said Ellen.
'We can. I did, that's what I'm saying. Didn't you see, Annie?'
'To tell you the honest truth, I didn't.'
Hugh blundered to the seat Charlotte had vacated. He closed his hands around Rory's and then relinquished it, not merely because it felt limp as tripe and yet unnaturally warm, perhaps with sunlight through the window overlooking the bed, but in case he might appear to be manipulating it. 'You can hear us, can't you, Rory?' he said and found he didn't know how loud to speak, which left him uncertain where his voice might reach. 'Do you know what you want us to do?'
That was stupidly ambitious; the blazing of Hugh's face told him as much. Even urging Rory to signal yes and no with a finger, as he would in any number of films, might be. 'You know what we were talking about, don't you?' Hugh nevertheless insisted. 'Did he do this to you?'
No doubt someone was digging below the ajar window, and a breeze had brought the smell of earth in. 'Don't, Hugh,' Ellen said.
'Don't what?' Hugh retorted, fiercely for him. 'He doesn't seem to mind.'
'He isn't going to, is he?' Ellen's face worked as if she hardly knew how to shape it, and she sat forwards to lower her voice further still. 'You're just upsetting yourself and me as well. We both know the crash did this.'
'Yes, but what made him crash?'
As she gazed sadly at him Hugh was afraid that Rory would agree with her by indicating him with a finger. His brother didn't stir, however. Might a more explicit question rouse him? Hugh was searching for one that wouldn't sound like an attempt to displace his own guilt when the ward doors crept open. Their slowness unnerved him even once he saw they were admitting Charlotte.
He set about vacating her chair, but she waved him down. 'I'll sit at the end for a change.'
Ellen barely waited for her to finish. 'What did the doctor say?'
'Physically Rory isn't in a bad way at all. Not even any broken bones. The van's a wreck but his belt saved him.'
'You're making it sound as if that's bad somehow.'
'Of course that isn't, but –' Charlotte sat on the edge of the chair in the aisle. 'They've given him scans and everything else they do,' she said, 'and the doctor says they're going to change the treatment if there's no improvement soon.'
'I expect that's all they can do, isn't it?'
'It may be, but that's not my point. I couldn't get him to come right out and say it, but I don't think they know why Rory's in a coma. He couldn't tell me any reason at all.'
Hugh opened his mouth. He closed it at once – dismayingly, to no effect. The sound that was scraping his nerves continued with scarcely a break. While it was a cry he might very well have uttered, he'd last heard it from Charlotte in the tunnel. This time the powerless desperate almost shapeless plea was struggling from between Rory's slack lips. It took perhaps a minute to subside without rousing him, and then he was as inactive as before. Hugh waited until Ellen and Charlotte looked at each other and eventually, quite possibly reluctantly, at him. 'Do you believe me now?' he said.
TWENTY-FIVE
As soon as the doors clumped shut behind Annie on her hasty way to lunch Hugh said 'What do you think's happening to you, Ellen?'
He wanted her to admit to living in a nightmare, Charlotte guessed. Her own instinct was to hope for an interruption – hope that Rory might cry out again and bring back the staff, not that their prolonged examination had identified any change – but the hope was so irrational that she would have been ashamed to betray it. 'Hugh,' she protested instead.
'We've got to talk. We mustn't let anything stop us. You have to see that now.'
Charlotte wondered if he imagined he was exhorting Rory as well as both his cousins. His face was red with the effort or embarrassment of attempting to take the lead. 'Depends what you want to talk about,' Ellen told him.
'I said.'
'Hugh, you know we love you, but you aren't too good at understanding women. Sometimes we just need to be left alone.'
His face grew more thoroughly suffused as he searched for somewhere to look, and Charlotte had to intervene. 'Not if we need help,' she said.
'You know we'll help you in any way we can, Charlotte,' Ellen said.
'That's right, we should help one another, but we can't if we don't know what's wrong.'
'I shouldn't think either of you is in any doubt about me.'
'I can't speak for Hugh, but I am. Honestly, Ellen, what's happened to you? If it's stress and I'm responsible, I'll take as much of it off you as I possibly can. Just tell me how.'
'That isn't what needs taking off me, and nobody can except me.'
'I'm not sure I understand that. In fact I'm sure I don't.'
'Oh, Charlotte, for heaven's sake. You're getting as bad as Hugh.'
'I'd say that was as good.'
'Sorry, Hugh. I'm sure Charlotte's right and it must be stress. What else would you expect just now?'
Ellen swung her free hand towards Rory before letting it drop out of sight, and Hugh held onto his brother as he turned to Charlotte. 'She can't have got like this since then, can she?'
'You're forgetting I lost my job.'
'So did I, but I'm still eating. Why won't you?'
As Ellen sprang to her feet a haphazard bouquet of perfumes filled and seemed to shrink the space around the bed. If any of this had stirred Rory it would have been worthwhile, Charlotte thought, but he was as inactive as a statue. 'They used to say you had to be cruel to be kind, Hugh,' Ellen declared, 'but you're being kind to be cruel.'
'I don't mean to be.' Hugh struggled to hold her with his gaze as he said 'I just don't see why you have to do this to yourself.'
'Oh, Hugh.' Ellen stretched her arms wide, less like a preamble to an embrace than as if to ensure none could occur. 'Take a good look and say what you're seeing,' she said. 'Don't dare to be kind, that's all.'
'I'm seeing you. The same person you've always been.'
'Inside, you mean. Maybe I'm the same person, but not the same thing.'
'You aren't a thing.'
'I know how you feel about me, but don't bother any longer. That's what I am.'
As Charlotte caught up with Ellen's first comment and felt absurdly unobservant not to have realised, Hugh turned his dismayed gaze on her, which she saw Ellen take as evidence that he couldn't stand any more of the sight of her. 'Can't you talk to her?' he pleaded.
'Ellen, you tell us. How are you expecting us to say you look?'
'Obese. Gross. Lumpish. Doughy. Pasty. Mammoth. Gargantuan. Cumbersome. Hippopotamish or whatever word there is. I haven't finished.' Ellen held out her hands as if they were objects she was disgusted to have picked up. 'Then there's putrid,' she said, 'and foul and rotten and tainted and septic and festering. Are you proud of me? I'll make a writer yet with all these words. And as for the smell –'
'Stop it, Ellen. You're just indulging yourself now.' As Charlotte saw Hugh's eyes flicker wildly in their sockets she felt as if she'd been delegated to calm her cousins down, although who could be calmer than Rory? 'Let's stay with how you started,' she said. 'You aren't overweight, you're very much the opposite. You weren't the last time we all met, and you haven't had time to put it on since.'
'Listen to her, Ellen. She's telling you the truth.'
'I've said before I'm glad we're so close, but you're both trying too hard. I know what I am.'
'All right then,' Charlotte said and stood up. 'Come and show me.'
