The Spoiler by Annalena McAfee Page A

barely out of high school, and had arrived at the front only hours before. One horribly wounded boy kept begging his comrade to shoot him—” Honor said, before breaking off.
    Had the girl really said “Fantastic?”
    It was touch and go. Honor gave her interviewer a beady look andstruggled to her feet to fetch a glass of water from the kitchen. Alone in the sitting room, Tamara stood to look around for some tangible leads to the real Honor Tait, not the grandiose soapbox orator. There was a pile of recently opened post by the vase of flowers. She picked up one card, a child’s garish drawing of a tree, and turned it over. It was a flyer about a meeting on “child exploitation” that was taking place next Wednesday to launch a new charity, Kids’ Crusaders. Honor Tait was listed as one of the speakers. Not exactly revelatory, but it could be useful. Tamara was noting the details when she heard the old woman coming back into the room.
    The monologue resumed. Honor had come too far to stop now. She sipped from her glass and was swept on by the tide of her narrative and a sense of the epic arc of her own life.
    “It was Lieutenant General Walker, Commander of the Eighth Army, who ordered me out of Korea, saying the battlefield was no place for a woman. MacArthur refused to get involved at first, saying it was Walker’s decision. But after I secured an interview with MacArthur in Tokyo, the ban on women reporters was lifted.”
    The task of extricating a lively article from this self-congratulatory litany would have defeated even one of
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’s Nobel Prize winners, Tamara thought. What chance did she stand?
    It was getting dark, and Honor Tait did not let up. She was describing the liberation of a concentration camp now.
    “Four days later, the surviving prisoners assembled to celebrate their freedom and mourn their dead. They had each fashioned their national flags from rags or scraps of paper they had somehow procured.”
    Tamara watched as the lights went on, a window at a time, in the building opposite, turning it into an illuminated Advent calendar of domestic interiors. But Honor Tait seemed indifferent to the gathering gloom.
    “You have to understand the chaos of war. Everything we had witnessed. We were all, press corps included, fired up by a monumental anger.”
    Tamara was finding all this bragging exhausting, and the cessation of hostilities between them had left more room for other anxieties. Without a mention of Hollywood, or husbands or lovers, not a hint of indiscretionor a shred of human interest, how on earth was she going to write four thousand words? And she had two freelance features to file this week before she could even make a start on the
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piece.
    “I’m really sorry, Miss Tait,” she said, glancing at her watch which, despite its luminous dial, she could barely read in the dusk. “I was so absorbed I completely lost track of the time. I have to go.”
    She closed her notebook.
    Honor felt a tug of disappointment. She had not talked about all this—even thought about it in any depth—for so long. It had been too painful. Under pressure from Ruth, she had rashly agreed to return to the subject and write a coda to her original Pulitzer Prize–winning report on Buchenwald for the next book. The prospect filled her with dread. She had not known where to start and had rehearsed several desperate excuses to get herself off the hook. But somehow the blank-faced ignorance of this girl had drawn her out, and Honor was beginning to see a way of attempting the piece she had avoided writing for half a century. Was Tara really leaving now, just when they were getting into their stride?
    “Already?” Honor said, her hands fluttering. “I was just going to make another pot of tea. I might even have some biscuits somewhere.”
    Tamara slipped her notebook and tape recorder in her bag.
    “I’d love to,” she said, springing to her feet. “Can’t think of anything nicer. But I do