The Spoiler (35 page)

Tamara buried her head in her hands. She remembered her elation when she received Lyra’s message, and the gushing enthusiasm of her instant response. It was several seconds before she felt steady enough to speak.

“If it wasn’t for me, that message, then who
was
it meant for?”

But she knew the answer already. Simon’s sympathy was sincere.

“Tania,” he said. “Not Tamara Sim, but the omnipotent, all-conquering Tania Singh, the Media Medea, the Queen Semiramis of the Information Age.”

Tamara sank back in silent horror as Simon went on.

“She’d been pestering Lyra to write for
S
^*
nday
for months, claimed she’d read everything by Honor Tait, admired her above all else, admired Lyra even more, thought
S
^*
nday
was the most significant publishing event since the Book of Kells, et cetera.”

Tamara groaned softly as she recalled, again, the narcotic surge of pleasure Lyra’s message had given her, and her skittish, almost flirtatious response—“I SO much admire! … I’m THRILLED to be part of!! …”—and her repeated suggestions, so pathetic in retrospect, all unanswered for what were now obvious reasons, that they might meet for lunch, or coffee, or just simply meet, to discuss the project further.

“Lyra felt pretty bad about it all,” Simon explained, “inasmuch as she actually
has
feelings. She said you sounded so damned happy about it in your reply. Delirious, she said. She didn’t have the heart to slap you down. She was avoiding the issue really. Told me that you might turn something up in your interview that she could use in a caption story.”

“A caption story?”

“You know, run glitzy photos of the old bag in her heyday with a couple of hundred words by you. And then Lyra heard that Tania was going to do a big piece for the books pages, and she felt that got her off the hook. She was really only lukewarm about the Honor Tait story anyway.”

“Then why didn’t she
say
?” Tamara moaned.

“You know what she’s like,” Simon said. “She’s a prima donna who’ll never admit mistakes, even to herself. She had moved on, trusting you and Tania and Caspar and all the other journalistic pygmies would go away and leave her in peace to commune with the Greats.”

“You could have put me out of my misery at least. You’re supposed to be my friend. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Precisely because I’m your friend. Something could have come of it. Something has. News of the commission really boosted you—you’d been low for weeks. Don’t deny it. You were in such a state over Tim, I had to send you home from the office. Remember? And when you finally found your way into the story, you rose to the challenge.”

“Great,” Tamara said with a croak of self-pity. “Where does that leave me now?”

“It’s been a blow, I know,” Simon said. “And Lyra hasn’t handled this well. Great editor, hopeless people person. But I’d say you’re in a pretty good position.”

“Oh yes? Where’s that? Poised outside on a high-rise ledge staring into an eighty-foot drop?”

He reached across the table again and gripped her hand.

“Come on, Tam. It’s not that bad. This small temporary hitch could work in your favour.”

“How’s that exactly?”

He was trying to humour her now.

“Get on with your piece. You’ve made a terrific start. You’re sitting on a brilliant story, and, since
The Monitor
’s given it the brush-off, you’re perfectly within your rights to take it elsewhere and make some serious money. Pursue the racy angle, the toy-boy story, and the tabloids will be gagging for it. It would have been wasted on
S
^*
nday
anyway. Forget
S
^*
nday
. Think big. Tim would pay a lot for a yarn like that, and you might even be offered a staff job on
The Sphere
. It might be time for us old-fashioned fun-loving hacks to bale out of
The Monitor
anyway.”

It was an appealing argument. But there was one problem.

“Tim,” she said. “He dumped me, remember? And I wasn’t exactly friendly to him at the Press Awards last week.”

Simon sighed, checked his pager and got to his feet. He threw a roll of notes in the saucer and put the receipt in his pocket, ready to clip it to an expenses form that afternoon.

“You’ve just got to put it behind you. Move on,” he said. “I wouldn’t let a little thing like that stand in the way of a good story. Time for some bridge building.”

Honor picked up the day’s newspaper.

Violence in Algiers; riots in Albania; Basque separatists bombing and bludgeoning their way to a dream of independence; famine; brutality; the slaughter of innocents. She could have read, or written, the same stories fifty years ago but Honor was still drawn to the daily deadly déjà vu of the papers. What had changed was the context in which these stories of human cruelty, greed and injustice were placed. Once they would be given dour prominence on pages as unadorned as tombstones. Today you had to search for them in a dizzying visual vortex.

These timeless stories of injustice now bleated ineffectually, shouted down like Calvinist preachers at a carnival, by brash accounts of the private lives of royalty and pop stars, actors and footballers. Political coverage, too—its trivial bellicosity, puffed-up personalities, old-fashioned sex scandals, endless worthless speculation about the date of the forthcoming election—was reduced to the parochial, a subset of show business. And then there were the columnists. Glancing at the bottomless banalities—“Crumpet King: why cheating TV chef’s wife should dump him”—of another lipsticked fool, she had wondered if it was the picture byline that had administered the coup de grâce to newspapers. The introduction of this simple design device, the postage-stamp-size portrait, to brighten the appearance of pages for a public infantilised by television, had created
a need for young, pretty, ideally blonde, journalists—regardless of their abilities as writers and reporters—whose winsome photographs would contrast favourably with those of the balding middle-aged men who then made up the majority of newspaper staff. Hence the prevalence of vacuous ninnies like Tara Sim.

But then, Honor reflected, her own contribution could be called into question: The banner of truth she had waved so often on the front line was a poor, tattered, blood-stained thing. The world had not necessarily been better under the old dispensation, and her failures had mattered more than the silly blunders of Tara Sim, or of all the jobbing “journalists” today. Perhaps, Honor thought, her greatest crime had been a sin of omission. It was the story that she failed to report that lingered more vividly now than any of her breathless dispatches from the frontline.

The music, a random assault on the electrified strings of an unidentifiable Eastern instrument, was playing at police-siren pitch as Tamara made her way into the smoky twilight.

The Chakra Bar, formerly the Chequers Pub, seemed to have been designed by a committee whose members had competing memories of drugged-out gap years; Buddhist prayer flags were strung across the room like Christmas decorations, Hindu gods smiled from purple walls, hookahs stood on every table, their coiled lengths of tubing suggesting exotic life-support machines.

The smoke—from joss sticks, cigarettes, the hookahs and, from somewhere in the corner, a fruity joint—was as thick as dry ice, and what light there was flickered from a host of votive candles.

Gradually Tamara made out the lone figure at a corner table. As she drew nearer, she saw that he was reading from a paperback, which he had propped against a hookah and illuminated with a candle. He looked up and smiled, his eyes creasing roguishly. His paperback, she noticed, was called
The Book of Changes
. They ordered drinks: cocktails of vodka and kiwi fruit called The Sound of One Hand Clapping.

“So. Tamara the Writer. What do you want to know?”

“You’re the clairvoyant,” she said. “You tell me.”

He laughed and touched her hand lightly. She felt an unprofessional ripple of pleasure.

“Well, Tamara, Seeker after Truth, I’m here to help in any way I can.”

He was looking at her appreciatively. Her look this evening—spiky moussed hair, low-cut, leopard-print blouse and slinky pencil skirt—evoked a classy rock chick.

“I was really interested in what you said about your work,” she said. “I thought I might write a piece about you.”

She reached for her glass. The cocktail was not bad.

“For a magazine?”

His expression was neutral.

“A magazine. Or maybe a newspaper,” she added.

“I didn’t know you were that kind of writer.”

“I’m not really. I’m working on a book, but I do a bit of journalism on the side. I’m the kind of writer who needs to make a living.”

He laughed again.

“Well, that makes two of us, I suppose. I’m the kind of healer who needs to make a living. How much would you pay?”

She was startled.

“For what?”

“For this piece you’re going to write about me.”

“Oh, you don’t get paid for this kind of story,” she said with a coquettish shake of her head. She needed to approach this gently. She mustn’t scare him off. “This is a straightforward story about your work; the healing. It’s not a kiss-and-tell.”

“We’ll see about that.”

He smiled and touched her hand again. This time his fingers lingered on hers. Why shouldn’t she enjoy this? It was not as if she would jeopardise the story by responding. And this was her first date in weeks. Ideally she should have fixed it for Friday, Valentine’s Day, and preempted all those irritatingly coy questions from colleagues. But this was an emergency. Work came first, even before love. It had to be tonight.

“Tell me a bit more about aura massage.”

“Take
your
aura, for example,” he said, gazing directly at her. “You’ve got a beautiful aura. Do you know that? There’s a lot of red in there, the colour of sensuality. And silver. The colour of spirituality. Lots of silver.”

“What about your clients?”

“They’re all sorts really. Young, old, wealthy—mostly wealthy.”

“Any famous people? Celebrities?”

He looked at her quizzically.

“Oh yes. I’ve had a few well-known types. Quite a few. You’d be surprised.”

“I’m sure I would,” she said.

They ordered another cocktail. Three parts grappa to one part ginseng
tea, with a garnish of a single mung bean, set alight by a bored waitress dressed as a belly dancer. The cocktail was called the Art of Tantra.

These Augean stables had to be cleaned. More books—history, current affairs, alarmist tracts about the future of the ecosystem, American political analysis, biographies, Graham’s novels, which had been another point of contention with Tad. His jealous rages, though tiresome, had never intimidated her. Sometimes, although she would never admit it to him, she had even found them comic. Despite Honor’s repeated, weary assurances, Tad had always been inflamed by the very sight of the name of her second husband. He was stirred to fury whenever Bartók, with whom the tone-deaf Sandor had no link other than birthplace, was played on the wireless, and he had once disappeared in a huff for three days in Salzburg when he had seen posters advertising a performance at the Mozarteum by the violinist Tibor Varga, who, like tens of thousands of Hungarians, shared Sandor’s surname.

Dead husbands, Honor supposed, had been more of a threat than extant exes or deceased divorcés, though Sandor’s cardiac, presumably brought on by the carnal ministrations of Miss Monte Carlo, had beaten the divorce courts by a mere month. Spouses were usually sanctified in death, no matter how monstrous, or inadequate, they had been in life. And now it was Tad’s turn for canonisation.

Candles and coasters, ridiculous hoards of pens—old felt-tips, an unused Mont Blanc, countless Biros, a set of fluorescent highlighters packaged like candy bars—all fell with satisfying finality into black plastic sacks. She remembered a similar operation after her mother died, though some of that detritus was destined for the more recherché auction rooms and kept her father in whisky and grouse beaters for a few more years.

Bradley, Honor’s brother-in-law, a blandly polite retired heart surgeon from Phoenix, had done the honours here for Tad, clearing his closets and drawers and disposing of the contents. Honor could not face it, but she had kept back the locked trunk, telling Bradley it was hers, and a week later she asked the porter to come up and carry it to her front door. Late one night, conscious of the strange ceremonial quality of her task, she had unlocked the trunk and, one by one, sent Tad’s billowing
costumes on their final spree, slithering down the chute in the hall to the vast communal garbage bin behind the apartment block.

Lois’s flat had to be cleared, too, before it was sold to pay for her incarceration in the residential home. Two greedy nieces had done the job, squabbling like magpies over glittering scraps.

Honor closed tonight’s sacks with a decisive knot and unpeeled another bag from a roll. Someone would have to perform this posthumous task for her—Ruth, most likely, in a tumult of self-importance. This clear-out was a satisfying preemptive strike.