about her – that he was as helplessly trapped by it as he was making her feel. 'We don't think you left anything behind,' he said. 'We think you just didn't want to get in.'
The man's gaze strayed towards Ellen and retreated, no more hastily than she could blame him for. 'Think what you like,' he said.
'It isn't what we like, it's the truth.' Hugh clutched at the seat across the aisle with his free hand, though the carriage was steady enough. 'Why couldn't you get in?' he insisted. 'And don't say you're claustrophobic. We know someone who is.'
'Too much disinfectant.'
Hugh shook his head or swivelled it from side to side. 'Too much . . .'
'They must have sprayed in there to cover something up. I'm surprised you could breathe.'
'Then how did you manage to come down in it?' Hugh enquired in a kind of unwilling triumph.
As Ellen saw the man's lips stiffen she succeeded in parting her own. 'You're right,' she told him, and the reflections that were wadded against the windows mouthed it. 'There was something that ought to be covered up.' When Hugh gave her a defiantly unhappy look she said 'Sit down before you forget where we're going.'
Her cruelty silenced him, though for some seconds he appeared not to know how to resume his place. She couldn't help by touching him, but she was at the very edge of her patience by the time he abandoned his handholds and shuffled to face her before subsiding opposite. The small squat man had already failed to lose himself in his book, which he laid on the seat next to him. Ellen stared at Hugh hard enough to keep him quiet – almost hard enough to distract her from the grotesque reflections squashed against the windows by the dark. She was peripherally aware that the small man alighted at the last of the underground stations, even if she didn't glimpse him as the train moved off. His departure seemed not to have left the carriage as empty as it ought to be, an impression that worked on her nerves until she realised 'He didn't take his book.'
'Shall I get it for you?'
'Just stay there, Hugh.'
He wasn't ready to abandon his compulsion to help. 'About him, you know, I was only trying –'
'And could you stay quiet as well? You've said considerably more than enough for a while.' When he made to speak she added 'Otherwise I'll be telling you where to go and leaving you to it.'
She wondered if he might take this less as a threat than as an opportunity to protect her, but some aspect of it hushed him. He gazed at her as if he didn't know where else to look, which left her feeling trapped inside her flesh, peering out of the blurred mass of her face. The onslaught of sunlight as the carriage emerged from the tunnel was some distraction, though it aggravated her clamminess – and then she noticed something else. 'It's gone,' she said.
Hugh's gaze seemed focused on reminding her that he was forbidden to speak, and so she lurched past him. 'His book,' she said, not having found it on the seat or on the floor. 'It was there.'
'I wouldn't know. You said I had to sit.'
Ellen felt as if, having intensified her sense of her condition, the man had snatched away the possibility of a Cougar book. The train had halted at a station for nobody visible to board before Hugh said 'Maybe he's showing us what he can do.'
'What do you mean?'
'Maybe there wasn't a man at all.'
Was this a desperate attempt at reassurance? It simply left her feeling more unsure of herself. If she concentrated on the horizon, where the edge of the slate of the sea cut into a heavy black sky, she could imagine that the train was scarcely moving. There were very few stations to go, and soon the train swung away from the water, and there were none at all.
A man with a rucksack over his left shoulder stepped back as she dumped herself on the platform, and she almost believed he was only making way for her and Hugh. She stumped past the unstaffed booth and the end of the platform into the little booking hall, where she turned on Hugh. 'Where are you proposing to get your spade?'
'I must have been thinking we could borrow one from the house. There'll be a shop, won't there?' he came close to pleading. 'Let's ask.'
A solitary taxi was at rest outside the station. Once Ellen made for it he succeeded in reaching the driver's window. 'Excuse me, do you know where we can buy a, gardening equipment, sort of thing?'
The large tattooed man inclined his shaven pate in a lazy sidelong nod. 'Should be some in the next road.'
'Can you take us?'
'It's not that far,' the driver protested, then glanced askance at Ellen. 'Are you going on anywhere?'
She felt referred to rather than addressed, and left Hugh to say 'You could wait and take us to Thurstaston.'
'Helping the rangers, are you?'
'I expect so,' Hugh was sufficiently thrown to tell him. 'I'll sit in front, shall I, Ellen? You can have the back.'
At least this let her sit as far from the driver as she could. Nevertheless he lowered his window all the way as he started the engine, and didn't ask whether she minded the breeze that fluttered her old nightdress, peeling it away from her moist flesh only to paste it more uncomfortably still. He turned left off the main road and immediately left again, which brought them in less than a minute to a hardware store next to a wine bar. 'Do we both need to go in?' Hugh said.
'I take it you're asking me to.'
'I'll give you the money if you can.'
She wondered if the driver thought this sounded like a bribe; it felt absurdly like one. 'Don't go digging in your pocket,' she said. 'We're both out of work.'
As she struggled out of the taxi she was confronted by spades, four of them hovering in the gloom beyond the shop window. They were hanging from hooks on the wall, and the shop was darkened by an advancing mass of cloud. There was a spade for her and for each of her cousins, but what was that supposed to mean? She ought to bury her imagination for a while, and did her best to fancy that the bell above the door was indicating she could.
The comfortably plump woman in trousers and an overall behind the small counter might have been dressed for gardening. 'Brought the dark with you,' she said and sniffed. 'Needing help?'
Ellen gathered that the woman was eager to see the last of her, and why. 'Just a spade,' she said and was nervous enough to add 'For the garden.'
At once she was intensely aware why she was buying the item. Perhaps the banality of the transaction made its purpose real for her. A smell of earth that no amount of perfume could disguise clogged her nostrils, challenging her to breathe. If she fled the shop she would be letting her cousins down, and Hugh would feel compelled to find his way in. She plodded to the wall, shaking the resonant floorboards, to clutch at the biggest spade – the one, she couldn't help thinking, that might be most use as a weapon. She almost wrenched the hook loose in her haste to lift the spade off. She laid a twenty-pound note on the counter when the woman failed to take it, and that was where the woman placed her change. 'Would you like a bag?' she said.
As Ellen wondered if it might be advisable to hide the implement until she and Hugh were on the beach, the woman produced a plastic bag that would barely cover its head. 'Never mind,' Ellen said and bore the spade out of the shop.
The bell drew attention to it, and so did the taxi driver. 'Here's the digger,' he said. Hugh glanced so unsteadily at her that she thought he too might be fully aware at last of their undertaking. 'May as well keep it with you,' the driver said as she headed for the boot.
When the car swung away from the kerb the thin object lurched towards Ellen, tapping her on the shoulder with its handle. She grasped it by the shaft to keep it off, though this entailed too much awareness of the deformed hand at the end of her misshapen arm. Meanwhile the taxi found a different route to the main road and then set about climbing a hill. Soon the last houses were left behind, and the car was dwarfed by sandstone banks whose colour anticipated the thick brown of the cliff. Although the taxi was speeding uphill it was so enclosed that Ellen felt as if it were plunging into the earth.
It gained the summit of the road at last and swerved right at a crossroads towards the underside of the sky.
