All right, Miss Joyce. Angel was the favoured child, wasn’t she?
HJ. I don’t see how this is relevant. I refuse to answer questions about our parents.
MS. You must answer the questions I put to you. And you’re on oath. Angel was the favourite, wasn’t she?
HJ. If she was, she deserved to be.
MS. That’s not what I’m asking, Miss Joyce.
HJ. That’s what I’m answering.
MS. Very well. I’ll ask another. Why did you keep your parents out of the loop after you brought Angel back to London? Why not enlist their help?
HJ. Angel didn’t want that.
MS. I’ll ask her, in due course. I suggest you didn’t want that. You knew that they would have made their favoured child tell the truth, didn’t you? Whereas you had no interest in that. You were using her to get your own back on them, weren’t you?
HJ. That really is nonsense. If I wanted anything, I wanted to protect them all.
MS. Oh yes, I can see that. Save Angel’s disgrace by crying rape and kidnap. Bit of a power kick, wasn’t it, keeping them in the dark?
HJ. They weren’t kept in the dark.
MS. They must have resented their exclusion, didn’t they?
HJ. I was doing what Angel wanted. I did that as far as I could.
MS. What you wanted. What made you feel the more important one, for once. The little dry-cleaning assistant takes charge…
CHAPTER ELEVEN
William Joyce came back home from the storage warehouse that was the foundation of his modest fortunes, cold and hungry after an early start. He shared shifts with his manager. They had remarked on how the punters were already putting their unwanted Christmas presents in store. Mr Joyce told anyone who would listen that his business was based on the fact that people owned so many things without the space to keep them; it thrived on an insufficiency of attics in modern houses and a need for ownership. Things equal a sense of prosperity. As long as people dwelt in places too small, moved house, changed jobs, divorced, had temporary existences, worked overseas, renting space for storage provided that extra attic or garage. WJ’s self-storage units provided bigger space for vehicles, machinery, spare parts, heirlooms, furniture, redundant cookers awaiting further use, tricycles, three sets of county archives, endless book and record collections, surplus stocks and at least one set of prosthetic limbs, but the bulk of the customers stored rubbish. Hired space for it by the square foot, per week, month or year. Storing rubbish was good business. Will Joyce neither minded nor cared what people wished to store, provided it was legal and non-infectious. He liked to see them return, collect their keys and check on treasured possessions, even if he wondered why they valued them. He was proud of keeping things safe in the old hospital buildings converted for the purpose on the roundabout outside town; it had made a good living for three decades. He was pleased with his own business acumen, which had made him see the opportunity before anyone else did all those years ago when the place stood empty. We facilitate materialism and preservation, he would say. We rent out space in metal containers and that’s an honourable enough way to make a living, although not exactly a riveting subject of conversation. Except to Hen, he remembered. She considered the featureless, anonymous storage facility as a magic place where people stored dreams of how they wanted to live, silly child.
The storage buildings maintained a cool temperature, with cold, concrete floors, painted grey. An industrial estate had grown up unpicturesquely around it. Privately, William enjoyed the place, but today he was cold to his bones and he wanted the warmth of his extraordinarily comfortable house.
That was where Ellen Joyce had always excelled. Comfort: soft seats and good linen, thick towels, clean clothes and heavy curtains, colourful tapestries on the walls, a love of fabric and the homemade. No clutter or fussiness, nothing too precious to handle, everything durable, no sharp edges, always a relaxing place to land. Plus something ready to eat or something cooking, or at least that was the way it had been in their solid brick-built nest before the fledglings arrived and left. William Joyce wanted it back; he wanted to forget the in-betweens and enjoy it again. As long as Henrietta stayed away, they would surely come to enjoy it again. He worshipped Henrietta, but not when she was the reminder of all their failures.
He went upstairs, feeling the warmth seep back into his bones. As long as everything stayed as it was for the time being, with no new reminders of old nightmares, no shocks or alarms, they would gradually accommodate themselves to their new freedoms and they would manage. The house was back in order without Hen in it. She could not live and let things alone. Hen ‘helping’ was a running sore. They were better by themselves with no more interruptions.
William loved order, hated anything superfluous. Better to forget and move on. The Joyce family did not store rubbish because everything in their house was either pretty or necessary. He could see the clear lines of the place beginning to emerge, and the shadows ready to lift in the spring.
There was a knock on the door.
Delivery for a Miss Joyce, the man said.
Henrietta’s father stood on the doorstep and said there must be some mistake. A Miss Joyce, or Miss A. Joyce? Failing to add that Miss A. Joyce was dead.
A Miss Joyce, the man from Federal Express said. Sorry, misread it. Maybe to Ms H. Joyce, from Ms H. Joyce. Says so here, on this label, black and white. Where do you want it? I’ve been waiting five minutes and I can’t take it back.
Where the hell am I supposed to put it? You’ve got the wrong address.
No, I haven’t.
The FedEx man had already wheeled it out of the back of his van. It was the size of a broad, squat coffin, which gave William a turn as soon as he had answered the door, still with his coat on. The van blocked the street going up to the sea; a car hooted behind it and another car which had turned right from the front began to reverse impatiently, so that out of a corner of the other ear which was not listening to the FedEx man, he heard the sound of a furious engine noise and found himself waiting for a crash. The van had a peculiar resemblance to an ambulance in size and stripes and emblazoned emblems announcing its own urgency, but was mercifully without a siren. William thanked the stars that Ellen was out, although he bitterly regretted it. Damn Henrietta, what kind of joke was she playing, getting stuff delivered here?
The car behind the FedEx van hooted again and the delivery man said, Where do you want it, and without listening to William saying, I don’t want it at all, he hauled the thing up the steps and over the doorstep. Not a coffin, a trunk. It was too bulky for one man, and against his better judgement, Mr Joyce found himself helping. The trunk blocked the narrow hallway and bumped against Mrs Joyce’s framed tapestries: no one could pass either side. William panicked about her not being able to get in, panicked at the sight of it, so he and the angry delivery man hauled it upstairs and put it in the room on the left of the landing, which was Angel’s old room. The house was deceptive from the outside, looked small, but expanded like a TARDIS into many rooms leading off from narrow spaces on three floors. The trunk was more like a wardrobe, heavy but feeling lighter than Angel had been when they hauled her down on a stretcher – but somehow still similar. It was as if she was being delivered back in a container, still dead.