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it into his wallet.
    Breakfast in the kitchen and not a word of his lurching up the stairs a little after midnight. His mother didn't ask him why he had been out so late. Big boy, wasn't he?
    Twenty-six years old, a grown man. Nothing had ever been said about his moving out, not that Sam would have complained if Jack had announced one Monday morning that he was off to look for a flat. He couldn't have faulted Sam for the way he had taken this other man's son into his household, but kindness and patience couldn't have turned them into father and son. Sometimes they were friends, sometimes he was a generously tolerated lodger. Jack could recognise there was more fault in him than in the attitudes of his step-father. He was close to himself, rarely gave of his affections, took his pleasures away from home, pubs and squash club friends and the girls who were casually hooked into that scene. He was aware of his own cold streak of independence. Natural enough, for a boy who had never known the companionship of a true father.
    And no mention made at the breakfast table of James Carew. Didn't have to be talked about, because he was there with them. Sam too loud, his mother too quiet, and Jack behaving as if he had buried the whole matter, and all of them hurrying through the bacon and the scrambled egg the sooner to escape to their work and the privacy of their thoughts.

    Jack didn't even call the office.
    He drove into London and parked off the Vauxhall Bridge Road, behind the cathedral and walked through the park to Whitehall. Yesterday had been wasted, and now there was no more time to waste because time was short for James Carew..
    He stood in the courtyard outside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He made some rapid calculations and decided to advise Richard Villiers not to accept the contract.
    It was just too damn four-square big. Almost intimidat-
    i ing.
    He watched the civil servants arriving with their uniform E II R briefcases, most of them looking as though they had nothing but a morning paper in them; and the leggy secretaries, and the chauffeurs and the messengers. He went up the steps and into the dark reception area.
    There was a commissionaire, blue uniform and medal ribbons, an old regular army man. There was a security man a yard or two back in the shadows. There was a woman with grey hair drawn into a tight knot. She wore a white blouse over what didn't look like regulation underwear. He wasn't asked what his business was. They waited on him to speak.
    He was an ordinary citizen who was calling by because his father was going to be hanged in South Africa. He wondered how often the ordinary citizen came to announce themselves in the reception area. They were all looking at him, like it was an attempt to make him grovel. Probably not worth pointing out that he and a few other ordinary chaps off the street paid their salaries.
    "My name is Curwen. I'd like to see someone, please, who deals with South Africa."
    There was a very slight smile at the commissionaire's mouth. The security man looked as though he hadn't heard.
    The woman said, "Do you have an appointment?"
    "If I had an appointment, I'd have said so."
    "You have to have an appointment."
    "I don't have an appointment, but I do insist on seeing someone who deals with South Africa, on a matter of urgency."
    Jack wondered what the word urgency might mean under this roof. He'd used it forcefully enough for her to hesitate.
    "What's it in connection with?"
    "Are you an expert on South Africa?"
    "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.