A wave of heat rose from her neck and into her face. There was an instinct to weep, scream and also to remain completely still, numb with hurt. This was her home. She looked at the framed tapestries on the wall. All sewn by the restless, painstaking hands of her mother. Hen wished Ellen could sew now.
‘You don’t want me here.’
‘We’ll always want you here, Hen. But not at the moment.’
‘If you’re telling me to go, I might never come back.’
He was silent for a moment and then smiled again.
‘When you were a child, you were always threatening never to return,’ he said. ‘And you always did.’
‘But all the same, it’s a risk you’re prepared to take.’
He was, she could see it in his averted eyes. Her dear, ineffectual father. There was nothing she could do. You could never make people love you and you couldn’t mend anything by simply loving them. She knew that, but what she had not realised until now was that her presence was an irritant. Her mother shrugging away her supporting arm should have told her that, likewise her father turning a goodnight hug into a pat on the shoulder. They may as well have loathed her. All they wanted was Angel, and Angel was dead. Angel had used her secret cache of pills to overdose herself into endless sleep; if only they had not left her in peace. There, there, they had always said to Angel, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. And in the end they blamed Angel for nothing and Henrietta for everything. If only Hen had not interfered. You never know when to leave a thing alone, Hen. She saw the newspaper he had stuffed behind the cushion of his armchair, where it had remained because he could not throw it away. She had thought that dramatic photograph of that hateful woman in free fall would have helped, but it had not. He was not that kind of man. Watching her watching him, he took the newspaper and threw it on the open fire.
‘Poor woman,’ he said. ‘Do you know what I dreamt last night? I dreamt you’d killed her. I don’t know how you would have done it but I wouldn’t put it past you, Hen. You didn’t kill her, did you?’
‘No, Dad. I wrote to her, that’s all.’
Henrietta Joyce went upstairs, past the locked bathroom door where her mother hummed in the bath, into the tiny bedroom which had been designated hers since childhood and had always been too small. She packed a few things into her single holdall and was back downstairs again within minutes, picking up her coat from where she had dropped it in the hall. There didn’t seem much point in saying goodbye. It was not so much the fact that her mother and father did not like her much, but the fact that they did not know her at all. They would not have dreamed that it was she, Henrietta Joyce, who needed them. Being in danger had always been Angel’s sole prerogative. Her privilege, her inalienable right. Angel always had to be rescued: Hen, never.
She walked along the promenade in the opposite direction to the one her mother had taken, moving easily with the wind behind her towards the centre of town. There was a train at five thirty: she knew the train timetable by heart. Anger gave way to mourning, and the sea seemed to mourn with her. It took twenty minutes to reach the station. She had made this journey to London hundreds of times.
Sitting on the slow train, she tried to feel relieved. An hour and a half would take her to a different world of light, bustle and optimism. Work, friends. She might never have to make this journey again. The heaviest thing she carried in the carpet bag was the file. She had covered it with a binding of red rust velvet, the colour of dried blood, because she liked to handle soft material and the luxury of the cover belied the nature of the contents. The colour was accidental, but it went with the muted, autumnal colours in the material of the bag itself, which sported a motif of abstract flowers growing from the handle and over her shoulder as she strode along. People remembered the bag. The file was beginning to wear a hole on one corner.
The file contained a history of everything that had happened to Angel, from the moment when she herself had found out and intervened. Found Angel and dragged her back, which was not exactly what Angel had wanted. There was stuff in there she had never shown anyone and never let out of her possession, not quite knowing whom she was protecting. She had found Angel in a dump and everything of his that could go into the carpet bag had gone with them. Shame there had been no money. The photographs were obscene, enough to convict him of something if ever they had been used, but Angel had wept and said no, never.
I am thirty-one years old, thought Hen. I’m not going to look at this file now, although I shall when I get home. I have the older-sister syndrome of knowing best. I am still so angry about everything that happened I give it off like an infection. And it’s all over, or it would be if I had not written to her. I wonder if she was inspired by that other woman who jumped? One hour to go on this train and all those stops ahead of me and I can’t even bear to read. Paddock Wood, Tonbridge, into London commuter land. She rummaged in the bag and brought out her sewing, leant against the window and made stitches with quiet precision.
Peter Friel got on the train at the penultimate stop before London, on his way back from his brother’s house and aiming for home, relieved to be returning to normality after a day with other people’s children, marvelling at the carnage created by a birthday party for his four-year-old niece and considering that life in the suburbs really was red in tooth and claw. A quiet drink or three, accompanied by adult food and possibly a phone conversation with Thomas Noble was what he had in mind for the rest of the evening, and then he saw that bag, alongside a woman sewing. It was the bag he recognised first because he had seen and admired it often enough before. Then he registered the novelty of a young woman sitting and sewing in a half empty train carriage, knew who it was, Angel Joyce’s sister, the nondescript girl who had come to court with her, sat with her patiently through the long delays, always accompanied by that colourful bag. The girl who gave evidence first, was cross-examined first, and then kept apart, waiting outside Court One while her sister was grilled, bullied and humiliated inside, until she could bear it no longer. Angel’s blotchy face and badly tinted black hair made a mockery of her name and Marianne Shearer had cut her to ribbons. Peter had always resented the fact that a good-looking victim was always more convincing. It gave them confidence, and Angel had none of that. It seemed unfair. The last time he had seen Angel’s sister, she had been running away from the building and he had wanted to stop her.
Peter hesitated, then went and sat opposite the girl whose name he could not immediately remember, although he could remember the words of her statement. Last time he had seen her he had been in disguise, a faceless lawyer/junior prosecutor wearing a wig, part of the legal team who had thrown Angel Joyce to the wolves in the interests of justice and had been powerless to protect her. It was the case that had shattered his belief in the system, the vision of her collapse haunting him for months now, coming back in strength because of what had happened this week. He had to talk to her. It occurred to him that he would be the last person in the world she would want to speak to, but by that time it was too late. Hen carried on sewing a hem on a piece of emerald green silk the size of a handkerchief. The train trundled through London Bridge station. He had five minutes to do what he had wanted to do six months ago. Apologise.
‘Ms Joyce?’
Henrietta, that was the name. A jolly-hockey-sticks kind of name that did not suit her any more than Angel had suited her sister. She folded up the piece of cloth and began to stuff it into the bag, ignoring him. She closed the bag with a clumsy leather clasp he also remembered and began to move out of her seat.