The Spoiler (43 page)

“No!!” Honor Tait brought down her hand on the table with a force that made the photograph of her last husband rock precariously. It was, Tamara realised now, the only photograph left in the room. “That’s it. There’ll be no more stories.”

“But there will be. You know that. This story will run for years, decades, as long as there are papers to print it and people to read it. Unless we put a stop to it now. Publish the truth.”

“We?” Honor shrank back into her chair. “Don’t, for a moment, assume that you and I have anything—even a shared humanity—in common. I have no need for you or your kind. I withdraw my cooperation from this or any other story. It’s finished. The whole damned charade is over.”

“But why?” Tamara asked, her voice hoarse with indignation.

“That is quite the most stupid question you’ve asked all afternoon,” Honor said. “Now get out.”

As she walked towards the door Tamara turned to look back at the small seated figure, dwarfed by the room’s leaping shadows. In the lamplight Honor Tait’s face was set in a grimace of mad defiance, her head thrown back, her eyes blazing: an ancient Joan of Arc at the stake.

By the time Tamara arrived outside the Clapton flat, the flames were under control. The fire, onlookers said, had been mostly confined to the attic. Tamara saw the punk girl, barefoot in the cold, wearing only a sweatshirt and leggings, drinking tea with a couple of firemen. No one was hurt, they said, but there was some serious structural damage. Tamara had tried phoning him from a call box as soon as she left Holmbrook Mansions, but she had known, even as she dialled, that his number would be disconnected.

She walked over to the girl whose face was streaked with black tears—mascara, or smoke.

“You missed him,” she told Tamara, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “He left this morning. Said he was heading east, and he didn’t mean Canning Town. The vibe round here was bad, he said. Too much negative energy.” She gave a wry laugh. “And there will be, when the landlord finds out he’s gone. On top of all this”—she gestured at the attic, the broken, blackened windows and the caved-in roof—“he owed three months’ rent.”

Honor had all she needed for this journey on her bedside table: a jug of water, a glass and her cache of pills. The wireless was tuned to Radio 3. Schubert lieder. “Erlkönig.” Goethe again.

“My father, my father, oh do you not hear / What the Erl-king whispers into my ear?”

She picked up her notebook—the habit of work was hardest to break—and looked again at her latest revisions.

She flinched as she remembered the jubilant blows and the boy’s stare as he went down. His eyes, nursery blue in the ruin of his face, found hers. And then he cried out: “
Mutti! Mutti!
” Mother! Mother! His last words. The notebook slipped from Honor’s hand and fell to the floor.

The day before she had been to her GP, leaving and returning by the rear entrance of the mansion block. She had complained of angina. Heart pains. Half true, though the pains were not, in the main, physical. But the recent visit to her doctor would mean there would be no fuss, no need for an inquest. She had shaken her stockpiled tablets into a cup and thrown the bottles down the chute. Back in her bedroom, she emptied the pills into her palm and swallowed them, two handfuls, with the water, in four bitter mouthfuls. All her remaining strength was needed to suppress the urge to vomit. This was to be her last fight.

She drew the blankets up around her throat. She had completed her flat clearance. Her photographs of Tad and Daniel had been thrown down the chute with the last of her books and papers. All that remained was the final notebook, lying facedown on the floor. She had unplugged the phone and disconnected the doorbell. The maid was not due until next week. The doorman had agreed to post the letter—simple, evasive, no blame or recriminations—to her publisher, second-class. By the time she received it and hurried over to let herself into the flat with Bobby’s key, it would be finished, and self-important Ruth could be trusted to keep Honor’s final secret. Death from natural causes would be the story.

Ruth was to be executor of her will. The flat would be sold, debts paid and any residue to be given to an Alzheimer’s charity. There was no point in leaving it to Lois herself. And as for Daniel, he had had his final payment. She settled back on her pillows and closed her eyes, trying to still her mind and shut out this terrible sense of failure. Had Daniel been born bad? Or had she, the most unnatural of mothers, an observer of life rather than a participant, made him so?

Honor had often wondered what her last thoughts would be. Work,
whatever role it had played in her life, was not a matter for the deathbed. It would be people—memories of friends, family, lovers, enemies—who would provide the final torment or consolation. Would it be a slow fade, a gradual extinguishing of the lights? Or would she die in anguish, howling her regrets? She could not shake it, this sense of misdeeds returned to haunt her. The whimpering boy in that place of beauty and horror. And her own ruthless curiosity.

“My father, my father, he’s gripping me fast! / The Erl-king is hurting! Help me, I’m lost!”

She reached across the bed and switched off the radio.

Gradually the black void, vast as the universe, dissolved behind her closed eyes to a restless blue—Loch Buidhe, shimmering in its amphitheatre of soft green hills, and in the distance Ben Firinn, its peak shining with snow, rearing over its sister mountains. Not Ettersberg, then, and its sinister beech forests. This was an unexpected benediction. The hills and mountains around Glenbuidhe were, in world terms, topographical pygmies. But they were her own pure and lovely Himalayas. And there was her childhood home in the distance, restored to her, its granite bulk softened by evening light, a place of peace, perhaps for the first time. No sign of her parents. At peace, she hoped, also for the first time.

Here by the lodge at the water’s edge, gazing up at the mountains, she is not alone. By her side a small boy, solemn and trusting, reaches up and entwines his fingers in hers. They stand there silently, hand in hand, watching the light shifting on the mountains. Soon, the sun will set, showering golden embers on the loch, and they will go inside, prepare supper and light the fire against the cold night to come.

How ironic that it should have been Ross, who had never been good at beginnings or endings, or much else in between, who was to provide the story’s conclusion; Ross and crazy Crystal, whose sister Dawn’s tragic fate had been sealed eight years ago, the day she had met Danny Varga, also known as Dev, with whom she had shared an interest in New Age beliefs and old-style substance abuse. But this was not for publication. As Honor Tait had said, there were such things as private matters, and
no amount of money or promise of advantage would induce Tamara to talk about them. It was a question of integrity. Besides, another story had to be written.

It was a small victory, but a victory nonetheless, when Tamara’s piece on Honor Tait’s life and work finally appeared in
The Monitor
. Her hours of research, the interviews and her tireless legwork had not gone to waste, and there was the additional satisfaction in the thought of her new boss, currently in California for a technology conference, opening the paper and seeing Tamara’s name on a story that she, pompous, power-hungry Tania Singh, would have claimed as her own.

Some fudging of facts was necessary. But, Tamara reckoned, this was only fair. She owed it to the old woman. The piece was a good deal shorter than Tamara had anticipated, and unimaginative subeditors had cut many of her best lines, deleting the reference to T. S. Eliot’s West End musical and the mention of Tait’s close friendship with Lord Byron. They changed “transgressive” to “improper,” excised “hermeneutic” and refused to give way on “chthonic,” and the tone of the printed piece departed from that of her original drafts. But in the circumstances this was only to be expected. There was no point in being precious; adaptability was one of Tamara’s professional strengths, after all.
The Monitor
’s obituaries page was not
S
^*
nday
, but neither was it
Psst!
or
The Sphere
.

Tim’s job offer never materialised, and now it never would—he had been sacked, along with Gifford-Jones, after Tamara’s follow-up news story appeared in
The Monitor
and revealed the extent of Dev’s deception.
A PACK OF LIES—TAIT’S JUNKIE SON DUPES TABLOID
was the headline, and the picture byline beneath it was Tamara’s. They had used
The Sphere
’s photograph of the kiss, now revealed as an image of selfless maternal affection and a son’s betrayal, as well as Bucknell’s snap, furtively acquired from the bedside table during her first interview, of an angelic-looking boy holding Honor Tait’s hand outside the family home in Scotland. Johnny had sent Tamara a herogram, telling her that Wedderburn, delighted by the chance to expose the gullibility of other newspapers, and overlooking the fact that
The Monitor
had initially been taken in too, singled out her news story for praise in Morning Conference. Such a pity that Honor Tait, who had slipped into a coma as the presses rolled, never lived to see her name cleared so emphatically.

The story of tabloid folly and filial greed had ricocheted round the
world’s press, on the day Tamara’s cheque from
The Sphere
for the original story had been cleared and she sent Ross two thousand pounds to settle his debts. He could make a fresh start—or not—just as she was making a fresh start, with the obituary marking her second appearance in a week in the serious pages of
The Monitor
’s main paper. Her erstwhile protector, Simon, was no longer there, alas—a discrepancy over expenses had come to light, finally giving the management the excuse they had been looking for to sack him. So he was jobless as well as homeless. Jan, who had found out about Lucinda, and Davina, and all the rest, had kicked him out and taken up with the party planner who had organised their son’s eighteenth birthday celebration.

“A ‘party planner’! The guy’s sixteen years younger than her! Sleeping with my wife! In my bed! In my house! Can you believe it?” Simon said when he rang. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Get a grip, Simon,” Tamara said. “You’ve just got to move on.”

Just as she had moved on. Johnny, newly promoted as the paper’s deputy editor and tipped for Wedderburn’s job, had invited her to lunch at the Bubbles next week. She’d even been given a company cell phone, and Simon, before his untimely departure, had passed her a list of celebrity phone numbers and taught her a few useful tricks. She had already managed to access Pernilla Perssen’s voicemail. Pure journalistic gold. And now there was talk of a staff job on Features. She was on her way up. No question.