'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 amp; 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.'
