A SONG IN THE MORNING

by Gerald Seymour

  Villiers came into the office in the morning to ferret into the balance sheets and retired with a huge handicap to the golf course for the afternoon. Nicholas Villiers looked after the sub-contracting side of the business, and Jack was there to sniff out new contracts. There was a business manager who kept the books, two secretaries and a receptionist. Nice and lean, was how Richard Villiers described D & C Ltd, no waste, no fat. He liked young Jack because he didn't have to pay the lad that much, and because the lad kept the cheques rolling. When he retired there might be a director-ship for the lad.

  D & C Ltd were housed in the ground floor of a Victorian building. They shared with a solicitor, an accountancy practice, a chiropodist and two architects.

  Jack would have preferred to have just slipped in that morning, shut himself away. No chance. Villiers had an office where he could keep his clubs and his wet weather anoraks and leggings. The business manager had his own territory. Nicholas Villiers and Jack and the two secretaries shared what had once been the ground floor drawing room.

  The girls and Nicholas Villiers stared at him, like he looked awful.

  "Been on the piss, have we?" Villiers asked loudly. Janice giggled, Lucille dropped her head.

  "Didn't have a very good night," Jack muttered.

  He'd had a tossing, nightmarish, sweating night.

  He'd nicked his right side nostril with his razor.

  He'd missed breakfast.

  "You look pretty rough."

  "Didn't sleep much."

  "Not got the 'flu?"

  Hadn't been on the piss, hadn't got the 'flu, only problem was that his father was going to hang. Nothing else was wrong.

  "I'm fine, thanks, just didn't sleep much last night."

  Only problem was that his father was going to kick it on the end of a rope with a load of crap-arse foreigners around him, with no one of his own around him.

  The girls were all eyes on him. He was a good dresser, took care of himself. Wasn't every day that Jack Curwen looked as though he'd slept in a hedge. He thought they both fancied him, but they were too close to base. No future in a typists' pool relationship. Best keeping the ladies separate from work. And he was on the rebound anyway.

  Last girl had been with him for four months, good kid and good looker and occasionally good in the back seat of his motor, till she'd upped and offed with a doctor to Canada.

  She had looked him hard in the eye and said he was sweet and said her new fellow had more of a future with a medical degree than he had working at a nothing place like D & C

  Ltd. It was a comfort to think that Janice and Lucille fancied him, but he wasn't doing anything about it.

  "Please yourself . . . The pillbox on the Downs, they can't do that today. The blaster isn't free before tomorrow.

  Too expensive keeping the plant hanging about. Going to go tomorrow afternoon. Does that mess you?"

  "Not particularly. I've other places I can be." It wasn't a lie. "There's a line of elm stumps I'm chasing near Dorking.

  A bit of chasing'll fix it."

  "And afterwards try sleeping it off, eh?"

  Jack smiled weakly. He was on his way back to the door.

  Nicholas Villiers said, "Anything I can do to help, Jack?"

  "No."

  Janice watched through the window as Jack walked to his car. She typed two lines and looked up again. She saw the car turn in the road and drive away.

  "He's not gone to Dorking," she announced, proud of her keen observation. "He's taken the London road."

  * • •

  He had the wipers on, shovelling the rain off the windscreen, for the drive into the city.

  By luck he found a parking space near the street market behind Waterloo station.

  He walked over the bridge with the rain lashing his face, soaking his trousers and his shoes, and he hadn't cared.

  His father had never been mentioned since his mother's second marriage. What he knew of his father was what he had been told when he was a child. A bastard of a man had walked out of his mother's life, told her that he would be away for a few days and had never come back. Jack had been two years old. He had had it drilled into him that his father was a callous man who had opted out and left a young mother with a child that was little more than a baby. There was nothing accidental about it because money had come to his mother all the time that she had been bringing up the child, and had kept on coming right up to the week of her registry office marriage to Sam Perry. Jack knew that. Never a word from his father, only the cruel mockery of a monthly stipend. He had never asked about how the money was paid or where it had come from. But it had arrived, sufficient for the household bills, food and electricity and heating oil and a caravan holiday each August, right up to the time of the wedding. It was as if his father had watched their lives from a safe distance, and stopped the money when he'd known it was no longer needed. Jack had kept his father's name and it would have been hell's complicated to change it to Jack Perry. He had been Jack Curwen at grammar school, and Jack Curwen at college. But of Jeez Curwen there was never a word in Sam Perry's household.

  He turned left onto the Strand. He knew where he was going. He knew that he had first to go to Trafalgar Square.

  He knew nothing of this man who was condemned to die in South Africa but his name and his age, and that he was his father. He didn't know his face, nor his habits. He didn't know whether he drank, or swore or whored. He didn't know whether he laughed, whether he cried, whether he prayed. He hadn't the least idea what he did for a living.

  He had to fend off the spike of an umbrella tent, and the woman who was powering out of Simpson's didn't notice him, so didn't apologise. He came into the square. Weather too awful and season too early for the tourists. The column and the lions and the statues were granite grey in the rain.

  Sam Perry had been good to them. Good to his mother by marrying her, kind to her son who had no blood with him but whom he had treated as his own. Sam had worked hard to make himself into Jack's father. Jack could remember the days at the infant and primary schools before Sum had showed up. Other kids' dads helping with school projects, shouting at the sports afternoons, dropping them at school, picking them up. It didn't make sense to Jack that a man who cared so little for his wife and kid that he could walk out on them should keep a watch to satisfy himself that their survival was assured. Jack didn't know a single detail about the man who was his father.

  He crossed the Strand. The rain ran on his forehead, dribbled into his eyes and his nose and his mouth.

  There were six demonstrators outside the South African embassy and eight policemen standing on the steps of the building.

  It was obvious enough that he should come here. He knew the embassy. Everybody who travelled through central London knew that the embassy was in Trafalgar Square, huge and powerful in its cleaned colonial yellow stone. He had seen the demonstrators on television the week before, when they started their vigil. The embassy building's solidity mocked the critics of South Africa, the orange and white and blue flag sodden but defiant on the high pole. The policemen, gathered close to the main double doors were able to take some protection from the rain. The demonstrators had no shelter. Two were coloured, four were white.

  They were drenched. The rain had run the paint of the slogans on their placards which they held against their knees.

  FREEDOM FOR THE PRITCHARD FIVE.

  NO RACIST HANGINGS IN SA.

  THE ROPE FOR APARTHEID, NOT FOR FREEDOM FIGHTERS.

  Before last night Jack would not have given a second glance to men and women who stood in the rain outside the embassy of the Republic of South Africa. Any more than the diplomats inside, in the dry and the warm, gave a shit for them, or their slogans.

  He saw the distaste on the police sergeant's face as he walked to speak to the demonstrators. The man he picked out was middle forties, Jack guessed, because the hair that was lank on the back of his neck was streaked grey. The man was shivering in a poplin sports top
that was keeping out none of the rain. He wore plastic badges for Anti-Apartheid and the African National Congress and the South West African People's Organisation. His jogging shoes were holed and worn, but he stood motionless in the streams of water on the pavement. His placard was

  FREEDOM FOR THE PRITCHARD FIVE.

  All six looked at him coldly, mirroring the stares of the policemen.

  "Good morning. Can you tell me about your protest?"

  "Pretty obvious, isn't it? You can read."

  "I thought you'd want to tell me," Jack said.

  "We don't need your kind of interest."

  "What the hell does that mean?"

  "Just go up the steps and join the other fascists."

  Jack read the man's supercilious stare. He had his hair cut short, he wore a businessman's rain coat, a charcoal suit, he wore a tie.

  He looked hard into the man's eyes.

  "Listen, I am not a policeman. I am not a snooper. I am a private citizen, and I want to know something about the Pritchard Five."

  There must have been something in Jack's gaze, and the lash of his voice. The man shrugged.

  "You can sign the petition."

  "How many signatures?"

  "One hundred and fourteen."

  "That all?"

  "This is a racist society." The man rolled his words, as if they gave him a satisfaction. "There's not many who care that four heroic freedom fighters will go to (heir deaths."

  "Who are they?" Jack asked.

  "Happy Zikala, Charlie Schoba, Percy Ngoye and Tom Mweshtu. They took the battle into the middle of Johannesburg in broad daylight. It will be a crime against humanity if they hang."

  "Your placard calls them the Pritchard Five.''

  "He only drove the car."

  "And he's white," Jack yelled. "So he doesn't get to be a hero."

  Jack wanted to get the hell away, but the man was tugging at his sleeve.

  "The issue is whether the White minority government and the White minority courts will dare to hang four Black freedom fighters. That's what it's about . . . "

  Jack wrenched himself clear.

  He walked the length of the Strand and on until he came to Fleet Street. Sam and Hilda Perry always took the Daily Telegraph at home. The Daily Telegraph was as routine as shaving and brushing his teeth in the morning. He asked at the Reception if he could see someone from the library.

  When the woman came he didn't spin a story, just asked directly if he could see a file. Nine times out of ten he would have been told that visitors were not permitted access to files without prior arrangement, but she looked at the rain-swept young man, and said:

  "What file is it you want?"

  "Everything on the Pritchard Five."

  "The ones who are condemned to hang in South Africa?"

  "Everything you have, please."

  "I can tell you now there's not much. The unrest and the economic crisis and the sanctions issue, that's what has taken up the space."

  But she took him to the library. She sat him at a table and brought him the file of newspaper clippings. She shrugged, she said that it was pretty thin, that there would probably be a long story on the day before the execution. She left him to read the file.

  There was a clipping from the day of the bombing that just mentioned the arrest of an unidentified White. Nothing then until the trial, and most of that detailed the prose-cution's evidence against Tom Mweshtu, that he'd been trained by the Soviets and had spent time in Kiev. James Carew was described as a white South African taxi driver, aged 63. Two paragraphs on the sentencing, what they were accused of, what their names were, that they showed no emotion when they were told they would hang. Months of a hole in the story and then the dismissal of the appeal, four paragraphs. Jack learned that the five had been in the maximum security compound of Pretoria Central gaol for thirteen months, that the Pope had urged the State President to exercise clemency, that three EEC Foreign Ministers had sent telegrams urging reprieves. Everything that he read had been in the paper pushed through the letter box every day at home - and he hadn't bothered, just as he hadn't stirred himself to take an interest in the shootings in the townships or in the detentions or the bombings.

  And then, there it was, the photograph.

  In last Tuesday's paper. It was probably still in the cupboard under the stairs. Might be lining a dustbin, or it might have been crumpled up by his mother for cleaning the front room windows. His mother always read the paper, front to back. Jack didn't know how she could not have recognised the photograph of her first husband. He had never before seen a photograph of his father.

  It was a mug shot, might have been a police picture, might have been for a passport. He peered down at the column-wide photograph, at the man who only managed two paragraphs with four others, who didn't rate as a hero, who was a white South African taxi driver, 53. He saw a gaunt face, staring, ungiving eyes, shadowed hollow cheeks, sparse short hair. The photograph was misting, blurring.

  Jack's fists were white knuckled, tight. He felt the choking in his chest. He saw the tears fall on the newsprint and be absorbed.

  When the woman came back from her desk to look into the corner where the young man had been sitting she found the file neatly piled, but open. She saw the damp on the photograph and wondered what the silly man had managed to spill on it, could have been the rain from his hair. She noticed when she gathered up the file that the final clipping reported that within the next few days the State President would make his decision as to whether the sentences of death should be carried out.

  Jack drove to Dorking and made sure of the contract for the removal of the thirty-two elm stumps. He rang his mother and said he'd be late home; then he set off to get himself drunk.

  3

  The drink hadn't hurt, had been something of a blessing because his stupor sleep didn't let him nightmare.

  First thing when he came down the stairs he hunted for the newspaper and his father's photograph. It was one from the top of the pile, next to the fire lighters. He tore out the picture and folded it into his wallet.

  Breakfast in the kitchen and not a word of his lurching up the stairs a little after midnight. His mother didn't ask him why he had been out so late. Big boy, wasn't he?

  Twenty-six years old, a grown man. Nothing had ever been said about his moving out, not that Sam would have complained if Jack had announced one Monday morning that he was off to look for a flat. He couldn't have faulted Sam for the way he had taken this other man's son into his household, but kindness and patience couldn't have turned them into father and son. Sometimes they were friends, sometimes he was a generously tolerated lodger. Jack could recognise there was more fault in him than in the attitudes of his step-father. He was close to himself, rarely gave of his affections, took his pleasures away from home, pubs and squash club friends and the girls who were casually hooked into that scene. He was aware of his own cold streak of independence. Natural enough, for a boy who had never known the companionship of a true father.

  And no mention made at the breakfast table of James Carew. Didn't have to be talked about, because he was there with them. Sam too loud, his mother too quiet, and Jack behaving as if he had buried the whole matter, and all of them hurrying through the bacon and the scrambled egg the sooner to escape to their work and the privacy of their thoughts.

  Jack didn't even call the office.

  He drove into London and parked off the Vauxhall Bridge Road, behind the cathedral and walked through the park to Whitehall. Yesterday had been wasted, and now there was no more time to waste because time was short for James Carew..

  He stood in the courtyard outside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He made some rapid calculations and decided to advise Richard Villiers not to accept the contract.

  It was just too damn four-square big. Almost intimidat-

  iing.

  He watched the civil servants arriving with their uniform E II R briefcases, most of them looking as though they
had nothing but a morning paper in them; and the leggy secretaries, and the chauffeurs and the messengers. He went up the steps and into the dark reception area.

  There was a commissionaire, blue uniform and medal ribbons, an old regular army man. There was a security man a yard or two back in the shadows. There was a woman with grey hair drawn into a tight knot. She wore a white blouse over what didn't look like regulation underwear. He wasn't asked what his business was. They waited on him to speak.

  He was an ordinary citizen who was calling by because his father was going to be hanged in South Africa. He wondered how often the ordinary citizen came to announce themselves in the reception area. They were all looking at him, like it was an attempt to make him grovel. Probably not worth pointing out that he and a few other ordinary chaps off the street paid their salaries.

  "My name is Curwen. I'd like to see someone, please, who deals with South Africa."

  There was a very slight smile at the commissionaire's mouth. The security man looked as though he hadn't heard.

  The woman said, "Do you have an appointment?"

  "If I had an appointment, I'd have said so."

  "You have to have an appointment."

  "I don't have an appointment, but I do insist on seeing someone who deals with South Africa, on a matter of urgency."