Free The Spoiler by Annalena McAfee Page B

resplendent youth displayed so proudly in her £250,000 London flat and turning to her now is like watching that scene in
Last Horizon,
or was it
Lost Horizon?,
the movie masterpiece, when the chthonically beautiful (chk name) flees the protection of the magically hermetic valley only to wither horribly, ageing a thousand years in minutes before her lover’s terrified eyes
.
    The crockery rattled as Honor Tait carried in a tray bearing a teapot, two vividly patterned gold-rimmed cups, a jug of milk and a saucer of sliced lemon, and lowered it shakily onto a leather stool between the chairs. Tamara knew that an offer of assistance might cause offence. Shewatched apprehensively as the old woman poured the tea and the brown stream wavered dangerously over the cups.
    Using a pair of tongs, Honor dropped a sliver of lemon into one cup and passed the milk to Tamara. The girl could serve herself.
    “Well? Where were we?” Honor asked, raising her cup to her lips.
    Tamara’s gaudy cup rocked in its flooded saucer. For a reckless moment she was tempted to suggest that Tait had been in the middle of a detailed appraisal of Frank Sinatra’s performance in bed, but she held back and flipped through her notebook, looking at some of the questions she had prepared earlier, buying time.
    “You were telling me about the difficulties of being a woman in journalism when you started out.”
    Honor pursed her lips over the tea, then drew them back sharply, recoiling from the heat.
    “Was I? Well, I suppose journalism, like much else in those days, was a male domain. The newsroom was pungent with testosterone.”
    Was this what had attracted her to the job in the first place? Honor had sometimes wondered. It had provided an escape route, obviously, from family, from the limited roles available to women at that time, from the silken straitjacket of her class, offering freedom, purpose, adventure. Her parents had wanted nothing more for her than marriage to a member of their caste—landed, wealthy and philistine—and the nuns had groomed her for a life of modesty and self-abnegation. Both options were perfectly compatible, she knew. They were also abhorrent, denying curiosity, passion and ambition. She wanted to make her own way, forge a new kind of life, devour the world. Was there also an exhibitionist’s pleasure in storming the grim gentlemen’s clubs—part barracks, part monastery—that were the newspaper offices of the thirties and forties? Was it like breaching Mount Athos in a bathing costume? As she crossed the newsroom floor in her neat crepe suit, her heels tapping counterpoint to the thrumming wires and the clattering typewriters with their musical pings, had she enjoyed the sense that her colleagues were watching her, craning their necks, hungrily following her progress, mesmerised by the kinetic retreat of her stocking seams? Perhaps she had relished, more than the story itself, the moues of surprise from taciturn newsmen when they learned that it was a woman, and an attractive woman, who had turned in such an exemplary piece of work. There had also been thesingular rigours and, it could not be denied, the pleasures, of work in the field—fighting with them, eating with them, sleeping with them—the sole woman among men of action and men of war.
    “That must have been tough,” Tamara said.
    “I imagine it’s all lipstick and cheap scent at
The Monitor
these days,” Honor said.
    Tamara ignored the slight and looked again at her list of questions.
    “I wonder if you could tell me in your own words about some of the real-life incidents that inspired the book.”
    The old woman’s eyes narrowed to two sparks of spite. She had been prepared, for a moment, to give the girl the benefit of the doubt, but this was ridiculous.
    “Real life? In my own words? Do you think I made the whole thing up? And whose words are you suggesting that I used? Are you accusing me of plagiarism?”
    “Absolutely not. Of course not.”