‘I don’t know. Could go both ways.’
She nodded. ‘Well, it would attract if you happened to be pretty with it. And had the faintest idea of what you were doing. Instead of not being popular, being rude to people, being on the outside. Drawing attention in all the wrong ways, and getting the wrong result. I’d’ve rather she’d gone with dozens of boys than stayed in her own room, wanking. Her Dad never knew, of course, but I heard. It calmed down of course, it always does, I suppose. Angel never got what she wanted, really. It broke my heart.’
Peter was wondering quite what all this was about. Mrs Joyce looked at him shrewdly.
‘Too much information, eh? I’m sorry about that, but I’ve never been able to talk to anyone else about it and you’re here. Nothing stopped Angel being a sweetheart, she’d have given you the shirt off her back, but she did need protecting. And I could see the look on your face when Father was downplaying what that man did. He’s wrong, I know, but he only does it because he can’t bear the thought of her really hurting. And, as I said, I’m not sure if it’s fair to say that Rick Boyd corrupted Angel. She had corruption in her. There was nothing she wouldn’t have tried. After all, she died with her legs spread, lips and tits smeared with lipstick, oh, never mind, that’s how I found her in the morning. I had to wash her before I called Dad, like I did when she was a kid. Poor baby. I don’t know if that was her own pose, or one she’d learned from him. More coffee?’
‘No, thank you,’ Peter said, quietly absorbing his own shock.
Footsteps sounded down the stairs. Mrs Joyce got up and loaded the tray, as if her part was finished. How well do parents really know their children? Peter thought. How well do the children know one another and to what lengths would all of them go to protect each other?
Mr Joyce had recovered himself. He took the tray from his wife, put it to one side and ushered her back to her seat.
‘C’mon, pet,’ he said. ‘I’ll see to those. I like to see you just sitting.’
‘I’m not good at that,’ she said, smiling at him fondly as if there was no one else in the room. ‘I shall have to learn, shan’t I?’
A grandfather clock ticked in the corner of the room. Peter waited, curious to see where they would go from here, deciding it was up to them. The silence was not uncomfortable as if the warmth of the place took away any feeling of urgency.
‘Well, well,’ Mr Joyce said. ‘I don’t know if that’s cleared the air, or what. We’d better be honest, with you, Mr. Friel. We were angry with Hen over this, and it looked like sending down all this stuff was her trying to tell us something, shock us out of our misery. Being a bit vindictive, I thought. She can be like that. Well, I thought, anyway. We went back into a bit of a state of shock, you see, when that woman committed suicide. Brought it all back, as if it had ever gone away. Kids, eh? Who’d have ’em? They’re all you want, and then you don’t know them at all. Never know what you’re going to get, not even when they’re your own. I suppose we took even more of a risk, didn’t we, Mother?’
‘No, we didn’t. No more than anyone else.’
‘What do you mean?’ Peter asked.
‘They were adopted,’ Mrs Joyce said. ‘Didn’t you know? Angel and Hen, both of them were. We got them when they were only ten days old.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
‘Both of them?’ Peter said, keeping his voice on an even keel. ‘That was very brave of you. Who came first?’
‘Henrietta, of course,’ Mrs Joyce said, proudly. ‘Mind, we’d had to wait long enough for her. It was like being vetted for being a spy. I think they even looked to see if you had anything hidden under the carpets. Very secret and private it was then, not like now. It was a church adoption society. You didn’t even know the name of the mother and the mother was never to know who we were. Anyway, we got her at ten days old, and it didn’t take us long after that to decide, in all fairness, there’d better be two. Didn’t seem right to raise one on her own, when we’d got so much to give. So Angel arrived. We were so lucky.’
‘So were they, Mother, they were lucky to have you.’ Mr Joyce leaned forward and patted her hand, the gesture covering Peter’s loud fit of coughing, which took him by surprise and brought them back into the present. They both looked towards him with genuine concern. He could imagine that every babyish cough or whimper from one of their daughters would be examined instantly.
‘Did they know?’ he asked, when the coughing stopped. ‘About being adopted, I mean? Only it’s never been mentioned, not in the court case, not anywhere.’
‘Yes, they both knew early on. That’s what we were advised to do. Didn’t bother Hen either way, she wasn’t curious or didn’t seem to be. We were her mum and dad, and that was that. But we probably set about it a bit wrong with Angel. She had bad dreams over it, she thought someone was going to come and take her away again. We made up for it by telling her she was very special, in a very special way. We told her she was ours because we loved her and chose her right from the start. I said most mums and dads didn’t get to choose their kids, they just happened; they could just be accidents and what made her special was that she was there, just because she was loved and we really, really wanted her so much, we’d had to fight to get her and we were never going to let her go. I suppose that set in the rot at school, because she got up one day and told the rest of them they were all accidents and their parents couldn’t possibly want them the way hers did. Bless her. She took everything literally, Angel did.’
‘Not sure Mr Friel wants to know about this,’ Mr Joyce muttered, but his wife was in full flight in front of an objective, deeply interested audience who was, in his stillness and irrelevance, a sounding board.
‘Maybe not,’ she said firmly. ‘But I do, and so should you, ’cos I think that’s where everything started, you know? Kids don’t discriminate, they really don’t, until one of them stands up and yells out about being different, especially if they’re saying they’re better. I only wanted to remind you, dear, that it was Hen broke up the fight. Hen always looked after her. There, that’s me done, but I need to know, love, what you want me to do. Talk too much, or not talk at all. It’s one or the other, I’m afraid, no in-betweens.’
‘Talk,’ he said, tersely. ‘Please talk. Talk me to death.’
She had risen to take up the tray again, carried it aloft over his head, brushing his arm as she moved.
‘I’ll not do that, love. I prefer you alive, for a good long while. And I’d like Hen to come home for a bit, whenever she’s ready. And I’d like that room back. I’ll agree with you there, she shouldn’t have sent that stuff down. It was, oh I don’t know, rude of her.’
‘She didn’t send it, Mrs Joyce. Somebody else did. She has no idea who. That’s why I’m here.’
She put down the tray again and then picked it up, like a shield, a person who always carried something or other about with the same ease she wore her clothes. She did not believe him, but she was willing to forgive mistakes.
‘Oh, really? Tell her I’ve given up the bus shelter, will you?’
She nodded towards the door to the stairs.
‘That’s man’s work.’
Angel’s room, beyond the stuff that stood in the entrance, was a pleasant room, apart from the frills. If not the best room in the house, it would have to rival it, larger than Peter imagined, but then he had been thinking of a child. He wanted to see the other two storeys of this house, Hen’s room, the parental room, and he could not ask, thought instead of how he himself could root himself here and never want to grow up and out of it. He could also see why the arrival of so much luggage would anger anyone. The baggage was not quite as he imagined it: he had been thinking ahead of untidy, rubbishy bags, because those were the sorts of items that had always accompanied him whenever he moved. Instead there was a neat old trunk of big proportions, and a couple of garment bags. Difficult to see what all the fuss was about, except for the sheer bulk, the intrusion into the room, the fact that they did not look as if they belonged, and the covering of purple and orange FedEx logos. FOR A JOYCE, FOR H JOYCE, other labels, too, H and A JOYCE, package prepaid, deliver on X. There was a set of far older, worn-out luggage labels on the trunk, overwritten by the purple and orange.