The Spoiler

by Annalena McAfee

  “He was a difficult adolescent: lazy, surly, with little aptitude or interest in anything apart from self-pleasuring and comic books.”

  Lois, dear Lois, had tried to help, true to her word, taking Daniel into her home when Honor was away working, sometimes for months on end during school holidays. At first Honor had resented Lois’s closeness to the boy and felt her attempts to help were interference. Lois had always been better at that sort of thing. People. Friendship. Children. Love. Later, though, Honor came to feel relief at her friend’s intervention. She was welcome to him. Adoption had been a mistake. Honor had been a fool to think she had anything to offer a child. Daniel had repaid Lois’s kindness by stealing from her—cash, jewellery, antiques, pictures—but she refused to go to the police and, with stubborn patience, had continued to offer him affection and hospitality as if nothing had happened.

  When he finally completed his schooling without further serious trouble and got a place at art college, it seemed, to Honor’s private chagrin, that Lois’s faith had been rewarded. But the Slade had proved a short-lived diversion, and Honor’s scepticism was vindicated. It soon became clear that Daniel preferred girls and drugs to life classes and printmaking. He ran up catastrophic debts, acquired a circle of semicriminal friends and began his involvement with a succession of cults.

  “He was on a spiritual path, he said, salaaming unscrupulous gurus and affecting a vegan diet, while popping handfuls of pills and haunting squats with tramps and sociopaths.”

  Honor rolled the worry beads in her palm. “The trouble with the Darling Boy,” Tad had once said, “is that he doesn’t worry enough.”

  There were spells in rehabilitation centres, costlier than five-star hotels—Lois had helped to pay the fees—then there was the Hare Krishna phase, followed by a stretch as a cerulean-robed devotee of Alandra, the Blue Goddess. For a while he was a sanctimoniously jocular adherent of the Sacred Laughter Fellowship, then he spent two months as a sandalled zealot of the New Jesus Militia. But he was always drawn back to his sordid milieu, to his derelicts’ circle in grim North London flats, to his addict girlfriends and his own ruinous drug habits.

  “It was Tad,” Honor told Tamara, “who finally insisted: no more money to fund this fecklessness.”

  Lois would have gone on shelling out, but her money simply ran out and the anxiety over her proxy son seemed to trigger her mental decline.

  “And that was when I first saw Daniel’s vicious side,” Honor continued. “He stumbled across evidence of Tad’s sexual peccadilloes—‘occasional cross-dressing,’ as they call it now.”

  She saw the girl stir and reach with automatic swiftness for her pencil and notepad again; but what was the point of dissembling anymore? Didn’t people boast about this sort of mild eccentricity these days?

  “He tried to blackmail us,” Honor went on.

  Looking for something valuable he might sell, he had prised open the tin trunk. He had mocked and raged at his stepfather, stormed at his mother for tolerating “life with a drag queen” and threatened to go to the tabloids, which would have gone into ecstasies of disapproval at news of the private urges of a well-known film director.

  Tamara was scratching away at her notebook like an industrious schoolgirl.

  “I was repelled by his ruthlessness, his venality,” Honor said. “I didn’t want anything more to do with him. I gave him what he asked for but said it would be our last contact. Severance payment.”

  And so, a week later, in their London flat, Tad had answered a call at 4 a.m. from the police in Inverness-shire. Glenbuidhe was in flames.

  “Local police initially suspected arson. There had been rumours of attacks on second homes by nationalist hotheads. There were also uncomfortable questions about our relationship with Daniel, about his state of mind—the day before the fire he had been seen in a local pub, insensible with drink—and about his underclass connections. But their curiosity faded when forensics revealed a fault in the wiring, which hadn’t been renewed since the twenties. The case was closed, and Daniel was, by then, setting up his doomed utopia on an abandoned farm on the Abel Tasman peninsula. I never expected to see him again.”

  “But how …? Where …?”

  Honor dismissed Tamara’s questions with a wave and continued. Five years ago she heard reports from one of his old girlfriends, just out of a rehabilitation clinic and looking for money, that Daniel had been sighted at an Indian monastery in Uttar Pradesh.

  “She probably thought she was telling me, a mother, what I most wanted to hear. I put the phone down on her.”

  Weeks later the girl called again with news of a rumour that he had been asked to leave by the monks, who accused him of abusing their hospitality.

  “That’s when I knew it was him,” Honor said. “It’s his trademark. He’s been abusing hospitality all his life.”

  Honor had kept the news from Tad, and from everyone else, and silenced the girlfriend with a payoff, “sufficiently large to fund a fatal overdose of heroin.”

  Outside Holmbrook Mansions, late afternoon had ceded to evening, and the glow from the streetlights gave a jaundiced cast to the flats opposite. Tamara thought of her colleagues standing outside as night fell, waiting for a glimpse of the old woman. There would be laughter, gossip and a comradely sharing of drinks and smokes. Someone would be nominated to go to the pub for bottles of spirits to liven up the coffee and keep off the chill. Night was descending in the flat, too. But there was no warmth or conviviality here. Tamara could barely make out her own handwriting. But Honor Tait did not seem to mind the dark. It suited her.

  “So when exactly did he come back into your life? Daniel?”

  “He phoned just after Tad died, two years ago.”

  After that call Honor had been uncertain whether the chief cause of her anguish was Tad’s death or Daniel’s resurrection. Her son had expressed no sorrow about his stepfather’s death, no sympathy for Honor, no curiosity about Lois, who could no longer be of use to him, nor any remorse about the blackmail or the fire. But still she had wanted to see him.

  “I was lured back in, suckered. What mother wouldn’t be? Even a mother as inadequate as me. My own guilt played a part, obviously. But in the end it came down to money. That was all he ever wanted. I know that now. I sent banker’s drafts to aliases in Goa and Almora, arranged payments to American Express offices in Ibiza, Athens, Marrakech … Friendship, kinship, love—it was always a financial transaction with him. You listened for a heartbeat and heard the click of an abacus.”

  The shock had subsided, and Tamara knew she had to regain control of the interview.

  “When did you first see him again?”

  “Before Christmas there were a number of silent phone calls—I guessed it was him—then a taunting postcard. He finally phoned a few weeks ago. We agreed to meet. He said he was staying with friends.”

  “In Clapton?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me where he lived. He seemed to move around a lot.”

  “But everything he told … said about you, in The Sphere?”

  Tamara knew the answer but needed to hear it baldly stated.

  “Lies. Ludicrous, self-aggrandising untruths. And greed. He would have received a large cheque from that repugnant tabloid, I don’t doubt.”

  Tamara held her breath, hoping the gloom concealed her blush. The streetlights outside seemed to grow brighter as the edges and outlines in the flat—the mantelpiece and shelves, the fireplace, the squat, solid furniture and the insubstantial shape of Honor Tait herself—gradually dissolved in the darkness. The old woman talked on regardless, her voice disembodied, as if emanating from a ghost.

  “But he can’t just have invented it all,” Tamara said.

  She could just make out Honor Tait’s silhouette as she shifted in her chair and leaned across to switch on the table lamp. The light it threw on her was brutal, giving her face a greenish lustre and making a grotesque woodcut of its folds and shadows.

  “You’re
not simply a ninny, are you? You’re a dangerous ninny.”

  She looked at Tamara with the detachment of a sphinx.

  “I just want to get this right. What happened …” Tamara said.

  Wincing, the old woman rose from her chair and walked to the fireplace again. She gripped the mantelpiece, bent to turn a lever and the flames of the gas fire flared up, casting shadows against the room’s bare walls.

  “I came to write another piece altogether,” the young woman continued. “I really don’t know where to start with this.”

  “You expect my sympathy?”

  “Of course not. But this really is a chance to set the record straight.”

  Honor Tait slowly returned to her chair. She was nodding now. Compliant at last, thought Tamara, restraining a self-congratulatory smile. She wondered how she might approach this new angle. It would not be for The Sphere, obviously. No paper wants to trash its own story, and Tim would be apoplectic when he learned they’d been taken for an expensive ride. The Mail on Sunday might welcome the chance to knock a rival’s story: EVIL LIES OF JUNKIE SON IN GIGOLO BLACKMAIL SCANDAL. Maybe the broadsheets would take it: The Times or even The Independent. The tone would be loftier and might be more to Honor Tait’s liking: BETRAYED BY THE SON I LOVED! SHAMED PULITZER PRIZE WINNING JOURNALIST SPEAKS OUT.

  “No!!” Honor Tait brought down her hand on the table with a force that made the photograph of her last husband rock precariously. It was, Tamara realised now, the only photograph left in the room. “That’s it. There’ll be no more stories.”

  “But there will be. You know that. This story will run for years, decades, as long as there are papers to print it and people to read it. Unless we put a stop to it now. Publish the truth.”

  “We?” Honor shrank back into her chair. “Don’t, for a moment, assume that you and I have anything—even a shared humanity—in common. I have no need for you or your kind. I withdraw my cooperation from this or any other story. It’s finished. The whole damned charade is over.”

  “But why?” Tamara asked, her voice hoarse with indignation.

  “That is quite the most stupid question you’ve asked all afternoon,” Honor said. “Now get out.”

  As she walked towards the door Tamara turned to look back at the small seated figure, dwarfed by the room’s leaping shadows. In the lamplight Honor Tait’s face was set in a grimace of mad defiance, her head thrown back, her eyes blazing: an ancient Joan of Arc at the stake.

  Twenty-four

  By the time Tamara arrived outside the Clapton flat, the flames were under control. The fire, onlookers said, had been mostly confined to the attic. Tamara saw the punk girl, barefoot in the cold, wearing only a sweatshirt and leggings, drinking tea with a couple of firemen. No one was hurt, they said, but there was some serious structural damage. Tamara had tried phoning him from a call box as soon as she left Holmbrook Mansions, but she had known, even as she dialled, that his number would be disconnected.

  She walked over to the girl whose face was streaked with black tears—mascara, or smoke.

  “You missed him,” she told Tamara, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “He left this morning. Said he was heading east, and he didn’t mean Canning Town. The vibe round here was bad, he said. Too much negative energy.” She gave a wry laugh. “And there will be, when the landlord finds out he’s gone. On top of all this”—she gestured at the attic, the broken, blackened windows and the caved-in roof—“he owed three months’ rent.”

  Honor had all she needed for this journey on her bedside table: a jug of water, a glass and her cache of pills. The wireless was tuned to Radio 3. Schubert lieder. “Erlkönig.” Goethe again.

  “My father, my father, oh do you not hear / What the Erl-king whispers into my ear?”

  She picked up her notebook—the habit of work was hardest to break—and looked again at her latest revisions.

  Then I stood by, watching as the Allied soldiers took turns with fists and boots until that young German, an innocent schoolboy and victim twice over, sprawled bloody and unconscious by the blasted stump of Goethe’s mighty oak. It was in this spot that the poet had written, “Here man feels great and free—great and free as the scene before him, and as he ought properly always to be.”

  She flinched as she remembered the jubilant blows and the boy’s stare as he went down. His eyes, nursery blue in the ruin of his face, found hers. And then he cried out: “Mutti! Mutti!” Mother! Mother! His last words. The notebook slipped from Honor’s hand and fell to the floor.

  The day before she had been to her GP, leaving and returning by the rear entrance of the mansion block. She had complained of angina. Heart pains. Half true, though the pains were not, in the main, physical. But the recent visit to her doctor would mean there would be no fuss, no need for an inquest. She had shaken her stockpiled tablets into a cup and thrown the bottles down the chute. Back in her bedroom, she emptied the pills into her palm and swallowed them, two handfuls, with the water, in four bitter mouthfuls. All her remaining strength was needed to suppress the urge to vomit. This was to be her last fight.

  She drew the blankets up around her throat. She had completed her flat clearance. Her photographs of Tad and Daniel had been thrown down the chute with the last of her books and papers. All that remained was the final notebook, lying facedown on the floor. She had unplugged the phone and disconnected the doorbell. The maid was not due until next week. The doorman had agreed to post the letter—simple, evasive, no blame or recriminations—to her publisher, second-class. By the time she received it and hurried over to let herself into the flat with Bobby’s key, it would be finished, and self-important Ruth could be trusted to keep Honor’s final secret. Death from natural causes would be the story.

  Ruth was to be executor of her will. The flat would be sold, debts paid and any residue to be given to an Alzheimer’s charity. There was no point in leaving it to Lois herself. And as for Daniel, he had had his final payment. She settled back on her pillows and closed her eyes, trying to still her mind and shut out this terrible sense of failure. Had Daniel been born bad? Or had she, the most unnatural of mothers, an observer of life rather than a participant, made him so?

  Honor had often wondered what her last thoughts would be. Work, whatever role it had played in her life, was not a matter for the deathbed. It would be people—memories of friends, family, lovers, enemies—who would provide the final torment or consolation. Would it be a slow fade, a gradual extinguishing of the lights? Or would she die in anguish, howling her regrets? She could not shake it, this sense of misdeeds returned to haunt her. The whimpering boy in that place of beauty and horror. And her own ruthless curiosity.

  “My father, my father, he’s gripping me fast! / The Erl-king is hurting! Help me, I’m lost!”

  She reached across the bed and switched off the radio.

  Gradually the black void, vast as the universe, dissolved behind her closed eyes to a restless blue—Loch Buidhe, shimmering in its amphitheatre of soft green hills, and in the distance Ben Firinn, its peak shining with snow, rearing over its sister mountains. Not Ettersberg, then, and its sinister beech forests. This was an unexpected benediction. The hills and mountains around Glenbuidhe were, in world terms, topographical pygmies. But they were her own pure and lovely Himalayas. And there was her childhood home in the distance, restored to her, its granite bulk softened by evening light, a place of peace, perhaps for the first time. No sign of her parents. At peace, she hoped, also for the first time.

  Here by the lodge at the water’s edge, gazing up at the mountains, she is not alone. By her side a small boy, solemn and trusting, reaches up and entwines his fingers in hers. They stand there silently, hand in hand, watching the light shifting on the mountains. Soon, the sun will set, showering golden embers on the loch, and they will go inside, prepare supper and light the fire against the cold night to come.

  How ironic that it should have been Ross, who had never been good at beginnings or endings,
or much else in between, who was to provide the story’s conclusion; Ross and crazy Crystal, whose sister Dawn’s tragic fate had been sealed eight years ago, the day she had met Danny Varga, also known as Dev, with whom she had shared an interest in New Age beliefs and old-style substance abuse. But this was not for publication. As Honor Tait had said, there were such things as private matters, and no amount of money or promise of advantage would induce Tamara to talk about them. It was a question of integrity. Besides, another story had to be written.

  It was a small victory, but a victory nonetheless, when Tamara’s piece on Honor Tait’s life and work finally appeared in The Monitor. Her hours of research, the interviews and her tireless legwork had not gone to waste, and there was the additional satisfaction in the thought of her new boss, currently in California for a technology conference, opening the paper and seeing Tamara’s name on a story that she, pompous, power-hungry Tania Singh, would have claimed as her own.

  Some fudging of facts was necessary. But, Tamara reckoned, this was only fair. She owed it to the old woman. The piece was a good deal shorter than Tamara had anticipated, and unimaginative subeditors had cut many of her best lines, deleting the reference to T. S. Eliot’s West End musical and the mention of Tait’s close friendship with Lord Byron. They changed “transgressive” to “improper,” excised “hermeneutic” and refused to give way on “chthonic,” and the tone of the printed piece departed from that of her original drafts. But in the circumstances this was only to be expected. There was no point in being precious; adaptability was one of Tamara’s professional strengths, after all. The Monitor’s obituaries page was not S*nday, but neither was it Psst! or The Sphere.

  Tim’s job offer never materialised, and now it never would—he had been sacked, along with Gifford-Jones, after Tamara’s follow-up news story appeared in The Monitor and revealed the extent of Dev’s deception. A PACK OF LIES—TAIT’S JUNKIE SON DUPES TABLOID was the headline, and the picture byline beneath it was Tamara’s. They had used The Sphere’s photograph of the kiss, now revealed as an image of selfless maternal affection and a son’s betrayal, as well as Bucknell’s snap, furtively acquired from the bedside table during her first interview, of an angelic-looking boy holding Honor Tait’s hand outside the family home in Scotland. Johnny had sent Tamara a herogram, telling her that Wedderburn, delighted by the chance to expose the gullibility of other newspapers, and overlooking the fact that The Monitor had initially been taken in too, singled out her news story for praise in Morning Conference. Such a pity that Honor Tait, who had slipped into a coma as the presses rolled, never lived to see her name cleared so emphatically.