A SONG IN THE MORNING (3 page)

the yesterday shirts and socks and pants into the machine straight after she'd done the carpets. Down the hall the door into the kitchen was open. The saucepans and the frying pan from last night's dinner and the morning's breakfast were in the sink.

Had to be a catastrophe.

Sam gone bankrupt? Will hurt? . . . But Will was sitting glumly at the top of the stairs, still in his school blazer, and he too had his routine and always changed out of his blazer, chucked it on the bedroom floor, as soon as he came in, and that would have been two hours back . . . Sam couldn't have gone bankrupt. What recession? Business never brighter, Sam was forever saying.

The boy on the stairs shrugged dramatically, like no one had bothered to tell him what was biting his Mum and his Dad.

Jack heard Sam's voice through the closed living room door.

"Get it into your head, it's nothing to do with you."

He heard his mother crying. Not loud weeping, not crying for sympathy. Real crying, real misery.

"Whatever the bastard's done, Hilda, whatever he's going to get, that's not your concern."

He turned to close the front door. Behind him was wretched, normal Churchill Close. Nothing ever happened in the dead end road where the cherry trees were in blossom and the pavements were swept and the mowers had been out once or twice already on the front lawns and the rose beds were weeded. Tudor homes set back from the road, where nothing ever went bad and sour. You could get a funeral moving out of neo-Elizabethan Churchill Close with half the residents not knowing there'd been a death. Jack dosed the door behind him.

"He's gone out of your life." He heard the anger in Sam's voice.

Jack knocked and went into the living room.

His mother sat on the sofa beside the fireplace. Yesterday's ashes. She had a crumpled handkerchief tight in her fist and her eyes were red and swollen. She still wore the housecoat that was her early morning gear. Sam Perry was at the window. Jack didn't think that they could have been rowing between themselves, they hardly ever did, and never when Will could hear them.

Jack was 26 years old. His quiet love for his mother was the same as it had been from the time he could first remember, when there had only been the two of them.

"What's happened, Mum?"

Sam replied for her. "There's been a letter."

"Who from?"

"There's been a letter come from a gaol in South Africa."

"Will you, please, tell me who has written us a letter from South Africa."

"A letter to your mother from a condemned cell in Pretoria Central prison."

"Damn it, Sam, who wrote it?"

"Your father."

Sam turned to stare out of the window. His wife, Jack's mother, pointed wordlessly up to the mantelpiece, fresh tears on her cheeks. Amongst the delicate china pieces, next to the flower vase, was a small brown paper envelope.

His mother's voice was muffled through the squeeze handkerchief.

"You should read it, Jack. They're going to hang you father."

He went slowly across the room. He stepped over th brimming ashtray in the middle of the carpet. She had bee there all day with her cigarettes and her letter. It was a envelope of flimsy paper with a blue airmail sticker and a 25

cent stamp which showed the bulged bloom of a protea plant. Tight, joined handwriting had addressed the letter to Mrs Hilda Perry, 45 Green Walk, Coulsdon, Surrey, Great Britain. A different hand had crossed out that address and replaced it with Foxhaven, Churchill Close, Leatherhead Surrey. No one had seen a fox in Churchill Close for six years. On the reverse side of the envelope was overstamped

"If Undelivered Return to Commissioner of Prisons, Pre toria", and there was a post box number. The envelope was featherlight, for a moment he looked again at the mantel piece.

"It's inside, Jack," his mother said. "They don't seem to give them much in the way of paper."

Sam said tersely, "You don't have to read it. Not after what he did to your mother and you."

"If it's my father I'll read it," Jack said quietly. It wasn't a put down. Jack knew that Sam Perry had done his damn-dest to be a good proxy father to his wife's son.

He drew the single sheet out of the envelope. Across the top of the sheet was written in capital letters JAMES

CAREW - C2 3/86.

"My father's James Curwen."

"It's the name he's using there," his mother said.

Jack turned the sheet over. The letter was signed "Jeez".

His mother anticipated him. "It's what he always called himself. He was always Jeez to me and to everyone."

To himself almost, but aloud, he read: "Dear Hilda, This comes a bit out of the blue I'm afraid, and I have to hope that it doesn't upset you. God knows that once I did enough to upset you and I've no right to repeat the dose. I suppose that it's because of my present situation, because I am sentenced to hang, that I thought it would be good to tie down some of the loose strings of my life, that's why I'm writing. About going out of your life, well, I'm not saying anything about that. What happened is gone. No excuses, no whining, it just happened . . . "

"And, Christ, did it happen," Sam snapped. "Walked out on a fine lady and a two year-old child."

Jack ignored him.

". . . A lot of years later I came back to the U.K. and I found out that you were well and married, that Jack was well, that you had a new baby. I didn't see the need to drag up the past. You were in good shape. I was OK. I reckoned you were best left alone . . . "

"And why couldn't he leave her alone now?" Sam couldn't let go of it. "Suddenly, twenty-four years after he's dumped your mother, it's a sob story."

" . . . So, I'm in a bit of a mess now, things aren't looking too good. As I used to say, you win some but most you lose.

If you read in the papers that I'm going for the early walk then please just think of me that morning, and remember the better times. As I will. If nothing comes up at the last minute, this has to be goodbye to you and the lad. I watched him at sports once over the fence. I thought he was OK.

Things aren't always what they seem. When I'm gone, ask the old man. He'll tell you. Yours affectionately, Jeez . . . "

"Got all that's bloody coming to him."

Jack put the letter back into the envelope. He was very pale. His hand trembled as he gave it to his mother.

"Why should he have written to you, Mum?"

"Perhaps there's no one else he could have written to."

She stood up. Jack knew she wanted to be out of the room.

She didn't want her husband and her son to see any more of her tears. She laughed in a silly, brittle way. "There's jobs. Will's tea. Our dinner. Have to be getting on."

She was going to the door.

"Do you want a hand, Mum?"

"You talk with your father - with Sam."

She went out. She couldn't help herself, she was sobbing before she'd closed the door.

"Sponged for sympathy, that's what the bastard's done.

Old man, indeed. I'd give him bloody old man."

"Steady, Sam. He's my father."

"I've put it together, what he did, what it said in the papers. He was involved with communist terrorists and murder."

"You're talking about my father."

"He treated your mother like dirt."

"He's still my father."

"He's not worth a single one of your mother's tears."

"Do you bloody well want to hang him yourself?"

"Don't swear at me, son, not when you're under my bloody roof."

"Isn't it enough for you that they're going to throw him in a pit with a rope round his neck?"

"He made his bed. He'd no call to bring his problems into my house, into your mother's life."

"He's still my father," Jack said.

Sam dropped his head. The hardness was gone from him.

"I'm sorry, Jack, truly sorry that you ever had to read the letter."

They had a drink together, large Scotch and small soda, and another, and there was time for one more before Hilda Perry called them to dinner. They talked loudly of business, Sam's garage and showroom and Jack's work. They sat at the dining room's mahogany table with candles lit. The man who was in a cell fifty-five hundred miles away was thought of but not spoken about. When they were having their coffee Will came in and sat on Hilda's knee and talked about the school soccer team and there were bellows of laughter.

Jack pushed his chair back and stood up. His lather was going to hang. He thanked his mother for dinner. He said he had some work that had to be sorted by the morning. In a gaol on the side side of the world, dear God. He said he'd go to his room and put his head into his papers. Was so alone that the one he wrote to was the one he had most hurt.

He told Will that he should learn to kick with his left foot if he ever wanted to be any good. He had no sense of his father's face. He rested his hand on Sam's shoulder, and Sam patted it. The man he didn't know was his father, and his father was going to hang.

He went up the flower-carpeted staircase to his room.

* * *

It was a little under four miles to work, across on the London side of the town. Jack Curwen was employed by Richard Villiers and his son, Nicholas. The office was an unlikely place for D & C Ltd (Demolition and Clearance). There was no yard for JCB diggers and bulldozers and heavy earth-transporting lorries; there weren't any cranes; there weren't any workmen. Villiers was a shrewd man, which made him a good employer, and he'd long before decided that the way to the maximum profit and minimum outlay was to be in the art game of sub-contracting out. He hunted out the business and then pulled in the freelance operators that he needed. A few local calls could bring in a million pound's worth of plant and transport whose maintenance and upkeep was some other bugger's headache. D & C Ltd liked to boast that nothing was too small, nothing too large. They could clear the foundations of a 5000 square yard warehouse in dockland. They could take out the stump of an oak tree.

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.