The Truth Commissioner (7 page)

In time, Stanfield thinks, when Matteo sits on his side of the desk, as he surely will, he will come to understand the recklessness
of such a question, that by then to have got where he is, he will understand that only the young believe that management is
about doing things and that in maturity the greatest skill of all is the ability to do nothing. So with the greatest show
of conviction he can muster he states solemnly, ‘This is a serious and despicable attempt to thwart the work of the Commission
and is clearly intended to undermine the credibility of the process. I suspect it won't be the last example of this we're
going to encounter so we've got to stand up strong. I want you both to prepare a detailed analysis of where you think the
file's been tampered with – consult independent experts if you have to – and after you've done that I'm going to contact all
the other commissioners. I'll go to the highest office with this if we don't get the right answers.'

He's rewarded by the belief and respect that their faces register and by the end of their discussion he sees the elation in their faces, the sense of a moral stand having been righteously taken. For a little while he bathes in the communal warm glow and then, as he watches them leave his office with a lightness of heart and step, for a second feels a tiny frisson of sympathy for them and what the world still has to teach them.

That night he attends one of the seemingly interminable functions designed to celebrate the new process and honour the commissioners
and even if this black-tie do at Hillsborough Castle is the most prestigious so far, Stanfield finds the level of boredom
commensurate with his previous experiences. There's a lot of standing around exchanging small talk while black-dress waitresses
serve slightly ridiculous canapes and then afterwards the inevitable speeches. He finds his fellow commissioners a stolid
bunch; all are slightly older than him and have the cardigan and slipper whiff of the recently retired. He particularly avoids
the South African judge who endlessly drones on about their experience and persists in holding it up as a shining template
to the backwardness of the present imitation. It feels like colonialism in reverse. Only twro things prevent Stanfield slipping
quietly away because already he is thinking of Kristal and the pale perfection of her skin seems even more perfect when imagined
against this sea of jowelled greyness and faces flushed by the wine – the curiosity of hearing one of the new Prime Minister's
first public speeches and the prettiness of the waitresses.

But if the latter continues to please him the former is a source of much disappointment and he chides his naive anticipation,
belatedly realising that the mouth delivering the words may have changed but not the hands of the writers. It's a soft-centred
meringue of a speech that leaves Stanfield feeling he has overdosed on sugar as he endures the endless references to healing
and closure. He hears the word healing so often that he wants to stand up and shout that perhaps they should have employed
doctors instead of representatives of the law. Thankfully there is no attempted knock-out punchline such as the hand of history
but only a whimpering petering out with tautological references to momentous moments and rather tired images of building the
future. The applause afterwards is polite but restrained. Stanfield looks at his watch and slips away before the subsequent
speakers have a chance to take the podium and inflict further tedium on him.

She arrives half an hour after Beckett drops him off. He has decided for better or worse that he will bring her to the apartment
rather than meet her in the city-centre hotel, trying to convince himself that it is more prudent to avoid such public spaces
but knowing why he wants her here is that he hopes to exorcise the cavernous emptiness of his temporary home. Before she arrives
he changes into casual clothes and does a sweep of the rooms removing anything that identifies him, or is too personally revealing,
but in truth there is little to do because the residence has never assumed anything other than an austere functionalism.

He is pleased by her punctuality – it allows him to dream that she is keen to see him, a fantasy preserved by the smile with
which she greets him and the seemingly affectionate kiss on his cheek. As he brings her into the main living area he keeps
a little distance so that he can survey her more easily and once again admire the elegant choice of clothes – this time she
wears a woollen three-quarter-length coat with a pale green silk scarf at the neck and when he stands behind her to help her
take off the coat, he closes his eyes for a second as he breathes her in, lets his lips linger briefly on the fall of her
hair. Underneath she wears a cashmere sweater, dark trousers and the same string of pearls as the first time. He offers her
a drink and watches as she walks around the room taking everything in, sometimes lightly touching things with the tips of
her fingers. Like a child in a toyshop, he thinks, and then for some unwanted reason remembers the Saturday morning when driven
by some temporary surge of guilt for a particular period of neglect he took his daughter to Hamley's. How long the moment
of choice took when faced with the magnitude of possibilities, how, too, she touched things with her fingertips as if that
light brush might intimately gauge their potential desirability.

‘Very nice,' she says, sweeping her arm in a slow half circle.

‘It's OK but it's only temporary – it's not my main home,' he answers, embarrassed by his desire to convey the extent of his
wealth.

She goes to the window and looks out on the river. He stands behind her as if he, too, wants to share the view.

‘Pretty view,' she says.

‘Yes, but not the most beautiful river in the world.' And suddenly he has the impulse to take her away from here, take her
to Paris and walk along the Seine, and the thought rejuvenates and excites him like champagne bubbling open. He feels the
delicious lightness in the recklessness of the thought, drinks from it as deeply as possible before he lets it be subsumed
slowly by the leaden weight of reality. He puts his hand lightly on her shoulder and she lays her hand across his without
turning round. It is a simple gesture but whatever money she costs he thinks that he has been paid in full in that moment.

Part of him doesn't want to sleep with her because part of him wants to talk to her and hear her talk in return. He sits opposite
her and enjoys the burnish of her hair, the blueness of her eyes, the clean ring of her voice. He looks at the way her hand
holds the glass, the slight tilt of her head as she drinks. He looks at the paleness of her neck when she removes the scarf.
He wants her to feel the way a model feels as she shows herself to a great artist so he's desperate to avoid any crude hint
of physical necessity or the selfishness of greed. But perhaps he waits too long because once as they sit listening to some
of his favourite music he catches her eyes glancing at her watch and the gesture scatters the consoling weave of his illusion.
So in an instinctive defence he assumes a greater sense of detachment, the more formal air of a business transaction. She
knows that he is disappointed about something and tries a little too hard to compensate but after a while he is happy to
be pampered out of his sulk.

In the morning while she is still sleeping he starts some coffee in the kitchen and in his dressing gown goes to the window.
On the river a rowing crew sculls by, the rhythmic pull on the oars slicing the boat through the still grey-coloured water
and spurting up little flurries of white. On the other side a jogger moves in a less elegant way with as much up and down
movement as forward. Stanfield slightly opens the sliding door to the balcony and lets the morning air hit his face. Already
he hears the
thock thock
of tennis being played out on the courts. Unlit by the sun the water below looks cold and skimmed with a misty gauze.

If the sex was largely unsatisfactory he knows, as always, it's a question of diminishing returns and that, after the initial
flurry of passion, into the too quickly opening void must pour inevitably the knowledge of other still unfulfilled needs.
Stanfield considers it one of life's most bitter little cruelties but decides that perhaps it is the trick that brings the
deceived back to the banquet again and again. There was something else as well, something unexpectedly and inescapably ugly
in his head when it should've been filled with nothing but release, and that was an image of snow, but snow tainted and stained
by his print. He closes the glass and glances at her sleeping. She has one arm thrown back across the pillow above her head.
Just as the first time he looked at her like this he is struck by the paleness of her skin, almost subsumed by the whiteness
of the pillow. He feels tired, not physically, but by the wearisome predictability of the day ahead, so he goes back to the
bed and, trying not to disturb her, snuggles into her penumbral heat. He falls into a soft, comforting sleep but a little
while later is wakened by some kind of alarm, then is slowly aware that there's someone else in the apartment and talking
to him. For a second he thinks it's Kristal but as he glances towards her she turns on her side and pulls the quilt over her
shoulder and anyway, as he blinks and squints at the rising light that fills the room, he knows that it's not her voice. And
then he suddenly understands that it's his daughter speaking to him from the other room but as he stumbles myopically towards
the voice he senses that there's something not quite right about it and as he slumps back heavily on the bed he realises that
it's the answering machine.

‘What is it?' Kristal asks, squirming her white shoulders coldly above the snow line of the quilt.

But now he's oblivious to her and abruptly tells her to be quiet as he struggles to hear his daughter's final words. He sits
with his back taut and straight, straining to hear the voice he hasn't heard in five years and feeling distant from it, struggling
to read its timbre and tone, trying to hear the meaning in the spaces between words, trying in vain to see the expression
on her face. He feels Kristal's hand on the small of his back but it means nothing to him as the message clunks dead.

‘What is it?' she asks. But he doesn't reply at first because the narrowed focus of his thoughts doesn't allow him to register
anything beyond his own confusion and the growing sense of fear he feels spreading in the pit of his stomach. It's the fear
that freezes him to the bed, the knowledge that things are swaying in a kind of balance and he's helpless to know what way
they might finally come to a halt. She's sitting behind him now and he feels the warmth of her breath on his neck as she presses
her hands on his shoulders.

‘It's an important message,' he says, still motionless and staring at the open doorway.

‘Bad news?'

‘I don't know.' For some reason he thinks of all the months when Emma was a child, when she was going through her wake-in-the-middle-of-the-night
phase and she would come into their room and somehow manage to tunnel into the space between her sleeping parents, a space
that was increasingly wide, then sleep in that neutral sphere, that no man's land in the cold war between two stalled armies.

Without his having to tell her, she knows she has to go and she drifts past him like a pale ghost. He's glad because he knows
he can't listen to the message while she's still in the apartment, can't have his daughter and his indiscretion in the same
room, and before he listens to it he tries to piece together what he remembers, desperate to read the omens so that he can
prepare himself accordingly. He goes to the kitchen and pours two coffees, all the time glancing at the red light on the answering
machine. When she joins him her hair is wet, plastered to her head in a way that makes her face thinner. She wears no make-up
and her face is primed like a white page, waiting for the story of the day to be written on it.

‘Sorry,' he says, without knowing exactly what he's sorry for and confused when she asks him. ‘I don't know. For hurrying
you, for not making a proper breakfast.'

‘That's OK,' she says, using the palms of both hands to push the tails of her hair behind her ears. He knows she senses something's
wrong. ‘Will I see you again?'

‘I hope so,' he says neutrally and then offers to call for a taxi but she tells him that she will walk a little, for the exercise,
and then call one. He sits at the kitchen bar as she puts on her coat and knots the silk scarf loosely at her neck but all
the time his eyes flick to the red light. She turns to go but then stops and looks at him. ‘I didn't please you?'

‘You pleased me very much.'

She continues to stare at him, uncertain in her own mind, and unsure whether it's to reassure her, or hurry her on her way,
he stands up and coming to her kisses her lightly on both cheeks. He briefly feels the wetness of her hair upon his skin and
he can't tell himself whether he will see her again. In the law of diminishing returns there is always a time to cut your
losses, a time to move on, and whether it was her stay, or the voice of his daughter on the phone, he doesn't know but it
feels as if the apartment is smaller now, not so resonant with its former arching emptiness.

Even after she's gone he doesn't go immediately to the phone but instead sits on the chair opposite it and drains the last
warmth from the cup of coffee. Somewhere inside the welter of chips and circuitry rests the voice of his daughter, a voice
he wasn't sure he would ever hear again. The red light seems to steadily magnify in brightness until it feels that if he is
to stretch out his hand he might get burned. He goes to the window and looks down on the river but there is no answer reflected
in the grey dullness of its surface and so he has no option but to turn and walk uncertainly to the phone.