The Spoiler

by Annalena McAfee

  “Close? We weren’t close. I think Tad worked with her once. On a picture.”

  “What about those wild Hollywood parties?”

  This line of questioning puzzled Honor.

  “Tad could be sociable, certainly.”

  Tamara’s eyes widened to an inquisitor’s stare.

  “How sociable? Was he sociable in the bedroom, too?”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  Was this the broadsheet alternative to tabloid bile? Was the narrative of her life to be reduced to a tepid gush of name-dropping and innuendo?

  “Even the most serious stories need some pep and human interest,” Tamara said, with open condescension.

  The old woman’s reply was a reflexive snap: “I need no lessons in basic journalism from you.”

  “Well, perhaps that’s exactly where you’re going wrong. When did you last write for a newspaper? I mean, actually write a story? How many decades ago? Things have changed. The world has changed. You might benefit from a little instruction in late-twentieth-century journalism.”

  Tamara was enjoying this. But the old woman, too, seemed suddenly roused.

  “Journalism? Really? What do you know about it? You and your kind have the same relationship to journalism as lavatory graffiti to the Sistine Chapel.”

  “I don’t see what makes you so superior.”

  Honor shook her head. It was a pointless squandering of diminishing resources to pursue this further. To blame a witless shopgirl, who by some accident of fate had ended up typing titbits in a magazine instead of scanning barcodes at a supermarket checkout, was to give her an importance she did not merit. It was the culture that was at fault, not her.

  “Look,” Honor said more gently, “it’s not about you. It’s about the time you’re living in. You’re a pawn, an innocent, the end result of a process of decline that has elevated nonentities, moved the bedroom into the bazaar and conflated fame with virtue.”

  Her conciliatory tone did not soften the insult.

  “You weren’t so very high and mighty then, were you?” Tamara replied. “In the good old glory days? Hobnobbing with the stars, thinking you were something of a star yourself, photographed with a Spanish dictator in your hot pants. Do you think that picture would have gone anywhere if you hadn’t been glamorous and scantily clad? At least I’ve generally managed to keep my clothes on in the course of an interview. You played the game. You put yourself about—all that ‘high IQ in a low-cut gown’ stuff. Nobody’s fooled by your intellectual grande dame act.”

  The silence that followed was prolonged and intense. Honor could hear her breath roaring like a stiff north wind in her ears. Tamara was staring fiercely at her notes, wondering whether she had finally gone too far. Tim had been very keen on this second interview, she reminded herself, and there was a good deal at stake here. Suddenly, as clamorous in the quiet of the room as a fire alarm, the telephone rang. Honor rose from her chair and walked stiffly into the hall.

  “Hello … Who is this? … How did you get this number? … No. I have nothing to say … The whole thing is ridiculous … Who gave you this number? … I just want to be left in peace … Of course it’s untrue … No. I have nothing to say …”

  She dropped the receiver as if it had scalded her hand and walked back into the room with cautious steps. Tamara watched Honor—still lying, still in denial—shut her eyes and tense her body against pain as she lowered herself into the chair.

  “You need me more than I need you,” the young woman said.

  Honor’s eyes flashed open.

  “Don’t you think I have been mocked and humiliated enough? What exactly do you want from me? Should I howl and sob into your tape recorder? Is that it? Go into the street and weep for the photographers?” She pointed a shaking finger at Tamara. “What your generation doesn’t seem to understand is that there are such things as private matters; that to some people no amount of money or promise of advantage would induce them to talk about these matters. It’s a question of integrity. And the vulgar publicity, the public exposure, brought to them by airing family business, private affairs, in confessional memoirs or newspaper articles would be completely abhorrent, unthinkable.”

  “Very noble, I’m sure,” Tamara said with a slow smile, her triumph nearly complete. “But they’re out there now, your ‘private affairs,’ aren’t they?”

  Honor shrank back in her chair.

  “This is preposterous.”

  “You can be as snooty as you like about it, but when more than one person is involved in ‘your affairs,’ you can’t guarantee they subscribe to the same moral code. Not everyone can afford to be that principled—or perverted.”

  Honor Tait’s face hardened into a mask of such ferocity that, for a moment, Tamara feared she might be capable of violence.

  “Just what are you implying?”

  Tamara paused. Honor Tait was barely able to stand unaided, much less strike out with any force. She was clearly not, at this stage, going to spill any beans on her celebrity friends, but if she could be provoked into an angry quote, admitting her guilt over Dev, perhaps attempting to defend her actions, then that would give a new angle and extend the story’s life. Every paper would run it.

  “Your ‘boyfriend,’ companion, whatever you call him, he obviously felt he stood to gain more by telling your story than by continuing your ‘arrangement.’ Maybe you just didn’t pay him enough. Maybe, rather than being an active supporter of worthy causes—Kid’s Crusader!—defender of the underprivileged, scourge of injustice, you are actually a callous, hypocritical exploiter, a vile child abuser.”

  Honor felt the blood drain from her face, and she was seized by a sudden weakness, as if her bones and sinews were melting away. All she could do was sit, silent and horrified, as the girl continued her senseless rant.

  “You had all the power—the money, the reputation—and he was a kid, an innocent boy. Was this what you meant by ‘championing the weak’ and ‘shining a searchlight in the darkest corners of human experience’?”

  Honor closed her eyes, and her hands balled into fists in her lap. When she spoke at last, her voice was so faint and tremulous that Tamara had to strain to hear it.

  “At seventy-nine years of age, after a long life, rich and interesting by any standards, with a respected body of work behind me, devoted to the pursuit of truth and exposure of injustice, it seems this absurd lie is what I’ll be remembered for.”

  “This lie?”

  “I will be seen forever as a vain and foolish old woman, a grotesque object of ridicule, a byword for deluded and distasteful lust. A female Malvolio, cross-gartered in her dotage.”

  Tamara was losing patience.

  “ ‘This lie’?”

  The old woman shot Tamara a whiplash look.

  “Yes. This lie, which will stay in the press cuttings, along with all those other lies, distortions, misrepresentations, and will be endlessly repeated. Like nuclear waste, these lies will have an infinite half-life. They will never entirely disappear.”

  Tamara was not going to be thrown by her bluff.

  “Don’t try to deny it. We have the evidence. Dev told us everything, in minute detail.”

  “We”? “Us”? She had given too much away. But the old woman did not seem to notice.

  “In some cultures,” Honor said, “your naïveté might be seen as charming.”

  Her voice was returning to her, regaining some of its strength.

  “But the facts were all laid out: the times and dates of your meetings …” Tamara said.

  “ ‘The facts’? This isn’t fact. It’s a crass contemporary fantasy for the lowest common denominator. You people are only interested in simple-minded archetypes. Bad people. Good people. Fairy-tale endings. Cruel comeuppances. Imbecilic morality tales for an amoral age.”

  Tamara was not going to be harangued by a repulsive old paedophile.

  “Now wait a moment. This was a serious investigation, with a strong pu
blic interest element. You’re an influential figure. You’ve published pronouncements on moral issues, talked endlessly about truth. What you say, how you live, matters.”

  “A simple, lurid lie will always be more attractive to people like you than dull, complicated truth.”

  “Don’t give me ‘people like me.’ It’s people like you who are the problem here. How complicated can it be? You have been seeing him regularly, your ‘aura masseur.’ Your gigolo.”

  “ ‘Aura masseur’? One of his many skills. And gigolo, too? A true Renaissance man.”

  “This isn’t the time for sarcasm. He’s been coming to you for private sessions.”

  “A lie.”

  “You were photographed with him!”

  Honor sighed and shook her head.

  “Yes. I was photographed with him.”

  Tamara felt a thrill of righteousness. She knew how this went; she had seen the prosecuting barrister’s merciless routine in countless TV soaps.

  “You were holding hands.”

  The old woman, the defendant, bowed her head, and was about to change her plea to guilty.

  “Yes.”

  “Kissing.”

  Tait lowered her head further. Telling the truth, Tamara could see, was costing her a great deal.

  “Yes.”

  “Like lovers.”

  At this Tait lifted her head. She was nodding now. An admission of guilt. Tamara had her at last.

  But when it came, the old woman’s answer was a vehement denial.

  “No! No! Not like lovers.”

  Tamara was exasperated, but she was not going to give up. One more push.

  “So, you agree you do know him. He did come to see you. And you held his hand and you kissed him, just as you’d done since he was a boy.”

  The next “yes” was a whisper.

  “Your lover,” pressed Tamara. “Your paid-for lover.”

  Honor extended a wavering hand and gripped the arm of the chair, using it to lever herself to her feet. She was agitated, trembling all over now, and walked slowly to the fireplace where she clutched the edge of the mantelpiece for support.

  “He was a … friend. A close friend. I’ve barely seen him in the past seven years.”

  This was procedural, a distraction. Tamara refused to be deflected.

  “Never mind times and dates. Let’s deal with the truth here. You kissed him.”

  “Yes, I kissed him,” said the old woman wearily, unwinding the green worry beads coiled around the base of the clock.

  “You were lovers,” Tamara said, elated by her adversarial mantra. “You kissed him, like a lover, not like a friend.”

  “Not like a friend. Not like a lover,” Honor repeated faintly, twisting the circle of jade in her hand.

  “We’ve seen the photographs. How exactly were you kissing him then?”

  Tamara had her now.

  A sudden sound, like a hailstorm rattling against a window, broke the silence as the thread snapped in Honor Tait’s fingers and the beads fell in a sudden stream, bouncing and scattering across the parquet. The old woman did not move.

  “Like a mother,” she said quietly.

  Tamara had a sudden swooping sensation of weightlessness.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I kissed him,” Honor Tait said in a voice ringing with anger, “not like a friend, or a lover. I kissed him like a mother. A mother kissing her son.”

  Tamara reeled back in her chair.

  “Dev is your son? But you never mentioned a son.”

  Honor sat down again, and Tamara stared as the old woman absently sifted the few remaining beads, like grains in an hourglass, through her gnarled hands.

  “He was—is—my only son: Daniel, Danny, Hari, Asgar, Dev—whatever name he’s calling himself at the moment. He’s my son. My adopted son.”

  She was lying. She must be. What else could she do? It was the reckless act of a cornered woman, a practised manipulator. She had succeeded in throwing Tamara off course, but only temporarily. Tamara checked her recorder—still plenty of tape left—and picked up her notepad. She needed to get the facts absolutely straight.

  “There was no mention of a son in any of the cuttings I read.”

  Honor answered in a mocking drawl.

  “Well, if it’s not in the cuttings file …”

  Tamara sat, silent and tense, trying to recall Dev’s accusations—his exact words—as Honor continued.

  “Daniel Edmund Tait, or Varga as he preferred, went—fled—to New Zealand in 1990 at the age of twenty-three. He bought enough land to set up a commune on the South Island with a bunch of like-minded crackpots. It all fell apart, of course. Then he went to Hong Kong, and blew the rest of his money there before moving to northern India, then Spain, then on.”

  “You’re lying.”

  Honor stiffened.

  “If it’s lies that interest you, Daniel could run master classes. He always had a taste for invention and reinvention. During a brief period of teenaged gentrification, when he swaggered about Chelsea in a waxed jacket like a country landowner at a point-to-point, he insisted we called him by his middle name, Edmund. When the drugs first took hold, he changed that to Ed.”

  “Dev and Daniel are the same person?”

  Honor tilted her chin and smiled with false pity.

  “In his early teens he insisted on using the last name Varga, the name of my second husband, whom he’d never even met. It was a deliberate insult to Tad, and to me, of course. At that time—we learned from Daniel’s school later—he was affecting an aristocratic Hungarian past.”

  “So you’re telling me,” Tamara said, picking her words carefully, for the record, so there could be no mistake, “the young man in the photograph, Dev, the man you were seen kissing, is your son?”

  “I am telling you,” the old woman said, jaw clenched, “my son, my adopted son, Daniel, was—is—a dangerous fantasist and a pathological liar.”

  She let the beads drop in her lap. Daniel’s kombolói, his worry beads, an affectation he had acquired after a month living in a Greek island cave with fellow hedonists. They were “finding themselves.” That was the trope. First he had found himself, and then he was lost forever.

  Now Honor was no longer parrying the dumb girl’s questions. She was telling the story because she had to. Because she never had. She was enjoying the young woman’s discomfort. And there was nothing to be gained from concealment now, no one to protect. Least of all herself.

  “He was there, in Glenbuidhe, the night of the fire. He’d taken a key and gone up there without our consent after we refused to give him more money. He bought a plane ticket with our final payment and left for New Zealand the next day.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Of course you don’t. You don’t understand anything. Why should you?”

  It was a double curse: confidence and ignorance, Honor thought. Was this the burden of Tamara’s generation, affluent children born in an unprecedented time of peace and privilege? Daniel, not much older than this girl, had been similarly afflicted. By the time he had reached the age to be curious about the world, there were no hidden frontiers that had not been meticulously annotated by backpackers’ guidebooks; the only uncharted journey was interior. And what a disappointment that must have proved. Daniel’s psyche had not turned out to be a transcendent range of virgin peaks and hidden valleys, nor a candlelit pleasure palace. No amount of mind-altering drugs could change the fact: Daniel’s mental landscape, his inner life—or his soul, as he liked to characterise it—was a commonplace shopping mall, a kitsch temple dedicated to envy and greed.

  “Why?” Tamara asked, lost in a pained replay of the most intimate moments of that first night in Clapton, and their last in the Paddington hotel.

  “As the adopted child of moderately well-known parents, he had some scope for storytelling—and for the nursing of resentments, real and imagined. In that, at least, he excelled.”

  T
he revelation that the story departed so much from the tabloid version had, Honor noted with satisfaction, wiped the smile from the girl’s face. Tamara sat crushed and silent as the old woman resumed her story unprompted.

  She had been nearly fifty when her second marriage had come to an end.

  “I was between lovers, too. The child was a project, the suggestion of a childless friend who thought the thing that she most yearned for, a baby, would give me the profound happiness it would have given her. I went along with it. Motherhood was an experience I had not had, and this lack, I stupidly thought, defined my distance from other women. By becoming a mother I would join the stream of humanity, instead of just looking on. I wanted to feel that love, to give it and to receive it.” The old woman closed her eyes. “Selfish folly, I realised later. I wasn’t cut out for motherhood, just as he wasn’t cut out for the filial role.”

  Her voice trailed away again as she lapsed into thought. The womanly stuff, the wise wound and the aching womb, the call of biological destiny, had always seemed bogus to her, and she had sometimes wondered, when she first gathered the vulnerable baby into her arms in that orphanage in the shadow of Ettersberg, if it had been an act of contrition rather than love.

  The silence in the room was crystalline. As Tamara turned to check her cassette, her notebook slipped from her lap and hit the floor with a slap, jolting Honor out of her thoughts and back into her spoken confession.

  “I had visited the orphanage in Weimar, covering a story about postwar adoption in Germany—thousands of girls who’d had liaisons with occupying soldiers had abandoned their babies. The boy’s decorative quality—his fair putto prettiness—drew me in. We looked good together, that little fellow and me.”

  She had sent him to the best schools, furnished him with all the toys, tools and gadgets he required.

  “Later Tad came into our lives and did his best as a stepfather. Together, during school holidays, we escorted Daniel round the museums and monuments of Europe’s greatest cities, and introduced him to some of the most interesting men and women of the age. I took his silent watchfulness for awe, but some years on I learned I had been badly mistaken.”

  It was when he reached his teens, her beautiful son, newly expressive, disclosed that, far from appreciating all she had done for him, he had been harbouring resentments for years.