Sam Perry had been good to them. Good to his mother by marrying her, kind to her son who had no blood with him but whom he had treated as his own. Sam had worked hard to make himself into Jack's father. Jack could remember the days at the infant and primary schools before Sum had showed up. Other kids' dads helping with school projects, shouting at the sports afternoons, dropping them at school, picking them up. It didn't make sense to Jack that a man who cared so little for his wife and kid that he could walk out on them should keep a watch to satisfy himself that their survival was assured. Jack didn't know a single detail about the man who was his father.

He crossed the Strand. The rain ran on his forehead, dribbled into his eyes and his nose and his mouth.

There were six demonstrators outside the South African embassy and eight policemen standing on the steps of the building.

It was obvious enough that he should come here. He knew the embassy. Everybody who travelled through central London knew that the embassy was in Trafalgar Square, huge and powerful in its cleaned colonial yellow stone. He had seen the demonstrators on television the week before, when they started their vigil. The embassy building's solidity mocked the critics of South Africa, the orange and white and blue flag sodden but defiant on the high pole. The policemen, gathered close to the main double doors were able to take some protection from the rain. The demonstrators had no shelter. Two were coloured, four were white.

They were drenched. The rain had run the paint of the slogans on their placards which they held against their knees.

FREEDOM FOR THE PRITCHARD FIVE. NO RACIST HANGINGS IN SA. THE ROPE FOR APARTHEID, NOT FOR FREEDOM FIGHTERS.

Before last night Jack would not have given a second glance to men and women who stood in the rain outside the embassy of the Republic of South Africa. Any more than the diplomats inside, in the dry and the warm, gave a shit for them, or their slogans.