The Spoiler Read Online Free Page B

been noise, mud, bombs, blood and transcendental terror. There had been comradeship, too, and even passion. Watching colleagues die beside you does concentrate the mind, and body, on the pure animal pleasures of being alive. When they were not working, away from the battlefield, it had been one long, orgiastic rout. Back home, she had sometimes felt echoes of that hellish hunger at polite funerals, without the proximate opportunities for satisfaction. The practised poker faces of the undertakers, the whispers and muffled sobs of mourners, the comically slow pace of the cortège, all could trigger inappropriate cravings.
    She should have thrown the postcard out months ago; it was only accumulating dust. She tore it up and reminded herself that she should dispose of another, more recent, card, still in its envelope in the hall. It was a crude Donald McGill caricature, of ogling boors and oversize mammaries, with a jeering note on the back, part summons, part begging letter, that might raise an inquisitive journalistic eyebrow. She would deal with it later. Her attention must not wander from the sitting room. This was to be the only theatre of action.
    Coiled around the base of an ormolu clock on the mantelpiece was a string of jade
komboloi
, worry beads, a souvenir from the Cyclades. They could stay, surely, along with Tad’s Staffordshire kiltie—it would take a severely inflamed imagination to make anything of either of them. The death mask of Keats, a present from Tad after their reconciliation in Rome, and a little nun in snow globe—a jokey trifle from Lois—were, surely, also unexceptional. But the winged marble phallus, a replica of a Pompeian household god—a votive offering from Lucio, the skittish Tuscan youth, which Tad had, in a benign moment, found droll—could be more problematic. She cradled the cool stone in her hand. Was she being overscrupulous? Best to play safe. She scooped up the Little Sister of the Snows, too. Nuns and penises: a desperate journalist might makesomething of the pairing. Honor might have done so herself in similar circumstances.
    She had cleared a space—an oubliette—in the utility cupboard in the hall. What rubbish you can accumulate in a lifetime; vast midden mounds of it, trash troves, even with natural wastage and an abhorrence of bibelots. It seemed that after all, despite her efforts and inclinations, she had ended up as a full-time curator of “stuff.” A rag-and-bone woman. That most of it had once been Tad’s was irrelevant. It was hers now, this little museum of nostalgic juju, and dismantling it entirely would require an effort of will that was beyond her.
    Sometimes, on those days when she left the flat, for a publishing lunch with Ruth, perhaps, or a vernissage with Clemency or Inigo, or an evening of chamber music or theatre with Bobby or Aidan, she had an urge to keep walking, to take a taxi to the airport, fly to a city she had never been to in a country she barely knew, and start again. Rented rooms, few possessions, no damned pictures, books or worthless trinkets. Maybe she would find that, along with the jetsam, she had also discarded the wasted years and the physical shame of old age. She could have another go, and get it right this time.
    As she placed her haul on the deep shelf behind the vacuum cleaner, it occurred to her that she might never retrieve this clutter. Only a residual fondness for Tad, who found her periodic purges of possessions physically painful, stopped Honor from throwing the lot down the garbage chute.
    Now the books. She dragged a footstool to the shelf and sat down to consider them, resisting the urge to close her eyes even for a second. She had to concentrate. Was she succumbing to paranoia? She was always alert to the possibility of incipient dementia now, having barely noticed the memory lapses and confusions that had signalled the early stages of Alzheimer’s in her friend Lois.
    Once, when Honor was too young to know better, she