Julie G’s Reviews > Coming Home > Status Update

Molly Dunbar, sweet and pliant, had been an ineffectual mother. Nervous about driving her little car, disinclined to sit on damp beaches in the cold north wind, shy of making new friends, and incapable of coming to any sort of a decision. Prospect of change had always alarmed her. . . As well, she had little stamina, tiring easily, and retiring to bed on the smallest excuse.

It was trying to be brave and sensible on one's own that was so wearing. Two people could console each other. Two people could share. Could comfort.

Judith was in the front garden gathering the first of the lily of the valley to sweeten the sitting-room. The bunch of slender, wiry stems grew in her hands, and the scent of the tiny bell blossoms was delicious, set in their coronet of pointed leaves.

I suppose growing up is always a bit lonely.

"Listening to music comes second only to reading."

It seemed that you could cycle and walk until you were physically exhausted and ready to drop, but nothing would still the ever-present and restless anxieties which rat-raced around in the inside of her head.

She was reduced to nothing, a pin-point of humanity, and all at once was seized by a terrible fright, the old panic of disorientation, and nonentity. Who am I? Where am I? Where am I going and what will happen when I get there?

It is ironic that one spends so many years bringing up a child and then, just when she begins to be a friend and an equal, she has to be abandoned and life continued on without her.

"I think 'bitch' is a rather good word. And it only means a lady dog. There's nothing rude about that."

She changed for dinner every night, as she had done all her married life. . . It was one of the small conventions that had propped up her lonely life, providing a sort of structure and order that she needed to give day-to-day existence, humdrum as it was, some sort of shape.