”She has a lump on her – her breast, like a gull’s egg.”

”Your mother has a cancer.”

‘He was silent. The whole room was full of the silence and the weight of what she had said lay upon him.’

In Black Sheep, Evie has noticed her mother-in-law Alice’s increasing fatigue and weight loss – ‘Alice looked as if the tiredness had settled in the marrow of her bones.’ Not content with her husband’s diagnosis of ‘ailing somehow’, Evie challenges Alice to share what she suspects her mother-in-law has been suffering from, and which she has hitherto been hiding:

‘The swelling was the size of an apricot, pushing against the skin.’

What particularly moves me about this passage, is how both women immediately, and silently, acknowledge the significance of the swelling. Reminiscent of Susan Sontag’s kingdoms of the ill and of the well, with a very narrow gap between the two, the chapter ends poignantly, and tenderly:

‘She put her hand on the other woman’s arm and rested it there, and so they stood, both silent, as if they were staring into the depths of the same river but from opposite banks.’

CQ