Excerpt from The Love Object by Edna O'Brien, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In the late afternoon they drive back to the villa and discuss where they should go for dinner. Penny decides to cut her fringe and stations herself at the kitchen table wielding a huge pair of scissors, the only pair in the house, while Mark holds a small, shell-shaped mirror in front of her. Sometimes in jest Penny puts the point of the scissors to his temple or nips a little hair from above his ear and they joke as to who is the bigger coward. Afterwards, the shreds of cut blond hair lie on the table, but Penny makes no attempt to sweep them up. They have drinks and the bits of hair are still there, dry now and exquisitely blond. Eileen eventually sweeps them up, resenting it even while she is doing it.

When they arrive for dinner they are bundled out onto a terrace and told they must wait.

"Aspetta . . . aspetta," the waiter keeps saying, although his meaning is already clear. Eileen notices everything with an awful clarity, as if a gauze has been stripped from her brain — the metal chairs glint like dentist's chairs, a pipe protruding from underneath the terrace is disgorging sewage into the sea, while a little mongrel dog barks at the sewage with untoward glee. The waiter brings three tall glasses filled with red Campari and soda.

"It's just like mouthwash," Penny says, wiggling one of the straws between her lips. Eileen is doing everything to be pleasant, but inside she feels that she will erupt. First she counts backwards from a hundred to one, then she takes a sip from her glass, not using a straw, then resumes counting and wonders if they, too, are aware of the estrangement. She is meaning to tell them she will go home earlier than planned, but each time she is on the point of saying it, there is some distraction, Penny asking for a fresh straw, or the mongrel now at their table, or two people identically dressed and with similar haircuts, their gender a mystery.

As they drive back to the villa after dinner, it happens. Its suddenness is stunning. Eileen does not understand how it happens except that it does: a sharp word, then another, then another, then the eruption.

"Are you all right in the back?" he asks.

"Fine," Eileen says.

"We're not going too fast for you?" he asks.

"If Penny were driving too fast I'd tell her to slow down."

"Huh . . . it wouldn't make any difference," Penny says. "I'd tell you to hitch." Eileen bristles. She infers in this insolence, dislike, audacity. Suddenly she is speaking rapidly, gracelessly, and she hears herself saying cruel things, mentioning their moodiness, cut hairs, the cost of the villa, the cost of the very car they are driving in, and even as she says this she is appalled. In contrast they are utterly still, and the only change she sees is Mark's hand laid over Penny's. Eventually Eileen becomes silent, her outburst spent, and they drive without saying a word. When they arrive home, they stagger out of the car and she sees them walk towards the villa with an air of exhaustion and defeat. She hurries, to try and salvage things.

"We must talk," she says to Mark, and touches his sleeve. He flings her off as if she were vermin. It is his turn to explode. His rage is savage and she realizes that a boy who has been mild and gentle all his life is cursing her, vehemently. Penny clings to him as if he were a mast, begging him not to be angry, and there is such terrifying contrast between the tender appeal of her sobs and the rabidness of his words as he denounces his mother. She, too, looks at him, begging him to stop, and sees that the whites of his eyes are the color of freshly shed blood. He has passed sentence on her forever. A thousand memories pass through her as she begs to be allowed to explain herself. He will not hear of it. When he finishes his exhortation, he leads Penny towards the open door and they go out, down the steps and up the path to the gateway. Eileen knows that to call after them is useless, and yet she does. They disappear from sight, and turning round in the kitchen, she does something that she knows to be absurd: she dons an apron and goes to the sink to wash the glasses that have been there since before they went out. She washes them in soapy water, rinses them under the hot tap, then under the cold tap, and dries them until they are so dry that she can hear the whoosh of the cloth on the dry glass.

Excerpted from The Love Object by Edna O'Brien. Copyright © 2015 by Edna O'Brien. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company.