A song in the morning

2

He let himself in through the front door and the atmosphere hit him.

Before Jack had his key out of the lock and the door closed behind him, he could sense catastrophe.

The vacuum cleaner was in the middle of the hall rug.

His mother always did the carpets straight after Sam and Jack had gone to work and little Will to school. There were dirty clothes at the foot of the stairs. She would have put' 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