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. 'Who?'
'My Jack here.' She lifted his hand as if that helped her identify him and then let it subside. 'He was the one who was making the fuss,' she said.
'That's good, is it? Mustn't it mean he was conscious?'
'Not of his old Annie. The way he carried on it was more like he was having a bad dream and couldn't wake up.'
Hugh heard restlessness behind him. He couldn't look around, instead demanding 'Did you hear that?'
'What?' Ellen said with none of his nervous triumph.
'What this lady said.'
'Call me Annie, do.'
'We're all capable of hearing, Hugh. Nobody's lost their wits.' Rather less sharply Charlotte added 'Did your husband actually say anything, Annie?'
'He did that. Said there was someone on the screen that shouldn't be.'
This seemed remote enough for Hugh to experience some fleeting relief. 'In a cinema, you mean?'
'I wish he'd been dreaming about all the times he took me when we were courting. We used to go to the pictures twice a week and he always bought me flowers as well. I sometimes dream about that when I'm going off to sleep.' Annie's eyes grew unfocused and moist before she appeared to remember the question. 'It wasn't any picture-house,' she said. 'You'd have thought he was on about the screen around your Rory's bed.'
Hugh tried to recapture his sense of triumph but was closer to regretting his insistence. 'What did he say about it?' Ellen asked somewhere behind him.
'We couldn't make half of it out, me and the nurses. They're a credit to the hospital, let me promise you. Your Rory's in the best hands.' Hugh was afraid she'd lost her conversational way again, and was on the edge of having to prompt her when she said 'He kept saying they were hiding behind the screen. On the floor, it sounded like, or maybe they went under the bed.'
Hugh had to ask the question. 'Who?'
'Nobody they'd let in a hospital. Some man that was all bones and so dirty he left marks on the screen. Jack thought he was a big spider at first, he was going so fast, or maybe it was how he was going.'
Hugh heard movement behind him again as Charlotte said 'You seem to have understood quite a lot. Was that the half?'