The Spoiler (42 page)

“In his early teens he insisted on using the last name Varga, the name of my second husband, whom he’d never even met. It was a deliberate insult to Tad, and to me, of course. At that time—we learned from Daniel’s school later—he was affecting an aristocratic Hungarian past.”

“So you’re telling me,” Tamara said, picking her words carefully, for the record, so there could be no mistake, “the young man in the photograph, Dev, the man you were seen kissing, is your son?”

“I am telling you,” the old woman said, jaw clenched, “my son, my adopted son, Daniel, was—is—a dangerous fantasist and a pathological liar.”

She let the beads drop in her lap. Daniel’s
kombolói
, his worry beads, an affectation he had acquired after a month living in a Greek island cave with fellow hedonists. They were “finding themselves.” That was the trope. First he had found himself, and then he was lost forever.

Now Honor was no longer parrying the dumb girl’s questions. She was telling the story because she had to. Because she never had. She was enjoying the young woman’s discomfort. And there was nothing to be gained from concealment now, no one to protect. Least of all herself.

“He was there, in Glenbuidhe, the night of the fire. He’d taken a key and gone up there without our consent after we refused to give him more money. He bought a plane ticket with our final payment and left for New Zealand the next day.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t. You don’t understand anything. Why should you?”

It was a double curse: confidence and ignorance, Honor thought. Was this the burden of Tamara’s generation, affluent children born in an unprecedented time of peace and privilege? Daniel, not much older than this girl, had been similarly afflicted. By the time he had reached the age to be curious about the world, there were no hidden frontiers that had not been meticulously annotated by backpackers’ guidebooks; the only uncharted journey was interior. And what a disappointment that must have proved. Daniel’s psyche had not turned out to be a transcendent range of virgin peaks and hidden valleys, nor a candlelit pleasure palace. No amount of mind-altering drugs could change the fact: Daniel’s mental landscape, his inner life—or his soul, as he liked to characterise it—was a commonplace shopping mall, a kitsch temple dedicated to envy and greed.

“Why?” Tamara asked, lost in a pained replay of the most intimate moments of that first night in Clapton, and their last in the Paddington hotel.

“As the adopted child of moderately well-known parents, he had some scope for storytelling—and for the nursing of resentments, real and imagined. In that, at least, he excelled.”

The revelation that the story departed so much from the tabloid version had, Honor noted with satisfaction, wiped the smile from the girl’s face. Tamara sat crushed and silent as the old woman resumed her story unprompted.

She had been nearly fifty when her second marriage had come to an end.

“I was between lovers, too. The child was a project, the suggestion of a childless friend who thought the thing that she most yearned for, a baby, would give me the profound happiness it would have given her. I went along with it. Motherhood was an experience I had not had, and this lack, I stupidly thought, defined my distance from other women. By becoming a mother I would join the stream of humanity, instead of just looking on. I wanted to feel that love, to give it and to receive it.” The old woman closed her eyes. “Selfish folly, I realised later. I wasn’t cut out for motherhood, just as he wasn’t cut out for the filial role.”

Her voice trailed away again as she lapsed into thought. The womanly stuff, the wise wound and the aching womb, the call of biological destiny, had always seemed bogus to her, and she had sometimes wondered,
when she first gathered the vulnerable baby into her arms in that orphanage in the shadow of Ettersberg, if it had been an act of contrition rather than love.

The silence in the room was crystalline. As Tamara turned to check her cassette, her notebook slipped from her lap and hit the floor with a slap, jolting Honor out of her thoughts and back into her spoken confession.

“I had visited the orphanage in Weimar, covering a story about postwar adoption in Germany—thousands of girls who’d had liaisons with occupying soldiers had abandoned their babies. The boy’s decorative quality—his fair putto prettiness—drew me in. We looked good together, that little fellow and me.”

She had sent him to the best schools, furnished him with all the toys, tools and gadgets he required.

“Later Tad came into our lives and did his best as a stepfather. Together, during school holidays, we escorted Daniel round the museums and monuments of Europe’s greatest cities, and introduced him to some of the most interesting men and women of the age. I took his silent watchfulness for awe, but some years on I learned I had been badly mistaken.”

It was when he reached his teens, her beautiful son, newly expressive, disclosed that, far from appreciating all she had done for him, he had been harbouring resentments for years.

“He was a difficult adolescent: lazy, surly, with little aptitude or interest in anything apart from self-pleasuring and comic books.”

Lois, dear Lois, had tried to help, true to her word, taking Daniel into her home when Honor was away working, sometimes for months on end during school holidays. At first Honor had resented Lois’s closeness to the boy and felt her attempts to help were interference. Lois had always been better at that sort of thing. People. Friendship. Children. Love. Later, though, Honor came to feel relief at her friend’s intervention. She was welcome to him. Adoption had been a mistake. Honor had been a fool to think she had anything to offer a child. Daniel had repaid Lois’s kindness by stealing from her—cash, jewellery, antiques, pictures—but she refused to go to the police and, with stubborn patience, had continued to offer him affection and hospitality as if nothing had happened.

When he finally completed his schooling without further serious trouble
and got a place at art college, it seemed, to Honor’s private chagrin, that Lois’s faith had been rewarded. But the Slade had proved a short-lived diversion, and Honor’s scepticism was vindicated. It soon became clear that Daniel preferred girls and drugs to life classes and printmaking. He ran up catastrophic debts, acquired a circle of semicriminal friends and began his involvement with a succession of cults.

“He was on a spiritual path, he said, salaaming unscrupulous gurus and affecting a vegan diet, while popping handfuls of pills and haunting squats with tramps and sociopaths.”

Honor rolled the worry beads in her palm. “The trouble with the Darling Boy,” Tad had once said, “is that he doesn’t worry
enough
.”

There were spells in rehabilitation centres, costlier than five-star hotels—Lois had helped to pay the fees—then there was the Hare Krishna phase, followed by a stretch as a cerulean-robed devotee of Alandra, the Blue Goddess. For a while he was a sanctimoniously jocular adherent of the Sacred Laughter Fellowship, then he spent two months as a sandalled zealot of the New Jesus Militia. But he was always drawn back to his sordid milieu, to his derelicts’ circle in grim North London flats, to his addict girlfriends and his own ruinous drug habits.

“It was Tad,” Honor told Tamara, “who finally insisted: no more money to fund this fecklessness.”

Lois would have gone on shelling out, but her money simply ran out and the anxiety over her proxy son seemed to trigger her mental decline.

“And that was when I first saw Daniel’s vicious side,” Honor continued. “He stumbled across evidence of Tad’s sexual peccadilloes—‘occasional cross-dressing,’ as they call it now.”

She saw the girl stir and reach with automatic swiftness for her pencil and notepad again; but what was the point of dissembling anymore? Didn’t people boast about this sort of mild eccentricity these days?

“He tried to blackmail us,” Honor went on.

Looking for something valuable he might sell, he had prised open the tin trunk. He had mocked and raged at his stepfather, stormed at his mother for tolerating “life with a drag queen” and threatened to go to the tabloids, which would have gone into ecstasies of disapproval at news of the private urges of a well-known film director.

Tamara was scratching away at her notebook like an industrious schoolgirl.

“I was repelled by his ruthlessness, his venality,” Honor said. “I didn’t want anything more to do with him. I gave him what he asked for but said it would be our last contact. Severance payment.”

And so, a week later, in their London flat, Tad had answered a call at 4 a.m. from the police in Inverness-shire. Glenbuidhe was in flames.

“Local police initially suspected arson. There had been rumours of attacks on second homes by nationalist hotheads. There were also uncomfortable questions about our relationship with Daniel, about his state of mind—the day before the fire he had been seen in a local pub, insensible with drink—and about his underclass connections. But their curiosity faded when forensics revealed a fault in the wiring, which hadn’t been renewed since the twenties. The case was closed, and Daniel was, by then, setting up his doomed utopia on an abandoned farm on the Abel Tasman peninsula. I never expected to see him again.”

“But how …? Where …?”

Honor dismissed Tamara’s questions with a wave and continued. Five years ago she heard reports from one of his old girlfriends, just out of a rehabilitation clinic and looking for money, that Daniel had been sighted at an Indian monastery in Uttar Pradesh.

“She probably thought she was telling me, a mother, what I most wanted to hear. I put the phone down on her.”

Weeks later the girl called again with news of a rumour that he had been asked to leave by the monks, who accused him of abusing their hospitality.

“That’s when I knew it was him,” Honor said. “It’s his trademark. He’s been abusing hospitality all his life.”

Honor had kept the news from Tad, and from everyone else, and silenced the girlfriend with a payoff, “sufficiently large to fund a fatal overdose of heroin.”

Outside Holmbrook Mansions, late afternoon had ceded to evening, and the glow from the streetlights gave a jaundiced cast to the flats opposite. Tamara thought of her colleagues standing outside as night fell, waiting for a glimpse of the old woman. There would be laughter, gossip and a comradely sharing of drinks and smokes. Someone would be nominated to go to the pub for bottles of spirits to liven up the coffee and keep off the chill. Night was descending in the flat, too. But there was no warmth or conviviality here. Tamara could barely make out her
own handwriting. But Honor Tait did not seem to mind the dark. It suited her.

“So when exactly did he come back into your life? Daniel?”

“He phoned just after Tad died, two years ago.”

After that call Honor had been uncertain whether the chief cause of her anguish was Tad’s death or Daniel’s resurrection. Her son had expressed no sorrow about his stepfather’s death, no sympathy for Honor, no curiosity about Lois, who could no longer be of use to him, nor any remorse about the blackmail or the fire. But still she had wanted to see him.

“I was lured back in, suckered. What mother wouldn’t be? Even a mother as inadequate as me. My own guilt played a part, obviously. But in the end it came down to money. That was all he ever wanted. I know that now. I sent banker’s drafts to aliases in Goa and Almora, arranged payments to American Express offices in Ibiza, Athens, Marrakech … Friendship, kinship, love—it was always a financial transaction with him. You listened for a heartbeat and heard the click of an abacus.”

The shock had subsided, and Tamara knew she had to regain control of the interview.

“When did you first see him again?”

“Before Christmas there were a number of silent phone calls—I guessed it was him—then a taunting postcard. He finally phoned a few weeks ago. We agreed to meet. He said he was staying with friends.”

“In Clapton?”

“He wouldn’t tell me where he lived. He seemed to move around a lot.”

“But everything he told … said about you, in
The Sphere
?”

Tamara knew the answer but needed to hear it baldly stated.

“Lies. Ludicrous, self-aggrandising untruths. And greed. He would have received a large cheque from that repugnant tabloid, I don’t doubt.”

Tamara held her breath, hoping the gloom concealed her blush. The streetlights outside seemed to grow brighter as the edges and outlines in the flat—the mantelpiece and shelves, the fireplace, the squat, solid furniture and the insubstantial shape of Honor Tait herself—gradually dissolved in the darkness. The old woman talked on regardless, her voice disembodied, as if emanating from a ghost.

“But he can’t just have invented it all,” Tamara said.

She could just make out Honor Tait’s silhouette as she shifted in her
chair and leaned across to switch on the table lamp. The light it threw on her was brutal, giving her face a greenish lustre and making a grotesque woodcut of its folds and shadows.

“You’re not simply a ninny, are you? You’re a dangerous ninny.”

She looked at Tamara with the detachment of a sphinx.

“I just want to get this right. What happened …” Tamara said.

Wincing, the old woman rose from her chair and walked to the fireplace again. She gripped the mantelpiece, bent to turn a lever and the flames of the gas fire flared up, casting shadows against the room’s bare walls.

“I came to write another piece altogether,” the young woman continued. “I really don’t know where to start with this.”

“You expect my sympathy?”

“Of course not. But this really is a chance to set the record straight.”

Honor Tait slowly returned to her chair. She was nodding now. Compliant at last, thought Tamara, restraining a self-congratulatory smile. She wondered how she might approach this new angle. It would not be for
The Sphere
, obviously. No paper wants to trash its own story, and Tim would be apoplectic when he learned they’d been taken for an expensive ride.
The Mail on Sunday
might welcome the chance to knock a rival’s story:
EVIL LIES OF JUNKIE SON IN GIGOLO BLACKMAIL SCANDAL
. Maybe the broadsheets would take it:
The Times
or even
The Independent
. The tone would be loftier and might be more to Honor Tait’s liking:
BETRAYED BY THE SON I LOVED! SHAMED PULITZER PRIZE WINNING JOURNALIST SPEAKS OUT
.