The Spoiler (16 page)

She could not go on. She was going through the motions of work, the pantomime of purposefulness. Why was she bothering? The world was a mess then. It continued to be a mess. And rereading her younger self, breathless with excitement in a place of horror, was disquieting. All that had changed was her attitude; her youthful solipsism had persuaded her that she could combat injustice and transform the world. Today she knew better. There was consolation in this, as well as reproach.

It was stubborn pride, and anger with Simon, rather than journalistic zeal, that took Tamara two nights later to the drab parish hall of the Strict and Particular Baptist Church off the Archway Road. As she stood shivering in the queue outside to buy her ticket (the cost equivalent to a night at the pictures, fares included, or a couple of decent bottles of wine), Tamara regretted her choice of wardrobe for the evening. Jill Dando was tonight’s role model, but the
Crimewatch
presenter’s sensible girl-next-door charm, achieved with some hair gel, pearl earrings and a black trouser suit, marked Tamara out from the crowd as an interloper. Most of the women were dressed in fleeces and waterproofs as if for a trek in the Hindu Kush, while a few in tiered skirts and festooned scarves suggested a delegation from a Gypsy campfire.

The men were mostly crushed academics in quiet corduroy; wraithlike elderly hippies, their surviving wisps of hair, long and grey as carpet underlay, tied back in frail tribute to a ponytail; and a handful of peaky teenagers, shoulders hunched under the weight of book-filled backpacks. In the hall porch, a goateed pensioner in a patchwork waistcoat was sitting at a table selling tickets. Without looking up from his tin cash box he took Tamara’s money and handed her a numbered cloakroom ticket. Useless for expenses.

“Could I have a receipt for that?”

“We don’t do receipts,” he said, holding his hand out to the teenager behind her. “Next?”

The rows of red plastic chairs in the hall had already begun to fill. The audience murmured and nodded as they made their way to their seats, and the general mood seemed to be one of simmering indignation. Tamara, anticipating a long evening and determined to make a swift
exit as soon as she had gathered the information she needed, took an aisle seat in the back row. She planned to follow Honor Tait’s advice: “Through meticulous observation and a ravenous hunger for detail, all will be revealed.”

On the walls, primary-coloured posters, pasted up for the benefit of tonight’s audience rather than for the Strict and Particulars, celebrated liberation struggles in Latin America, urged the release of political prisoners, called for the boycotting of goods from unfashionable countries, enjoined trades union members to pay their dues and, in a mock-up photograph, showed John Major outside Number Ten Downing Street with a Hitler moustache painted above his simian upper lip and his right arm raised in a Nazi salute. Over the proscenium arch of the small stage, a portrait of the queen in her comely youth had been partly obliterated for the evening by a plastic plaque depicting Che Guevara, eyes upturned in ascetic rapture like a medieval Christ. Faded velvet drapes framed the stage, which was bare, apart from four bentwood chairs.

Tamara looked around and marvelled that the hall was almost full; so many people for whom a few hours of dreary speeches in a church hall represented a good night out. Most of them, she saw now, were morbidly unattractive, and more conventional evening pleasures would be unavailable to them. As she scanned the audience, she caught sight of only one exception, someone who possibly could have a life if she chose to. Tamara registered the profile, almost saccharine in its delicate perfection and framed by a fall of dark hair that shone like liquid jet, before she recognised its owner: Tania Singh. What was she doing here? Didn’t she have a groundbreaking play to go to? Or an opera? Or a Web diary to write?

The general murmur faded as a rugged figure with parched sandy hair and combat fatigues, who looked as if he had just choppered in from an Amazonian guerrilla encampment, strode from the wings across the stage towards the microphone. As soon as he spoke Tamara recognised him as the blunt-jawed correspondent from the TV news programme that preceded
Blind Date
. Paul Tucker, roving reporter, a middle-aged hulk in an Action Man costume, the liberal intelligentsia’s equivalent of a celebrity, with a presence on prime-time TV. Though he did not qualify as famous in the proper sense of the word—his private life was not interesting enough to make the tabloids—his name would be worth dropping for
S
^*
nday
readers. The audience applauded tentatively but respectfully,
and the sound was of an uncertain scattering of spring rain. Tucker was joined on stage by a tall, angular woman whose disproportionately wide hips, encased in taupe slacks, seemed to have been borrowed from a fat friend. Tucker introduced her as the “well-known philanthropist and human-rights activist, Clemency Twisk.” Well known to whom? To everyone in the audience, apart from Tamara, it seemed. They demonstrated their familiarity with the woman and all her works, in a renewed and amplified round of clapping—a prolonged April shower of noise.

Twisk acknowledged the audience with a modest nod as the next speaker came on to more grudging applause: a local Labour MP, an eager-to-please young barrister and member of the shadow cabinet, who had been putting himself about, garnering publicity in advance of the coming election, like an “It girl” on the party circuit. Only last week he had been pictured grinning in leathers astride a snorting Harley-Davidson on the cover of
Biker’s News
, and he had appeared in
Country Life
’s New Year issue in a waxed jacket, squinting dreamily at distant hills. Having covered the Hell’s Angels and Barbour constituencies, tonight he was focusing on the traditional Labour voter. He gave the audience a chummy wave as he took his seat and Tucker announced the evening’s special guest speaker. The applause increased in volume and intensity—a clamorous monsoon on a vast tin roof—as Honor Tait walked slowly from the wings. She smiled graciously. Some younger members of the audience stood to cheer and whistle, and soon everyone was on their feet; a standing ovation before the old woman had even opened her mouth. Tamara remained resolutely seated.

The noise subsided, and it was Twisk who walked first to the microphone. Tamara groaned quietly and glanced at her watch. She had hoped Honor Tait would give the opening speech, leaving her free to escape and salvage something of the evening, and as Twisk talked, with high and quavering voice, at length and in detail, of the genesis of the new pressure group, Kids’ Crusaders, which had been set up by her foundation, Tamara felt a creeping desolation.

“The purpose of KC,” said Twisk, in a sustained yodel, “is to fight child exploitation wherever it is to be found, in third-world factories, in the grotesque barbarities of the sex industry, in Eastern European sweat shops, or in the economically privileged but spiritually impoverished environment of the Western middle-class home …”

Tamara, numb with boredom, gradually drifted into a pleasant daydream
involving Tim, his newspaper’s irascible proprietor, and some compromising photographs taken in the bedroom of the Georges V. That the images of Tim, taken at his most sexually playful, when he had used her pink thong as a hairnet, existed solely in Tamara’s mental photo album did not diminish her enjoyment of the revenge fantasy. She was shaken from it by the crackle and thunder of sudden applause. Honor Tait was on her feet again. Tamara gripped her pencil, steadied her notebook and wrote: “Frail. Small. Dwarfed by microphone.” All eyes in the hall were focused, unblinking, on the speaker. Of Tait’s speech, a querulous inventory of cruelty featuring child weavers, underage gold miners (would that be minor miners?) and prostitutes, Tamara took no record; Clemency Twisk’s mission statement had exhausted any reserves of social concern. “Rousing. A fury. Reminiscences. India. Philippines. Thailand. Lithuania,” were the only notes Tamara made. On it went and, though she tried her best, she could not reclaim her delicious reverie of retribution. She would have to revive it later in bed.

She looked at her watch again and judged by the falling timbre of her voice that Honor Tait was winding up. Quickly glancing behind her to check that her exit route was clear, Tamara saw that it really was standing room only. Leaning against the walls or seated cross-legged on the floor, as if at a yoga class, were several dozen people ranging in age, she guessed, from sixteen to seventy. All of them were gazing enthralled at the tiny figure on the stage.

Tamara’s attention was drawn to a tall latecomer who was pushing open the door. His hair was a tangle of Romany curls and, despite the wintry evening, his shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbows of his muscular arms. He looked incongruously heroic in this hall full of pallid whiners. Lady Chatterley’s lover, fresh from some butch business in the potting shed. He was the only attractive man in the room, and he appeared to be alone. Surely
he
could have found something better to do on a cold evening in January?

They were all applauding again. Honor Tait must have finished. Five minutes ago, Tamara would have taken this as the signal for immediate departure, but the prepossessing stranger had added a new element of interest. She willed him to look in her direction. Paul Tucker was speaking now, grasping the microphone in his freckled fist like Henry VIII at a hambone. It was time for questions from the audience and a bustling figure of indeterminate gender in a purple anorak was waving a microphone
in the aisle. Only Tamara’s curiosity about the brooding figure by the door kept her from bolting for the exit.

“Could Honor Tait tell us something more of her experiences in South East Asia?” asked a blowsy hiker with owlish glasses.

Of course she could. The real question was whether Honor Tait could stop telling us more about her South East Asian experiences. Tamara tried taking notes again—“Manila, Chiang Mai, Cambodia, Laos”—but gave up. She could not listen to this stuff, let alone write it down. And who would want to read it? She looked over at the latecomer by the door. His arms were crossed against his broad chest and he was leaning back, one foot braced against the wall, in a pose that suggested defiant boredom, or perhaps rapt surrender to the potency of Honor Tait’s oratory. Tamara preferred the first explanation; it was heartening to think of him as a kindred spirit, a fellow contrarian at this prigs’ convocation. But she was here in the line of duty. What was his excuse?

She returned to her notes: “She is the diva of dissent, a
bien pensant
superstar, and they are listening in admiring silence to her account of horrors in Hyderabad, calamities in Cambodia, atrocities in Azerbaijan.”

Was she ever going to stop talking? Was there much more of this? There was. Much more. A continent-hopping grand tour of global misfortune.

Tamara glanced round the audience—even these professional pessimists and catastrophiles must have their limits. But no, another question from the audience. The voice, the light yet assertive peal of a summoning handbell, was irritatingly familiar. Tania Singh.

“I wanted to say, first of all, what a privilege it is to hear Honor Tait tonight, and I wanted to thank her for her inspiring work.”

There was an outbreak of affirming applause. Wasn’t this supposed to be a question, not a master class in grovelling? Tamara, seething, looked back towards the door and was gratified to see that, like her, the good-looking loner was not clapping.

Tania continued.

“I wondered what advice you would give a young woman journalist starting out today?”

Honor Tait hesitated for a moment, plainly displeased.

“Any advice I have would apply just as much to young male journalists as to their female counterparts.”

At the back of the hall Tamara gloated. It was good to see the old
woman turn her blowtorch on Tania Singh. But Tania was implacable. She bounced back with another question.

“What would you say are the most important qualities a journalist requires?”

Tait shrugged, and for a piquant moment Tamara thought she was going to put Tania in her place. But the old woman seemed to relent.

“An ability to really see,” she said finally. “Through patient observation, the accumulation of detail and a hunger for truth, the bigger picture will emerge. The reporter’s duty is to champion the weak and to shine a searchlight in the darkest corners of human experience.”

Visibly tiring, Tait was reduced to quoting herself. Tamara had had enough. But more hands were raised as the audience jostled to take the microphone and put questions to which they already seemed to know the answers. Honor Tait’s voice wavered as she spoke of child brothels in Asia and sex traffickers in the former Soviet Union, but her words were, despite the promising subject, free of enlivening anecdotes and full of generalisations and statistics. She even seemed to be boring herself. Her voice gradually trailed away and she went to sit down, with a final mumbled admission that “It isn’t really my area. Perhaps Clemency would like to add something.”

Clemency most certainly would, and did. Her contribution was heartfelt, vague and self-loving as she vibrated with transcendent righteousness before the microphone. Tamara’s spirits only lifted when the ticket collector with the harlequin waistcoat appeared at the back of the hall swinging a plastic collection bucket. The meeting was drawing to a close. Tamara pushed past him as she made her way to the door, in time to see that she was not the first fugitive. The attractive latecomer was sprinting just ahead of her, wrenching open the door of a white van and nimbly slipping inside. It was raining hard and, as Tamara looked vainly for a cab amid the thunderous convoy of traffic on the Archway Road, he drove off into what remained of the evening, spattering a jet of muddy water over her trouser suit.