Julie G’s Reviews > Coming Home > Status Update

"Who was it who said that marriage was a summer birdcage, set out in a garden? And all the birds of the air wanted to get in, and all the caged birds wanted to get out?"

Friends are wonderful and sympathetic, but they can only be wonderful for just so long. After that, if you go on complaining and moaning and being sorry for yourself, they get bored and stop coming to see you. You have to come to some sort of deal with yourself. A compromise. If you can't say anything cheerful, then don't say anything at all.

At the edge of the sea, bordered in pale pink, the detritus of fragments of shells, washed up by the breakers. Exotic shells, a world away from the homely mussels and banded wedges of Penmarron. Here lay shards of conch and nautilus, scorpion shells and cowries. Ear-shells with their mother-of-pearl linings, and the lethal husks of sea-urchins.

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?