The Spoiler (14 page)

Honor did not mind solitude. Loneliness was another matter. In the two years since Tad had died, she had amassed her group of young friends, her Boys, the Monday Club. And why not? The old friends were dead, if not physically, then, like poor Lois, in every other sense. Honor had first met her in postwar Berlin, where Lois was working as an interpreter. She was a brilliant linguist, on secondment from Bryn Mawr, with the dark, slanted eyes and long neck of a Modigliani and the limber body of a dancer. When Honor moved to Los Angeles and Lois, by then a Progressive Party activist, was living in Brentwood, their friendship strengthened, and it was sustained over the ensuing decades by rare and punishingly expensive phone calls, rarer but lengthy letters—all lost in the fire—and reunions, at least one a year, usually in Italy, where they would visit museums and churches, eat at neighbourhood trattorias, drink prosecco and talk into the night. Lois finally moved to London in 1970 to work for the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square and bought a little flat in Mayfair. They had seen each other regularly—galleries, concerts, lunches, suppers—and every spring Lois would take the sleeper to Scotland and they would hike the hills around Glenbuidhe.

Lois’s romantic life was decorous and comparatively chaste, but she had seen Honor through two marriages and countless
crises d’amour
. And then, after the collapse of Honor’s marriage to Sandor, there was the spell of depression that Lois, in a classic display of projection, had put down to childlessness. Whatever its cause, Lois had seen her through. When Honor met Tad, he had been threatened by the closeness of her friendship with Lois. He did not believe a relationship of such intensity could be innocent of desire. He would call Lois, with leaden sarcasm, “the Darling Girl,” and Honor wondered if Tad had secretly rejoiced when Lois began to lose her mind seven years ago.

Today a few of Honor’s contemporaries might be reasonably intact neurally and breathing unassisted, but they had become body bores, obsessed by their infirmities, competitive about challenging new symptoms and excruciating medical procedures. Her Boys, though often glib and ignorant, had more to talk about than colonoscopies and CAT scans.

She switched on a lamp and walked to the window. The garden was empty, a shadowy stage set poised expectantly between the infants’ matinee and the teenagers’ evening performance. She closed the curtains to discourage curiosity from the flats opposite. Not that there was anything to see here. An old woman, head bowed, sitting alone, waiting. Waiting: the chief business of the old.

She glanced at the page proofs of
The Unflinching Eye
, resting reproachfully on the coffee table. She needed to read through this third—and final, Honor had insisted to her publisher—collection of her journalism. For now, though, she did not have the stomach to revisit old work, casting a jaundiced eye over past triumphs. Instead she picked up her notebook. New work. The coda to her Pulitzer Prize–winning article about the liberation of Buchenwald would be the last chapter of this final book. Here, with a new and expanded version of the original report, was a chance for reparation. Whether she would be able to write it she did not know. But she had to try. She had resisted a return to Goethe’s Oak for too long.

The phone rang early the next morning, jolting Honor out of a pill-induced sleep. She lifted the receiver, expecting another silent call, but this time he spoke. His voice hit her like a shock of ice water. Her questions, banal, essential, tumbled out: “Where have you been?” “How are you?” “What have you been doing?” “Where are you?”

As he hedged and sidestepped at the end of the line, all that had stood between them shrank away.

“Who else would it be? Another lover?” he said. “I’ve been around, you know … Pretty good … Bit of this, bit of that … Hard to say, right now …”

She felt the sweet low timbre of his voice reverberate inside her, as if a string had been plucked on an instrument that had not been played for years and was still perfectly in tune. He was pulling her back and, against all reason, she wanted to bind him tightly to her with her questions.

“But are you well? Where have you been living? How have you managed?”

She feared that she would drive him away with her questions, and yet she could not stop. She wanted more of that voice, more of him. What he said, or did not say, was irrelevant, just as long as he kept on talking.

“I got by.”

She had dreamed of him, in fitful playlets of separation and reconciliation. His voice had also provided a soundtrack for many of her nightmares. She paused to check, passing her hand across her brow, that, no, she was awake, this was really happening and it was him at the end of the line.

“I got your card,” she said. “You said you needed to see me.”

“Did I say that? Need? I thought need was more your game.”

He sounded so close, near enough to touch.

“And where are you now?” she asked, anxious not to provoke him.

“I’m around. Back in circulation.”

“In London?”

She heard him sigh, a long exhalation of exaggerated weariness.

“Not a million miles away,” he said.

“Any plans?” she asked, with a lightness she knew he would detect as fraudulent.

“You read my card. I thought we might get together.”

“Get together”—the awful slanginess of the phrase. He was mocking her.

“Yes … Why not?”

The tentativeness of her reply suggested exactly why not. And yet, at some level only he knew, though Dr. Kohler and his colleagues might guess at it, she wanted it, craved it, this “getting together.”

“Only it’s difficult,” he said.

Naturally it would be difficult. Dangerous, too. He had drawn her in, gained her admission that she wished to see him, and now he was withdrawing. She was feeling light-headed, whether dazed from the effects of the sleeping pill she had taken only two hours ago, or by palpitations brought on by the shock of his call she was not sure.

“I’m sure there is no difficulty that can’t be overcome,” she said.

“I’m not so sure. It’s been a bit tricky.”

She felt a sudden debilitating warmth steal over her; an ambush of tenderness.

“We can forget all that, surely. Start again,” she said. Could he hear the pathetic note of pleading in her voice?

“My finances. They’re a bit compromised right now,” he said.

Finances? Of course. That was what it was all about. How could she forget?

“Money?” she said, with a blustering laugh. “Look, that’s not a concern. Let me know how much you need, where to send it.”

He had to go, he said. He would be in touch again, soon.

“Really?”

“Really!”

Was there a bass note of menace in his voice? He was still angry with her.

And then he was gone.

Honor pushed aside the bedcovers and walked unsteadily into the kitchen. She poured herself a vodka with trembling hands and pulled back the curtains. Outside the postdawn sky was grey as an army blanket, and the trees were restless, anticipating a storm. A few lights were already on in the flats across the way, and she watched as a young woman brought a baby to the window and looked out, pointing down at the garden. Honor turned away and sank into a chair, overwhelmed by a sense of dread. Sometimes an idle longing for intimacy could become an unseemly hunger, and for her it had always been a hunger that could never be fully satisfied.

She drained her glass and put it on the table next to Tad’s photograph.
Did she miss her husband? Even though their marriage, outwardly successful, had been something of a sham? One could be as lonely in the corporate bustle of coupledom as in a spinster’s bedsit. But intimacy, that was what she missed. The comforting banality of companionship requiring no effort or examination. His body lying next to hers, night after night. Mostly. And sex, not necessarily with Tad—she missed that, too.

There was a time, in her early fifties, as her body began to undergo the Change—a term that could also do useful service as a euphemism for death—when she hoped that her body’s fluctuating thermostat, the internal wildfires, would burn out her remaining reserves of libido. Lois had always been comparatively sexually continent, and menopause for her had been merely the dying note of a long diminuendo. How Honor had longed for a sudden, permanent arctic winter of passion, for the time that would be saved, the mental energy spared, to devote herself to contemplation and decisive execution of useful projects: to work, without distraction. The Change that would be as good as a rest. No such luck. John G appeared, twenty-two years her junior, dark, intense and not in the least displeased by her ageing body. She had seen him as her last hurrah, her terminal tarantella before the deathbed. And then he was followed by Lucio, and then Bernard … There had been little dimming of desire since, only diminishing opportunity.

Now this phone call mocked her with a reminder of real, perilous intimacy. He was back, within reach. He had phoned, and he would come to see her. She knew he would. He was angry, yes, but perhaps, even now, it was not too late.

Tamara’s desk was already occupied when she arrived at
The Monitor
on Monday morning. Tania Singh sat there, her face illuminated, like a spotlit Bollywood princess, by the glow from the computer screen. Her child-size fingers flickered over Tamara’s keyboard, and her books and papers were heaped on the desk. “Excuse me?” Tamara said, dropping her bag on the floor by Tania’s feet, which looked preternaturally tiny in their kitten-heel boots.

“Hi!” Tania looked up and smiled. “I didn’t think you’d be in till later. My computer’s down. I knew you wouldn’t mind.”

“Well, actually …”

“Won’t be a moment.”

Tania gathered up her possessions and exited, her long hair swishing defiantly behind her like a black silk cape. Tamara noticed with irritation that Tania had left a pile of books behind. There would be nothing remotely readable in there; no ghosted pop star biographies, no paperback fiction about a modern woman’s search for love, no quirky detective stories, no jokes. Tania was famously pretentious and was said to spend her waking hours—when not consolidating her position at
The Monitor
—reading educational tracts and going to art galleries, the theatre or the opera.

She wrote a diary for the Web site, and Simon had seen it. “Waste of time,” he said. “Don’t know why she bothers. The Internet is for losers. Citizens band radio for pseuds and geeks.” Last week, apparently, Tania was “re-evaluating Lévi-Strauss”—not, as Tamara first thought, a reflection on the disappearance of blue jeans from the wardrobes of the fashion-conscious young (a piece Tamara herself had offered to commissioning
editors several times without success) but an extended essay on the founder of structural anthropology.

“I don’t know who she thinks she’s writing for,” Simon said. “The small online community, so-called, seems to be a loose fraternity of lonely masturbators. And I’m not talking intellectual onanism here. On the other hand, as it were, her byline picture is
very
fetching.”

In an effort to disseminate that byline photo as widely as possible, Tania wooed commissioning editors in other sections of the paper with a frightening single-mindedness.

Vida, who stood in for Johnny as features editor when he was away from the office, had commissioned and published two pieces by her—one on a women’s refuge in Baluchistan, the other on an artist who painted “painfully intimate” abstracts using brushes made of her own body hair. Neither would have got past Johnny himself, if he had not been marooned in a Surrey hotel at the time, role-playing trades union negotiation scenarios with other senior editors under the tutelage of a management consultant.

Johnny had fallen foul of Tania directly when he enthusiastically agreed to commission a piece she had apparently offered on the semiotics of the Simpsons, only to be presented, two weeks later, with a two-thousand-word essay on someone called Barthes. Roland Barthes. Johnny had been avoiding her ever since, taking imaginary calls on his phone whenever she approached. She had written reviews of Eastern European theatre for Arts and of new Scandinavian fiction for Books, covered a curling competition in Blairgowrie for Sports, expounded on flood relief in Benin for Opinion and was said to have petitioned the unassailable Lyra every day for a month, with messages on the office computer, in a desperate bid to break into
S
^*
nday
.

How satisfying, thought Tamara, that it should be her—modest, unpretentious, straight-talking, street-savvy, down-to-earth Tamara Sim—rather than the flagrant intellectual snob Tania, who had been invited to join Lyra’s team. Among
The Monitor
’s senior editors, only Simon remained unsolicited by Tania, who was coolly dismissive of the central subject, the bantering style and debunking japes of
Psst!
. She rarely lunched and never joined the basement team after work in the Beaded Bubbles, the cellar wine bar that served as an external office canteen, with the additional advantages of alcohol and receipts. Tania was
always too busy working, or heading off to some grim poetry reading, or sitting through a new playwrights’ season at the Royal Court.

“If she’s so brilliant, what’s she doing working on the Web site?” Tamara had asked Simon one evening in the Bubbles.

“Ambition,” he said. “The new frontier. She wants to be there, planting her flag.”

“She really believes that?”

“Definitely. It’s the pioneering spirit, the spirit that saw her choosing to spend her summer holidays in Bosnia a couple of years ago, trying her hand as a war correspondent. She’s omnivorous; she wants to write about the future of feminism, economic crisis in South Korea, vote rigging in Serbia and the exquisite agonies of literary life.”