The Spoiler (2 page)

She stood in the centre of the room, a fragile, fretful old woman, her hair awry, in a shabby dressing gown of paisley silk. She had recently developed a sporadic tic, a nodding tremor of the head that seemed to become more pronounced when she was agitated, as she was now, and gave the impression of enthusiastic endorsement when the opposite was invariably the case. Her left hand gripped the back of one of Tad’s precious wingback chairs and, steadying herself, she turned slowly, her watery blue eyes narrowing, trying to take in the room as if for the first time, to read it as if she were illicitly scrutinising someone else’s intimate journal.

Start with the walls: the pictures and photographs. How long was it since she had actually looked at these things? That watercolour of verdigris waves and muddy mountains—Antrim? The west of Scotland? Not Loch Buidhe, anyway. It was too wild and open for that sheltered glen. Another of Tad’s impulse purchases; blamelessly unbiographical and criminally inept. Honor’s young interviewer would have difficulty drawing disparaging conclusions from this crude seascape, unless she was a connoisseur of art, which, given the calibre of most newspaper people these days, or indeed most young people, was unlikely. For the dealer in swift stereotypes, the picture might reflect a fondness for conventional Sunday painters or Celtic melancholy. Entirely wrong, but a harmless misreading.

The deceptively simple ink and wash of Tristram and Iseult could be more problematic. Tad had found it so. His first inclination had been to destroy the drawing, rip it in two with his meaty hands, or at least to leave it where he had found it, in a stack of Honor’s unregarded papers at Glenbuidhe. But the proprietorial husband, furious that his wife, whom he had married in their middle years, had ever been close to anyone else, lost out to his peculiarly American deference to fame. It was Tad who eventually chose the unwieldy ebony frame, after a degree of contemplation and dialogue that would not have discredited Plato, and placed the
picture over the mantelpiece in the flat, where it still hung today. The artist had united the lovers in a single line and, if an interviewer were to examine the drawing closely in an unobserved moment—when, say, Honor was making tea in the kitchen—she might detect his dedication, written vertically in his tiny square print up the line of Iseult’s gown:
To Honor from Jean. Je t’embrasse
.

The story of their friendship had been regurgitated several times, in biographies of Cocteau and in the few profiles of her. Most recently, Kettering had attempted to warm it up and serve it again to an apathetic public. And the
South Bank Show
had shown jerky footage of the party for
Le Bel Indifférent
—with Picasso characteristically clowning for the cameras—but, observing her stipulation to the letter, the programme makers had refrained from attribution or comment, using, instead of informative voiceover, a rippling guitar soundtrack from Django Reinhardt and the Hot Club de France. “Oh, Lady Be Good.” Not an exhortation that was often heard in her circles in those days.

Her brief time with Jean had preceded her marriage to Tad—the last and best of husbands—by many decades, but timing had never been the issue for Tad. Nor did he need any evidence of intimacy. His jealousy—retrospective, current and prospective—had seemed a manifestation of madness evident nowhere else in his nature. A naughty deed in a good world.

But, really, what interest could such a story of busy couplings and sunderings, opium addiction and wild drinking among artists and bohemians in Paris—what was it? sixty years ago? sixty-five?—possibly hold for readers of a British Sunday newspaper magazine in the dying days of the millennium? Today art was about smearing your bodily fluids on canvas or parading your personal inadequacies for the benefit of the gawpers. They were all artists now; at it like farm animals, drinking like Bacchae. Opium, or its contemporary equivalent—was it cocaine again? or Ecstasy?—was served at industrialists’ dinner parties, shopgirls’ suppers and suburban pubs. Yesterday’s scandal was today’s optional footnote. Who really remembered Jean? And of those few wilful connoisseurs of obscurity who remembered him, who cared? The picture could stay. Besides, it was too heavy for her to move it unassisted.

Opposite the Cocteau, in a frame of unvarnished oak, was a harsh oil portrait of her, painted ten years ago, stiffly coiffed, carmine lipped and glacial. It was unflattering, even menacing, but something about it, its
raw candour perhaps, or the timeless impassivity of a Russian icon—
The Temptation of St. Honor
, facing down innumerable unseen demons—had appealed to Tad, despite his constitutional antipathy to the artist. Daniel had painted it in his first and, as it transpired, final term at the Slade. His final year. She wrested the picture from the wall, cursing the effort this simple act required of her. But setting it down against the skirting board, she was dismayed to see that the painting had left a ghostly rectangle of dark wallpaper, like the poignant patch in the Boston museum that awaited the return of the stolen Vermeer. The absence of the portrait might invite more speculation than its presence. Better to leave it. She struggled to replace it on its hook. Her heart began to race uncomfortably, a prick of pain in each beat. She sat down to catch her breath.

Despite Honor’s initial refusal, her publisher had persuaded her to meet the interviewer in her flat. For all her earth-mother affectations, Ruth Lavenham, founder and editor in chief of Uncumber Press, was a steely operator. The intrusion would be good for sales of Honor’s new book, Ruth had said. Good, too, was the implication, a threat sheathed in a smile, for Uncumber Press, a valiant David to the corporate Goliaths of the publishing world. Honor owed her. It was Ruth who had rescued her from insolvency two years ago, just after Tad’s death, with a smart new edition of Honor’s first collection of journalism,
Truth, Typewriter and Toothbrush
, originally published by Faber in the 1950s and long out of print. The book, in its second incarnation, included her Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the liberation of Buchenwald and became a surprising
succès d’estime
. Honor Tait was “rediscovered” and, more gratifyingly, she was able to pay off some of her more pressing debts. The hope was that the new book,
Dispatches from a Dark Place: The Collected Honor Tait
, would repeat the trick. And next year, if all went well, there would be a third book, with the title, suggested by Ruth though resisted by Honor, of
The Unflinching Eye
.

“Oh, come on,” Ruth had said when they discussed advance publicity for
Dispatches
, “an interview with the most respected magazine in the land? In the comfort of your own home? Where’s the harm in that? And in publicity terms it’s infinitely better than a double-page advert.”

Cheaper, too. So Honor had capitulated. But she knew it was a mistake. On the few occasions in her life that she had consented to be interviewed, she had never admitted any reporter to her home. Even the most well-disposed journalist would regard the flat and its contents
as her psyche’s porthole, curtainless and illuminated in the dark. The
South Bank Show
conversation with Melvyn had been filmed at the London Library, where she had previously agreed—in a moment of reckless narcissism, justly rewarded by the photograph itself (a Halloween fright mask in hell’s reading room)—to pose for
Vogue
.

Hotels, impersonal no-man’s-lands, stripped of signs and souvenirs, were best for these encounters. The most energetically malevolent reporter would find it hard to take you to task for the blandness of the interior decoration, the stains on the sofa or the musty smell pervading your room. Even then, in a corporate suite of beige leather and chrome, where the only indigenous books were the Gideon Bible and the Yellow Pages, you could be caught out, like poor John Updike. She had written him a note of sympathy after one newspaper interviewer had spotted a discarded pair of underpants under a chair in his hotel room and went on in her article to use the white briefs as a metaphor for what she considered to be the casual, masculine attitude to sex reflected in Updike’s fiction. It was the priggishness Honor had abhorred. Here in her flat, at least, thanks to the maid, there would be no underwear on view.

It was an old technique: alight on an apparently insignificant object and use it to construct a catchpenny psychological case history of its owner. How else to sum up a life on the evidence of an hour’s conversation and a little legwork in the cuttings library? Honor had resorted to the practice more than once herself, particularly when the interviewee was unforthcoming. Every tchotchke tells a story. Even in the newest New Journalism, some things never change. She recalled her own blood-sport thrill when she had spotted the netsuke mule on MacArthur’s bureau in Tokyo; a playbill for a Max Miller burlesque in Beckett’s Montparnasse redoubt; the copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets by Mme Chiang Kai-shek’s hospital bedside; and the signed photograph of Ida Lupino in de Gaulle’s austere wartime office in Carlton Gardens.

Could her own photographs, still on the bookcase and on the walls where Tad had first placed them, withstand such scrutiny? One black-and-white shot showed her as a young war reporter, lithe as a lioness and chic in fatigues among the grinning doomed boys before Normandy. Next to it was the iconic image, for
Collier’s
, sitting with Franco, newly appointed commandant general of the Canary Islands. Above the waist she was primly professional, her notebook and pen raised in a posture of exaggerated attentiveness, like a thirties stenographer. “Take a letter,
Miss Tait.” Below she was all showgirl. Her long tanned legs, in tailored shorts and high-heeled sandals, looked as if they were on temporary loan from the Ziegfeld Follies. The picture was syndicated all over the world. “The Newsroom Dietrich,” they had called her. All on the record. All part of the myth. Nothing could be done about that now.

The doctored paparazzi shot of the candlelit dinner—a fund-raiser for the Progressive Party—might be more contentious. In its unexpurgated form, with Sinatra by her side, whispering in her ear, it certainly had been at the time. He was married but openly dating Ava Gardner when the picture was taken, and the gossip pages had been exultant, though with the sycophantic tone of those more innocent days; mortals enviously ogling the sport of gods. Now the mortals were in the ascendancy and the gods in the stocks, pelted with rotten vegetables. She lifted the photograph from its hook and held it in her hands, admiring—yes, why not admit it?—the way the light fell across her shoulders, illuminating her gardenia corsage. The blooms were as soft and dewy as her guileless young face, apparently caught in a state of precoital deliquescence. How the camera lies, and sometimes in our favour. She had been a matron by the standards of the time; she had hit thirty, with one war, one miserable marriage and several ill-advised romantic liaisons behind her. Two further wars—three, if you counted Algeria—lay just round the corner. She had been in no mood for that kind of evening—her old friend Lois, then working for the Henry Wallace campaign, had strong-armed her—and Honor had been irritated to find that the seating plan had twinned her not with Alvin Tilley, a progressive playwright, one of the Hollywood Eleven, but with the kitsch crooner Frank Sinatra. Sinatra, too, clearly had other plans for the evening, though he had been civil. His murmured proposition, as recorded by the camera, was actually a conversation about the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee.

Two decades later Tad, in another squall of jealousy, had cut the picture in half, removing the singer, with his fallen-seraph smile, as well as the encircling photographers and fans. The original unedited picture was still in circulation, owned by one of the big agencies, and had been used in the recent documentary. Posterity, savagely capricious, had kept Sinatra’s forty-watt gifts ablaze in the public imagination, while numberless brighter talents had been extinguished. Might Honor’s interviewer, the bathetically named Tamara Sim, recognise this version in her hands as bowdlerised and conclude that Honor, a thwarted lover perhaps, had
taken the scissors to the photograph herself? Could it set the girl off on a false trail? Honor had no wish to encourage any prurience from
The Monitor
, or its Sunday magazine.

On the brink of a new millennium, and despite their journalists’ shambolic private lives, drink problems and drug habits, despite the widespread commodification of the most arcane sexual practices, newspapers faced with any story of the mildest marital impropriety still responded like Edwardian spinsters confronting their first flasher. Honor was permitting this newspaper to invade her privacy only up to a point, and for one purpose only: to sell the wretched book. Or, more precisely, to make money and pay some bills. Best to be safe. The photograph should go. Clutching it, breathless again, she turned back to her chair. She must sit down.

Seven miles away in Hornsey, in a narrow street of subdivided semis, Tamara Sim sat in the perpetual dusk of her basement flat squinting into a mirror. Lipsticks were scattered like spent shells on the dressing table, and there was an artist’s battery of cosmetic brushes at her elbow as she applied her makeup with the infinite care of a girl about to embark on her first date. Which in a way she was.

When the editor of
The Monitor
’s prestigious
S
^*
nday
magazine had sent a message asking Tamara if she would interview Honor Tait, she had replied instantly.

“Of course! Old-school journalistic heroine!! I’d LOVE to do her!!! …” Tamara’s response began.

In fact she had been surprised to learn that the legendary reporter was still alive. Her knowledge of Tait’s oeuvre was limited—a piece on the wife of a Chinese dictator from the 1950s had been a set text in Tamara’s Media Studies course. According to the lecturer, Tait had borrowed a nurse’s uniform, bluffed her way into a hospital where the old woman was being treated and spent an hour at her bedside. The interview itself was as dry and uncompelling as a broadsheet leader, and Tamara got through her finals without actually reading it in its entirety.