The Spoiler

She had two hours to conceal the secrets of her life. Evidence of vanity, foolishness and worse must be expunged. Domestic disorder was not a concern; the maid had remedied that this morning. And though Honor Tait might have been a slattern by inclination, she was never a collector, of people or of things. Divorce, bereavement, a house fire, a stringently unsentimental nature and the protocols of regular travel had ensured that, for a woman of her years, the flotsam was minimal. She had always travelled light. In love, as in life, it was hand baggage only. So what was left here in the London apartment? Which piece of junk, what accidental survivor of time’s winnowing, would betray her?

Breathless and gripped by uncharacteristic panic, she glanced around the room at the furniture, pictures and bookshelves. It was mostly Tad’s, of course. It had been his bachelor apartment and then it became their married pied-à-terre. Now it was her widow’s cell. He had been the homemaker, after a fashion. He had bought paintings, framed photographs, chosen curtains, indulged a whim for Staffordshire figurines and Sèvres china, taken a strange delight in the pair of soiled wingback chairs he had found in an Edinburgh antique shop, and spent silent hours, like a medieval monk at his manuscripts, poring over cumbrous books of fabric samples. Even at the companionable peak of their marriage, they both regarded Glenbuidhe, seven hundred miles north, with its invigorating discomforts, as her home and Maida Vale as his. Just as Honor had taken little interest in dressing the flat, she had no urge to dismantle it—to strike the set, as he would have said—once Tad had gone. Now
she would be called to account for the acquisitive spirit and questionable taste of her dead husband.

Artifacts so familiar that Honor no longer saw them, books and pictures haphazardly accumulated, unwanted gifts and gewgaws, sentimental impedimenta, carefully dusted and rearranged by the maid, would be seized on as telling details. Too much had been said and written about Honor already; rumours, misinformation, insinuation and distortions had been picked up, polished by successive inquisitors and turned into lapidary fact.

She was still smarting from the
Vogue
piece, which Bobby had talked her into. It was more than a year ago now, but she felt incensed, demeaned by its inanities (and the photograph!) every time she saw an issue of the magazine—invariably, these days, in a doctor’s surgery. To insult and patronise and get so much wrong in the space of a three-hundred-word caption was quite an achievement. There had been radio appearances, on
Woman’s Hour
(so much fuss for an eight-minute slot) and with Melvyn Bragg on
Start the Week
, where Honor had attempted to make herself heard over a lugubrious scientist, a cleric who seemed to be under the impression that he was still in the pulpit and a novelist with eccentric views about animal welfare.

More recently, there had been the
South Bank Show
. (Melvyn again. Were there no other serious broadcasters left?) She had been assured that the programme would focus exclusively on her work—she had made it clear that her personal life was out of bounds—and she had been stupidly flattered into thinking that it would celebrate her “place, as a writer, at the heart of twentieth-century history.” Instead, what had it amounted to? A shrivelled old cadaver talking in the gloom about world events that no longer meant anything to anyone; a quavering Miss Havisham recalling the wedding that never was.

They had punctuated the interview with archive footage and stills—of Scotland, Paris, Spain, Germany and Los Angeles, with a procession of artists, poets, politicians and Hollywood panjandrums, and, successively, three husbands—a parodic distillation of her life in six minutes of flickering film. Painstakingly true to their word, the programme makers had refrained from actually mentioning any family, husbands or lovers, but the relentless pictorial parade was less discreet.

The researchers had unearthed a publicity shot of Maxime, waving
a cigarette holder like a conductor’s baton, dwarfed by his own shadow, flamboyant as Noël Coward, though without the wit or warmth, or indeed the testosterone. Sandor Varga appeared twice: sleek and saturnine as Honor’s bridegroom in Basel, then, ten years later, plump and smug in Monaco with the cheap little trollop he had left her for. Tad, her third and last husband, had, bizarrely, received less attention in the documentary than the overpraised actress Elizabeth Taylor—the voiceover included an oafish reference to “Hollywood royalty”—with whom Honor and Tad had been photographed once at some film industry gala. His work was represented by a couple of clips from his films, which proved a mixed curse; out of context the humour had seemed even more puerile and strained, its nudging sexual references suggesting repression rather than liberation. She had felt for the poor old thing, safely out of it, in St. Marylebone Cemetery.

Respect was paid to her working life with some war footage—juddering front-line stuff from Madrid, Poland, Normandy, Buchenwald, Berlin and Inchon. Shadowy figures flitted through the Casbah in fifties Algiers—more stock footage—and there was a mawkish picture of her cradling a startled infant in a Weimar orphanage in the late sixties.

Hungarian students dashed themselves against Soviet tanks in 1956, and thirteen years later (three seconds in absurdly concertinaed screen time) their Czech counterparts did the same, while across two borders, in Paris, the privileged sons—it was mostly the sons—of the bourgeoisie, future lawmakers, academics, politicians and pundits, played at revolution, kicked in shop windows and hurled bricks and firebombs at the proletarian gendarmes.

A shot of Honor in the fifties in a Korean foxhole, unkempt and besmirched, showed her looking less like a war correspondent at work than a debutante surprised in a face pack. Mostly, though, the clips showed her young self as shiny and groomed, lustrous hair tumbling artfully to her shoulders, her smile an Olympian beacon, defying anyone not to find her beautiful, to desire her, to admire her cleverness and envy her success. The juxtaposition of this luminescent, capering goddess with the palsied pensioner in the filmed interview made for an exquisitely cruel vanitas: an Ozymandia for the modern age—Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. The friends and lovers momentarily brought to life on-screen might all be ghosts now, decomposing slime beneath the soil,
or long ago cast to the air as ashes, but the grimmest spectre of them all was Honor Tait, the survivor, condemned to watch, appalled, over her own slow shrivelling.

What a mortifying thing fame was these days. It astonished her that so many people appeared to have little better to do than to sit gape-mouthed before late-night TV arts programmes. She had been recognised everywhere—taxi drivers, maître d’s, shopkeepers, strangers at gallery openings, passers-by in the street. One labourer in an orange jerkin, shouldering scaffolding poles near her consultant’s clinic in Wimpole Street, had tipped his hard hat at her and called out, “Keep up the scribbling!”

Then there had been T. P. Kettering, the fawning academic who had volunteered as “official biographer” and, when rebutted, attempted to become unofficial snitch. His book, published by an obscure university press, with a title of preposterous grandiosity—
Veni Vidi: Honor Tait, History’s Witness
—had been a flaccid collage of cuttings, neutered by lawyers and fatally sunk by Honor’s unspoken decree that anyone who wished to retain any connection with her should have nothing to do with the proposed book or its author. Martha Gellhorn, Honor had been galled to see, had given Kettering a polite and mendaciously respectful quote. The book had been poorly reviewed. (“There is a compelling biography to be written about the extraordinary Honor Tait, but this vapid volume is not it,” Bobby wrote in
The Telegraph
.) The book had been mercifully forgotten, as had Kettering himself. Honor’s pleasure on learning that he had sunk into alcoholic desuetude, and was reduced to ghosting a footballer’s autobiography, had verged on indecency.

She could not, however, excise her name from the indices of other people’s biographies, or from the press cuttings that had been Kettering’s source. Nor could she remove her work from the archives. So much was in the public domain already. At this stage she needed to preserve the few shreds of dignity and privacy she had left.

She must look around her flat with the eye of a stranger, a malign stranger: a journalist. For her, of all people, this should not be difficult. But she was old and out of practice—she had not published any original reportage for eight years and her last piece, on the plight of Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong, had been turned down by
The New Statesman
six months ago, with a letter of breathtaking obsequiousness. The “New Journalism,” of which she had once been seen as
an exemplar, had been superseded by even newer forms, whose guiding principles baffled her. Like the
nouvelle vague
of French cinema, or the wasp-waisted full skirts of Dior’s New Look, Honor Tait’s distinct brand of New Journalism—politically informed, veraciously impartial—was as obsolete as an antimacassar in this ironic modern age. Only the wilfully arch, the nostalgia nuts with a taste for “vintage” style and Bakelite aesthetics, held her approach in any esteem.