The Spoiler Read Free Page B

surprised to learn that the legendary reporter was still alive. Her knowledge of Tait’s oeuvre was limited—a piece on the wife of a Chinese dictator from the 1950s had been a set text in Tamara’s Media Studies course. According to the lecturer, Tait had borrowed a nurse’s uniform, bluffed her way into a hospital where the old woman was being treated and spent an hour at her bedside. The interview itself was as dry and uncompelling as a broadsheet leader, and Tamara got through her finals without actually reading it in its entirety.
    Chinese history, or history of any sort, had never much appealed to her. Nor, for that matter, had old-school journalistic heroines. In-depth profiles of elderly writers were not her usual beat, and the deadline—threeweeks—was tight. But she had been exhilarated by Lyra Moore’s terse proposal, sent via the office computer, that she “write 4,000 words on Honor Tait’s life and work, deadline 19 Feb for
S * nday
issue of 30 March, to coincide with Tait’s 80th birthday and publication of her new book.”
    Tamara worked four days a week on
The Monitor
as a freelance subeditor and occasional writer for
Psst!
, the paper’s Saturday celebrity gossip and TV listings magazine—a leering lout to
S * nday
’s snooty metaphysician. The world described in the primary-coloured pages of
Psst!
, peopled by sex-addicted soap stars and feuding boy bands, footballers’ anorexic molls and drug-taking TV hosts, was as remote from the intellectual aristocrats of
S * nday
as was Pluto, in both its planetary and Disney incarnations. Lyra Moore’s magazine, irreproachably elegant and cerebral, was regarded as the British riposte to
The New Yorker
, with the added appeal of pictures. Its pages, soft and slippery as silk, had most recently hosted a meditation on medieval aesthetics by Umberto Eco, a disquisition on Kierkegaard by George Steiner and an essay by Susan Sontag on the potency of the Polaroid, accompanied by instant photographs—mysterious, personal and touchingly ill-composed—taken one day last March by the recently besieged citizens of Sarajevo. All three writers were strangers to Tamara and, though she did her best to tackle their contributions to
S * nday
, she felt no compulsion to pursue their acquaintance by reading their books. Never mind the inclination, where would she find the time?
    She decided against the vampish slash of red lipstick—it accentuated her incipient cold sore—wiped her mouth with tissue, and opted for frosted pink. She had to look the part today. Groomed but unthreatening. A knee-length navy bias-cut skirt and matching jacket, white cotton blouse, beige trench coat and low-heeled court shoes—the sort of unexceptional outfit Princess Diana might wear on an official visit to a children’s hospital.
    Tamara knew this commission was going to be a trial of endurance, requiring a long interview and the obligation to write it up, at considerable length and in polysyllabic words, within a bracingly brief span of time. Four thousand words would, she was aware, be a struggle for someone more used to turning in a two-sentence caption story, a twelve-line list or a two-paragraph column on celebrity mishaps. Her occasional interviews might run to eight hundred words, and she had been calledon to produce two pieces of a thousand words each—a chequebook job with a transsexual lap dancer who claimed to have slept with a children’s TV presenter, and an exposé of the drug-taking teenage son of a senior policeman—for
The Sunday Sphere
. But four times that length?
    A great deal of typing would be involved, not to mention research.
    It was daunting, but a commission from Lyra Moore was the highest compliment any journalist could be paid. Five years after the launch of
S * nday
, its title was still uttered with quiet reverence, despite occasional stumbles over the typographic tic. Snobs admired Lyra Moore’s glossy for its intellectual cachet, while pragmatic hacks