'No, I'm saying you're forgetting what he dreamed.'
Charlotte closed her eyes as though to exclude the remark. 'What has that to do with anything?'
'It was about not being able to see, wasn't it? And now he can't. Don't you think an artist's nightmare has to be losing all his senses?'
Charlotte turned her face to him without opening her eyes. 'I'm sorry, Hugh, but I think Ellen was spot on.'
Ellen didn't understand this any more than Hugh appeared to. 'What are you saying I did?'
'You said he was trying to prove something. This isn't the time or the place, Hugh. We never said you had no imagination, so don't work so hard at convincing us you have. It's getting out of hand and not in the best of taste.'
'You're just upset about Rory, aren't you?' Ellen told him in the hope that would stop his gaze from jerking back and forth. 'You want to find something to blame besides yourself. Don't blame yourself and then you won't need to do this.'
Had she embarrassed him into silence? She was looking away from him, which showed her the door at the end of the aisle twitching as if someone hidden in the dark between the carriages were about to put in an appearance, when he said 'What's wrong with her?'
Ellen didn't know if she was being referred to or addressed. A sidelong glance at Charlotte offered her no clue, nor did Hugh's agitated gaze, even when he raised his hands on either side of it like blinkers. Charlotte took it on herself to answer, almost inaudibly. 'I'm claustrophobic.'
Hugh kept his hands up to direct his gaze at her, although the pose was beginning to put Ellen in mind of someone under threat. 'Since when?' he said.
'Hugh,' Ellen objected. 'Now you're going too far in the other direction.'
His fingers bent clawlike towards his eyes. 'How am I?'
'We aren't saying don't use your imagination at all.' She nodded at Charlotte, which made her face feel even more repulsively unstable, and leaned towards him to whisper 'Since we've been in here, of course.'
She sensed that he was struggling not to recoil from her, and so she straightened up before she'd finished speaking. His gaze left her at once, darting along the aisle. 'I didn't get that,' he complained and shut his eyes.
Ellen didn't need to be reminded yet again how unbearable he and Charlotte must find the sight of her. Perhaps he also disliked the restive jerking of the door as much as she did. She couldn't touch him to persuade him to look at her, she could only speak up. 'Since we came in the tunnel.'
'How long have we been in it?'
'I'm not looking,' Charlotte breathed. 'I can't say.'
'How long have we been talking? It feels like, I don't know –'
Charlotte cried out. It wasn't much of a cry; it was the kind of enfeebled wordless protest she might have uttered in her sleep while fighting to break out of a nightmare. Nevertheless it appeared to bring a response. The door at the end of the carriage slid swiftly yet noiselessly wide, and a thin blackened shape that might have been scaly or in some sense ragged sprang into the carriage.
It dodged behind the nearest seat, dropping low as it vanished, and Ellen threw her hands out to clutch at her companions. Barely in time not to subject them to her touch, she realised what she'd seen. The door hadn't opened. Only sunlight had prised the darkness wide, incidentally throwing the shadow of some object that had passed before Ellen could locate it. Although the sounds of the train had grown more spacious, they and the light seemed to fall short of Charlotte's awareness; she might still have been shut in a dream. At least Hugh's eyes were open, even if he looked less than reassured by the choice of views. 'We're out,' Ellen said, hoping this might release Charlotte from her panic – and then she wondered whether, in some sense she preferred not to grasp, they were nothing of the kind.
TWENTY-FOUR
Charlotte was first off the train. Before a signboard had identified Leeds Station she'd crouched forwards like an athlete impatient to begin a race. She stood at the door all the way along the platform and only just waited for the alarm to acknowledge that the train had stopped. Hugh watched her jab the button and dart onto the platform. He would have dashed to keep up except for Ellen, who hesitated as a thin figure, mostly covered in black and otherwise alarmingly pale, appeared outside the window. Although he was only a teenager, his approach seemed to startle Charlotte. 'Come on, you two,' she said without owning up to nervousness. 'Bring each other.'
He couldn't advance until Ellen did, or he might be lost. As soon as she took a few reluctant steps he was at her heels. When she looked back he was afraid she would tell him to overtake her, but she was peering beyond him as if she fancied someone else wanted to pass, not a pleasant fancy to judge by the expression on her starved slack face. Twisting around showed him the aisle was deserted, and once he grasped which way to turn he saw Charlotte losing patience with his and Ellen's antics. 'Nearly there,' she urged.
He felt she was blaming him for the delay – blaming him for having imagined too much aloud. If it had all been his imagination, why didn't she climb aboard to help instead of directing operations from the safety of the platform? She watched Ellen until her cousin ventured forwards, glancing both ways as she left the cover the train provided. Hugh stayed close while an escalator raised them all to a walkway considerably more than wide enough for them to progress abreast, where Charlotte looked over her shoulder to see why he wasn't beside her and Ellen. Was she about to tell him to keep up? Even if he was the youngest, he wasn't going to be treated like a child, and he couldn't help demanding 'Why did you make that noise, then?'
The question appeared to render Ellen nervous of the muddle of sounds beneath the vast arch of the roof. 'What did you hear?'
'I don't mean now. In the, you know where.' He felt inconsiderate for being forced to add 'The tunnel.'
Charlotte frowned at a queue of commuters within earshot at a cash dispenser. 'Not here, Hugh.'
'Where, then?'
'Preferably nowhere,' she said and stepped on a downward escalator.
As he followed his cousins Ellen's mass of perfume struck him in the face, and he retreated a metal step. Her uneasy question had heightened his awareness of the noises of the station, so that he heard somebody without very much to them scuttling after him. He clutched at the unstable rubber banister as he swung around to see that the escalator above him was empty. Some object must have caught between the treads, but it was no longer audible, never mind visible. 'Careful you don't fall,' Ellen told him.
Had her attention been drawn by the sound? He had no chance to ask as they descended, and by the time they reached the ticket barriers it seemed too late and too trivial. Beyond was a vaulted hall full of benches and echoes. 'How far is it to the hospital, do we know?' Charlotte said.
'The taxi will,' said Hugh.
'Maybe it's close enough to walk to. We could see if there are any clothes shops on the way.'
'We don't want to waste time getting to Rory,' Ellen objected. 'We aren't here to shop.'
Charlotte visibly thought better of responding. Hugh would have supported her if she'd suggested Ellen ought to buy something else to wear, but he couldn't raise the subject, especially while he was distracted by an echo surely too thin to be actual footsteps behind him. At least they fell short of pursuing him out of the station to a taxi rank, where Charlotte was asking 'Could we go to the hospital?'
The maternally plump driver looked sympathetically at Ellen. 'Which one, love?'
'We're visiting our cousin,' Ellen said, not without resentment. 'He was in an accident.'
Hugh felt provoked to establish that Rory was his brother, but said only 'He's in a coma.'
'You'll want the General,' the driver said, still gazing at Ellen.
Hugh could have said so at the outset if he hadn't hung back, and wondered whether Ellen was rounding on him because of it. Perhaps she was taking a sly revenge by enquiring 'Which way do you want to go, Hugh?'
'How do I know?'
Her starved face sagged at his tone. 'I mean which way do you want to sit.'
'Sorry. I thought –' He made to touch her arm until he sensed how little she would welcome that. 'Can I face the way we're going?' he said and felt childish.
