A SONG IN THE MORNING by Gerald Seymour Read Free Book Online

express, gave his address.

    I was staying with an aunt and he used to come and see me.
    I suppose I loved him, anyway we were married. There was a cottage right down in the country that Jeez got his hands on, near Alton in Hampshire. It was only a couple of bedrooms, pretty primitive, that's where we lived. He once said the colonel had helped him find it . . . Fill me up again, Jack."
    He took her glass to the drinks cabinet in the living room.
    Three cubes of ice, six fingers of tonic. She wouldn't notice.
    "He was born in 1933 and we married in '57, and I was nineteen. It was lovely down there, cress beds, trout streams, nice pubs, walks. Jeez didn't see much of it. He was up in London when he wasn't away."
    She stopped. Her hands fondled the cut glass tumbler.
    "He was very close, didn't talk about his work, only said that he was a clerk up in Whitehall. He called it a soupedup secretary's job."
    She had never before talked calmly to her son about his father.
    "Jeez used to take a train up to London, most of the year before it was light and come home in the evenings most of the year when it was dark. I didn't ask him where he went, he didn't tell me. He just said that what he did was pretty boring. He'd be away about half a dozen times a year, most often for about a week, sometimes as long as a month. I never knew where he went because he never brought me anything back from where he'd been, just flowers from Alton on his way home. Lovely flowers. Sometimes he looked as though he'd been in the sun, and it was winter at home. It's hard to explain now, Jack, but Jeez wasn't the sort of man you asked questions of, and I had my own life. I had the village, friends, I had my garden. There wasn't much money, but then nobody else round about had money. Then I had you . . ."
    "What did he think about me?"
    "Same as with everything else, you never really knew with feez. He used to do his turns with you at weekends. He'd change you, feed you, walk your pram. I honestly don't know what he felt."
    "And when I was two years old?"
    "You're interrogating me, Jack."
    "In your own time."
    "It's twenty-four years ago this month. He packed, always took the same small suitcase, always took five shirts, five pairs of socks, five sets of underwear, a second pair of trousers and a second jacket, and his washing bag. He went off on a Monday morning, said he'd be gone two weeks.
    Two weeks was three, three weeks was four. I was busy with you so until it was four weeks I was reasonably happy. Jeez wasn't the sort of man you chased up on. I can't explain that, but it's the way it was. Then at the end of four weeks there was money lodged in our account, the same amount as he always gave me, and I knew he'd walked out on me, on us. I went through the whole house looking for something about his work, there was nothing. Can you believe that?
    Not one single thing, not one scrap of paper with so much as a London phone number on it. No address book, no diary, not even a national insurance card. It was so horrible to realise I knew nothing about him. I rang the bank. I asked them where the money had come from. It had come from Liechtenstein, would you believe it? I had them send me the name of the bank. I wrote and I had a two line letter back.
    Regret not in a position to divulge. Divulge, dear God," she said and the tears were bright in her eyes. After a time she went on: "I went to a solicitor, he wrote and had the same answer. Jeez had gone from me . . . The money was the only way I knew he was still alive. Each January the sums he sent would go up as if Jeez was keeping abreast with the prices index. The month I married Sam they stopped. But by then I was long past caring. The only man I knew who knew Jeez at all was his old colonel. I wrote to him through his regiment, and he wrote back to say he was sorry, but he knew nothing of Jeez. There was just a wall, everywhere I turned."

    "So you gave up?"
    "You've no right to say that to me."
    "No, I'm