"Perhaps there's no one else he could have written to."

She stood up. Jack knew she wanted to be out of the room.

She didn't want her husband and her son to see any more of her tears. She laughed in a silly, brittle way. "There's jobs. Will's tea. Our dinner. Have to be getting on."

She was going to the door.

"Do you want a hand, Mum?"

"You talk with your father – with Sam."

She went out. She couldn't help herself, she was sobbing before she'd closed the door.

"Sponged for sympathy, that's what the bastard's done.

Old man, indeed. I'd give him bloody old man."

"Steady, Sam. He's my father."

"I've put it together, what he did, what it said in the papers. He was involved with communist terrorists and murder."

"You're talking about my father."

"He treated your mother like dirt."

"He's still my father."

"He's not worth a single one of your mother's tears."

"Do you bloody well want to hang him yourself?"

"Don't swear at me, son, not when you're under my bloody roof."

"Isn't it enough for you that they're going to throw him in a pit with a rope round his neck?"

"He made his bed. He'd no call to bring his problems into my house, into your mother's life."

"He's still my father," Jack said.

Sam dropped his head. The hardness was gone from him.

"I'm sorry, Jack, truly sorry that you ever had to read the letter."

They had a drink together, large Scotch and small soda, and another, and there was time for one more before Hilda Perry called them to dinner. They talked loudly of business, Sam's garage and showroom and Jack's work. They sat at the dining room's mahogany table with candles lit. The man who was in a cell fifty-five hundred miles away was thought of but not spoken about. When they were having their coffee Will came in and sat on Hilda's knee and talked about the school soccer team and there were bellows of laughter.