This novel, one of the Virago Crime Classics, combines humour with a look at the danger and suspense in the tyranny of motherhood. It also explores the redeeming power of love.
Still with no plans, still with nothing to do. Timorously, and hoping it wouldn’t annoy Val when she came in, Mildred had been spending the afternoon wiping dust and traces of stickiness off the jars and bottles that lurked, rarely used, on the upper shelves of Val’s kitchen cupboard. With one ha...
“There, there, my precious,” she kept saying. “Don’t cry. We’ll think of something. You’ll see. It’ll be all right. We’ll think of something.” What sort of something it might be she couldn’t, at this stage, begin to guess, but nevertheless the soothing words, over and over...
Sarah’s white-faced misery: Janice’s ill-timed jubilation—succeeded by sulks when she discovered that no one was disposed to share her view of the catastrophe as an occasion for rejoicing—quickly brought our once happy domestic routine to the verge of dissolution. The brief art-school term was ju...
The thought came to me out of the darkness, utterly unannounced. Indeed, I might even have been dreaming, though I felt as if I hadn’t been asleep at all throughout the long-drawn-out reaches of the night. You know how it is with insomnia. Right there in the centre of your...
Mrs Forsyth’s voice mainly, comforting some unseen sufferer in a voice shrill and purposeful as some predatory night bird. “My dear, I do know how you feel,” she was saying—and now Katharine could see the thin, neat figure poised dimly in the Prescotts’ doorway. “Douglas i...
Is the car all right?” Diana asked anxiously; and Bridget, having reassured her on this point, and apologising vaguely for having been so long, subsided into one of the big chairs to consider what, if anything, to reveal about her recent adventures. It seemed wiser, just for the moment, to keep q...
You know I would. I’m just as disappointed as you are. But …” But.But, but, but. What would it be this time, Stella wondered sourly? Whatever it was, she’d have heard it before, that was certain. After five years of going around with a married man, a girl knows his reperto...
You’d be good.’ Lindy had been explaining, with the greatest of good-humour, exactly why it was that she had changed gear on this hill but not on the previous one. Why couldn’t she lose her temper, like other drivers, thought Rosamund crossly. Why must she remain bright and serene in the midst of...
He hated waking up and finding that Helen had already left for work. He couldn’t blame her, obviously, since it was already a quarter to ten, and he didn’t blame her. He just hated it, that’s all. He had had an awful night, and he was feeling awful now. It had been five o’...
Well before eight, Mary must have been up and away, or so Alice concluded, glancing into the room on her way downstairs. She had made the bed, too, and flung the window open at the bottom before leaving. Both good signs, though the latter was admitting so icy a blast of damp January air that Alic...
Choking back the rest of her imaginary life-story, Milly stared at her prospective employer incredulously. The woman wasn’t even listening! When Milly had first seen the advertisement for a Daily Help, on a board outside a newsagent’s, it had seemed obvious to her that the first thing to do was t...
It was funny to be feeling interested enough to bother with that sort of thing; but of course it was because of Robin being here. He deserved a nice pudding after obligingly working through all that pâté for his first course, and nothing to go with it but sliced bread. There weren’t even any toma...
Rita was expostulating later that evening, when they were at last on their own. “Fancy you, a grown man, letting poor Derek stuff you up with all those fantasies and lies! Don’t you realise he’s mad? Not properly, mental-hospital mad, I don’t mean—just mad where I’m concerned. It’s ever since he ...
Louise found the two exercise books after lunch, as she swept up the crumbs, the bits of chalk and the remains of Bimbo the Boxer. There seemed to be a certain lack of finesse about Harriet’s and Margery’s methods of guarding their deadly secret, and Louise could not but be touched by Tony’s appa...
Tim said at last; but already he knew that she wasn’t. You could see it in his slack jaw, his blank, shocked eyes. “You’re crazy!” he repeated, as if still hoping, somehow, to convince himself that it was so. But of course this couldn’t happen, not with his degree of medic...