The Spoiler (15 page)

“Not much scope for that here.”

“Not on
Psst!
, anyway. Or on the Web site. But she must have judged that it’s better to be queen of the cyberkingdom than a serf in the twilight realm of print.”

Tamara scooped up Tania’s books from her desk. Just as she had thought. A novel whose drab cover matched its unalluring title, a Booker Prize winner, according to the sticker on the front. A two-volume biography of Picasso—really, how much more was there to say about the old lecher? A memoir by a nerdy-looking playwright in Buddy Holly glasses. And, for light relief, a book on the history of British film. There was also a copy of Honor Tait’s
Truth, Typewriter and Toothbrush
. Tamara opened it. Tania had gone through it, underlining passages and pencilling notes in the margins as if she was cramming for an exam on the subject. So here was Honor Tait’s natural constituency. A perfect match—the bland reading the bland. Tamara scooped up the books and dropped them in the nearest waste bin.

She had been asked to write the A-List again. This week, it was to be “Top Ten TV Bad-Hair Days.” She would also, discreetly—she did not want to take too much advantage of her friendship with Simon—put in another call to Honor Tait’s publisher, and press on with her
S
^*
nday
piece.

Tamara was ringing Uncumber Press when Simon arrived at his desk bearing two pint-size coffees from the canteen. She cupped her hand over the phone’s mouthpiece. The answering machine again.

She dialled another number, this time conspicuously, smiling and rolling her eyes in comradely good humour at Simon, who brought over one of the cups and left it on her desk. In her most efficient voice, delivered at broadcast-level pitch, she spoke to a publicity-addicted West End hairdresser who was always good for a quote, and asked him for some pointers on Bad Hair. She took detailed notes, thanked him loudly, replaced the receiver and began to type in a few of his suggestions. She would visit the morgue later and see what pictures they could come up with.

“Lunch?” Simon called out to her.

He must have been reading her mind.

“Sure. Half an hour? Just doing Bad Hair.”

“Great. Bubbles?”

“Where else?”

“Fantastic. Still on for the Press Awards next week?”

“You bet.”

She sensed a sudden swell of resentment in the office. Some of her
Psst!
colleagues, she knew, envied her friendship with Simon, didn’t rate him as an editor and would undermine them both if they had the chance. A seat at the annual Press Awards dinner was a prized ticket—the biggest social event in the newspaper calendar. Courtney, the embittered administrator, who had worked on
Psst!
longer than any of them and had a hopeless ambition to be a journalist, was staring at the fax machine with an unusual degree of concentration and Jim Frost, chief sub and trades union stalwart, was sucking forcefully at his unlit briar pipe and glowering at Simon.

Well, Tamara had no need to be defensive. Could she help it if Simon preferred
her
company? She returned to her work. Johnny sent an electronic message asking for a celebrity vox pop. The shadow chancellor had been spotted eating rabbit stew in a fashionable Islington restaurant and had left his broccoli and carrots untouched on the plate. An
hour of phone calls to the usual ring-round tarts—former newsreaders, fading pop stars, media-savvy actors, an outspoken Tory backbencher with a fondness for drink, a ubiquitous agony aunt, a high-profile hedge fund manager and a publicity-hungry novelist—all happy to name their favourite, and least favourite, vegetables in exchange for a mention in
The Monitor
—produced some serviceable copy, leaving Tamara free to get back to her real work.

By the time they arrived at the Beaded Bubbles the place was as full as a Northern Line tube. Courtney had sulkily rung in advance and reserved the centre booth. They sank into their seats, savouring their first glass of chardonnay in silence, like communicants draining a chalice.

“So Lucinda found out about Serena,” Simon said as he refilled their glasses.

“No! How?”

“Serena told her.”

“No!”

Tamara sometimes felt she needed a flowchart to keep track of Simon’s adventures. Lucinda was his barrister mistress, who shared a flat with Serena, who worked in an auction house. Lucinda had been at a conference last week when Serena had phoned to suggest that Simon might meet her for a drink. The drink became dinner at Claridge’s (on his expenses, naturally). The following day Tamara had received a thorough debriefing on the menu, the wine list, and the tumultuous sex that followed. But there were new developments.

“Now Lucinda’s gone ballistic.”

“I bet she has.”

“Ordered Serena out of the flat. She won’t go, of course.”

“Of course not.”

“So Lucinda’s put locks on the bathroom and kitchen to drive her out.”

“That would do it.”

Tamara waved to the waitress and ordered a risotto. Simon said he would have the same, and a second bottle.

“So Lucinda phoned me at home at midnight last night, hysterical. She kept sobbing and asking if I thought she was crap in the sack.”

“Is she? I mean, do you?”

“Of course not. That’s what Serena told her I’d said.”

He ran his hands through his thinning hair and his bottom lip jutted like a petulant child’s. Not for the first time, Tamara marvelled at his success with women. He was overweight, middle-aged and balding. As a young man he must have been chinless, and maturity, compensating for nature’s earlier oversight, had given him a concertina pleat of flesh at his throat.

“Blimey.”

“So there I was, trying to placate a hysterical Lucinda down the phone with Jan lying in bed beside me.”

Simon’s wife of long standing, posh, plain and pleasant Jan, had apparently never suspected a thing while her husband steadily worked his way through London’s Lucindas and Mirandas, Serenas and Marinas, like a bulimic at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

“Tricky.”

“And now, just before we came out, Serena phoned the office in tears. She’s furious.”

“Oh no,” Tamara said, pouring another glass.

Their food arrived. Simon didn’t even glance at his plate.

“She said I said she had tits like empty bed socks.”

“What?” Tamara put down her fork and tried to summon the image. “Bed socks? Has she? Did you?”

“
No
. That’s what Lucinda told her I said.”

“Oh. Right.”

“No word from Lucinda now, either,” he said, checking his pager. Tamara, beginning to tire of his story and keen to embark on her own, ate her lunch in silence. He clipped his pager back on his belt.

“So how’s the escape plan?” he asked.

Tamara was baffled, and then she realised he was enquiring about the subject she had been hoping to introduce into the conversation since they arrived.

“She was an obnoxious old witch,” Tamara said. “Wouldn’t tell me a thing about her life, but when she got onto the theme of her brilliant
career, about the boring stories she’d broken, about the boring politicians and soldiers she’d known, she wouldn’t stop talking. I thought I was never going to get out of there and—”

Simon’s mobile phone rang. Tamara looked away to conceal her envy: she really wanted one of those gadgets. The only people she knew who could afford them were senior editors, who got them on expenses, and drug dealers.

It was Jan, calling about their son’s eighteenth birthday party.

“Okay, sweetie …” Simon said. “Go with the marquee … Whatever you think … Yes … Whatever Dexter wants … No. Business lunch … Can’t talk now … Bye … Love you too.”

He turned off the phone and Tamara continued.

“I’ve been trying to reach the publishers to arrange another interview, and they won’t return my calls.”

Simon was drumming his fingers on the table.

“And you know how much this means, this commission,” Tamara added. “I mean, writing for
S
^*
nday
is a real breakthrough for me.”

He looked up, signalled to the waiter and ordered two more glasses of wine along with the bill. He had not touched his risotto.

“Get a grip, Tamara,” he said, taking out his credit card. “You’ve just got to move on.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look, if you really want to pursue this story, you have to show some initiative.”

This was unfair.

“I’m doing my best. I’m not even sure what angle Lyra wants on this piece, and she won’t answer my messages.”

“You don’t need any hand-holding from Lyra,” Simon said.

“I just feel I’ve reached a dead end. All I’ve got is a lousy interview, with maybe one halfway decent quote, and some cuttings. I’ll never wring four thousand words out of that.”

He took out his pager.

“Come on, Tamara. You can do better than that. Honor Tait’s a public figure. She’s out there. Watch her at work. Something will turn up.”

The pager was bleeping like a heart monitor. He paid the bill, tucking the receipt into his pocket. He was very good at dispensing brisk professional advice, Tamara thought resentfully, but the only work he would be doing this afternoon would entail locating a paper clip, fastening
this receipt to an expenses form and writing: “Lunch. Contacts. Features Ideas. £36.”

The interview had served one useful purpose, kick-starting a process that was long overdue. The disturbing phone call was a further spur. How had she, Honor Tait, the arch antimaterialist, the scoffer at sentimentality, taken so long to get round to this? She had the urge, but not the energy, to strip it all, or, better still, to walk out of the door and chuck a Molotov cocktail behind her. But the freeholders of Holmbrook Mansions would not thank her for it, and her neighbours might object.

This time, without hesitation, she wrenched Tad’s hideous seascape from the wall. It was not as heavy as she had feared. Clumsy watercolours of seas and hills, woods and waterfalls gave him a pleasure the landscapes themselves never could. “Yep,” he would say, coming up behind her as she stood by the window in Glenbuidhe. “The mountains are still there. And the loch. That’s still there too. Let me know when they move ’em.” But he had to be restrained from buying the abysmal paintings of local views offered for sale in folksy tearooms, alongside souvenir tea towels and handcrafted fudge.

Sunsets, too, left him cold. At the end of each day in Glenbuidhe, when she liked to walk down to the lochside and watch the blazing sky, he had always insisted on accompanying her. But he would stand there in the cooling evening air, stamping his feet impatiently. He didn’t get it. Yet he spent a ridiculous sum on a lurid oil, in which broad sweeps of mauve, rose and orange conjured a grotesque pastiche of nature. That was one picture she had happily dumped straight after his death—his goddaughter had expressed a liking for it and was bundled off with it in a taxi after an uneasy tea. Honor hadn’t seen her since.

She scooped up armfuls of books and took them with the painting to the cupboard in the hall—how much time was there left for reading, let alone rereading?—and placed them in there with the relics from her recent clearout. She began to gather up the photographs. Who was she doing this for? Would she accede to Ruth’s badgering and invite the foolish Tamara back? Or was she expecting another visitor, who might sneer, with some justification, at the display of her vanished splendours? Pompeii in happier times, as the caption cliché goes.

She took down the photograph of her younger self with Franco. Much had been made of the fact that she had conducted the interview while costumed like a chorus girl. In fact she had been holidaying in Tenerife with Thierry, and it was Franco—unknown, recently demoted, restless in exile and, it turned out, only weeks away from the uprising that would provoke the civil war—who had sought her out for the interview. Hearing that the young reporter, whose smile had already illuminated several RKO newsreels and who wrote for the American news magazines, was on the island, he had tracked her down and surprised her at a harbourside café. She had concealed her irritation at being disturbed by this officious little man, borrowed a notebook from an amused waiter and politely conducted an interview, only half listening to the answers, about the administrative problems of this cluster of extinct volcanoes moored just north of Africa. Her interview, a few workaday paragraphs in
Collier’s
, did not survive. The picture did. A local photographer had caught the moment and must have made more money from that single picture—so often reproduced that, sixty years on, it was a visual cliché—than he did in a lifetime’s career spent snapping wedding parties, overdressed infants and first communions.

The sitting room was beginning to look satisfyingly austere. Who could have guessed that such pleasure was to be had from this systematic pillaging of the past? If only memories could be ordered and dispensed with so easily. She had struggled to make progress with her coda. She worried that, as she got older, she had lost her sure touch as a writer, that her ear for good prose could no longer be trusted, and she found it increasingly difficult to assemble her thoughts in the service of a story. The phone call had been a further distraction, scattering her thoughts.

Fighting exhaustion, she gathered up the proofs of
The Unflinching Eye
. If she could not write, she could surely read.