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 drink. 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
