The Spoiler (33 page)

“Don’t worry about it,” she said.

“Honest, Tam. That’s brilliant. I’ll pay you back. Anything. I know I owe you, big-time.”

“Well, listen, maybe there’s one favour you might do for me. A work thing …”

She kept it simple. She could not rely on her brother’s discretion, any more than she could rely on his honesty or self-discipline.

“Work?” Her brother raised his eyebrow playfully. “Oh, right. You can call it whatever you like, sis. Secret’s safe with me.”

“There’s no secret.” She bridled. “I just wanted to have a private word with him. Mutual advantage, sort of thing. Work-based, like I say.”

“You sly devil, Tam.” He winked. “He’s more Crystal’s pal than mine. An old mate. Family stuff. But trust me, I’ll sort it.”

Ross flashed his ruined teeth in an Artful Dodger smile.

Tamara was feeling high again. She had taken another couple of pulls on a joint before Dev announced that he was leaving and Ross had suggested, a little too chirpily maybe, that he might give his little sister a lift. And here she was, sitting in the passenger seat of his van, thrillingly adjacent to a desirable man who also happened to hold the key to the biggest story of her career.

“The tube all right for you?”

His voice was as smooth and rich as a TV voiceover—an advert for a malted bedtime drink, perhaps.

“Great.”

She watched his hands—strong and sure, with delicate fingers—resting on the steering wheel, and found herself imagining them playing across her breasts. As he stared at the road, she slyly studied his profile, taking pleasure in its perfection: his nose straight and fine, with faintly flared nostrils; the slight jut of his upper lip inviting a kiss; his chin with its dusting of stubble, abrasive proof that he was all man, not some overgrown pretty boy.

He glanced towards her, catching her stare.

“How well do you know Crystal?” he asked.

She turned her gaze to the road ahead.

“Not that well … She’s more my brother’s—Ross’s—friend.”

“Right.”

“You?”

“We go way back. Practically family.”

His laugh was ironic. He must have known what an unlikely pair he and Crystal made; he heroically handsome and athletic, she a ghoulish wreck.

He slowed to turn a sharp corner and, as he moved the gear stick, his hand brushed against her knee and Tamara experienced an enfeebling swell of pleasure.

“Seems … hospitable. Crystal, I mean,” she said presently.

He laughed.

“Hospitable? You could say that …” He turned briefly to look at her. “You’re some kind of writer, aren’t you?”

“Sort of. A bit. Here and there.” She hoped he didn’t detect the tremor in her voice. “How do you know?”

“Ross—your brother—mentioned it. He’s proud of you, isn’t he?”

She felt an inconvenient tug of guilt.

“How about you?” she asked. “What do you do?”

He ran a hand through his hair.

“Me? I’m a clairvoyant.” He grinned.

“Really?” Tamara smiled back. “So what’s the future got in store for me, then?”

He narrowed his eyes.

“Mmm. I see a journey ahead. A long tunnel, dark, all the way to Hornsey.”

He was wearing some kind of exotic scent, a sweet, aromatic oil that was beginning to make her eyes smart.

“You’re good!” she said. “Except there isn’t a tube station in Hornsey. You must be channelling Turnpike Lane.”

“That’s it!” he said. “I overreached myself. There
will
be a tube station in Hornsey—in a couple of decades. Mark my words.”

She laughed and looked out at the empty streets, playing for time.

“Tell me, Dev, what’s your last name? Where are you from?”

“So many questions!” he mocked her lightly. “My name is Dev, just the one name, and I’m from everywhere and nowhere.”

“Just Dev?”

“I used to have two names, like everyone else. But when I started on
The Path, I jettisoned everything I didn’t need. A second name was just one more worthless material possession. Dev is Sanskrit. It means ‘follower of God.’ That’s good enough for me.”

“Right,” Tamara said. “One name, one syllable.”

“I like to leave a light footprint on the planet.”

Was he teasing her? They had pulled up outside the tube station. Time was short.

“Can you make a good living as a clairvoyant?”

“I work as a healer, too.”

“Healing? In what way?” she asked.

He leaned towards her and lowered his voice.

“In
every
way.”

“You mean like the laying-on-of-hands stuff?”

He cupped his hands and held them towards her, smiling.

“Yeah. I’ve got healing hands.”

“So, what do you do with them?”

She had stepped into a minefield of innuendo. But if he had noticed, he let it pass.

“Aura massage, crystals, prismpuncture, spirit painting, psychic surgery …”

Aura massage! An unpleasant vision loomed of Honor Tait lying naked, a withered peat-bog mummy, awaiting the ministrations of Dev and his healing hands.

“Prismpuncture?”

“You know acupuncture? It’s like that, only instead of needles we use colours.”

Tamara strained to picture it. She had a horror of needles—unlike Ross—and, though acupuncture had been recommended as a hangover cure, she had always avoided it.

“Colours?”

“Specially treated glass vials of pure colour. You apply them to the pressure points. So, you’ve got kidney problems? I hold a vial of red in the second quartile of your lower back. The energy radiates the blood.”

Was her story about to shrivel away? Could this be the service Honor Tait was paying for in the restaurant?
OLD WOMAN CONSULTS HIPPIE QUACK
would not make an arresting headline. But Tamara could not imagine Tait having much time for alternative therapies of any sort. And it would not explain the kiss, or the cash-stuffed envelope.

He continued: “Or you’re feeling jaded? I apply yellow to the third meridian just below your throat. We get fantastic results. And it’s completely noninvasive.”

“Where do you do all this?”

“Clapton.”

Not so far, then.

“I hold surgeries at my flat,” he continued. “Workshops, too—past lives, inner voices, angelology, life coaching.”

Life coaching. Was that it? She tried to imagine Honor Tait sitting attentively while this seductive huckster dispensed advice on her life, or what was left of it. Then again, Tamara thought, looking across at Dev, she could do with some life coaching herself. That and the gentle application of some healing hands.

“Wow. Brilliant,” she said. “In fact, I’m a pretty spiritual person myself.”

“You know, I could tell. Straight away.”

He glanced at his watch then reached in his pocket to pull out a business card. It was grey and grainy, as if made from compressed oatmeal, and the words, “Dev—Master Prismpuncture practitioner (RCPP—First Class). Aura Massage,” were printed in heavy gothic script.

He took out a fountain pen and wrote down a phone number in violet ink.

“Give me a ring, Tamara. I’ve got a good feeling about you. You’ve got a beautiful aura. There’s a lot of purple in there. It’s the colour of truth. And gold. The colour of strength. Lots of gold.”

“Wow.”

He leaned in closer to her, and she looked up, startled.

“Look, I’ve just had another premonition,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“If you don’t run, you’ll miss the last tube.”

Honor had not heard from Ruth or Clemency, and Bobby was not responding to her messages. Inigo, still absurdly puffed up by the success of his show, had flown to New York with a girl he had picked up at his opening. Even Paul had been out of contact. Aidan had gone to France with Jorge for a week, and before he left he phoned to tell her that Paul had been seen at the National Theatre, on the arm of Martha Gellhorn. Paul was just Gellhorn’s type, Honor supposed.

She stood at the window and watched a young family, a husband and wife in their early thirties, probably American, as they bumped an aerodynamically styled pushchair down the steps towards the garden. These fashionable young people were so preening in their parenthood, as if they had invented the whole arrangement. The carriage lurched towards the pavement, and the toddler, muffled in blankets, hat and mittens, swayed as impassively as a Himalayan idol in a mountainside procession. There was love, Honor supposed, its invisible, indivisible chains clanking behind them.

Her eye had been drawn in that morning’s paper to a story on Diogenes syndrome. If this was an affliction of age, she thought at first glance, she would welcome it. She had been intrigued by the Greek philosopher ever since she came across references to him when she was a rebellious schoolgirl, at a time when cynicism had seemed the only rational world-view. Diogenes’ choice of poverty and simplicity, his decision to forgo all possessions and to live in a barrel, was particularly attractive to a girl whose home life was characterised by material abundance and intellectual poverty.

But now she looked more closely at the article and saw that Diogenes syndrome was a misnomer. In fact, the condition was characterised
by obsessive hoarding of rubbish and was more properly termed “senile squalor syndrome.” Sufferers turned their homes into midden mazes, stacking piles of newspapers, rags, old tins, food wrappers, even faeces, and they often lay dead and undiscovered in their tunnels of trash for weeks.

No danger of that here. But there was still some work to do. She switched on the radio. Muslim riots shake China. IRA abandons six-hundred-pound bomb in Strabane. Bosnian Croats open fire on Muslims in Mostar. Ramadan ends in more violence in Algeria. She walked to the window. The news from Mr. Bose had not helped her mood. The colonoscopy had been inconclusive—would she care to submit to another? Outside, against the clear night sky, the moon was a neon crescent and in the garden the slender limbs of the beeches were pale as bone against the prison bar silhouette of the railings.

Her isolation had an undeniably different quality to the solitude she had once welcomed. Today it drained; then it irradiated. As a young woman she had been filled with a purity of purpose. Work was the thing—the urge to tell, and to tell it first. And friendship and love, if not always the enemies of truth, were not its most assiduous allies. She had worked remorselessly, cultivated a stringent emotional self-sufficiency, and told the truth no matter what it cost her. But her reputation among her colleagues, distilled, in the cheap, reductive way of these things—she became the subject of two silly romans-à-clef by
Tribune
reporters—was simply for a glamorous ruthlessness. And her reputation now? She should be beyond caring. But still she worried at her work, a terrier with an old bone. She reached for the proofs of
The Unflinching Eye
.

The initials were dizzying, and the piece quite unmoving. Her memory of the visit to Melouza had completely vanished as, presumably, had any trace of the murdered boys and men of the village. And if
she
found the piece arid and unengaging, how was a reader expected to respond? She wondered why Ruth was bothering with this third book. Was it a form of vanity publishing, which flattered the ego of publisher rather than writer? Then let Ruth do the editing. Honor had no wish to look at any of this stuff—old news from a vanished world—ever again. But only she could revisit Goethe’s Oak. Here was a chance to put something right.

The central heating was humming away, consuming money she did not have, and she was cold to the bone. Nothing could warm her, not the blankets she had draped over herself in the chair, not alcohol, not the fake fire twinkling feebly in the grate. She had turned, like a distant relative of Lot’s wife, into a pillar of ice. Was this a similar punishment for the same crime? Had they both looked back, lingering indecently, relishing the details of scenes too brutal for mortal eyes?

Simon was sulking. He had given up Morning Conference, he said on the phone.
Psst!
was Tania’s baby now. Let her read the list, and all her
other lists, and listen to everyone else’s lists at all the other meetings, and try to wrest a smile from Wedderburn, and laugh at his miserable jokes.

“But you can’t let her get away with it, ride roughshod over us, just like that,” Tamara said. “We’ve got one more month in reader-friendly full-colour paper format before we vanish into cyberspace. We’ve done all the work and we deserve the credit.
Psst!
needs proper representation.”

“You go then,” was his curt reply. “I’m still at Davina’s. I’ll see you at lunchtime.”