'I will too if nobody minds.'
'I don't,' Charlotte said.
She stepped back while Hugh followed Ellen into the vehicle, and then she seemed to reconsider ducking under the low roof. Hugh was expecting her to propose to walk by the time she took a loud deep breath and climbed in to sit opposite him. 'Is that everyone?' the driver said.
Charlotte twisted around to stare at her. 'Who else is there going to be?'
'I thought there was someone behind you.'
Hugh felt as if the interior had grown smaller and darker, unless he was sharing Charlotte's discomfort. 'That was me,' he said in the hope that it would end the misunderstanding and let him feel less nervous, but everyone gazed at him – even the driver, using her mirror – as if he had no idea where he was. 'If you say so,' the driver said and sent the taxi up a ramp.
As a green light released the vehicle into the traffic she lowered her window. In a few hundred yards the taxi veered into a cross street and then another, by which point Hugh had already lost the way back to the station. A shadow flexed its thin limbs on the seat beside Charlotte – only a shadow. It wasn't plucking at the sleeve of her black Cougar T-shirt to make her and her cousins look; that was just a breeze through the driver's window. In a moment Hugh realised why the driver had left it open, and was afraid Ellen would think even less of herself. His gaze dodged about in search of any subject he could mention and lit upon a passing Chinese restaurant. 'That looks like a good place to eat,' he said wildly.
'Do you want to know the best restaurants?' the driver said.
'We might, mightn't we, Ellen?'
'I can't speak for you.' She inched away from him as if she had to manoeuvre a ponderous burden. 'And you shouldn't for me,' she said.
'Don't be like that with us. We're your cousins. I was only trying –'
To his further dismay, it was Charlotte who interrupted. 'Not in here.'
Did she mean because of the space or because of the driver? Surely the woman at the wheel couldn't be delighted by their struggles to communicate – she didn't look the type – but nobody else was to be seen. 'Shall I tell you when we come to them?' she said.
'I'd really rather you didn't,' said Ellen.
Hugh was afraid this might provoke the driver to turn hostile if not personal. 'I shouldn't think any of us will want to eat till we've seen how Rory is,' he said.
He was tempted to inform the driver that his brother was an artist, but suppose that let her identify him from the news and she detested his work? Hugh didn't want to be responsible for any more awkwardness, and so he joined in the silence, although it made Rory into yet another subject nobody was anxious to mention. He was reduced to wondering where it was safe to look: not at the streets challenging him to grasp the route, nor at Ellen as he sensed her shrinking away from him or herself, nor at Charlotte's determination to keep her eyes wide as if closing them might plunge her into a nightmare, unless she was struggling to cope with one she could see. The driver couldn't be watching all or indeed any of this – she was intent on the road – and yet Hugh felt somebody was, and revelling in Hugh's plight as well. Were his cousins suffering the same experience? He couldn't refer to it while the driver might hear, but he was barely able to contain it until the taxi executed yet another turn that brought them to the hospital. At least this gave him an excuse to speak. 'I'll pay,' he said at once.
His cousins climbed out while he handed the driver a ten-pound note, and Ellen was shutting her door when she stiffened. Apparently the sight of Hugh with a hand through the aperture in the security grille didn't appeal to her. The driver was reaching for change, but he had a sudden notion that somebody else was about to clutch at his hand. He snatched it away and backed out of the taxi, thumping his skull on the underside of the roof, to accept the change through the driver's window. He was afraid his cousins might ask why he'd behaved like that, but they only insisted on giving him money before Ellen said 'Let's find him.'
'He's in Intensive Care,' Hugh said, which felt for a moment like knowing where to go. He dogged his cousins past a gathering of smokers, more than one of whom gave Ellen a concerned look, and through the entrance to the lobby, where a receptionist directed them to the first floor. Not too far, Hugh thought, and the lift was just around a corner, whichever way that led. The large featureless grey box took its time over closing, and he fancied that Charlotte was urging it to get the process over with while Ellen hoped nobody would join them. As the doors came within an inch of meeting he imagined that somebody was about to squeeze between them without pushing them further apart. Or might that happen when the lift reached the first floor? He felt as if it were weighed down by several kinds of apprehension. Certainly it was in no hurry to arrive, and he thought he wasn't alone in tensing when it did.
The corridor was deserted, and led straight to Rory's ward in the direction Charlotte and Ellen took. Hugh tried not to be distracted by the entrances they passed – operating theatres, children's cardiac, children's intensive care – although he felt as though he were avoiding the possibility that someone might be lurking in one of the side passages. Somebody thin rose up to meet his cousins as they pushed open the doors to the ward they needed, but she was the sister in charge, and she'd only stood up behind her desk. 'We're here for Rory Lucas,' Charlotte said.
'Have you come far?'
Hugh was reflecting that her accent had made her sound fatter on the phone as Charlotte told her 'London.'
'You may as well all go in.'
Hugh couldn't help feeling this seemed ominous. 'How is he?'
'Comfortable. No change since you called. It was you, wasn't it?' When he assumed it must have been she said 'Furthest on the left.'
He was grateful to have his cousins to lead him past sleeper after sleeper fitted with tubes. He tried not to glance at them, though this felt like ignoring an intruder. Most of them were unattended and presumably unaware of it. Worse, Rory was equally unaware he was the opposite.
He was lying on his back, his head slightly raised by a pillow as if this might lift his awareness. Various tubes led to and from him, but Hugh wished he could feel more encouraged to see little sign of injury, not even plaster. Rory's expression was utterly blank, and Hugh had the distressing idea that the tubes were draining his personality, reducing him to an inert mass indistinguishable from the contents of the other beds. He didn't stir when Ellen made to hold one of his hands as Charlotte clasped the other. Hugh busied himself with bringing them chairs and fetching a third one, after which there appeared to be nothing to do beyond feeling guilty and useless. Smiling sympathetically across the aisle at a woman seated by an even older man's bed soon lost any meaning, and he'd thought of something to ask a nurse well before she came to write on Rory's clipboard. 'What was wrong yesterday?' he enquired of her. 'Why couldn't we visit him?'
The brawny girl nibbled her pinkish lower lip as she glanced along the ward, and Hugh thought she'd heard someone come in until he realised she was checking that the sister was on the phone. 'We had a bit of excitement with one of Rory's friends,' she murmured, 'didn't we, Rory?'
Ellen had ventured to take his hand at last. She turned up her free one and then hid it beside the bed. 'Are you saying someone came to see him?'
'Not till you all did. Are you glad they have, Rory?' When this produced no visible response the nurse said 'Another patient got a bit lively, that's all.'
Charlotte crouched restlessly forwards in the gap between Rory's bed and his insensible neighbour's. 'I assume it had to be more than a bit for us not to be allowed to come.'
'Sister didn't want any more of a panic.' The nurse turned her head an inch towards the peremptory clatter of the phone returning to its stand. 'I shouldn't think Rory minded waiting, did you, Rory? Your family's here now,' she said and retreated down the ward.
Was it her professional opinion that addressing Rory might revive him, or had she been trying to encourage the visitors? Hugh's face grew hot at the thought of talking to the absence that was his brother, especially in front of an audience that didn't consist only of their cousins. Nevertheless he was about to move his chair away from the foot of the bed, once he decided which of his cousins might find his closeness least unwelcome, when he heard a whisper at his back. 'It was him.'
At first Hugh was afraid to turn, and even when he did he couldn't tell which way he had. It confronted him with the old lady opposite, who was still grasping her husband's limp fingers, and with the question he had to ask.
