Free The Spoiler by Annalena McAfee Page A

choose.”
    The pleasure Honor had derived from taunting the girl was beginningto drain away. She was reminded of those absurd games that had been imposed on her and her brothers at Christmas. A dull word contest, perhaps: agony for the children, hilarious for the adults. Or charades: an opportunity for drunken grown-ups to show off to one another.
    “You could always pick something from the book,” Honor said.
    “I don’t want to just lift whole passages from it,” Tamara replied, though that was precisely what she intended to do. “It would be useful to convey a sense of you in conversation, relaxed, at home …”
    That she was at home Honor could not deny. But relaxed? And in conversation? With this girl?
    “An interview is not my idea of a conversation. Perhaps you should just get on and ask your questions.”
    Tamara bit her pencil and glanced over at the Sony. The red light was still glowing; the machine dutifully recording her humiliation. Bucknell, who was taking an unusually long time to pack away his equipment, was back on his knees, fussing over his bag. This would be all round
The Monitor
in hours.
    “What was it
really
like to be a woman journalist in the nineteen forties and fifties?” asked Tamara with a sudden briskness.
    “Much the same as it was to be a male journalist,” Honor said. “Though the scarcity of sanitary napkins in war zones was less of an issue for them.”
    There was another cough—a smoker’s gurgling hawk—and Honor and Tamara looked over to the photographer, who was now standing, apparently chastened but impatient.
    “When this young man picks up his handbag and leaves,” Honor said, “we can have a cup of tea. Perhaps it will help you get your thoughts in order.”
    Bucknell glanced at Tamara and raised his eyebrows in an unwelcome expression of solidarity before turning to go.
    “You can let yourself out, can’t you?” Honor said, rising stiffly from her chair.
    She went into the kitchen, and Tamara caught a glimpse of cream vinyl and fluorescent strip lighting. Bucknell, keeping an eye on the door, gingerly pulled a smaller camera from his pocket, took some general shots of the room, then moved in for close-ups of the photographs on the bookcase and wall, as well as one of a smiling elderly man on aside table by Honor Tait’s chair. The magazine was bound to need additional material to illustrate the piece, and this legitimate pilfering of a few extra images would save time and costly hours of picture research. As Honor filled the kettle and clattered crockery, he looked at Tamara and winked—a gesture even more repulsive than his thumbs-up. Pausing to peek into the bedroom down the hall and take one last picture, he left the flat, shutting the door quietly behind him.
    “Milk and sugar?” Honor called from the kitchen.
    “Just milk, please,” Tamara said, pressing the pause button on her tape recorder and getting up to take a closer look at the photographs. She recognised the Golden Girl picture from the cuttings. Was that really her, Honor Tait, pert and voluptuous in shorts, smiling at the moustachioed soldier? With Franco. Or was it Castro? Hard to believe that the crooked hag filling the kettle in the kitchen was once this soft-eyed beauty who, according to the cuttings, had outfoxed and bewitched some of the most famous men of the past century.
    Tamara shuddered. She wanted to get old—it was better than the alternative. Her mother’s breast cancer had inoculated Tamara against the romantic view, expressed by flippant friends, that early death with smooth complexion and toned physique was preferable to life post-menopause as a slack-skinned frump. Her mother, who had died at forty-six, would have chosen life at any price. But looking at the radiant girl in the photograph, and hearing her decrepit counterpart shuffle around the kitchen, Tamara knew she did not want to get that old. There were limits.
    Looking at the photographs of Honor Tait in