The Spoiler by Annalena McAfee Page A

nausea.
    “I suppose you’ve done your homework too, gone through the archives, studied the cuttings?”
    “I read as much as I could, yes,” Tamara protested. “I was only assigned the interview this week, and I’ve been doing other stories in between. Could we get back to your tea with Hitler?” She looked over at her Sony: still recording.
    Honor chided herself for lowering her guard for a moment. The girl was a hostile presence, professional in her scepticism if in nothing else, not some neophyte sitting rapt at her feet, revelling in her recollections.
    “I’ve said all I need to say on the subject. You can read—you can reread—the episode in the book. Next question …?”
    “Could you tell me something about your childhood?”
    Honor rolled her eyes.
    “Is that really necessary?”
    The last time Tamara had encountered anything approaching this degree of obstructiveness was when she interviewed a third-rate American TV star who was taking over the lead in a long-running West End musical. He had agreed to open a new shopping centre in Sydenham. After queuing for twenty minutes in the corridor outside his hotel suite with half a dozen other journalists, Tamara had been ushered into his presence by flunkies and given exactly five minutes to wring out three hundred words for the
Sydenham Advertiser
’s In Town show-business column. He lay sprawled on a sofa, his hair a lacquered bonnet, his tan so florid it could have been a symptom of advanced liver failure, puffing on a cigar and chugging champagne. He had sniggered malevolently at all her questions. But she had persevered.
    Now she gathered her resolve and gave Honor Tait a challenging look.
    “Childhood. That’s usually the starting point in these in-depth interviews,” Tamara said.
    Honor shook her head.
    “I’m sorry, Tara. We’re here to talk about the book. I’m a journalist, not some attention-seeking actress. And you are not hosting a television talk show.”
    Tamara wondered if the old woman was deliberately getting her name wrong. She lowered her head, scribbling randomly in her notebook to allow herself time to collect her thoughts.
    “But it
is
relevant,” she said, looking up at last. “Your past. What made you take off like that? Break with tradition, the expectations of your class at that time?”
    “Goodness! A Marxist! How recherché.”
    “I mean your mother. Wasn’t she an aristocrat or something? She wouldn’t have … in those days … Did it affect your relationship?”
    “The psychoanalytic approach, too?”
    Honor laughed. She had often marvelled at the resilience of the twentieth century’s greatest pseudo-science. She remembered the ascetic room with its Buddhist memorabilia, like the vestibule of a Thai restaurant, where she had visited Dr. Kohler five days a week during a tricky patch in the sixties. They had talked about her childlessness, her mother, and her father, and her governesses, and the nuns, and her dreams; all a stupendous waste of money and energy. And time. She could forgive Dr. Kohler, a kindly old humbug merchant, not a charlatan, but what had
she
been doing? A grown woman whining and mewling like an infant about her barrenness—a choice made in her twenties that became inescapable biological fact in her thirties—and her long-dead mother? And her dreams? Since then Honor had thought that advances in neuroscience had seen off that canard. But no, the horoscope-reading class continued to look for portents and insights in the random electrical impulses generated by the brain at rest. And this little nobody, clearly, was a member of that class.
    “They’re just the standard interview questions. The questions we ask everyone,” the girl said, with unexpected firmness.
    “Standard questions? As in one size fits all? Don’t you ever wonder why your interviews are so bland and devoid of substance?”
    Tamara stiffened. She was not going to be defeated. What Honor Tait had not accounted for was