'I've no idea what you're asking me to think.'

'I don't want to say too much.'

'You are, though. It just isn't making a great deal of sense.'

Hugh leaned forwards, gripping the edge of the seat to rea.s.sure Ellen that he wasn't about to grab her. 'Suppose talking about you know who brings him?' he said barely louder than the monologue of the wheels.

'Too many people around, Hugh.'

He was behaving irrationally in at least one way: it surely couldn't matter how quietly or otherwise he spoke. He sat back, to Ellen's visible relief, before saying 'Now we're on our way you know where to do you know what, shouldn't he be trying to make things worse for us?'

Hugh had begun to wonder if she found his language childish by the time she said 'Perhaps he's distracted by us splitting up.'

'Leaving the others at the hospital, you mean.' When she confirmed this with a solitary nod Hugh said 'But he made us all have nightmares when we weren't together.'

'Maybe it takes more of an effort to keep them up.'

'Suppose it's to make us think he doesn't care if we find him?'

'I think you were right before. We ought to stop talking about it. Let's concentrate on getting there and seeing what can be done.'

This made Hugh more aware of the purpose of their journey than he wanted to antic.i.p.ate. Perhaps Ellen sensed his disquiet, because she said 'Think of Rory if it helps.'

It almost did, but only for a moment. 'Maybe he's there,' Hugh blurted. 'Him.'

'I thought we said that's just a kind of nightmare.'

'He could be busy doing something to Rory. Suppose that's why we're being left alone?'

'I expect Charlotte would call us if there were any developments.'

'We should have asked her to.' Hugh dragged his mobile from whichever pocket it was in. 'I want to be sure,' he felt defiant for saying.

He'd begun to wonder if some event at the hospital was distracting Charlotte by the time she said 'Where have you got to?'

He could have done without her turn of phrase. 'We're on the train,' he said.

'I thought you'd have to be. Any problem?'

'Not here, well, not more than we've been having. How about there?'

'Just the same as when you left.' Before Hugh could decide whether this contained any accusation Charlotte said 'Sorry, I should have thought. I didn't notice.'

'What didn't you? What's wrong?'

'Quiet a moment, Hugh. You're right, absolutely. It's going off. I'll take it out if I need to.' Closer to the phone she said 'We aren't meant to use mobiles in here. There's a sign at the entrance, apparently.'

'We just wondered how Rory's getting on. Will you let us know if there's any change?'

'So long as I can reach you.'

'Why shouldn't you be able to?'

'You'll have to go underground, won't you? Sorry,' she added, not addressing him. 'I have to go now, Hugh.'

'All right, maybe we'll talk again.'

As he wished he hadn't made the prospect sound uncertain Ellen said 'Hold on. Tell her hold on.'

'Ellen wants a word.'

'She'll have to wait until I go outside.'

Ellen tugged one of her hands from beneath her and inched it forwards, then shoved it back into hiding. 'Doesn't she want to speak to me?'

'Of course she does. She just can't in the hospital. She's going where she can.'

Ellen's gaze was sinking inwards by the time her mobile came to life. It sang O at length and eventually arrived at klahoma, the final vowel of which she thumbed off. 'Charlotte?' she said. 'You'll want to be part of this, Hugh.'

She switched on the loudspeaker and laid the phone next to her before sitting on her hand again. 'I was thinking, we never called Glen back.'

'It sounded as if he'd finished to me, but I can give you his number.'

'Do you think it might be better if you rang him? He won't know mine, so he mightn't answer it. You could always tell him it's for my book. I just thought we should find out if he had anything else to say about, you know, why he rang before.'

Charlotte sighed or made hard work of a breath. 'I'll see if there's anything to get out of him. It can be my excuse to stay out here for a few minutes.'

With that she was gone as though the impatient clawlike clicking of the wheels had surged to drag her down. Ellen's hand crept out to finger a key and retreated into hiding. Hugh levelled an encouraging gaze at her, even once his eyes began to smart with the prolongation of the task. She might have been holding herself rigid in antic.i.p.ation of the call, but the motion of the train a.s.sailed her with the occasional shiver. When the phone began to sing its tinny O she jabbed a key and s.n.a.t.c.hed her hand back. At first Hugh thought she'd broken the connection in her haste, and then he heard a voice, m.u.f.fled enough to be buried. 'You need to put the loudspeaker on again,' he said and activated it for her.

'Glen isn't answering, you two. I've left a message for him to call one of us.'

'You aren't waiting outside till he does,' Hugh protested.

'I'm not, that's right. I'm going to Rory in a minute. In fact, make that now.'

The clamour of an ambulance had begun to overwhelm her voice. Hugh had the disorienting impression that the artificial wail was rising from beneath the carriage or even from underground. It grew muddily blurred as it filled the loudspeaker, and then it sank into silence, but not before drawing a bony hand into sight behind Ellen's head.

Hugh didn't know whether he was more dismayed by it or by how Ellen might react when she noticed it. He was panicking over where to look when Charlotte said 'If anyone needs to call me I'll have the phone on mute.'

'Thanks, Charlotte,' Ellen said. 'We'll know you're there.'

'Good luck then. Be careful,' Charlotte added and might have been searching for less of a cliche as the owner of the hand peered between the seats. She was a pensioner whose reddish hair and bony face looked faded as an early photograph. 'Would you care to turn that down?' she said. 'We don't all want to hear your business.'

'Goodbye, Charlotte,' Hugh called, possibly in time for her to hear. 'Gone now,' he told the pensioner. 'Is it all right if we talk?' This sent her back into her seat, but her intrusion felt too much like an omen of a worse one, and left Hugh with such a sense of being spied upon that he was afraid of making some disastrous mistake out of nervousness. 'Let's talk,' he appealed to Ellen. 'It doesn't matter what about. Anything except, anything else at all.'

TWENTY-EIGHT.

By the time they came to change trains Ellen felt as if she and Hugh were reverting to childhood. They'd been reduced to playing a word game, competing to produce the longest word by adding a letter at each turn. Go, G.o.d, goad, gonad . . . Hugh had won that round and quite a few others by creating a plural while Ellen did her best not to resent his nervous triumph; she was supposed to be the writer, after all. She had even let him finish off the list of be and bee and beer and beery with begery, though she'd hoped his tentative lopsided smile had shown he meant it as a joke. Once they'd agreed they could rearrange letters the rounds had gone on longer, in some cases almost long enough she forgot why they were playing. At least the contest was preferable to I Spy, their solitary game of which had reminded them that neither liked to look towards the windows, not to mention around the carriage in search of anything hidden. I, in, inn, nine, linen, linnet . . . She'd baulked at letting Hugh turn this into ent.i.tle, though he'd seemed proud to have finally lit on the word. Now it was a question of how precarious an item he would find to stack on top of me and men and mean and meant and mental. She might have pointed at her mouth to suggest aliment if that wouldn't have risked touching her rubbery lips with a spongy finger. 'Mentaly,' Hugh said at last with some defiance.

'You win,' Ellen said and shut the lids of the moist bags of liquid that were her eyes, because the high walls of a railway cutting had conjured two reflections of her out of the dark.

When the train coasted to a halt she didn't open her eyes. She wasn't going to be tricked into glimpsing her reflection, even by the stench of clay and worse that drifted into her nostrils, presumably from herself. The train lumbered to a second halt, and Hugh murmured 'Liverpool.' Only the notion that she might force him to touch her and pretend again that he could bear it made her look.

Under an outsize clock magnifying ten to three in the afternoon the station concourse was crowded, but everyone seemed too preoccupied to notice Ellen, unless they'd seen her and weren't anxious to repeat the experience. Hugh poked a b.u.t.ton to summon a lift to take him and Ellen underground. As the doors opened, a small broad square-faced man topped with a handful of parallel strands of grey hair limped towards them, brandishing a Cougar bestseller, Just Be You. He followed the cousins into the lift and then retreated, waving the paperback as if miming a vigorous farewell, though Ellen knew he was fending off her appearance and her stench. 'Forgot something. You go on,' he said and stepped back.

Hugh's attempts to keep a rea.s.suring gaze on her made her say 'Don't waste your time on me, Hugh. We both saw that.'

'We heard him too, didn't we? He had to go back for something.'

'He didn't fool me, so don't try. He was being polite, like you.'

'Maybe he was claustrophobic. It says it's for eight people but they'd have to be squashed in.'

Rather than demand whether he had in mind the amount of s.p.a.ce that clammy misshapen Ellen was occupying, she said 'No, it was me.'

'Maybe you're right, but not the way you think. You've put on too much.' Hugh's gaze jittered but didn't veer away. 'It's even getting to me in here,' he said.

His honesty was less welcome than she must have been determined to believe. As the lift crawled downwards she felt as if they were being dragged into the earth. 'So you've agreed with me all the time,' she told him.

'I haven't, Ellen. What do you think I said?'

'You tell me. Go on, make yourself clearer.'

Patches of his face had begun to look raw, the way his brain might feel for all she knew. 'Too much . . .' he repeated, waving his hands as if to send away the remainder of the phrase.

'Finish it off. One more word.'

'Smelly.'

While she had invited directness, she couldn't have imagined he would be so cruel. The doors drew back, revealing a tiled corridor that led to the underground platform. A thin shrill echo mocked her as she said 'We don't need anyone to make me feel worse. You're doing fine.'

'I don't understand,' Hugh pleaded as he chased her out of the lift. 'What am I meant to have done?'

Ellen thought she glimpsed her reflection in the white tiles on both sides, a pallid writhing like the antics of a ma.s.sive grub. Hugh's presence at her heels was quite as unappealing. 'Don't you know what you're saying?' she enquired, not even over her shoulder. 'Haven't you any sense of that either?'

'I said . . .' She heard his footsteps pause as his voice did, but she wasn't waiting for him. 'Smelly,' he said and hurried after her. 'That's what you used to call perfumes.'

It was true, but how could she be sure that he hadn't been inadvertently accurate? She trudged to the end of the corridor and along the platform to the nearest trio of mud-brown plastic seats embedded in the wall. 'Just leave me alone for a while,' she said, and when his eyes began to flicker with panic 'Sit by me but don't say anything till I want you to.'

He left a seat between them when she took the furthest. She couldn't tell whether he was respecting her wishes or simply loath to sit closer. A board above the platform announced that their train to West Kirby was due in four minutes. The digit yellow as a warning on a traffic light twitched and diminished, and Ellen was reflecting that it was also the colour of cowardice a of her apprehension about the journey a when a figure emerged from the tiled corridor. It was the man with the book.

He must have caught the lift as soon as it returned to ground level. He hadn't even bothered to pretend that his imaginary errand had delayed him. Perhaps he'd hoped Ellen would have departed. He aborted his expression as he noticed her and trotted hastily past. 'Don't,' Ellen muttered as Hugh opened his mouth. Beyond the man another board subtracted a minute, and she heard the rumble of the train.

She could have thought the boards were taunting her and Hugh. At best they felt like an extension of her mind, determined to postpone the outcome of the journey. The train slowed as it wormed into the light, naming West Kirby in yellow letters that scuttled across a strip above the driver's window. Hugh jumped up as if he felt the need to demonstrate eagerness, then seemed at a loss until Ellen wobbled to her feet. As they boarded the train, so did the man with the book.

At least he stayed out of their carriage, which meant they had it to themselves. Ellen sat facing away from the driver and the man. She preferred not to watch the train burrow into the tunnel a it was a little too reminiscent of groping inside the cliff a but instead she felt darkness advancing at her back. The train raced under the river to Birkenhead, and had stopped at two more stations when the doors between the carriages rattled open to admit the man with the book.

Ellen tried to ignore him, especially for fear of alerting Hugh. He seemed disagreeably fascinated by the progress of the dark outside the window, unless he was doing his utmost to disregard Ellen's reflection. The man behind him apparently felt required to explain the change of carriages, however. 'Smokers,' he complained.

Hugh twisted around to catch him wrinkling his nose and waving the book like a fan. 'Hugh,' Ellen warned, but too late: he'd grabbed the back of the seat to swing himself into the aisle as he demanded 'Why were you doing that again?'

The man shut the door and squatted on the seat to its left, planting the book on his lap. 'I'm sorry?'

'Never mind being sorry. Just tell this lady why you didn't get in the lift.'

'I don't want to hear it, Hugh.'

'She doesn't want to hear.'

'She does really, and I do. What was wrong with it? You can say. We need you to.'

'I said I dropped something and had to go back.'

'You said you forgot it before.'

'Forgot it or dropped it. Same thing.'

'No it isn't. We know about words,' Hugh said and jabbed a finger at the book. 'She specially does. She's going to be published by them.'

'Is that right?'

While Ellen wasn't certain that the question was addressed to her or indeed to anyone, she said 'I hope so. Hugh a'

'First time I've met a writer. I suppose you have to be different from the rest of us.'

'Better, you mean,' Hugh said. 'So what did you drop?'

The man's face had begun to compete with his for overall redness. If Ellen were writing the scene she might have described this as the colour of a pair of traffic lights warning her to stop. Meanwhile the man was saying 'What do you care?'

'I care a lot,' said Hugh, not quite turning towards Ellen, who would have responded that he cared too much about her a 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.'