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 anticipation of the call, but the motion of the train assailed her with the occasional shiver. When the phone began to sing its tinny O she jabbed a key and snatched her hand back. At first Hugh thought she'd broken the connection in her haste, and then he heard a voice, muffled 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 cliché 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, god, 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 entitle, 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 button 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 reassuring 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 space 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 massive 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.'