“What do you worry about, Mrs. Armitage?”
“Dust,” I said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Dust. You know? Dust.”
“Oh,” he said, and wrote for a while on a long piece of paper. Then he sat back, folded his hands and said, “Tell me about it.”
“It’s very simple. Jake is rich. He makes about £50,000 a year, I suppose you’d call that rich. But everything is covered with dust.”
“Please go on.”
— How many times a day do you think about these lines from the first page of Penelope Mortimer’s Pumpkin Eater?