Second piece from book - Saturday
DI Steve Warwick’s Saturday was going to be event filled - and chaos. Time would be strained to breaking point as usual and his wife Joy would suffer the consequences. He knew this before it even happened, before the call came that would prove the rule.
He’d successfully delivered Stuart for his football practice in the morning and dropped Maddy at her friend’s birthday party in the afternoon. Collection of both - he just knew it - hung in the balance. In the meantime he and Joy would drop in on her parents’, to check on the stability of the new greenhouse that Joy’s father had erected, without advice, and alone. Joy was unwilling to let the children in the garden again until the structure was checked, although Warwick wasn’t entirely sure he was best qualified to check it. He’d had a go, in the past, the run of tongue-and-groove paneling in the downstairs loo that leaned slightly off vertical at one end proving his efforts. But a greenhouse? It was a whole structure wasn't it? Still, until the call came - the one he knew would come - he would do his best, before the upset and recriminations. ‘Arthur, I’m sure it’s fine. Feels pretty sturdy to me. Let’s see the instructions.’ He wandered around the spindly shelter, looking it up and down, giving it serious attention. Looked perfectly fine, not that he could be certain one way or the other. He was a tad jealous, seemed like the perfect escape on a temperate day, sitting dibbing and messing about, tomatoes and strawberries at the end of it. And it was mostly plastic. What’s the worst that could happen? ‘Don’t know what Joy’s so worried about. Used to do these in my sleep.’ Arthur grumbled as Warwick looked on with sympathy. ‘Steve!’ Joy called from the kitchen door where she stood with her mum and a glass of wine, no amount of which could disguise the annoyance. ‘Phone!’ She waved his mobile phone in her hand. After taking the call, he sighed and started to call Harper. There had been a gruesome find. DS Maggie Harper was having the same conversation with her mother that they always had when her mother became weepy. Lydia Harper’s eyes were downcast. ‘All my friends have grandchildren.’ She’d had Maggie quite late in life, but conveniently forgot this when berating her daughter for her single, childless status. ‘Great grand-children even.’ ‘I’m not the maternal type.’ Harper stayed calm, kept her answers short. ‘You’re not even the marrying type. That would be a start. What are you now? Thirty-three?’ ‘I’ve been busy. And I only meet other coppers or criminals, neither of which make for good company.’ The conversation stopped for a few minutes, but it wasn’t awkward. They were sitting on the teak garden bench in Lydia’s manicured garden, studying the rose buds, listening to the birds, willing the murky sun to burn off the grey shroud. Harper enjoyed it here. In the summer months she liked sitting here for an hour when there was nothing much else to do except placate her mother. And she enjoyed her mother’s company more than she’d say out loud, having matured out of an anxious youth, those days when she wondered if she was living in the right world. In the winter they’d go for afternoon tea somewhere, or a pub lunch. Lydia liked a pub lunch, looking around at the comings and goings, speculating on everyone’s lives and habits. Harper’s phone tingled. ‘Got to take this, hang on a minute.’ Lydia watched her daughter walk away, perplexed. She straightened her fine wool skirt, checked the impeccably painted coral nails and tried to sit up straight, like her mother had told her to. She’d had an idyllic upbringing, not well off but with standards, and pride. Any family dramas had been hidden, as was proper, and Lydia had entered a world – in her late teens and in the late fifties of the last century– wide eyed and open to suggestion. It worked for her very well. These days there was so much to be cynical at, and it seemed young people – if Maggie was anything to go by - had a lot to be wary of. But was it really that bad? She worried about Maggie’s choice of lifestyle, which she considered to be no life at all. There was a distinct lack of companionship, and she was convinced this made her daughter dull and tired. There was no spark, no energy. Lydia had had three companions, in marriage, and a few others besides that Maggie wasn’t aware of, all now gone. Her first marriage ended in divorce, due to her dalliance with her second husband-to-be. He’d later died on a world cruise – misadventure - leaving her bereft but comfortably off, and, after trust funds had been allocated to his children with his first wife, attracting the attentions of a reasonable selection of suitors, from which she chose the man who would become Maggie’s father. He would later succumb to the excesses of said comfortable life by dying of liver disease. In between her marriages, and sometimes when absolutely unavoidable, Lydia had enjoyed other essential liaisons, keeping her sane and in good spirits. In her own mind she loved them all at the time. And that was enough, she hadn’t imagined that there might be another way. She hated to be alone. Her daughter made her way back from the end of the garden. Lydia watched with a small smile, trying to be encouraging. She eyed her daughter’s lack of colour, thinking she should walk taller, smile more often. ‘Got to go mum.’ ‘Bring a man next time.’ ‘For you, you mean?’ Lydia laughed. ’Well, if you have one up your sleeve.’ They parted on good terms as always, Maggie smiling at her mother’s irrepressible character, but still with that small doubt in her mind about her own alleged lineage. |
Photo on this page: From Flikr, by Fernando Takai