The Spoiler (6 page)

She flicked through Tait’s file again. There was more gore than glamour, angry reports from the battlefront and not a trace of humour or gossip in her writing. Honor Tait had, in an apparent fit of masochism, left the bountiful comforts of Beverly Hills to sleep rough with the GIs in Quang Tri. There were stomach-turning accounts of burned children and mortally wounded young soldiers, tedious and unsurprising statistical litanies—literacy in India, infant mortality in Africa—but after that her newspaper articles began to thin and were replaced by longer magazine pieces.

For
Time
she wrote about a visit to a German orphanage, for
Granta
she fulminated about the changing face of newspaper reporting, and then she was reduced to reviewing, at arduous length, books about the Second World War, Vietnam and Korea for the
New York Review of Books
. In
The New Yorker
, at even greater length, relieved only by apparently random line drawings of gardening implements and small dogs, Tait had written about an American politician with a comb-over called McGovern and had championed the Irish writer Dominic Behan in his plagiarism case against Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan! The singer’s name leapt out at Tamara like a friendly face in a rush-hour crowd.

Later clippings that bore Tait’s byline came from even worthier, illustration-free magazines, in which long grey slabs of print—reflections on Asia, the Middle East and Latin America—were broken by shorter slabs of unrelated and mystifying verse by obscure poets. Then again, Tamara reflected, all poets were obscure. Would she have to mug up on poetry for the
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piece? Or pretend to? Honor Tait was said to cultivate an artistic set.

One diary clipping from the 1960s showed her, imperious and elegant
in hat and fur coat, with a group of awkwardly grinning men in suits, bland as bank managers, in a publisher’s boardroom. One of the men, the caption revealed, was T. S. Eliot. At least Tamara, a fan of West End musicals, had heard of
him
. All the same, the task of familiarising herself to bluffing level with arcane verse and ancient wars was a depressing prospect.

It might be necessary, however.
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employed some formidable writers, and its standards were exacting. She was troubled by what she had heard Johnny refer to, with sombre awe, as the “
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ethos.” Could she match the magazine’s tone, which could be both reverential and haughtily sceptical, its syllable-clotted style, its seasoning of italiccised foreign words?

Even
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’s adverts—stark studio shots of gem-studded watches handcuffed to slender wrists, brooding portraits of tank-size cars perched like stags on mountain ridges—were intimidating. It was said to be a writers’ magazine, written by writers’ writers, and was not intended to be taken recreationally. Reading it, Tamara sometimes felt a dress code was required: “smart casual,” at least. Embarked on systematically as a weekly course in self-improvement, even with the promise of a significant salary hike, it was tough going. But Tamara, though she had never seen herself as a writers’ writer (more of a readers’ writer, really), was not afraid of words. They were important weapons in a reporter’s armoury.

She had her mother’s two-volume
Oxford English Dictionary
, frequently mined
Roget’s Thesaurus
and, as someone who, as a child, had enjoyed fierce games of Scrabble with her brother, she collected words, recording them in her notebook, delighting in the unusual and trying to slip them into a story or, more often, a list, whenever pedestrian subeditors were looking the other way. Only last week she had come across “transgressive” (in a report of a gruesomely fascinating murder trial), “crepuscular” (in a pretentious fashion piece on sequins), “chthonic” (from Tod Maloney’s latest album,
Chthonic the Hedgehog
) and “hermeneutic” (an arresting headline on an arts-page piece about the Spice Girls).

A diligent reader of well-crafted detective stories and contemporary romances, as well as countless newspapers and magazines, possessed of a curious mind, respectable vocabulary and a serviceably wide education—solid A-levels in Drama and French (her grasp of both enhanced by six months as an au pair to a flamboyantly self-harming preteen in Lyons), and a B.A. in Media Studies (she narrowly missed an upper second)—known
for her nimble humour, cutting comments, encyclopaedic knowledge of the personal peccadilloes of the major cultural icons of the late twentieth century, Tamara was well equipped to join the
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team. Lyra Moore, a writers’ writer’s editor, had recognised her promise and her feisty streetwise touch, so lacking in
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magazine, and was willing to give her a chance.

At the bottom of the cuttings file was a printout of a profile, ten years old and doggedly respectful, from the long-vanished
Sunday Correspondent
. Tamara did not have time to read it all but at the end, in convenient bullet points, there were some bald biographical details. “Childhood: stately home in the Scottish Highlands.” A toff, then. “Education: governesses, followed by a Belgian convent school, Swiss finishing college and the Sorbonne.” A French-speaking Catholic toff. “Employment: Agence France-Presse, the
Herald Tribune, L’Espresso, Collier’s Weekly, Der Spiegel, Picture Post
 …” A multilingual Catholic toff with good contacts. “Marriages: three. Marquis Maxime de Cantal, Belgian-born theatre impresario; Sandor Varga, Hungarian publisher; and Tad Challis, American-born film director.” A goer, confirming Simon’s claims; for three husbands read thirty lovers, at least.

There were no quotes from Honor Tait at all, apart from a sermonising motto: “Through patient observation, the meticulous accumulation of detail and a ravening hunger for truth, the bigger picture will emerge. It is the duty of the reporter to champion the weak and to shine a searchlight in the darkest corners of human experience.” Pompous, too.

The peg for the article, a pallid excuse, was the inclusion of one of Tait’s dispatches from Korea in a forbiddingly titled anthology,
Classics of World Reportage
. No wonder
The Sunday Correspondent
had disappeared.

There was a more recent news story, seven years old, from
The Monitor
:
VETERAN JOURNALIST’S HOME GUTTED IN BLAZE
. The house, not the London flat across the road but a former hunting lodge “on the estate of what had once been her childhood home in the Highlands,” had burned to the ground in an electrical fire. One photograph, the older of the two, showed a smug, substantial building—four storeys high, with a narrow fifth-storey tower at each end—painted stark white, apart from black-rimmed window frames and the dark arched door. If that was a “lodge,” what must the main house have been like? Whatever conclusions might be reached about Honor Tait’s life, this was not a tale of rags to riches. The second picture, of a single charred wall with a glassless window like
a blinded eye, rearing against the sky in a clearing of ashes, sticks and stumps, looked like an image of some blighted postnuclear landscape.

The story included not a word from Tait herself, though she was said to have been “comforted by her third husband, Tad Challis, director of cult comedy films including
The Pleasure Seekers
and
Hairdressers’ Honeymoon
,” and a useful “friend” had described her as “devastated.” Tamara gazed across the road at the solid facade of Holmbrook Mansions. She had looked in the estate agents’ windows and knew what these flats could cost. Honor Tait may have been devastated by the loss of her holiday home, but she had not been destroyed. This was not a riches-to-rags story either.

Other, briefer, clippings gave a flavour of Honor Tait’s life over the last ten years. She was mentioned in passing in some of the broadsheet news pages as a supporter of pressure groups lobbying for children’s rights, against exploitation of third-world labour and against sex trafficking; she had served as a UN goodwill ambassador, campaigned for asylum seekers and, in her spare time, was a regular attendee at book launches, gallery openings and theatre first nights in the company of writers, artists and actors, all of them men, most of them young and highly presentable. There were a number of photographs of Tait at these events, stooped but regal, glowering at the photographer over a glass of champagne, surrounded by handsome acolytes. “Doyenne of journalists” was the most frequent tag, though
The Mail
preferred “the darling of the chattering classes.” There had been a TV arts programme about her a year ago (Tamara had been sent the videotape but had not had time to watch it), and one of the trails for it from a listings magazine was included in the publishers’ press pack:
HONOR BOUND
was the headline.

In a piece from
Vogue
, Annie Leibovitz had photographed her in black-and-white in a book-lined room, looking affronted, as if the old woman had just disturbed an intruder who, if he had any instinct for self-preservation, would have fled the scene at once. The article, on “salons,” also featured a poet who held weekly picnics and poetry readings on Primrose Hill, and a fashion designer who hosted what he called regular “cake and counselling” sessions for artists in his Thameside warehouse. Honor Tait was described as a “modern Madame de Staël” and was said to have gathered round her a group of admirers comprising “the most exciting young men in Britain’s creative industries.” They met on the last Monday of every month and called themselves, in ironic reference to the
right-wing think tank of the same name, the Monday Club. Discussions “exactingly chaired by Tait, doyenne of British journalism, friend of the Hollywood elite, and one-time muse of some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century,” would range from “Hegelian philosophy and aleatoric music to the single European currency and the future of artificial intelligence.”

Tamara sipped her coffee, by now repellently cold, and hoped that, along with poetry, politics or history, none of these subjects would come up in her interview.

The girl was late. Honor fetched a drink, settled in the armchair and picked up the plastic folder that Ruth had couriered over: the interviewer’s cuttings. Was their purpose reassurance, indicating that this journalist was not exclusively in the business of character assassination, that she did not habitually ridicule
all
her interviewees? Honor tipped the articles into her lap. Were they originals or colour photocopies? It was hard to tell. Technology had accelerated so fast since the days of the portable Olympia, flimsy carbons and the chunky telephone with its umbilical ringlet of wire.

Her own cuttings, scissored and pasted into large red ledgers by countless secretaries over the years, had amounted to fourteen bound volumes of news stories and features, columns and interviews; almost as large as the complete OED. The ledgers, like everything else, had been consumed by the Glenbuidhe flames. In newspaper libraries, the articles, clipped by clerks, were kept in brown envelopes labelled with the writer’s name. Shaking out a collection of your work would always be an intimation of mortality; within months of publication the cuttings would be as sere and yellow as a handful of autumn leaves.

And this scant, bright package? From a TV listings supplement, an interview with a young actress, unknown to Honor but, according to the piece, renowned for undressing slowly in a recent TV adaptation of a fatuous historical novel, and for the public breakup of her affair with a tattooed pop star. The photograph showed the actress, a spindly blonde, leaning against a marble fireplace. There was an edge of desperation, a plea for approval, in her effortful smile and the faint spidering of lines around her eyes. She looked tired, wrung out, used up. The article carried
a photograph of the interviewer too; a postage-stamp-size byline picture of a sharp-nosed blonde affecting a frown while chewing a pencil. They were all blonde these days. Was there something of the woodland creature about her? A spiteful creation of Beatrix Potter? Tamara Town-mouse? Or was she more of a shrew?

Included in the package of cuttings was a double-page feature on London’s “café culture,” and another on “flyposting,” the practice of illicitly pasting advertisements for nightclubs over lampposts and hoardings. This was billed as an “exclusive in-depth investigation by reporter Tamara Sim.” Not quite Watergate. Honor’s eyes closed slowly and her head bowed, unresisting, towards sleep.

Minutes later the amplified whine of a car alarm brought her back into wakefulness. She glanced at the clock. The girl was now insultingly late. Massaging her temples, Honor looked again at the articles in her lap. The same silly byline picture accompanied “The Tamara Sim Column,” eight hundred words, many of them in capital letters appended by clusters of exclamation marks, reflecting on the plot of a television soap opera, the bad behaviour of premier league footballers and “the modern problem,” which was apparently neither third-world poverty nor the spread of AIDS but “the dearth of decent, reliable, sexy, solvent single men in London.” The frivolity of the press no longer surprised Honor. But why this particular girl had been sent to interview her she could not imagine.

Tamara was startled by a sudden knock on the café window. Bucknell had arrived, out of breath. She glared at him as he walked in.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

“Another job. For the news desk.”

“The news desk? But this is for the magazine!
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! It’s a much bigger deal.”

“Try telling that to the news desk.”

She shook her head, picked up the bunch of Barbie-pink lilies she had bought as a peace offering from the supermarket on the corner (expenses would cover it and, if she handed in the doctored receipt for the red roses she had sent last week to Tim’s office at
The Sphere
, she would make something on the transaction). They walked in silence up the steps of the mansion block.