The Spoiler (28 page)

Honor had insisted on leaving immediately and was then obliged to sit through a dismal meal between Inigo, inflated as a dirigible with first-night grandiosity, and Aidan, spraying caustic asides over Inigo’s boasts like a crazed tail gunner. Ruth was unable to persuade Paul to stay beyond the first course: He had a story to file. And how Honor had wished, as he scraped back his chair and rushed self-importantly to the waiting taxi, that it had been she who was fleeing this table—the smeared wineglasses, the blasted landscape of soiled china and half-eaten food, the ring of tired familiar faces, the din of small talk and mindless conviviality rising from it like noxious fumes—and rushing off to deliver her account of grave matters, of war and strife, hunger and pestilence.

Alone in her flat, she poured a drink. She was not done yet. No one was clamouring for it, but she had one more piece to file.

Pernilla Perssen was back on the bottle. She was photographed in the early hours of the morning, puking outside a nightclub in the West End, hair tumbling over her face, looking up at the camera with a perplexed squint. That settled the question of this week’s A-List: “Losers and Boozers—Top Ten Rehab Write-Offs.” Caleb Hawkins, recently suspended from his Premier League side, and Tod Maloney would also make an appearance. Tamara just had time to put in a quick call to Ruth Lavenham before Simon got back from Morning Conference. There was a chance that no one had recognised Tamara in the melee at the gallery, but if they had she needed to get in her apology before any complaints reached Lyra Moore or Austin Wedderburn.

The publisher’s phone switched immediately to the answering machine.

“Got your glad rags for the awards tonight?” Simon called out as he walked into the office.

Courtney scowled.

“You bet,” Tamara said.

They left the office early. Courtney had grudgingly arranged a fleet of cabs to take the basement invitees to the dinner. Tamara found it as soothing as intravenous Valium to sit in the taxi in her scarlet halter neck, abandoning anxieties about last night’s setback, anticipating an evening of excitements, and vaguely listening in passive silence to Simon’s latest plot summary. Lucinda was out of the picture, and he was tiring of Serena, who was making unreasonable demands about holidays, flats and divorce. She was a lovely girl, he conceded, but the spark had gone.
Davina, however, was another proposition. Had he told Tamara about Davina? The polo-playing blonde in food PR he had met last week at a Thames Valley pork-pie launch?

“She’s really something, Davina,” he said, shaking his head in pleasurable despair over the impossibility of summoning sufficient superlatives to describe her. “Ravishing. A free spirit. Great form. And we’ve got so much in common. She makes me laugh like no one else. Plus which, she’s loaded.”

“Sounds great.”

He shook his head again and whistled softly.

“Amazing. I tell you. The real thing.”

Right on cue, his mobile phone rang. His eyes widened and, looking over at Tamara, he pointed at the phone.

“That’s her,” he mouthed, as if Davina might overhear him before he had even answered the phone.

“Go ahead,” Tamara whispered.

Even more restful than vaguely listening to Simon talking to her about his love life, was the prospect of vaguely listening to Simon talking to someone else. She did not even have to make the effort of nodding and smiling.

It had been two decades since Honor attended one of these events. Then she had been presented with a lifetime-achievement award—a clunky tangle of copper, supposed to represent a pen and notepad, which looked like a distressed sundial by that old fraud Dalí. Did it seem indecent, or even ghoulish, to return to the press awards, albeit in a non-speaking role as Bobby’s companion for the evening? She must have been the oldest person in the room, and she was unsettled by the glances of apparent recognition and the deferential smiles she received as they made their way into the Belvedere Park Hotel.

The ceremony was held in the ballroom, an impersonal arena framed by smoked-glass mirrors, with brutalist chandeliers cascading from the ceiling like shards of ice. Sixty circular tables radiated from the stage in a mandala of fractured light—silver cutlery, glinting glass, winking bottles—and were gradually filled by journalists and executives, the
women rustling self-importantly in taffeta and silk as if at a Glyndebourne first night, the men swaggering in tuxedos like hired thugs.

The Bishop of Limehouse, in a crimson robe almost identical to the floor-length gown worn by
The Sphere
’s bosomy agony aunt, stood to say grace, and Honor watched the heads of atheists, blasphemers and habitual sinners bow respectfully in prayer for truth and integrity and give humble thanks for the gifts that were about to be bestowed.

The food was execrable, served by anxious illegal immigrants costumed like footmen and parlour maids, and the wine was poisonous and plentiful. Bobby’s table was relatively temperate, but waiters struggled to keep up with the demand for more bottles elsewhere as the evening began its slow unravelling. Honor, pushing aside her smoked salmon parcels, pink as prostheses, wondered whether it was her emeritus presence that was restraining Bobby’s colleagues.

Around them, greetings and insults were roared to friends and rivals, faces grew ruddy, bow ties slipped their horizontal axes and stilettos dangled absently from stockinged feet. Impossible to tell the tabloids from the broadsheets. Shouting over the boisterous din, Bobby, sitting by Honor’s good ear, gave a commentary. That braying popinjay, an old Harrovian with a first from Cambridge and a doctorate in Gaelic panegyrics, was chief leader writer on
The Daily Mirror
. The hefty skinhead with a diamond stud in his ear was a comprehensive-educated Dagenham boy, said to have worked as a merchant seaman before turning to journalism. A first-rate sub, he edited
The Times
’s Court Circular page. The scowling girl in lawyer’s monochrome, resentfully cradling a glass of mineral water and looking at her watch, put Honor in mind of the young Margaret Thatcher, with her bright centurion’s helmet of lacquered hair. A former head girl of Cheltenham Ladies’ College and an Oxford economics scholar, this formidable young woman was now the disciplinarian foreign editor of
The Guardian
.

The volume dipped again, and there was applause as the compère took the stage. He was a plump little man with a Midlands accent and an emphysemic laugh.

“Jimmy Whipple,” Bobby explained to Honor. “TV comedian. Got a gong in the New Year’s honours.”

He was savagely cheerful, and his patter was coarse, derisive and tailored for his audience. He had been well briefed, and there was strident
appreciation for his insiderish references to a sports desk coup at
The Monitor
, a news desk punch-up at
The Courier
and the expenses claims of an unnamed features editor on an unspecified paper for weekly sessions at a Mile End massage parlour.

“No, but seriously,” was his catchphrase, greeted each time he said it with an outburst of inexplicable laughter from the audience. Bobby pointed out
The Monitor
table, where its editor, Austin Wedderburn, presided warily over his disorderly charges like an elderly virgin at the Feast of Lupercal.

There were whistles and whoops as Whipple was joined on stage by four young vamps in brief, low-cut black frocks and fishnet tights. Honor assumed they were there to hand out the awards, like mutely decorative game-show hostesses, until musical instruments were produced. They were members of a string quartet, winners of a recent television talent contest. This was clever programming—Haydn for the broadsheets, played by page-three girls for the tabloids. The ballroom fell silent as the musicians sawed with grim competence through a single movement of Opus 33, no. 1. The applause was appreciative. Whipple sighed and said: “In my next life, I want to come back as a cello.”

The puddings, vivid gelatine squares, like miniature Mondrians on a slick of crimson sauce, were toyed with, the espressos poured and the chocolate mints distributed. Some tables were becoming raucously impatient, demanding arcane liqueurs, and Whipple departed from his script and began to taunt the rowdier male elements.

“No, but seriously. You lot. Big noise, small members. Saw it with my own eyes in the john just before I came on. Microtechnology isn’t in it.”

Several men, including
The Mirror
leader writer, stamped their feet and whistled. It was time for the prizes.

Honor had anticipated a childish element of intertable barracking as the winners were announced and they stepped up to the stage to receive awards—for Scoop, News Reporter, Sports Writer, and Feature Writer of the Year. There had been some mild, affable heckling twenty years ago, though a respectful silence had fallen when she had walked onstage to receive her own prize. But she was unprepared for this degree of hostility. Acceptance speeches were shouted ineffectually against a storm of boos
and catcalls, while more belligerent winners semaphored their success with raised fists, or two fingers thrust defiantly at their rivals.

Bobby, who thought the evening far more diverting than his usual high-table dinners or poetry book launches, registered Honor’s astonishment.

“Cocaine,” he whispered.

Twenty-two tables away, towards the back of the hall, by the kitchen’s swing doors, Tamara Sim sat with her elbow on the table, fondling her wineglass. The evening was not panning out as she had hoped. The food was elaborate and tasteless and they’d just had to endure some pompous classical music played by Goth schoolgirls. She had spotted Tim earlier in the foyer with an anorexic nymphet, and she was sure he had dodged into the Gents to avoid her. Now she was straining to give the appearance of rapt interest as Alistair Porter, the weasel-featured picture editor of
Psst!
, described the latest managerial outrage.

“Thing is, you know we’re fully stretched already and once Jamal goes …”

Tamara frowned sympathetically over her Merlot—at least the wine was not bad, and the supply was limitless—and silently cursed Simon. Why had he sat her next to this earnest creep? On her other side was Tania, whose tawny back, visible through an artful slit in her lime silk dress, was eloquently turned. She was lecturing Simon on the relative merits of various Web browsers, about “the greenhouse effect,” and about Kosovan politics. Treacherously, he seemed to be enthralled.

All the interesting and useful people were on
The Monitor
’s main table, 150 feet away. Tamara had located them by taking a circuitous route to the Ladies before dessert. The head of Circulation and Marketing, Erik Havergal, was confiding in Lyra Moore, aloof and impeccable in pristine navy, while Johnny Malkinson, in fuchsia cummerbund, matching bow tie and grey tails, market-testing a fashion special on “The New Formality,” was gesturing vigorously at the managing editor, who was staring aghast at his untouched plate. Austin Wedderburn was listening with apparent interest to the paper’s majority shareholder, a pock-faced property millionaire from Vilnius who owned a string of Isthmian League
football clubs. These were the career makers, yet here she was, marooned at the back of the room, in career-breaking social exile, listening to the feeble complaints of no-hoper Alistair Porter.

He drank greedily as he spoke.

“Thing is, they can’t just take my parking space away …”

As he droned on, Tamara clung to the hope that there would be opportunities for networking at the bar later. The decibel levels were rising again. There was a fanfare—a blast of recorded trumpets—and on stage, Jimmy Whipple said, “No, but seriously, the moment you’ve all been waiting for …”

Relieved, Tamara turned from Alistair to the stage.

All around the ballroom, men—and some women—were heckling now, stamping their feet and whistling at the tiny figures on the distant stage. The scarlet-cheeked northerner, stout as a circus strongman, who was crowned Regional Journalist of the Year, had apparently prepared his speech on the train down from Doncaster. Prevented by the din from delivering it, he turned his back on the howling audience, bent over and dropped his trousers. He received another distinction: the loudest cheers of the evening.

“The Fall of Rome,” Honor said, nodding vigorously. The strain of the evening had set off her tic.

“The tenth circle of hell,” said Bobby. “I’m sorry I put you through this.”

The scene at the next table, occupied, according to Bobby, by the tabloid
Sunday Sphere
, could have been painted by Hogarth. One man, bald and violet-cheeked, was drinking straight from the bottle, apparently unaware of the rivulet of red wine running down his shirtfront, and another seemed to have fallen asleep on the table, like the Dormouse in
Alice in Wonderland
, while next to him a woman with a sulfurous suntan and wrinkled décolletage was silently weeping. A wan girl in a pink slip sat on the lap of an overweight executive and looped her bony arms round his neck. His extravagant froth of grey hair resembled an eighteenth-century periwig and he seemed to be fellating an oversize cigar.

Honor was tired. She knew Bobby’s colleagues would interpret her
disapproval as old-maidish prudery. But even in terms of debauchery these people were amateurs. How would they have fared at Henry’s Laurel Canyon parties in the 1950s? It was the vulgarity that was so repellent. Once she might have felt dishonoured by association, experiencing a sense of collective disgrace in the company of colleagues capable of such boorishness. Now she felt no connection at all with these people, and her exile from the trade that had once defined her suddenly seemed like liberation.

It was easy to lose track of the events on stage from this distance, but Tamara echoed the cheers and taunts of her colleagues. The compère was racing though them now; he had reached the bottom of the list, the sediment—Sports Headline of the Year, Layout Sub of the Year, Business Reporter of the Year—and the audience was beginning to lose interest.