She dodged around a queue of visitors at the reception desk and sprinted into a waiting lift. 'Who's in here?' a voice enquired as the doors shut, but surely that was just an echo in her head. Her fears for Hugh and Ellen outweighed any other panic, so that she was able to ignore the lack of windows in the lift and in the corridor.
A nurse was writing on the clipboard at the end of Rory's bed. 'Any change?' Charlotte was more than anxious to discover.
'He hasn't missed you.' That was Annie, and the nurse said 'Nothing yet.'
'I've been called away urgently. Can I leave you my number in case anything happens?'
'Give it in at the desk. We'll do our best to keep you posted.'
Suppose Charlotte became as unreachable as her cousins? Perhaps it wouldn't need to be like that; perhaps she would hear from one or both of them before she ventured too far. She advanced to give Rory's hand a squeeze that felt like leaving him for worse than the unknown. As she turned away Annie met her eyes. She looked as though she had a less than favourable question, but all she said was 'I'll be here.'
Charlotte remembered her saying 'Maybe we're all that's keeping them here.' That might be true, but as she'd meant it or the opposite? Perhaps if Charlotte didn't act he might stay there until he died. That was one more fear to drive her away from him. 'I will be,' she promised and managed not to add 'I hope.'
THIRTY-FOUR
'I will be.'
'So will I,' Rory said, but only inside his skull. He couldn't judge how long ago he'd last heard Charlotte speak, let alone when somebody else had made the remark to which she'd responded. At some point this person had also said 'He hasn't missed you.' Perhaps he hadn't, but he was doing so now, assuming that Charlotte and Ellen and Hugh were no longer with him. He needed to communicate how he felt, if he was capable of feeling anything any more. Weren't his thoughts a kind of feeling? Wishing that his cousins and his brother hadn't left him was, and surely that ought to bring him to the surface of himself. Only he had no idea where that might be, especially now that he was surrounded by silence, wadded in it like a sculpture packed in a box and just as unable to move. He ought to have struggled towards Charlotte's voice, but now it was too late.
It needn't be. If he'd managed to hear, however increasingly hard it was to distinguish this from the memory of a dream, his senses hadn't entirely deserted him. Were any others waiting to be noticed? Not his vision, since he couldn't even tell whether he was seeing an uncoloured void or an equally featureless dark. He couldn't imagine what there would be to taste, and there seemed to be nothing to smell. As for touch, he appeared to have forgotten how that worked. He had no idea where his hands might be, and that went for the rest of him. He couldn't even identify which part of him was being teased if not taunted by a persistent draught, which also had to mean he was alone, because surely any visitor would have closed the door or window on his behalf.
He had no means of measuring how long he lay inert within the thought before its implications overtook him. He couldn't be wholly senseless if he was feeling a draught. It was on the upper surface of an extension of him somewhere in the middle distance. It was on the back of his hand, beyond an arm that felt dully pierced by a needle at the tip of a tube that rested on it. Could he raise the hand to his eyes or open them to find it? Before he knew it he did both.
He was lying under a white slab almost as wide as his vision. It was the ceiling of a large long room – a hospital ward. To his left a window open at the top was letting in a breeze. To his right was a line of beds, each occupied by a supine sheeted figure. They were matched across an aisle, and directly opposite him was a solitary seated visitor. Now he recalled Charlotte saying she'd received some kind of urgent message, but had Hugh and Ellen also been called away? He was starting to recapture an impression that they had recently been at his bedside. 'Where is everyone?' he wondered aloud.
The loudness of his voice surprised him and startled the woman, who cried 'Oh, he's back.'
For a moment Rory was afraid to learn whom she was addressing. If she meant to alert the staff, it didn't work. Perhaps it was a proclamation to anyone who might be interested, but her entire audience seemed as unimpressed as the patient whose hand she was holding. 'How long was I gone?' Rory said.
'Only a couple of days, dear. I expect my Jack and the rest of them would call it just a nap. How has it left you feeling?'
Rory flexed his limbs, which hadn't lost too much strength. 'Alive,' he said.
'That's all you should expect, I always say. Then anything else is a bonus.'
This struck Rory as less a thought than a substitute for one, but his renewed senses welcomed even that. 'Weren't my family here?' he said.
'They're one right enough.'
'Yes, but I'm asking when did they go.'
'Your brother and the very thin girl only stayed for a bit, and then they had –'
'Which thin girl?'
'What was her name again?' Presumably the woman wasn't really waiting for her husband to answer, because she told him 'Ellen, that was what.'
'I wouldn't call her thin,' Rory objected.
'You mustn't have seen her for a while.'
He tried to remember how long it had been, but the memory of losing his senses as he drove around the roundabout was in the way. He was disconcerted to realise how careless he'd just been in testing his limbs. Why weren't they broken? He'd ended up no worse than bruised and stiff. Perhaps, as was said to be the case with drunks, his state had protected him from serious injury. For the moment it seemed more important to discover 'What did they have to do?'
'Did you all go to a camp somewhere?'
This made Rory feel as if the past had crept up behind him. 'Not recently, no.'
'Well, that's where they've gone.'
'What for?'
'They weren't telling us, were they, Jack? They went off and you wouldn't know who was looking after which.'
Rory heard his questions growing aggressive but was too uneasy to rein them in. 'How do you mean?'
'Him carrying on like he didn't know which way to turn and her not wanting anybody seeing her, which you can understand.'
Rory didn't, which left him still more anxious. Hugh had been losing his way when Rory was robbed of his senses, and now or at the same time Ellen had fallen distressingly ill. 'Why would they go all that way if they're like that?' he demanded. 'Forget I spoke. You said you don't know.'
'No, I said they never let on. The other girl did.'
He managed to cling to his patience and ask 'What did she say?'
'Did you leave something there when you were sleeping out?'
'Not that I know of.' That meant no until his words caught up with him. 'Such as what?' he was compelled to add.
'Something you buried by the sound of it.'
'I've never buried anything.'
'Maybe it was one of them that did. I just got the feeling you were mixed up with it somehow.' She appeared to be giving Rory a last chance to explain before she said a shade defiantly 'All I know is they were off to dig it up and it seemed like it was for your sake.'
Rory felt as if she were arousing memories he didn't realise he had. The first time his senses had come close to shutting down, he had been researching Thurstaston. He'd found a reference to someone called Pendemon, and had he overheard Hugh and their cousins discussing the owner of the name? 'They should all have had a bit more faith if you want my opinion,' the woman said.
Rory wasn't sure he did, but heard himself say 'All?'
The woman leaned forwards as if to keep a confidence from her husband. 'I'd lay money the other girl went off there too. Maybe she didn't think they were up to it by themselves, the way they both were. They should have
