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 – of her apprehension about the journey – 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 – it was a little too reminiscent of groping inside the cliff – 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 –'
'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 – 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.'