A SONG IN THE MORNING Read Online Free PDF Page A

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,