The Spoiler Read Free

long out of print. The book, in its second incarnation, included her Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the liberation of Buchenwald and became a surprising
succès d’estime
. Honor Tait was “rediscovered” and, more gratifyingly, she was able to pay off some of her more pressing debts. The hope was that the new book,
Dispatches from a Dark Place: The Collected Honor Tait
, would repeat the trick. And next year, if all went well, there would be a third book, with the title, suggested by Ruth though resisted by Honor, of
The Unflinching Eye
.
    “Oh, come on,” Ruth had said when they discussed advance publicity for
Dispatches
, “an interview with the most respected magazine in the land? In the comfort of your own home? Where’s the harm in that? And in publicity terms it’s infinitely better than a double-page advert.”
    Cheaper, too. So Honor had capitulated. But she knew it was a mistake. On the few occasions in her life that she had consented to be interviewed, she had never admitted any reporter to her home. Even the most well-disposed journalist would regard the flat and its contentsas her psyche’s porthole, curtainless and illuminated in the dark. The
South Bank Show
conversation with Melvyn had been filmed at the London Library, where she had previously agreed—in a moment of reckless narcissism, justly rewarded by the photograph itself (a Halloween fright mask in hell’s reading room)—to pose for
Vogue
.
    Hotels, impersonal no-man’s-lands, stripped of signs and souvenirs, were best for these encounters. The most energetically malevolent reporter would find it hard to take you to task for the blandness of the interior decoration, the stains on the sofa or the musty smell pervading your room. Even then, in a corporate suite of beige leather and chrome, where the only indigenous books were the Gideon Bible and the Yellow Pages, you could be caught out, like poor John Updike. She had written him a note of sympathy after one newspaper interviewer had spotted a discarded pair of underpants under a chair in his hotel room and went on in her article to use the white briefs as a metaphor for what she considered to be the casual, masculine attitude to sex reflected in Updike’s fiction. It was the priggishness Honor had abhorred. Here in her flat, at least, thanks to the maid, there would be no underwear on view.
    It was an old technique: alight on an apparently insignificant object and use it to construct a catchpenny psychological case history of its owner. How else to sum up a life on the evidence of an hour’s conversation and a little legwork in the cuttings library? Honor had resorted to the practice more than once herself, particularly when the interviewee was unforthcoming. Every tchotchke tells a story. Even in the newest New Journalism, some things never change. She recalled her own blood-sport thrill when she had spotted the netsuke mule on MacArthur’s bureau in Tokyo; a playbill for a Max Miller burlesque in Beckett’s Montparnasse redoubt; the copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets by Mme Chiang Kai-shek’s hospital bedside; and the signed photograph of Ida Lupino in de Gaulle’s austere wartime office in Carlton Gardens.
    Could her own photographs, still on the bookcase and on the walls where Tad had first placed them, withstand such scrutiny? One black-and-white shot showed her as a young war reporter, lithe as a lioness and chic in fatigues among the grinning doomed boys before Normandy. Next to it was the iconic image, for
Collier’s
, sitting with Franco, newly appointed commandant general of the Canary Islands. Above the waist she was primly professional, her notebook and pen raised in a posture of exaggerated attentiveness, like a thirties stenographer. “Take a letter,Miss Tait.” Below she was all showgirl. Her long tanned legs, in tailored shorts and high-heeled sandals, looked as if they were on temporary loan from the Ziegfeld Follies. The picture was syndicated all over the world.