"No."
"Then it won't help you to know what it's about."
A flush spilled through the make-up on her cheeks. She turned her back on him and spoke into a telephone, then told him to take a seat.
He sat on a hard chair away from the desk. He reckoned he'd spoiled her day. He was more than half an hour on the chair, and she began to look herself again. He wondered what they would be doing upstairs that meant he had to sit for more than thirty minutes waiting for them. Getting the coffee machine working? Sharing out the sandwiches?
Filling in the South African Department's football pool coupon?
"Good morning, Mr Curwen, would you come this way, please."
The man might have been in his late forties, could have been the early fifties. His suit didn't look good enough for him to be important, but he had a kindly face that seemed worn thin with tiredness. They went down a long and silent corridor, then the man opened a door and waved Jack inside.
It was an interview room, four chairs and a table and an ashtray that hadn't been emptied. Of course they weren't going to invite him into the working part of the building.
They were in the quarantine area.
"I'm Sandham. I'm on the South Africa desk."
The man apologised for keeping him waiting. Then he listened as Jack told him about the letter from Pretoria, and of the little that he knew about his father.
"And you want to know what we're doing for him?"
"Yes."
Sandham asked him please to wait, smiled ruefully, as if Jack knew all about waiting. He was gone five minutes. He came back with a buff file under his arm, and a younger man.
"Mr Sandham explained to me your business with us, Mr Curwen. I decided to come and see you myself. My name's Furneaux, Assistant Secretary. I read everything that goes across the South Africa desk."
Furneaux took a chair, Sandham stood.
A short, abrupt, unlikeable little man, not yet out of middle age, with a maroon silk handkerchief flopping from his breast pocket. Furneaux reached for Sandham's file.
"This conversation is not for newspaper consumption,"
Furneaux said.
"Of course."
"I understand that your father left your mother when you were two years old. That makes it easier for me to talk frankly to you. I am assuming you have no emotional attachment to your father because you have no memory of him. But you want to know what we are doing to save your father's life?
Publicly we are doing nothing, because it is our belief that by going public we would diminish what influence we have on the government of South Africa. Privately we have done everything possible to urge clemency for the terrorists… "
"Terrorists or freedom fighters?" Jack held Furneaux's eye until the Assistant Secretary dropped his face to the file.
"Terrorists, Mr Curwen. Your government does not support the throwing of bombs in central Johannesburg. You've heard the Prime Minister on the subject, I expect. Bombs in Johannesburg are no different to bombs in Belfast or in the West End of London. It is not an area we can be selective over… Privately we have requested clemency because we do not feel the execution of these men will ease the present tension in South Africa."
"What sort of reply have you had?"
"What we'd have expected. Officially and unofficially our request has been ignored. I might add, Mr Curwen, that your father is only a British subject in technical terms. For the last dozen or so years he has chosen to make his home in the Republic."
"So you've washed your hands of him?"
Furneaux said evenly, "There's something you should understand. They execute a minimum of a hundred criminals a year there. There's no capital punishment debate in the Republic. From our viewpoint, your father received a fair trial although he declined to co-operate in any way with his defence advisors. The Supreme Court heard his appeal, at length."
"I'm not interested in what he did, I only care about saving his life."
"Your father was found guilty of murder. My view is that nothing more can be done to save his life."
"That's washing your hands."
"Wrong, that's accepting the reality that in South Africa people convicted of murder are hanged."
"He's my father," Jack said.
"His solicitors don't believe he has a chance of a reprieve.
I am sorry to have to tell you this."
"How soon?"
Furneaux scanned the papers in the file, flipped them over. He fastened on a single sheet, read it, then closed the file.
"It may have been discussed by the executive council last night, but it might be next week – they're more preoccupied with the unrest – three weeks, a month maximum."
Jack stood. He looked at the table, he looked at his hands.
"So what am I supposed to do?"
Furneaux looked to the window. "Baldly put, Mr Curwen, there's nothing you can do."
"So you're just going to stand back while they hang my father?" Jack spat the question. He saw his spittle on Furneaux's tie, and on his chin.
Furneaux looped his handkerchief from his pocket, wiped himself. "Mr Curwen, your father travelled quite voluntarily to South Africa. He chose to involve himself with a terrorist gang, and it is, and from the very beginning was, more or less inevitable that he will pay a high price for his actions." the file was gathered against Furneaux's chest.
"I'm sorry for wasting your valuable time…" Jack said.
"Mr Sandham, would you show Mr Curwen to the front hull."
Jack heard Furneaux's heavy tread clatter away down the corridor.
He said, "I don't understand. My father is a British citizen living in South Africa for years, suddenly turns up in a murder trial, but your man has a pretty ancient looking file on him an inch thick. How's that?"
"Don't know." Sandham bounced his eyebrows.
Sandham took Jack to the front hall, asked him for a card so that he could contact him if there were developments.
* •*
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.