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 half of her mind she was hoping that Val wouldn’t notice, because she might count it as “helping”; with the other half she was hoping that Val would, because otherwise what was the point of doing it at all? There was no getting away from it, the two of them weren’t getting on quite as well as they had in the beginning. There was no open rift, no hurtful home-truths had been exchanged; it just wasn’t as much fun as it had been. At the beginning, all that talk about the awfulness of men had been balm to Mildred’s injured feelings, but latterly she had found herself getting irked by it. Not only their own failed marriages, but the failed marriages of most of their friends had been raked-over, at first enjoyably; but by now Mildred was beginning to feel that the subject had been just about talked into the ground.
What do You think about The Echoing Stones (2014)?
