in her gentle, high-pitched tone. 'I tried calling a little earlier.'
'I was probably asleep. I had a bad day today.'
Although we had only been speaking for a matter of minutes and had done little but exchange pleasantries, I could already sense that all was not well with Mom. She habitually telephoned me with an irritating regularity to make sure that I was all right (she seemed to find it difficult to comprehend the fact that I was twenty-six and perfectly able to look after myself) and her calls usually took a familiar pattern. Mom would ask how I was, I would tell her and then ask the same question back. Nine times out of ten, she would reply by telling me exactly where she had been recently, who she had seen and what they'd been doing when she'd seen them. This vital information could take Mom anything up to half an hour to impart and, on the rare occasion when it was not forthcoming, I knew that something was wrong and that she had called me for another reason.
'Is everything all right. Mom?'
She paused for a moment before speaking again.
'It's your father, Steven. He's not too well.'
'What's wrong?' I asked, concerned. Dad was a strong old man and was rarely ill. If he complained you knew that there was something seriously wrong with him.
'I think it must be the heat,' Mom replied. 'He just can't seem to settle.'
Although he was in his early sixties, it was difficult to accept that Dad was growing old. In the same way that they both thought of me as their little boy, my parents still seemed the same to me today as they had done when I was younger. 'Is there anything I can do?'
'I don't know. Would you come over one night soon? We'd both love to see you.'
'Of course I will. Mom. It'll probably have to be next week, but I'll definitely come across.'
My parents lived on the other side of town and it took a while for me to get over to see them. I knew that I would be busy for the rest of the coming week and for the weekend after that. I hoped that Mom wouldn't mind if I left it that long to visit.
'That's fine, love. Your dad'll be pleased to see you.'
Unusually, she did not seem in the mood to chat and I felt sure that she would have been happier had I made arrangements to visit them a little sooner. I apologised for not being able to and then said goodbye. I wished with all my heart that I could just abandon the office and go and see them first thing in the morning, but I knew that was impossible. Disappointed with myself and worried about my father, I walked away from the phone in the hall and into the living-room.
I flicked on the television set just in time to catch the beginning of a news bulletin. There was nothing of any real interest in the main headlines, but it was becoming noticeable that the weather conditions had begun to work their way gradually up the programme's running order. A few days ago they had been little more than a tacked-on postscript but now that it looked as if the heat would last for a while longer yet, they were fast becoming headline news. I switched off the set again and walked out through the open French windows into the garden. The air had become perfectly still again and the heat was dry, close and heavy.
As the seconds ticked away towards ten-thirty, I drifted off and away into a sound, undisturbed sleep. Undisturbed, that was, until four o'clock the next morning when I woke in my deckchair and stumbled back into the house.
Chapter Three
I was late getting into the office next morning. Once I had woken up on the patio and had gone back inside to bed I had found it difficult to get back to sleep. I had eventually managed to drift off again at around six and had then slept through my seven o'clock alarm. I could only have been ten or fifteen minutes later than usual but it did not matter - ten minutes or ten hours; once my daily routine had been disrupted it always seemed to take the best part of the whole working day to get it back into some semblance of order. Fortunately, the office was quiet all morning and it seemed that all of the people