A song in the morning

* *

He had come by the back route into 10 Downing Street.

The Director General always came through the Cabinet Officer entrance in Whitehall, and the underground tunnel to the Prime Minister's office. The P.U.S. had taken the same route.

The Prime Minister said, "Director General, you were appointed to suppress the type of clandestine nonsense you are now telling me about."

The P.U.S. said, "In fairness to the Director General, Prime Minister, Carew was sent to South Africa long before his time."

The Prime Minister said, "I want to know exactly what was Carew's brief."

The P.U.S. nodded to the Director General. For him to answer.

"Carew was sent to South Africa with the job of fastening himself to protest and terrorist organisations operating in t hat country. The job was created by a Colonel Basil Fordham for whom Carew had previously worked. It was the assumption of the Service that in the years ahead it would be important to know the planning and capabilities of the revolutionary factions." The Director General paused, relit his pipe. He had the Prime Minister's attention. He fancied the P.U.S. thought him a windbag. "Some statistics, Prime Minister. South Africa is our twelfth biggest export market.

We are the principal exporter into South Africa. We have the largest capital investment there. We have the most to lose if the place goes down in anarchy. We have 70,000 jobs directly linked to South Africa, another 180,000 indirectly dependent in that they are supplied by raw materials mined in South Africa. Should the present regime collapse, then we have to be sufficiently well-informed to ensure that any administration born out of revolution would be friendly to our interests."

"All of that seems to fall within the scope of conventional diplomatic observation."

The Director General puffed his disagreement.

"With respect, Prime Minister. In recent years South Africa has attempted to shield itself from guerrilla incursions by agreements with Mozambique, Angola, Botswana and Zimbabwe. This has led to the formation of cells, cadres, of A.N.C. activists inside the country. They act autonomously.

General orders are given from outside, specific actions are usually initiated from inside. Conventional diplomacy can monitor outside, Lusaka headquarters of the A.N.C.

Carew's brief was to infiltrate and report on the men inside…

"

"To report…" the P.U.S. mouthed softly.

"Not to take part." The Prime Minister was hunched forward.

"Indeed not." The Director General stabbed his pipe stem for emphasis.

"Without being instructed to do so he engaged in terrorism?"

"So far as we know, Prime Minister, Carew's role was strictly on the periphery."

"An act of quite shocking violence?"

"I don't think we can assume that Carew, who was only the driver of a getaway vehicle, knew of the intended violence."

"But in which a courthouse was bombed and a policeman was killed?"

"Correct, Prime Minister."

The Prime Minister leaned back. "Then, periphery or no, he deserves the gallows."

"What if he talks?" the P.U.S. asked mildly.

"He won't." A rasp in the Director General's voice.

"Should he make a confession from the death cell then our position will be that this was a freelancer who supplied occasional and trivial information…" The Prime Minister shrugged. "A private individual, whose terrorist actions we totally and unreservedly condemn… I have to be back in the House."

They were in the corridor outside. It was an afterthought from the Prime Minister.

''This fellow, what sort of man is he?"

"A very brave man and intensely loyal to our country…"

The Director General saw the Prime Minister turn towards him, puzzled.

"… who will die the victim of one horrendous mistake."

A spark of annoyance, and then the Prime Minister no longer listened. The meeting had run a little late. The black car was waiting for the drive to the House of Commons.

The Director General and the P.U.S. were left in the corridor, abandoned, because the circus was on the move.

"Why didn't you say that during the meeting?" the P.U.S. asked.

"No point, Carew's beyond our reach."

The P.U.S. touched the Director General's arm. There was a rare uncertainty in his eyes.

"That fellow we met, Sandham?"

"Happens to people who climb without the proper equipment. A very silly man."

Sam Perry stood by the window. He looked out over his tended garden. His wife sat in her usual chair, where she would have done her sewing or her knitting, where she would have watched television.

Jack paced. He couldn't have been still. He owed it to his mother, to talk to her. Couldn't have avoided the talk.

She stared all the time at the airline ticket that was on the arm of her chair. She said that she had thought it was just stupid talk when he had told her he was going to South Africa to bring his father home. She said that she had thought that he was just being emotional.

Sam hadn't spoken. Jack couldn't remember a time when Sam Perry had had nothing to say.

"You can't bring him home, can you?"

No reason to tell his mother about the man who was a military commander of the Umkonto we Sizwe wing of the African National Congress, nor about the man who was expert in his knowledge of shaped and hollow charges, nor about the man who had fallen to his death down a mountain in Snowdonia.

"It's just silliness, tell me it is."

And no reason to tell her about the man who lived in a cramped bedsit in North London, who had a tail on him, and who had to play the "on-off" game on the underground to throw the tail.

"I'll see him."

"You'll give Jeez my love?"

Sam strode to the dark wood cabinet. He poured Hilda's sherry into a whisky tumbler. He poured Jack a beer.

"It'll be all right, Mum, I promise you that," Jack said.

He doubted she believed him. She had no reason to. She liked to say that her Jack was a bad liar. She muttered about Sam's and Jack's dinner. They watched her go towards the kitchen, nursing her drink.

"Is there a chance?"

"I've no choice but to try," Jack said.

"It'll break your mother's heart if anything happens to you."

"I can't leave him there for them to hang."

The proxy father gazed at him. In many ways he regarded Jack as his own achievement. He thought his influence had given the young man his work ethic, his straightness, and his honesty. He thought he had the right to be proud of the way his step-son had grown. But the quiet authority and the bloody-minded determination, they weren't Sam's. Since he had met Hilda, when she was a bitter, introverted young woman, he had thought of Jeez Curwen as a right bastard.

The authority and the determination weren't Sam's and they weren't Hilda's. They could only be Jeez Curwen's hand down to his son. The man could not be a right bastard, not if this was his boy. He understood that he and Hilda could douse the boy with affection, love, he understood that Jack must go to find his true father. He was ashamed, because he felt envy.

"Come home safe," Sam said hoarsely.

•**

They'd picked up the scum when he left the flat to go for his drink.

Piet used the pay telephone in the lounge bar, Erik stayed in the public bar to watch. They wouldn't be thrown again.

The business in the underground still smarted with Erik, and the yelling he'd had from the major. No chances taken when the scum had gone to the pub, Erik walking behind the scum and Piet on the far side of the road in case the subject spotted the tail and dived into the traffic for a quick jump on a bus.

The scum had been two hours in the pub, sitting on his own, nursing his drinks to make them last. Near to closing time when Piet had gone to the telephone. The warrant officer did as their major told them. Independent action was not their right.

Erik watched Duggie Arkwright. Scum was a good word for the subject. What did the scum know of South Africa?

What did he know of the melting pot of the ethnic minorities that made up the Republic's population? Scum, Arkwright, would think of all non-Whites as being the same. The scum wouldn't consider that there were Asian Muslims and Asian Hindus, and Coloureds, and then the groupings of Africans

– Tswana and Xhosa and Tsonga and Swazi and Zulu, all the others. Chuck power at these groupings and there would be anarchy. If the Zulu had power over the Xhosa, or the Swazi over the Tswana… the State President knew what he was at when he kept the brakes on, which was more than the morons knew who shouted in London about oppression.

Erik was at the bar, leaning back, naturally, overlooking the scum. He could never read Piet's face, had to wait to be told what were the major's instructions.

"Shake the creature a bit. Says he has to know who the creature took to meet Thiroko."

Erik looked down at Arkwright. All skin and bone and wind. Erik had played open side flanker for Transvaal B.

The scum would have no muscle and no balls. If they shook the scum he'd rattle.

Arkwright walked home.

He had drunk four pints of Worthington, it was social security day. He was feeling low, feeling used. He'd put his bloody best bloody foot forward for priggy Curwen, and priggy Curwen had gone off into the wind. No thanks, no call. No bloody decency from priggy Curwen. And Anthea was pregnant again. First vomiting that morning. He was thinking of priggy Curwen and of Anthea heaving in the john, and with the beer inside him it was hard thinking. He never looked behind.

They took him fifty yards from his door. One from the front, one from behind. He thought he was being mugged, which was a laugh, last bloody penny for the last bloody pint… Down an alley. No lights. He smelled day old aftershave and day old body lotion, and he knew he wasn't being mugged. A punch in the solar plexus to double him, an uppercut to straighten him. He went down.

For a moment he saw them. He knew they were South Africans. Knew they were Boer pigs. Something of the width of the shoulders, the breadth of the hips. The hands were coming down out of the blackness to pull him up. He saw the pale blur of the faces, grinning. They reckoned he was insufficiently shaken. He was never asked to say who was the young man that he had introduced to Thiroko. It was Piet's hand that groped for Duggie's beard, to pull him up, to hit him again. The fingers found the beard. Duggie bit him. Closed his jaw on the hand and bit and shook his head as a terrier will with a rat. Bit and chewed at the hand, and heard the Boer pig scream, and felt the fingers loose his beard, and clung on while his teeth were half wrenched from his head. Piet heaved backwards and blocked Erik's chance to get his boot into the scum's rib cage.

Duggie staggered and ran.

He ran towards the lights and safety of the main road. He thought only of flight. He heard the pounding feet behind him. He ran up the alley, across the pavement, and into the path of a 38 London Transport double decker bus.

At the end of the alley Erik gripped Piet's arm, stopped him from going forward. He held him back in the shadow.

Erik could see the white-shock face of the conductor of the bus as he knelt beside his front wheel. He could hear the screams of a woman who had bent to look under the bus.

"You should get some medication for that hand, the scum might have rabies," Erik said.