‘Stop it, June,’ said Lil.

‘She was an embarrassment to this family. You know she was.’

‘Look, we ought not to be doing this. Not today,’ said Tom.

‘No,’ said Angel. ‘We ought not. I’m going.’

She turned on her heel and hurried back to the gravel walkway that led down to the lych gate. Tom hurried after her.

‘Don’t mind Aunt June. We’re all upset. She don’t mean it.’

‘Oh, I think she does,’ said Angel, and hailed a taxi. ‘Goodbye, Tom,’ she said, and climbed in and sped away.

98

‘You’re taking the bloody mick, that’s what you’re doing,’ said the manageress of the cake shop when Angel turned up there two days after the funeral. ‘Not a bloody phone call, not a kiss my arse nor nothing. I got a shop to run here, girl.’

Angel stood on the other side of the counter at the head of a lengthening line of increasingly restless and extremely interested customers, who were ear-wigging avidly at this young blonde woman getting a dressing-down from the pit bull behind the fruit scones.

Something had changed in Angel when Dora died. Her nature had always been patient and enduring. Dora had often told her that even in the womb, she’d been still, silent. ‘I thought you were damned dead, to tell the truth,’ Dora had always told her. ‘I was sure you were. Yet there you were, all the time, taking it easy, getting ready to put in your appearance.’

But now her patience was strained to the limit. The aunts at the graveside. Cheeky sods, showing up there. Family, my arse. And Donny, sniffing around the day after they’d put her mum in the ground, trying to hug her, give her comfort.

‘You poor baby. I’m so sorry about your mum. It’s tragic. But I couldn’t be there with you on the day, to support you, you do understand that, don’t you?’ he’d said to her.

Christ, she hated him so much for what he’d done to Dora. Maybe he did have a grievance against her, but to take it that far, to make her suffer for her whole lifetime, that was just obscene. And now he had Dora out of the way, he could get properly started on Angel. And she really, really didn’t want that to happen. She thought of his wife’s strained, unhappy face at her front door.

Are you one of his women?

Well she was. But she couldn’t end up like Mum, drink-addled, defeated. She just couldn’t.

Angel laid a brown-paper-wrapped package on the cake-shop counter.

‘What’s this?’ asked the manageress. ‘Where you been then? On your flipping holidays?’

‘It’s your ruddy overall,’ said Angel. ‘And your stupid fucking hat. And you can stick your job up your fat, lazy arse.’

‘Well, I . . .’ started the manageress, her mouth hanging open in shock. Angel was a quiet girl, biddable. Or so she’d always thought. Give her the dirtiest, most menial jobs, she never complained. And now this.