The Spoiler (25 page)

Reluctantly, and with a sense of grim duty, Tamara put aside her notes, opened Tait’s first book and returned to the Pulitzer Prize–winning essay.

Exasperated, Tamara closed the book and turned back to her own work.

It was getting dark outside now, and the smiling brother was lifting the chairs onto the tables while his moody brother swept the floors.

If Tamara had not been so absorbed in her work at that moment, she might have seen the bent figure of an old woman walking slowly up the steps and through the doors of Holmbrook Mansion.

In the café the shutters were lowered, and the miserable brother rang up the till and counted out the cash. Tamara paid her bill, adding a generous tip, and they handed her two blank receipts. She would be back.

It was dark when Honor got home. She switched on the wireless. Bach. Like Inigo’s smile, Bach’s music was a sound barometer of Honor’s emotional weather. In spells of good cheer she thought the partitas and fugues, even the inventions, offered rational mortals the most persuasive glimpse of paradise they were ever likely to be granted. On darker days the keyboard pieces could sound as trite and mechanical as a child’s music box: a hellish hurdy-gurdy. She turned off the radio. Silence was preferable. But she felt an urge to talk, to describe today’s hospital visit, to describe the Lois she had known and in describing her, to bring her back to life. Honor poured a glass of vodka and reached for her address book. So many names crossed out, some excised by the attrition of feuds and fallings-out, so many arbitrarily annulled by death. One day soon the book would be as obsolete as its owner.

And her Boys? Ideally Honor liked to see them singly, to eke them out. That way she could maximise her pleasures—have each one all to herself—and minimise any treacherous suballiances. They fought one another for the scraps of her approval, knowing that there would never be enough to go around, and she encouraged their competitiveness. The idea that they might talk about her in her absence, pity her, laugh about her, have fun without her, was loathesome to her. Though she had no concept of an afterlife, she sometimes imagined that death would be like this: lying mute and immobile, listening to the muffled sounds of a merry party next door.

There would be tears, at first. Ruth might wail the loudest. She had the physique and dress sense of a professional mourner, the beefy Greek chorus sort, born to hurl herself, shrieking, over the passing coffins of strangers. Bobby would sob more fastidiously and lean on his latest young friend for support, and Inigo would weep into a large silk handkerchief and drink too much—“If you can’t binge at a dear friend’s funeral,” she could hear him saying, “when can you?” Aidan would be silent and inconsolable, shrugging away his frightful boyfriend, while Clemency would probably set up a trust fund in her name: The Tait Award for Young Journalists. Honor shuddered. And Paul? Well, Paul was like her. She could see him facing news of her death with virile gravity. But tears? She doubted if he had ever shed them in his life.

There would be the respectfully inaccurate obituaries and a memorial service, in which weeping false friends, distant associates and old rivals—who would claim victory at last by simply outliving her—would utter humbug from the pulpit about her exemplary integrity and professionalism. She had no illusions, least of all on the question of mortality. Soon, even to her regular intimates, her Boys, the Monday Club, she would be reduced to an amusing anecdote, a murmur of regret and, with time, would become the butt of black humour. Inigo, she suspected, would crack the first postmortem joke, and the others would laugh with gratitude and relief. Then the party would go on, without her. It might even be jollier in her absence.

Only now it occurred to her that the person she really wanted to talk to about today’s hospital visit was Lois herself. She closed her address book and picked up her pen. Despair could be as good a provocation to work as any. While she still had her wits, she must write her coda.

In the acrid warmth of the pub, where the staff and patrons were gaping glitter-eyed at a football game on a vast TV set, Tamara ordered a large gin and tonic and took it outside. This vantage point was going to be a lot less comfortable, but she could put another tape in her recorder and use it to dictate her copy.

At 11 p.m., as the pub closed, it started to rain. She had not brought an umbrella, and her tape recorder was getting wet. She stowed it in her backpack and moved across the road to stand sentinel outside Holmbrook Mansions. The foyer seemed ghostly in the bluish light. The doorman was sleeping again.

Honor finally rose from her bed at 7:30 a.m. on Monday, drew back the curtains and, if she was not quite ready to embrace the day, felt more prepared to face it than she had been when she closed the curtains on Saturday, after visiting Lois. She had not stirred from the flat for the rest of the weekend, turned off the phone, cleared out more junk, ate half a packet of oatcakes and drank one and a half bottles of vodka. Clemency would tut over the empties.

Now she bathed to the sound of Radio 3—some playful harpsichord music by Rameau—and dressed in her silk-lined grey skirt and mulberry cashmere cardigan; their softness against her skin was pleasing, a kind of intimacy. The radio news came on. What had she missed? Not much. Labour pledging a national trust for culture in the event of their election victory; a former soldier charged with the murder of his missing stepdaughter; accusations of “ageism” at the BBC made by middle-aged male presenters. She reconnected the telephone and checked her diary in the hall. Yes, her Wimpole Street appointment was at 9 a.m. No breakfast was the stipulation. This suited her. And then there was the lunch. She must steel herself.

Tamara was in the window seat on her third cup of coffee. Today was her last chance—she could not afford to take more unpaid leave from
Psst!
—and, after spending Sunday in the same café without a single sighting of Honor Tait, she had dragged herself to Maida Vale at an absurdly early hour on Monday anticipating a third day of fruitless observation. Even the good-humoured brother had muttered ungraciously when she
walked through the café door at 8 a.m. She would have to order another sandwich, and the prospect depressed her further as she stared blankly out of the window.

When it finally happened, she thought for a moment that it was a mirage, conjured by hope. She wiped the misted window and looked again. Honor Tait! There she was, emerging from Holmbrook Mansions at 8:30 on Monday morning. Tamara leapt up, scattered some change on the table, turned up the collar of her coat and ran into the street. She need not have hurried. The old lady was still standing on the pavement, timorously scanning the road, looking as tiny and vulnerable as a child who had slipped her mother’s hand. Tamara slowed her pace, keeping to the opposite pavement, and stopped outside the estate agent’s on the corner. There she pretended to examine photographs of expensive flats while keeping an eye on her target, reflected in the shop window. Suddenly, Tait raised her arm. A black taxi came into view and stopped. As the old woman stepped into it, Tamara scanned the road for one of her own. She was in luck. It swerved obligingly into the kerb and she got in, indicated Honor Tait’s cab, idling at traffic lights one hundred yards down the road and, shrinking from the cliché—but what else could she say?—commanded: “Follow that taxi!”

The driver shot her a quizzical look in the rearview mirror. The traffic lights were in their favour, delaying Honor Tait long enough for Tamara to catch up.

“What’s your game?” he asked.

“Game?”

She craned her neck to keep sight of the other cab, which had shot ahead.

“Tax inspector? Disability fraud investigator?”

“No. No. I’m a journalist.”

“A story! Used to be in the print myself. Old Fleet Street. Happy days.”

Soon they were in the Marylebone Road.

“Ever drink in the Stab in the Back?” he asked.

“No.”

“You missed yourself there, love,” he said, shaking his head at memories of better times, as he nipped between a couple of idling double-deckers.

“We’re losing them!” she said.

He cut up a post office van, and the other taxi was back in view.

“Keep your hair on, Sherlock.”

At the next set of lights they drew alongside Honor Tait’s taxi, and Tamara shrank into her seat. Her cabbie wound down his window and gestured to the other driver.

“All right, John?”

“Yeah. Not so bad.”

Honor Tait’s strained little face was clearly visible, staring ahead at the broad neck of her cabbie. Tamara, pressing herself against the far door, slid further down the seat.

“Haven’t seen you down the clubhouse in months.”

“Rotator cuff tendinitis been playing up.”

“Tough one. You want to watch that. Can lead to excessive anterior translation of your humerus head.”

“Got an ultrasound Monday. Checking for calcification.”

“Nasty. Could play havoc with your follow-through.”

The lights changed, and both taxis turned companionably in parallel into Harley Street and then into Wimpole Street. There Tamara’s driver finally had the wit to hold back, waving on his colleague with a genial “Be lucky!” Tait’s taxi pulled in thirty yards ahead, outside a grand house with wide stone steps and two prim topiary trees flanking double doors.

“Here’s fine,” Tamara said, watching the old woman mount the steps and ring the bell.

As soon as Tait disappeared inside, Tamara paid her driver, giving him a generous tip.

“You’re in luck, Sherlock,” he said, handing her a book of blank receipts. “I usually charge extra for undercover work.”

The double door was black and glossy, framed by strips of beveled glass whose facets sparkled in the winter sunlight. The polished brass door knob was as big as a cantaloupe. Tamara squinted through the glass into the entrance hall. It was tiled in black and white like a chessboard, and she could make out the curved wooden banisters of a stone staircase. Outside, to the right of the door, was an entry phone with a brass nameplate, engraved with the perplexing consonant clusters that declared this was a warren of private doctors’ consulting rooms.

She made a note of the names and initials: “Professor Hereward Browning MBChB FRCS(Plast); Miss Isabella Kerr MBBS FRCS(Glas);
Rose A. McCotter MBBS FRCS(OFMS); Dr. Didier Mooney MBChB FRCP; Mr. F. Bose Dch DGM FRCOG; Mr. Eliot J. Tregunter BDS FDSRCS.”

Now all Tamara had to do was wait. As she turned from the door an elderly woman in a fur coat, her snowy hair as stiffly peaked as meringue, brushed past her with a lofty tilt of the head and pressed the buzzer for Professor Browning. Another candidate for cosmetic surgery, innately hostile to the young and attractive.

There was something especially repugnant about these ancient women who allowed white-coated mercenaries to dismantle and rearrange their faces, like tailors altering an ill-fitting suit. All the pain, the blood, the bruising, the money. And for what? No one would actually fancy them, no matter how much surplus skin had been sheared off or fat had been sucked out. They were beyond desire. Their own, or other people’s. They should take up lace making, cultivate their grandchildren, or their gardens. They had had their go; it was someone else’s turn. My turn, thought Tamara.

It was not entirely rational, but she could not help thinking that the visible effects of extreme old age—the withered skin, the drooping jowls and shrivelled lips—were the result of simple carelessness. The crones had not paid attention. They had let themselves go. Though discipline was not her strongest suit, Tamara was scrupulous about her beauty regime. She cleansed, toned and moisturised regularly, and never left the flat without applying SPF15 sunblock. Honor Tait was reaping the consequences of a lifetime’s negligence—Tamara guessed the old woman had never used sunscreen and had probably washed her face with soap and water all her life.