoiler.”
“The books section? Four thousand words? Do me a favour!” he said. “Minority interest. Not the sort of stuff we want to be spending good money on at The Sphere.”
“I thought you liked to get the better of The Monitor. You shelled out good money to poach that snobby old windbag Bernice Bullingdon,” she said, peevishly picking at the corners of a beer mat.
“Old Bernice?” He laughed. “Yeah, we really wound up Wedderburn there, didn’t we? Got our own back on him for doing the dirty on us with Ricky Clegg.”
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