38

I’ve spoken to your mother already, so she knows the situation,” announced the consultant, a balding man with NHS spectacles and a brusque manner. “The growth she has is malignant.”

I hope you were gentler with her, thought Liz, feeling furious, though she knew it was the news rather than his method of imparting it which was most upsetting her. “What happens next?” she asked, knowing that even if he had the bedside manner of a doctor in ER, her mother would have been in too much shock to take it all in.

And Liz herself had to concentrate with all her might as the consultant began to speak dispassionately about the programme that lay ahead. An operation to remove the growth; chemotherapy if they discovered it had spread; radiation after that; possible further drug treatment as well. All this, thought Liz despairingly, for a woman who resisted taking so much as an aspirin.

When the consultant finished and went off to see a patient, Liz thought she had understood it all, despite a queasy feeling that seemed worse every time she remembered that this was not a dream, or a television drama, but the stark facts of her mother’s cancer.