What he knew of his father was what he had been told when he was a child. A bastard of a man had walked out of his mother's life, told her that he would be away for a few days and had never come back. Jack had been two years old. He had had it drilled into him that his father was a callous man who had opted out and left a young mother with a child that was little more than a baby. There was nothing accidental about it because money had come to his mother all the time that she had been bringing up the child, and had kept on coming right up to the week of her registry office marriage to Sam Perry. Jack knew that. Never a word from his father, only the cruel mockery of a monthly stipend. He had never asked about how the money was paid or where it had come from. But it had arrived, sufficient for the household bills, food and electricity and heating oil and a caravan holiday each August, right up to the time of the wedding. It was as if his father had watched their lives from a safe distance, and stopped the money when he'd known it was no longer needed. Jack had kept his father's name and it would have been hell's complicated to change it to Jack Perry. He had been Jack Curwen at grammar school, and Jack Curwen at college. But of Jeez Curwen there was never a word in Sam Perry's household.
He turned left onto the Strand. He knew where he was going. He knew that he had first to go to Trafalgar Square.
He knew nothing of this man who was condemned to die in South Africa but his name and his age, and that he was his father. He didn't know his face, nor his habits. He didn't know whether he drank, or swore or whored. He didn't know whether he laughed, whether he cried, whether he prayed. He hadn't the least idea what he did for a living.
He had to fend off the spike of an umbrella tent, and the woman who was powering out of Simpson's didn't notice him, so didn't apologise. He came into the square. Weather too awful and season too early for the tourists. The column and the lions and the statues were granite grey in the rain.