When celebrity gossip writer Tamara Sim is sent to interview Honor Tait, one of the most renowned journalists of her era, their mutual incomprehension generates a rich seam of dark comedy.

Listen to Annalena McAfee reading from this extract on our Vintage Podcast (Podcast 7)

At the door, her finger beat his to the doorbell.
Waiting for the old woman to answer, Tamara mentally reworked
her intro.

We’re fifteen minutes late and flustered by the time we arrive at Honor
Tait’s lavishly appointed apartment and the doyenne of British journalism
greets us with a welcoming smile.

There was a jingle and clank of chains and bolts before the door opened
and Honor Tait, smaller and more frail than she appeared in her most
recent photographs, stood before them.

‘You’re late,’ she said.
Tamara looked reproachfully at the photographer but he turned away,
attending to the clasps and buckles of his bag.

‘So sorry,’ Tamara said, addressing the old woman with an apologetic
smile. ‘The traffic in St John’s Wood was horrendous. We tried to
ring . . .’
She held out the bouquet of flowers and Honor Tait accepted them,
sighing.
‘You’re here now. You might as well come in.’
They followed her stooped back into the hallway, stepping over a
stack of old newspapers and a supermarket carrier bag filled with
books. Under her Mediterranean widow’s drab, her spine jutted like
the vertebrae of an ancient sea creature.

By the time we arrive panting at Honor Tait’s faded mansion flat,
we’re five minutes late and the doyenne of British journalism fixes us
with a spooky glare.

‘Do you realise how late you are?’ she growls.

The old woman showed them into the sitting room and left them
standing there while she disappeared into the kitchen with the flowers.
It was an old person’s flat, unmistakably – shabby, cluttered, faintly
grimy, and reeking of the past. Or was it the stench of death? Tamara,
on the job already and alert for details, walked towards the bookshelf
and looked at the photographs. Not the standard family snaps. No gaptoothed
children in school uniform, or dizzy graduates balancing mortars
on anachronistic hairdos. These were mostly pictures of Honor Tait
herself, and taken a very long time ago. The old woman returned and
brusquely indicated a flock-covered chair. Tamara smoothed the back
of her skirt and sat down with a demure half-smile that she fancied
called to mind the biddable charm of the pre-divorce Princess Diana.
Honor Tait gripped the scuffed wooden arms of the chair opposite –
her hands were as thin and twisted as chicken’s feet – and carefully
lowered herself into it.

Behind the old woman a tall sash window, hung with green velvet
curtains that were coming adrift from their hooks, framed a view of
windows in an identical mansion block opposite and, just visible in the
gulf between the two buildings, the topmost branches of wintry trees.

The leafless boughs of the oaks in the garden below flail in the wind
like the arms of orphaned children once described so vividly by the
doyenne of British journalism.

Tamara had to get it all down. She reached into her handbag and, after
a spell of noisy rummaging, drew out a pencil, a notebook and a miniature
tape recorder.