The Spoiler (21 page)

She leaned across her desk to check her answering machine. The display was flashing a mocking red zero, but she wanted to be sure. She pressed the replay button.

“You have no new messages.”

Was there an element of malice in the digitalised female voice, a hint of jubilation in the emphatically lilted “no”?

“And if you think anyone—a single person in the whole world—cares about you,” was the subtext, “think again, sweetheart.”

Resisting misery, she looked around at the sitting room, which also served as an office, and was comforted. With its blue walls, green sofa and aquamarine rug (the colour scheme copied from
The Monitor
’s monthly
Dé-COR!
supplement), and the strings of conch-shell fairy lights over the mirror, it looked like a mermaid’s
pied-à-mer
, twenty thousand leagues under the sea. Here were her treasures: souvenirs of family holidays (the tube of coloured sand, in layered stripes, from the Isle of Wight, and the chipped plaster cat won at a Dorset funfair on the mantelpiece, the panting-puppy pyjama case, bought in a St. Ives gift shop, at the foot of her bed next door); every letter and birthday card she had ever received; every Christmas card since she had left home at eighteen; and family photographs, in labelled, colour-coded box files stacked in a corner, as carefully catalogued as anything in the British Library.

Gemma, her old flatmate from Brighton Poly, had said that Tamara’s mementoes of her mother, laid out on a small bamboo table in her bedroom, were “a bit creepy.” But Gemma had never been bereaved. There
was an irreparably broken coral necklace that Tamara’s mother had worn as a teenager, a Waterford crystal vase she had kept on her bedside till the end, some of the little glass animals she had collected—two horses, a poodle and a fragile-necked giraffe—which seemed to have been chipped from ice by tiny elves, a larky red feather boa, a silk scarf edged with sequins that she had used to cover her thinning hair during chemotherapy, and a photograph of her in her twenties, sitting on a beach, her pin-up’s curves challenging her modest swimsuit, her head thrown back in laughter, arms enfolding two wriggling children who stared at the camera with frank hostility.

The religious would have called Tamara’s collection a reliquary, but it was precisely because she was unsure about the existence of life after death that these souvenirs were precious. They had been chosen by her mother, cherished and touched by her. When Tamara traced a finger along the rim of the vase or held the scarf to her face, sniffing the sweet, mossy smell no bottled fragrance could capture, she was holding her mother. Tamara had been comforted by that scent, which lingered like an afterglow for months following her mother’s death. And then one day when she picked up the scarf the reassuring smell had vanished, and she realised she could no longer accurately recall it. She had wept helplessly. These keepsakes, meaningless to everyone else, must still bear traces of her mother’s DNA. And that was all that was left of her.

Tamara went to her kitchenette, an alcove just off the sitting room, and opened the fridge. It was empty apart from a tub of low-fat yoghurt, two weeks past its sell-by date, a pint of skimmed milk and a bottle of wine, half empty, vacuum sealed with a rubber stopper. She opened the wine, filled a glass and watched the liquid shivering to the vibrations of the upstairs din before she raised it to her lips. Didn’t they have law books thick as London telephone directories to memorise?

If she really could have everything she wanted, she would dig a trench round her flat and prise it out from under this ugly villa, slide it onto a gurney and wheel it from hard-pressed Hornsey to a better, grander part of town, say Holland Park. She would slot it beneath a big white Regency house garlanded with wisteria. She could take to life in a peaceful haven of gardens, lush with lilac and roses, among wide avenues and interesting little boutiques, a place of silence and contentment where a single woman could turn her key in her lock at night without glancing over her shoulder and gripping her rape alarm.

She went back to the sitting room, clamped the padded headphones from her stereo over her already plugged ears, picked up her bag and returned to her desk. There was always the possibility that with
S
^*
nday
’s reputation, once her piece had been published she could break into the American market:
Vanity Fair, Time, Esquire
. Then there were the women’s glossies:
Sassy
, perhaps
Vogue
. And she could always write features for
Entertainment Weekly
. They liked lists. It was, as Tania Singh demonstrated, all about spreading yourself as widely as possible.

Tamara opened her bag and took out her swag. This was tonight’s sole haul: a handful of letters, the product of what Simon would call “a little light larceny,” a legitimate tactic in pursuit of a story, especially when the subject of the story was so obstructive. She had not taken too many; she did not want to arouse suspicion.

So what had her lucky dip yielded? An electricity bill. This could be of use only if it revealed that Honor Tait was mired in debt: “Tragic end of top journalist, friend-of-the-famous, ex-beauty, debt ridden and alone, shivering by candlelight?” But no, Tait seemed to have paid her unexceptional bills, which was more than Tamara herself had done lately. She wrote a reminder on a Post-it note and stuck it on the phone. There was a bank statement, by the look of the envelope, and a doctor’s bill for a “consultation,” which could mean anything, from ingrown toenail treatment to a post-face-lift follow-up. The face-lift option would obviously make a better story. There were also three letters, hand-addressed, as well as a circular for stair lifts. Promisingly, one of the letters had already been opened. It contained a postcard. A dated saucy seaside cartoon depicting a pair of leering spivs in striped bathing trunks eyeing up two women in swimsuits who were holding large ice-cream cones. One woman was bent, toothless and decrepit, a withered granny in a floral rubber cap. The other was a pouting blonde doll with enormous upthrust breasts. Both men, the double speech bubble indicated, were speaking at the same time. And both said the same thing: “I don’t fancy yours.” Tamara turned the card over. The handwriting, in purple ink, was spiky and affected, with open, forked
e
’s and fat-bellied printers’
a
’s, and the message brief and cryptic: “Surprise! Need to see you soonest. No cheques this time. Cash will do. Your Darling Boy.” That was it. No “Dear Honor,” or “all the best.” No signature. It must be a private joke. One of her posturing groupies. Tamara puzzled over the picture again. It was amazing what used to pass for humour.

The bank statement, though oblique on details, was more interesting—Tait seemed to be nudging the outer edge of her four-thousand-pound overdraft limit. She was broke, and she needed her book to be a success. She needed the publicity, which made her sabotage of the interview more perverse. But for all Tamara could tell from the cryptic lists of numbers, the standing orders and cheques could be made out to massage parlours, casinos or cat-rescue charities. She turned to the two remaining letters. They turned out to be annoyingly impersonal: an invitation to an art exhibition in Soho and a brochure advertising a string quartet series at a London concert hall. She threw them theatrically into the wastepaper basket.

She was angry with herself for being so cautious and wished she had been more professional. She should have scooped up a bigger handful of Tait’s post. The risk would have been the same, but the outcome would have been more rewarding. She went over to the wastepaper basket and fished out the invitation; its bright lettering, printed over cartoons of old-fashioned schoolboys in caps and crumpled shorts waving catapults, announced a party next week to mark the launch of the exhibition. Of course. The painter, Inigo Wint, with the falsetto laugh, had been at Tait’s flat tonight. Tamara sifted through the cuttings again; there he was, cited in
Vogue
as a “flamboyant draughtsman using seminal images of British popular culture to interrogate conventional mores” and a “prominent member of Honor Tait’s Salon,” along with Bobby Ward-Moore, “waspish literary journalist and flaneur” (the frog-featured smoker), and Aidan Delaney, “writer of verse as satisfyingly mordant as fifteen-year-old malt” (the Glaswegian leprechaun). In addition, there was a thumbnail picture of one of Wint’s pictures, which the caption described as “a witty postmodern take on the stories of Richmal Crompton.” Whoever he might be.

In the absence of anything else, the exhibition might provide some sort of lead. As Tamara turned to her keyboard, she felt a slowly percolating optimism.

Tamara wrote another Post-it note and stuck it on the phone:
chk Challis films
. Her memory of Ealing comedies—glimpsed on Sunday-afternoon TV when she was too hungover to reach for the remote—was that they were black-and-white and distinguished by an absence of humour and a lack of stars: the leading men were unappetising baldies, and the actresses were either busy old trouts like Bernice Bullingdon or frigid English roses. She should take another look, get a few videos, maybe buy a boxed set on expenses. But she must not be distracted. The goal was clear. Nothing must stand in her way. Not four thousand words. Not anything. She picked up Tait’s first book and turned again to the Pulitzer Prize–winning essay. She could at least filch a few chunks from it to pad out her article.

For Honor Tait, rich girl with a charmed life, the shock must have been great. At the time she was writing, the liberation of the camps, the enormity of Nazi crimes, must have seemed like the ultimate scoop. But from this end of history, the hard fact was that it was stale news, almost cliché. Accounts of Viking raids or the activities of Attila the Hun would have
made riveting reading in the Middle Ages, but their impact these days was minimal. Besides, coverage of atrocities was best left to television.

Tamara had never seen a corpse in person—she couldn’t, in the end, face seeing her mother’s lifeless body in the funeral parlour—but she had attended several harrowing inquests for the
Sydenham Advertiser
and imagined that for her, from a background far less sheltered and privileged than Honor Tait’s, the professional reflexes would soon kick in. And she was certain that when she came to write up such a story, she would not have wasted space on the insipid musings of a long-dead nob in a frock coat.

Damn. The phone. Its piercing ring in the silence of her flat jolted her, irritated, back to the present.

And then she remembered that she had been willing it to ring all week. It must be Tim. He wanted to see her again after all. This was just the sort of interruption she needed. With a smile of triumph she picked up the handset. But instead of Tim’s teasing plea for forgiveness, she heard urgent mechanical pips followed by the rattle and clunk of a coin. A phone box. She knew, before a word was spoken, that it was her brother.

“Ross?”

Silence. Tamara’s heart faltered. She had to calm herself, take a deep breath. She needed to be in control.

“Ross?” she tried again.

Had she got it wrong? Was it a crank caller? She felt the familiar churn of self-loathing; would she
rather
it was a crank caller instead of her brother?

“Sis!”

It was Ross, and he was excited. High. But not on heroin. Too alert for heroin. Maybe too alert altogether. Was he back on amphetamines?

“You okay?” Tamara asked.

“ ’Course I’m okay.”

Part of her tried to imagine her brother at the end of the line; another part of her, the self-hating, selfish coward, did not want to know, wanted to shut him out, erase the nightmare images of him—haggard, filthy, his skinny body deformed by fear and craving—that were lining up in a grotesque beauty pageant, each contestant more hideous than the next.

“Only it’s late.”

“Well, I’ll piss off then if I’m bothering you.”

“No. No. Don’t go, Ross. I was just worried you were in trouble.”

“Don’t you worry about me, Tam. I’m doing great.”

His voice was pitched half an octave higher than usual, borne up by a helium exhilaration. Or perhaps agitation.

“Have you eaten lately?” Tamara asked.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m good. Taking care of myself.”

Tamara knew her questions were futile. Ross’s dishonesty was automatic. He lied by default, especially to himself. Other people might let themselves go a little, have a few off days now and again, but Ross’s self-abandonment was total, heroic.

“Is the flat okay?” Tamara asked.

“Yeah. Been tricky, though. Those bastards, the Brummies in the flat above, had it in for me. They tried to bug me. Microphones. I sussed them out, though. Found a camera in the ceiling, too.”