A SONG IN THE MORNING

by Gerald Seymour

  Jack wondered what the word urgency might mean under this roof. He'd used it forcefully enough for her to hesitate.

  "What's it in connection with?"

  "Are you an expert on South Africa?"

  "No."

  "Then it won't help you to know what it's about."

  A flush spilled through the make-up on her cheeks. She turned her back on him and spoke into a telephone, then told him to take a seat.

  He sat on a hard chair away from the desk. He reckoned he'd spoiled her day. He was more than half an hour on the chair, and she began to look herself again. He wondered what they would be doing upstairs that meant he had to sit for more than thirty minutes waiting for them. Getting the coffee machine working? Sharing out the sandwiches?

  Filling in the South African Department's football pool coupon?

  "Good morning, Mr Curwen, would you come this way, please."

  The man might have been in his late forties, could have been the early fifties. His suit didn't look good enough for him to be important, but he had a kindly face that seemed worn thin with tiredness. They went down a long and silent corridor, then the man opened a door and waved Jack inside.

  It was an interview room, four chairs and a table and an ashtray that hadn't been emptied. Of course they weren't going to invite him into the working part of the building.

  They were in the quarantine area.

  "I'm Sandham. I'm on the South Africa desk."

  The man apologised for keeping him waiting. Then he listened as Jack told him about the letter from Pretoria, and of the little that he knew about his father.

  "And you want to know what we're doing for him?"

  "Yes."

  Sandham asked him please to wait, smiled ruefully, as if Jack knew all about waiting. He was gone five minutes. He came back with a buff file under his arm, and a younger man.

  "Mr Sandham explained to me your business with us, Mr Curwen. I decided to come and see you myself. My name's Furneaux, Assistant Secretary. I read everything that goes across the South Africa desk."

  Furneaux took a chair, Sandham stood.

  A short, abrupt, unlikeable little man, not yet out of middle age, with a maroon silk handkerchief flopping from his breast pocket. Furneaux reached for Sandham's file.

  "This conversation is not for newspaper consumption,"

  Furneaux said.

  "Of course."

  "I understand that your father left your mother when you were two years old. That makes it easier for me to talk frankly to you. I am assuming you have no emotional attachment to your father because you have no memory of him. But you want to know what we are doing to save your father's life?

  Publicly we are doing nothing, because it is our belief that by going public we would diminish what influence we have on the government of South Africa. Privately we have done everything possible to urge clemency for the terrorists . . . "

  "Terrorists or freedom fighters?" Jack held Furneaux's eye until the Assistant Secretary dropped his face to the file.

  "Terrorists, Mr Curwen. Your government does not support the throwing of bombs in central Johannesburg. You've heard the Prime Minister on the subject, I expect. Bombs in Johannesburg are no different to bombs in Belfast or in the West End of London. It is not an area we can be selective over . . . Privately we have requested clemency because we do not feel the execution of these men will ease the present tension in South Africa."

  "What sort of reply have you had?"

  "What we'd have expected. Officially and unofficially our request has been ignored. I might add, Mr Curwen, that your father is only a British subject in technical terms. For the last dozen or so years he has chosen to make his home in the Republic."

  "So you've washed your hands of him?"

  Furneaux said evenly, "There's something you should understand. They execute a minimum of a hundred criminals a year there. There's no capital punishment debate in the Republic. From our viewpoint, your father received a fair trial although he declined to co-operate in any way with his defence advisors. The Supreme Court heard his appeal, at length."

  "I'm not interested in what he did, I only care about saving his life."

  "Your father was found guilty of murder. My view is that nothing more can be done to save his life."

  "That's washing your hands."

  "Wrong, that's accepting the reality that in South Africa people convicted of murder are hanged."

  "He's my father," Jack said.

  "His solicitors don't believe he has a chance of a reprieve.

  I am sorry to have to tell you this."

  "How soon?"

  Furneaux scanned the papers in the file, flipped them over. He fastened on a single sheet, read it, then closed the file.

  "It may have been discussed by the executive council last night, but it might be next week - they're more preoccupied with the unrest - three weeks, a month maximum."

  Jack stood. He looked at the table, he looked at his hands.

  "So what am I supposed to do?"

  Furneaux looked to the window. "Baldly put, Mr Curwen, there's nothing you can do."

  "So you're just going to stand back while they hang my father?" Jack spat the question. He saw his spittle on Furneaux's tie, and on his chin.

  Furneaux looped his handkerchief from his pocket, wiped himself. "Mr Curwen, your father travelled quite voluntarily to South Africa. He chose to involve himself with a terrorist gang, and it is, and from the very beginning was, more or less inevitable that he will pay a high price for his actions."

  the file was gathered against Furneaux's chest.

  "I'm sorry for wasting your valuable time . . ." Jack said.

  "Mr Sandham, would you show Mr Curwen to the front hull."

  Jack heard Furneaux's heavy tread clatter away down the corridor.

  He said, "I don't understand. My father is a British citizen living in South Africa for years, suddenly turns up in a murder trial, but your man has a pretty ancient looking file on him an inch thick. How's that?"

  "Don't know." Sandham bounced his eyebrows.

  Sandham took Jack to the front hall, asked him for a card so that he could contact him if there were developments.

  * • *

  He saw the young fellow walk away, threading between the official cars. He noted the athleticism that couldn't be hidden by the disappointed droop of his shoulders. He went back up the three floors to the South Africa desk. Smoking too damned much, and his chest was heaving when he made it to the open plan area where he worked.

  He thought he knew the answer to the question that Curwen didn't understand. He was old enough, and passed over often enough not to care too much what he said and to whom he said it. He knocked at Furneaux's door, put his head round the corner.

  "That chap they're going to hang, Mr Furneaux, is he a bit complicated?"

  "Too deep water for you, Jimmy."

  * * *

  "I really don't want to talk about him."

  "I have to know about him, Mum, everything about him."

  "You should be at work, Jack."

  "He was your husband, he's my father."

  "Sam's right. It's nothing to do with us."

  "Mum, it's killing us, just thinking about him. Talking about him can't hurt worse."

  Hilda Perry couldn't remember the last time that Jack had come home in the middle of a working day. He hadn't told her of his visit to the Foreign Office, nor about the embassy, nor about the visit to the newspaper's library.

  They were in the kitchen with mugs of instant.

  "Mum, he's in a death cell. Can you think of anywhere more alone than that. He's sitting out the last days of his life in a gaol where he's going to hang."

  She said distantly, "I've hated him for more than twenty years, and since I had his letter I can only think of the good times."

  "There were good times?"

  "Don't make me cry, Jack."

  "Tell me."

  He brought her a dr
ink. Two fingers of gin, three cubes of ice, four fingers of tonic. She normally had her first of the day when Sam came back from the office.

  She drank deep.

  "Your grandfather was stationed in Paderborn, that's in West Germany. He was a sergeant major. I was seventeen, just finished school. I used to nanny for the officers' wives.

  Jeez was on national service. He was a cut above the rest, not classy, not like an officer, but Jeez was always correct.

  Treated me like a lady. He always stood in a cinema for the national anthem, stood properly. We didn't go out much, a lot of evenings I was tied with the officers' kids and Jeez was a sort of batman and driver to the colonel. He was well in with the colonel. After we were married we used to get a card from the colonel each Christmas, not after Jeez went.

  Jeez went back to the UK, demobbed, we used to write a bit, and then Mum and Dad were killed in the car accident, it was in the papers. Jeez wrote by express, gave his address.

  I was staying with an aunt and he used to come and see me.

  I suppose I loved him, anyway we were married. There was a cottage right down in the country that Jeez got his hands on, near Alton in Hampshire. It was only a couple of bedrooms, pretty primitive, that's where we lived. He once said the colonel had helped him find it . . . Fill me up again, Jack."

  He took her glass to the drinks cabinet in the living room.

  Three cubes of ice, six fingers of tonic. She wouldn't notice.

  "He was born in 1933 and we married in '57, and I was nineteen. It was lovely down there, cress beds, trout streams, nice pubs, walks. Jeez didn't see much of it. He was up in London when he wasn't away."

  She stopped. Her hands fondled the cut glass tumbler.

  "He was very close, didn't talk about his work, only said that he was a clerk up in Whitehall. He called it a soupedup secretary's job."

  She had never before talked calmly to her son about his father.

  "Jeez used to take a train up to London, most of the year before it was light and come home in the evenings most of the year when it was dark. I didn't ask him where he went, he didn't tell me. He just said that what he did was pretty boring. He'd be away about half a dozen times a year, most often for about a week, sometimes as long as a month. I never knew where he went because he never brought me anything back from where he'd been, just flowers from Alton on his way home. Lovely flowers. Sometimes he looked as though he'd been in the sun, and it was winter at home. It's hard to explain now, Jack, but Jeez wasn't the sort of man you asked questions of, and I had my own life. I had the village, friends, I had my garden. There wasn't much money, but then nobody else round about had money. Then I had you . . ."

  "What did he think about me?"

  "Same as with everything else, you never really knew with feez. He used to do his turns with you at weekends. He'd change you, feed you, walk your pram. I honestly don't know what he felt."

  "And when I was two years old?"

  "You're interrogating me, Jack."

  "In your own time."

  "It's twenty-four years ago this month. He packed, always took the same small suitcase, always took five shirts, five pairs of socks, five sets of underwear, a second pair of trousers and a second jacket, and his washing bag. He went off on a Monday morning, said he'd be gone two weeks.

  Two weeks was three, three weeks was four. I was busy with you so until it was four weeks I was reasonably happy. Jeez wasn't the sort of man you chased up on. I can't explain that, but it's the way it was. Then at the end of four weeks there was money lodged in our account, the same amount as he always gave me, and I knew he'd walked out on me, on us. I went through the whole house looking for something about his work, there was nothing. Can you believe that?

  Not one single thing, not one scrap of paper with so much as a London phone number on it. No address book, no diary, not even a national insurance card. It was so horrible to realise I knew nothing about him. I rang the bank. I asked them where the money had come from. It had come from Liechtenstein, would you believe it? I had them send me the name of the bank. I wrote and I had a two line letter back.

  Regret not in a position to divulge. Divulge, dear God," she said and the tears were bright in her eyes. After a time she went on: "I went to a solicitor, he wrote and had the same answer. Jeez had gone from me . . . The money was the only way I knew he was still alive. Each January the sums he sent would go up as if Jeez was keeping abreast with the prices index. The month I married Sam they stopped. But by then I was long past caring. The only man I knew who knew Jeez at all was his old colonel. I wrote to him through his regiment, and he wrote back to say he was sorry, but he knew nothing of Jeez. There was just a wall, everywhere I turned."

  "So you gave up?"

  "You've no right to say that to me."

  "No, I'm sorry."

  "I did not give up. I carried on, trying to be a mother to you, trying to get the shame out of my system. Has it ever crossed your mind what it's like to live in a small community, a village, when you're marked down as the woman whose husband walked out. I did not give up, I was building our new life. I managed to shut Jeez out for two years, close him down. Two years, and then I couldn't stand the ignorance any longer. The solicitor had gone cold on me. I did it myself. One weekend I left you with a neighbour and I took the train to Chippenham, then a taxi to the address that had been on the colonel's letter. It was my last throw . . . " She stared once more into her glass.

  "Was he there?"

  "Entertaining, for lunch, guests on the patio, smart cars in the drive, uniformed drivers. They all looked at me very puzzled till the colonel came and took me inside to his study where the dogs were. He was obviously embarrassed. I suppose it wasn't easy for him . . . He said that your father had been some sort of clerk up in London in a government office, that his trips away had been couriering documents or working on low-level audits. He said Jeez was a deep, close man, without friends, but the opinion was that he'd just become restless, things too quiet for him, that he'd just upped and away. His advice was that I should try to put your father out of my mind and start again. He asked after you, and I can still see his sad smile when I showed him your photograph. I think he was trying to be kind to me

  . . . His wife brought me some sandwiches for the journey home. When the colonel brought me out of the house all his guests stopped eating, they were all staring at me. The colonel told one of the drivers to take me to the station. The next week I went to the solicitor and filed for divorce, desertion. That's when I gave up."

  "Did he love you?"

  "I thought so," she said simply.

  "Can you believe he'd go along with murder and bombing, or be associated with black South African terrorists?"

  "No."

  Jack reached into his pocket, took out his wallet. He laid the newspaper photograph in front of his mother.

  "Who's that?"

  "That's Jeez today," he said. "That's my father."

  * • *

  Jack was annoyed, stamping about the field, time wasted.

  And this after he had broken off milking his mother's memories to get there punctually.

  A small crowd waited on the blaster. There was the farmer who was selling the field, there were three from the development company which was buying the field. There were the JCB drivers, and the oxyacetaline cutting team, and the lorry men. There was a deputation from the housing estate three hundred yards from the pillbox rabbiting on to anyone who would listen about how all their windows would be broken.

  The blaster was working quietly with his spade, filling sandbags.

  Jack knew the blaster was slow. He knew also that the blaster was good, and he knew there was no use at all in offering to get anyone to help him. It was the blaster's way that he did his own work, himself, because as he'd often told Jack that way there wasn't any other bugger to get things wrong.

  D & C used George Hawkins as often as he was available.

  He was their regular. They put up
with the wizened little man's cussedness because the job was always done as it should have been, but every time they had him they cursed the old sod and asked themselves why they went on using him and always had the same answer. George would retire the day after they found another blaster who could do the job better.

  A young man from the development company walked brusquely to them. His shoes were caked in mud. He had ripped his raincoat on barbed wire. He had come for an arguument. Didn't they know they were running late? George Hawkins ignored him and Jack tried to shut him up with a sharp glance. Time was money, you know - George Hawkins spat to the ground and went on with his w o r k .

  "In fact your running late is causing us considerable inconvenience."

  Jack said, "And unless you get out of this gentleman's way and let him get on with the job that he's damn good at then you'll be running even later."

  The young man's moustache trembled on his lip. Jack thought it was shaved so thin that it might be touched up with eyeshadow.

  "What I meant was . . . "

  "Just make yourself scarce, and quickly."

  The young man backed away. He'd seen the bloody-minded crack on Jack's face. He decided this wasn't a man to fight with.

  The pillbox was part of a line that had been built along the Surrey uplands during the summer of 1940. If the Germans had landed on any of the beaches around the resort towns of Eastbourne or Brighton and if they had broken out of the beachhead then the high ground thirty miles to the north would have been the last defensive barrier before the southern outskirts of London. They might have been chaotic times, but they had known how to build pillboxes. It was squat, hexagonal, walls two feet thick with three machine-gun slits giving a wide view down towards the Surrey and Sussex county border. No one wanted the pillbox as a memento of the war. The farmer was selling his field, the developers were buying it for twelve houses to the acre, and anyway it was a hangout for the local teenagers and their plastic bags and solvent sniffing.

  The last sandbag was filled, the top knotted.

  "Do I have to carry 'em all myself?"