Tamara stood her ground.
“This story’s much more interesting than one of Bernice’s screeds on early-day motions and adjournment debates.”
“That wouldn’t be difficult,” he said. “Anything’s more interesting than that. But don’t worry. The Sphere’s readers have been spared. Let’s just say Bernice’s been redeployed—she’s known as Bernie the Bin Queen these days.”
Tamara refused to be sidetracked.
“But Honor Tait used to be famous. More famous than Pernilla Perssen. Old-style, Hollywood-star famous.”
He glanced at his watch.
“We’re shelling out for some terrific pictures of Pernilla,” he said, his eyes misting with pleasure. “Wait till you see them …”
“Terrific,” Tamara said, without enthusiasm. “But this is a whole different order of story.”
“Look, darling, your Honor Tait—she’s old and she’s ugly, and most of our readers have never heard of her.”
“But they’ve heard of Frank Sinatra. Of her famous friends. Liz Taylor, Marilyn, she knew them all …”
He leaned towards her and patted her knee.
“Sorry, babe. Nice try. But it’s not for us. One more for the road?”
She used his time at the bar to marshal her arguments.
“There was a recent TV show all about her,” she said when he returned with the drinks. “Prime time. She’s involved in all the fashionable left-wing causes. She hangs out with Labour MPs. And movie stars. Jason Kelly. And telly stars. Paul Tucker.”
At the mention of Tucker, a risible figure to Tim and his associates, he spluttered into his drink.
“Don’t tell me she’s shagging Tucker, too.”
“I couldn’t say for certain. But she shagged everyone else. All the greats.”
Tim raised a quizzical eyebrow, forgetting last week’s injury again, then flinched as the pain reminded him.
“Which greats?”
“Sinatra … Picasso … Bing Crosby … Bob Dylan … Castro …”
“Pictures?” He traced a finger tenderly round his eye.
“Yes. I’m sure. Most of them. Not actually in bed together. But together.”
“A goer then.”
“Yes, and that’s the point. She’s still at it. In her eighties and insatiable.”
“So, what’s he like? Her toy boy?”
“Very fit,” Tamara said. “Very fit indeed.” And she allowed herself a smile of dreamy satisfaction.
It could have been the next drink, or the chance to ridicule Paul Tucker, or simply the identity of Tait’s third husband, that changed Tamara’s fortunes.
“Not old Tad Challis? Hairdressers’ Honeymoon? Comedy genius?” Tim said. “Ah, good old-fashioned English smut … He must have had his pick of all the saucy starlets, old Tad. This Honor Tait must have been a looker then.”
“Oh, she was,” Tamara said. “Check her out. She really was.”
“I don’t know, Tam. You’re really pushing me on this.”
She gave his thigh a playful pinch through the grey flannel.
“You know how important this story is to me,” she said. “There’s a lot at stake for me here.”
“Look. I don’t know, girl. I’m too soft-hearted for my own good. I’ll see what I can do.”
Tim called her that afternoon. He had ordered up Honor Tait’s picture file.
“They had to go into the depths of the morgue to find the early stuff, but once I’d blown off the dust, it was fantastic,” he said. “Absolutely priceless. What a corker! And she knew them all, didn’t she? Sinatra, Kennedy … you name them, your old biddy had it away with them.”
“She was connected. I told you.”
“Recent stuff’s not so bad, either. Those pictures with that young Kelly bloke. He’s hot, isn’t he? All the girls on the desk have been oohing and aahing over him. She looks like she’d have him for breakfast, the old bag. We’ll have some fun with this.”
“How soon do you want it?”
“Can you get the goods this weekend? We’ll rush it in for the Sunday after. Front-page splash and two double-page spreads?”
At the other end of the line, Tamara gave a victor’s clenched-fist salute.
“What happened to the Pernilla Perssen story?” she asked.
“It’s running in The News of the World this week.”
For an editor who had learned he was to be the victim of a spoiler, Tim sounded surprisingly cheerful.
“You lost the story?” she asked.
“The guy was a complete con man,” he said. “Pictures were a set-up, with a bargain basement Pernilla-lookalike. We sent him over to The News of the World. Looks like they’re going to take the bait and blow their budget for the next six months. And then there’ll be their legal fees. They’ll be stuffed.”
How many more times was she going to subject herself to this degradation, Honor asked herself; the tedious business of washing and dressing, then forcing herself out, dragging dread in every step, to be stripped back, exposed and reduced to her unappetising essence? Mutton to the slaughter. She knew she should not complain. If Lois had been offered the choice, she would have favoured daily colonoscopies and CAT scans in full possession of her intellectual faculties over perfect physical health and Alzheimer’s. She might have bridled at today’s doctor, however. A young privately educated swaggerer, he had an inauthentic line in sympathy. His indifference was obvious. Honor could almost hear it: “What the hell do you expect?”
Back at her flat, she continued her labours. The maid had been shocked when she arrived this morning and asked whether there had been a break-in. When she learned the truth she was even more horrified and refused to throw away the bags of books, clothes and trinkets. She would not even take them to a charity shop. For an unnerving moment Honor feared there might be tears, until she agreed to let the maid have the junk herself. Honor could not imagine where she would put it all in her overcrowded council flat.
There really was not much more to do. Honor took the newspaper and ripped it up, wrapping the torn pages around Tad’s precious Sèvres cups, which she stuffed in a plastic bag with other breakables—Aidan’s scent bottle, champagne glasses, and the vase. More junk for the maid.
She poured herself a drink and sat down in the empty gloom of the sitting room. So what, she wondered, watching her shadow rear against the bare walls, would an interviewer make of this room now? And what would it matter? It was easier to perceive error than to find truth—Goethe again—but sometimes it was impossible to discern either.
Even the astute could get it wrong. She had done so herself. Unforgivably, in the forest of Ettersberg. She could not face this now. Easier to contemplate, and with consequences no greater than private embarrassment, was her account for The Paris Review of the reclusive Canadian writer living alone in upstate New York in a clapboard farmhouse, his wife long fled and their children with her. Honor had found him stooped and rheumy eyed in that wintry house, warming his hands, metaphorically, over the fading embers of his literary fame. By the fireplace in his lonely house she had noticed an empty magnum of champagne, a dusty souvenir of that tabloid staple—happier times. He had turned his attic into a museum of his early success: walls crowded with framed reviews of his one best-selling novel, lurid posters and stills from the film adaptation (Tad had been first assistant director) and photographs of miniskirted starlets, eyes canopied by extravagant lashes, smiling in the company of a fashionable writer in a Carnaby Street suit who couldn’t believe his good fortune.
He had shown Honor round, talking solely of that one book, three decades old: the writing of it, the revising of it, the publication of it, the sales figures, the filming of it. Every attempt she had made to change the subject—his other books, contemporary politics, his family, the house, the garden—had been steered back thirty years to the glory days of that one bright triumph when everyone, even the critics, had wished him well and the earlier years of disappointment and failur
e seemed behind him for ever. How could he have known then that, after a brief scherzo of success, failure would be the leitmotif in a lifelong symphony of loss and bitterness?
It was not until her melancholy article had been printed that she received a call from a former colleague from The Herald Tribune, long retired and cultivating dahlias in the Chenango Valley.
“So you saw old G—? Did you get a sight of the Vestal Virgins?”
These, she learned, were the writer’s twenty-year-old lovers, identical twin sisters, rosy Renoir beauties of Irish origin from a housing project in Vestal, outside Binghamton, who had exchanged their jobs behind the till in the local supermarket for a wing of the farmhouse, champagne on demand and monthly shopping sprees. Yes, you could be gulled. And well-meaning misinterpretations could be as damaging as maliciously revealed truths. It had to be faced.
Skirting woodland at the edge of the camp twenty minutes later, I spotted a fugitive German soldier hiding in the bush and hurried back to the camp to alert the American troops. Then I stood and watched as the Allies formed a high-spirited queue to give the young Nazi a savage beating. In the chaos of victory, the Americans were pumped up with righteous vengefulness over the horrors they had witnessed in the newly liberated camp. The captured German moaned softly as one GI held him by his hair, which was matted with blood, while others took turns to pummel him, shouting abuse.
“Want a turn, lady?” one soldier asked me. I declined.
Eventually, with blood streaming from his face and soaking his detested Nazi uniform, the German fell to the ground.
Twenty-one
Tamara settled on a three-star hotel in a Paddington terrace. It was not the Ritz but, while Tim had finally offered Dev £50,000, plus a generous fee of £3,500 to Tamara, he insisted that her expenses for the piece had to be modest.
“I’m already stretching my budget with this, babe,” Tim told her. “I’ve had to fight to get this through our managing editor.”
Dev, who had been hoping for at least £100,000, was not impressed when Tamara phoned to tell him the news.
“If that’s the best they can do, I’m not sure it’s worth my while,” he said.
“But you said it yourself. This story needs to be told.”
“Once it appears, my main source of income will be gone. She won’t give me any more money. Ever. That will be it. Then what do I do?”
And once he had outed Honor Tait in the tabloids, his other clients would melt away too.
“But you wanted to make a fresh start,” she argued. “Put it all behind you.”
There was a pause. This could go either way, Tamara thought.
Finally, he spoke.
“Okay. As long as it’s in cash. No cash, no deal.”
Tim handed Tamara a briefcase filled with enough banknotes, clean and crisp as counterfeits, to make a substantial down payment on a decent West London flat.
“Highly irregular,” he said, winking with his good eye. “But I’m counting on you for some quality sleaze.”
She booked the room over the phone, negotiating a discount by implying that she would give the hotel a favourable mention in The Monitor’s travel pages. She insisted on their best suite, which apparently included an “emperor-sized” bed and a whirlpool bath.
Strangely, Tim seemed to be encouraging extracurricular activity.
“A bit of hotel rumpy-pumpy? If that’s what it takes. You go for it, girl,” he said.
Tamara was peeved by his absence of jealousy, but she was looking forward to some serious pampering, some rest and recreation, as well as some rewarding work, and it would be negligent not to take advantage of the hotel facilities.
The display advert in the Yellow Pages had promised “intimate luxury and superlative service,” but the shabby carpet in the hotel foyer and the yawning receptionist on the front desk suggested neither. It was too late to do anything about it now. Dev turned up with his backpack just as Tamara took the key. They stepped into the lift, a narrow wooden box, like a vertical coffin, which enforced an intimacy—groin brushing groin, thigh rubbing thigh—neither seemed prepared for.
He seemed almost shy, looking away when she tried to engage him with a knowing smile. She was going to have to handle the next two days with great sensitivity. He was feeling humiliated, she knew. What self-respecting man would be happy admitting to the world that he was sleeping with a geriatric? He might also be feeling guilt at betraying Honor Tait. That was, Tamara knew, one of the most pernicious aspects of abuse—victims felt responsibility for their victimisation.
“Have you got the cash?” he asked, as the lift stopped on the third floor.
“Yes. Right here.”
She patted the briefcase, accidentally brushing his crotch with her elbow.
When she unlocked the door to their suite they were met, though not welcomed, by a brassy fanfare of colour: an enormous heart-shaped arrangement of carnations barred their way into the room and, above it, like a pastel punching bag, bobbed a pink balloon bearing a Disney-style image of two kissing cupids.
“What the hell is all this about?” asked Dev, squeezing his way round the giant floral display, which was giving off a sickly fructose scent.
Pink bunting—more hearts—was pegged up around the window, which looked out onto the bleak service area at the back of the hotel. Over the bed (prince-size rather than emperor-, she would guess, and covered in pink chenille) was a banner in jolly nursery lettering enthusing, “Congratulations!”
“I asked for the best room in the hotel. I didn’t expect all this. It must be the honeymoon suite.”
“It’s an eyesore,” he said, with the pursed mouth of a spoiled child. “I can’t stay here.”
Then he saw the bottle of champagne in the ice bucket by the bed.
“Well, this will come in useful, anyway.”
“There’ll be plenty more where that came from,” Tamara reassured him.
He poured himself a glass, sullenly stretched out on the bed and began channel surfing.
“Any for me?”
He passed her the bottle without averting his eyes from the TV at the foot of the bed, which was showing a children’s quiz show—eager little swots vying for a worthless prize. She phoned room service for more champagne, and the receptionist, now wearing a chambermaid’s apron, brought in the bottles, edging carefully past the flowers. She left the tray on the table and backed out of the room, unsettling the cupids and almost toppling the carnation heart.
Dev switched to a porn channel, taking in a scene of naked mud wrestling with a connoisseur’s cool eye while rolling a joint with one hand. Tamara opened a second bottle, kicked off her shoes and passed him a drink in exchange for the joint. They lay inches apart like figures on a medieval tomb, their brows creased with stoned concentration as the mud wrestling evolved into sludge sex. She reached across to stroke his arm, and he sighed.
“So when do we start?” he said.
“Whenever you like,” she murmured.
“I mean this story deal.”
He seemed unaccountably tetchy.
“No pressure.”
She got up and dimmed the lights, arranged herself decoratively on the bed and opened another bottle of champagne.
“You sure you’ve got the money?” he asked.
“I told you. In my bag.”
“Show me.”
For forty hours they holed up in their suite, sleeping little, sedulously smoking their way through two ounces of grass, snorting the best part of a gram of cocaine, drinking a crate of champagne and talking; above all, talking. They ignored the whirlpool bath, and Tamara’s hopes of a weekend sex junket were soon forgotten. They made love only once, almost by accident; he rolled on top of her to reach for a bottle, their thin hotel bathrobes parted, flesh met flesh, and they were surprised by desire. Their bodies did the work, but it was a perfunctory entanglement. As they rocked together conscientiously, to the metronome accompaniment of the bed’s headboard banging
against the wall, his mind was evidently elsewhere. Something had happened to her, too. He was beautiful, yes. But all she really wanted was the story.
And she got it. What a story. Once he started to talk, he could not stop, and the sordid tale unfolded in a smog of recrimination and marijuana smoke. Tamara, taking notes, propped up on pillows next to him, with her tape recorder running on the bedside table, marvelled at the transformation; the enigmatic man of few words turned out to be a monologuist. She put in more than a dozen cassettes. This would, she knew, mean a marathon transcription job later, but her notes would shortcut the process.
He was angry, and spoke with such vehemence that it seemed revenge, rather than money, propelled his confession. He was not, he insisted, a professional gigolo, nor any kind of male escort. He never had been. He had been entirely truthful when he first met Tamara; he was a qualified masseur, a healer and “seeker after truth” with psychic gifts, but he had been groomed as a boy and then abused for years by a manipulative old woman who had lured him into her clutches and destroyed his chances of ever having a normal relationship.
“I’ve tried to get away, believe me,” he said. “But she always dragged me back.” He shook his head, overcome by regret and shame. “She drew me back in each time. I could never escape.”
Tamara looked up from her notebook.
“How young were you when it started?”
He avoided her eyes, staring straight ahead at the blank TV screen.
“Twelve? Thirteen? I don’t know. What I do know is that I was a complete innocent.”
Tamara’s disgust was tempered with jubilation. This was a story of boundless depravity, and she could not wait to tell it.
“Thirteen? You were a schoolboy?”
“What else would I be doing? Career opportunities for thirteen-year-olds were limited.”
She would not be deterred by his sarcasm. His real hostility was towards Honor Tait, she knew.
“How did you meet?”
“She was close to my father.”
“Were they lovers?”
The Spoiler Page 29