The Truth Commissioner (8 page)

Beckett drops him off outside the cafe and he tells him he'll phone when he needs him to return. He can tell that his driver is curious as to why he should have chosen such a place to eat, so out of keeping with his normal haunts. By way of explanation he says, ‘Meeting an old friend. Their choice.' As he watches Beckett drive further up the main street to park he wonders why she stipulated this place and not her home, which is only five minutes away. His nervousness has made him early and he's unsure whether to go in or wait outside. It's a little country parlour, one down from a restaurant and one up from a cafe. He can tell just by looking at its prim exterior that it's a solid little place where the menu will not divert from the home-baked, home-cooked, homespun respectability so beloved by this provincial backwater. He knows already that there will be vegetable soup and wheaten bread, Irish stew and in a slight recognition of the outer world possibly lasagne or quiche.

There's no sign of her and he knows it's a possibility that she'll have changed her mind and won't show but he decides to wait inside and try to stake a claim on somewhere they might be able to talk. What it is they will talk about is unclear to him and although he prepares various scenarios in his head, none of them manages to convince. Inside everything is as he anticipated but even more so and with a hint of a smile he thinks of the London restaurants he frequents. As he sits at one of the white-clothed tables with its doilies and country-cottage chairs, he thinks it's the very worst place for this meeting. He tries to understand why his daughter should choose to live in this forsaken part of the world with which she is linked only through a deceased grandmother, why she should throw away the expensive and cultured start she was given in life to teach in some school he's never heard of and live in a one-street town where at the glass-covered counter they sell tray bakes and homemade shortbread.

He orders a coffee from the waitress and tells her he's waiting for someone, and then reruns the phone message in his head
that by now he knows by heart. ‘This is Emma,' it began and he knows that no matter how many times he replays it he will never
hear her use the word father or any affectionate variation of it. And no matter how many times he tries to analyse it he can
find no other tone except a perfunctory neutrality in her speech and her expression of a need to see him. He tries to strip
the words of the distortion and awkwardness always involved in speaking to a machine, the sudden gauche expression that inevitably
affects the speaker, but is still unable to deconstruct any meaning beyond the literal. She needs to meet him – the word ‘needs',
however, comes out bereft of any emotional resonance and instead carries the dull inflection of a business request – there
are some things she needs to talk about, but no clue as to what these might be and no personal reference to him, no ‘hope
you are well', or ‘looking forward to meeting you'. He wonders for a moment if it's about money but discards this as an unlikely
motivation, not just because her mother's will left her financially comfortable but because his daughter somewhere along the
way has acquired an unhealthy indifference to money.

Feeling a little self-conscious he is aware of the curious stares of the other customers he assumes are regulars and senses
their sad interest in the small-town drama of an unfamiliar man in a suit drinking a cup of coffee and waiting for someone.
He tries not to meet their eyes and the inappropriateness of the setting for the meeting begins to irk him. He tells himself
that it's confirmation of his belief that there has always been something contrary about his daughter, a wilful disregard
for the prerequisites of etiquette, and he feels a sudden resentment that he has come to this, sitting waiting in a tiny cubby-hole
that makes him increasingly imagine he's taken residence inside a doll's house. For a moment he wants to think of Kristal
but he banishes the images she so readily furnishes because it feels distasteful to place her in proximity to his daughter
and he wishes she hadn't been in his bed when Emma's voice echoed in the silence of the apartment. He wonders if a voice,
even a disembodied voice, somehow carries the power of intuitive vision and wonders, too, how women always know unfaithfulness.
Despite all his best efforts, despite every discretion and without anything ever being said by her in the later years, he
always understood that Martine knew every time. How was it done? Lipstick on the collar? A crude cliche that masked the ability
to divine the intangible with the springy, willowy rod of her heart however deeply he believed his indiscretion was buried.

She's five minutes late and every time the door opens and its bell rings he feels the beat of his heart. He forces himself
to admit that they're not meeting at her home because she doesn't want him to enter her world, that it's still closed to him
in the same way that her whole life is. So he counsels himself, advising himself to moderate his expectations, to hold himself
in balance, but the coffee tastes bitter – he needs something much stronger. Outside a sudden squall of rain has started to
fall and new arrivals take the opportunity to dramatise themselves with shakes of their shoulders and puffed-out cheeks. The
audience shake their heads in silent sympathy and postpone their departures for a few more minutes. She isn't coming, he knows
she isn't coming, but as he tries to catch the waitress's eyes to pay his bill, the door opens and a young woman enters with
her head bowed from the rain and he knows it's his daughter. She looks up and pushes the wetness from the side of her hair
with her fingertips and there's none of the uncertainty he'd worried himself with, thinking that her decision to remove herself
from his life would somehow change her physically as well. He stands up and raises his hand and for the briefest of moments
thinks he must look like he's standing in court promising to tell the truth and he drops it to his side as soon as she sees
him. But she's not the same. It's not just the swelling globe of a new world that orbits her old self but there are subtle
changes in her face that mark her as older and, in some way he can't quite perceive, not exactly as he remembered. And then
with a sharp pierce of sadness he remembers that she's married now and has adopted a different family, so perhaps what is
unfamiliar to him is the patina produced by the tight embrace of those she newly loves.

There is a table between them and he doesn't know how best to greet her beyond the conviction that he won't try to impose
anything but the problem is solved almost immediately by her simple expression of the word ‘Hi' and the quickness of the way
she takes her seat. So far she hasn't held his eyes and instead flusters about herself, opening the buttons of her coat and
smoothing her hair that still wears a light sheen of damp.

‘It's started to rain,' she says as she looks about her. ‘Really coming down.'

‘Maybe you shouldn't be out in the rain,' he says, placing both hands on his empty cup. He offers it as an expression of concern.

‘Why, what do you think's going to happen?' Her voice is quick and sharp-edged.

‘Nothing,' he retreats. ‘How far pregnant are you?' And every word that comes out of his mouth feels treacherous, liable to
betray him by leading in the opposite direction to the one in which he wants to go. He knows his question sounds abrupt, too
personal too quickly.

‘Eight months,' she says, looking only at the menu she's lifted. ‘Have you ordered yet?'

‘Just a coffee – I was waiting for you.' It's started badly and once again he silently curses the surroundings and then he
understands that she's chosen them deliberately, chosen them to put him on unfavourable ground, to drain away the possibility
of dramatics of speech. And so he has to try and speak to his only child within the hopelessly narrow constraints of the mundane.
It feels as if she's put him in a straitjacket, that everything's loaded against him.

‘Hello, Emma, how're you keeping?' the woman who is obviously the owner asks and it hurts to see the natural, instinctive
smile with which his daughter greets a woman who is a stranger to him.

‘Not so bad, thanks. Legs are a bit heavy, that's all.'

‘Let Alan do all the work – you keep your feet up, girl,' the woman says and then she looks at him but Emma makes no effort
to introduce them and he is forced to offer only a brief smile. ‘Would you like to order?'

‘Just a bowl of soup,' Emma says and then looks at him for his order.

‘I'll have the same.' Then after the woman has gone, ‘Would it have hurt so much to tell her I'm your father?' He can't help
himself, he can't play this game where they are supposed to pretend that what is happening is normal.

‘Please don't start,' she says in a whispered voice and looking at him properly for the first time as she leans across the table. ‘I don't want any trouble.'

‘I'm sorry.' But he feels her words are those of someone trying to placate an attacker. Does she think of him as someone whose purpose is to give her trouble?

‘This isn't the place,' she insists.

‘So why did we come here?'

‘Because I like it here and it'll serve its purpose.'

He knows he has to be more careful or she'll leave and already he sees the signs that she's having second thoughts as her eyes flicker round the other tables and her hands straighten the cutlery on the table. He feels like a climber exposed on the narrowest of ridges where a second's carelessness might send him spinning to disaster so he asks, ‘How have you been?'

‘Good.'

‘Good,' he replies, noticing for the first time in his life that she has her mother's eyes.

‘And you?' she asks. There are still little beads of water trembling in the thickness of her hair.

‘Not so bad.' For a second he has the crazy idea of inventing some serious illness in the hope of generating the possibility
of sympathy but instead he asks about her pregnancy and she tells him that it's been fine and just when for the first fleeting
moment it feels as if they're having a conversation, the waitress arrives with the soup and she lapses into silence.

‘So you're going to be a mother?' he offers and in that moment how much he would give to hear her say, ‘And you're going to
be a grandfather,' but instead she merely stares at the bowl of vegetable soup then stirs it slowly with her spoon. ‘And Alan,
how is he?' It's the first time he has ever spoken the name of her husband and the word sounds inexplicably strange. She tells
him he's fine and blows gently on the spoonful of soup. He breaks the brittle freshness of the roll on his side plate and
some of the crumbs fritter on to the white tablecloth. ‘What does he do?' he asks.

‘He's a teacher.'

‘In the same school?'

‘Yes. He teaches geography.'

Geography. He thinks of cartographers, of maps, tries to see what direction he now should take. The soup is overheated and
overdosed with barley. He stares at her eyes again. Is it his imagination or have the intervening years of absence propelled
her to this likeness to her mother, a likeness that he has obtusely failed to recognise in the past? He stares, too, at her
wedding ring – a thin, plain band of gold. A functional ring devoid of decoration or the need to proclaim anything other than
to herself.

‘I'd like to meet him.' She doesn't answer and he has a sudden urge to reach his hand across the table and touch her hair,
to express the surge of affection he hadn't expected to feel. But there is no map and he flounders lost and blind in some
unknown terrain where even the bright stars of instinct are hidden from sight. ‘I suppose he thinks I've got two horns and
a tail.'

‘He knows about you, if that's what you mean,' she says coldly and without embarrassment.

Her words make him flinch and it feels as if a hand has just unveiled what their circumspect politeness had left discreetly
covered and the pain of knowing that nothing has changed collides with the shock of knowing, perhaps for the first time, how
much she means to him.

‘Emma,' he says, setting the spoon down and resting both hands on the table.

‘No, Dad, I don't want to talk about it. That's not why I've asked you to come here.'

She's called him Dad for the first time and it spurs him on. ‘Please, Emma; there are things I want to say. I think you have
to let me say them and if not here, then somewhere else.'

‘And would sorry be one of those things you want to say?'

‘Yes, sorry is one of the things I need to say, sorry and many other things.'

‘There's just one problem: the person you most need to say sorry to isn't here any more to hear it.'

So this is it, Stanfield thinks, he's to be eternally held to account without the possibility of parole because there's no
forgiveness possible from the dead. Like Sisyphus he is to be condemned to ceaselessly push this burden through whatever years
lie ahead and at the end be no closer to her forgiveness than when he started. He bridles at the unfairness of it, the moral
righteousness of this young woman who sits as his judge.

‘The quality of mercy is not strained,' he says, indifferent to whether it sounds ‘portentous or not.

‘I don't want a pound of your flesh.'

‘What is it you want, Emma?' he asks, exhausted by the vertiginous precariousness he feels, willing to plunge headfirst into the chasm below rather than continue to walk this knife edge. Better to know his fate, receive his sentence and try to let his life continue in whatever ways he himself will choose.

‘I want your help,' she says as she straightens her back and looks directly at him. Then she looks away again and asks the
waitress if she can have a glass of water.