… I gingerly added a glob of crystalline jelly, and watched in awe as it slowly dissolved, quivering and squirming in the acid bath like a translucent squidling.

Each evening, it was true, when the flare of Fleet Street would have begun really to smoke, she had, in resistance to old habit, a little to hold herself; but for three successive days she tided over that crisis.

[…] she kept toying with a pair of old sunglasses which lay beside her on the kitchen table. One of the bows had been mended with adhesive tape, and one of the lenses was cracked.

The winter sun shone orangely in the sky just as the weak low wattage bulb in the lamp beside her mother had that night she talked.