The Bottle Factory Outing (15 page)

After a time Rossi left the café and wandered about outside, hands behind his back and chin sunk on his chest. Patrick nudged
Brenda and indicated she should go outside and talk to him.

‘No,’ she protested, pursing her mouth edged with
crumbs, and he pinched her quite hard on her thigh and frowned.

‘Talk to him, that’s all I ask.’

He wasn’t as he had been in the bathroom. He was no longer shy and full of reverence. She bridled and moved her leg away and
chipped a raisin from her tooth.

Vittorio was perpetually in the dark – the strange accent of the Irishman and the mumblings of Brenda confused him. He listened
politely to the men discussing the placid lions, nodding in all the right places, his eyes continually flickering from Brenda
to Patrick and back again. Under his fingers the picture postcard buckled at the corners. Patrick removed his cap and laid
it on a ledge. Exposed, his flaring ears burned pinkly beneath his copper-coloured hair. I don’t like him without his hat,
thought Brenda. Come to think of it, she didn’t like him at all. She actually preferred Rossi with his trouble-some ways and
his black and tangled curls. Excusing herself, she pushed her way from the table and went outside on to the lawn. They paced
in silence for a time, up and down the path outside the window. They could hear the clatter of cups and the hiss of the coffee
machine. Now and then she sensed Patrick’s face at the glass, and when they reached the corner of the café building she took
Rossi by the arm and marched him away to a ditch at the side of a fence and leapt clear over it into a field. He dithered
on the other side and was reluctant to follow.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I want to tell you something,’ and he scrambled awkwardly over the cut in the ground, dipping one foot
into muddy water and shaking it like
a dog, one suede shoe turned black and the turn-up of his trouser soaked.

‘Never mind,’ she said impatiently, and she ducked down behind a hillock of damp grass and smoothed her purple cloak. ‘You
must know,’ she said, when he had sat down beside her, fussing about his saturated shoe and sulkily wiping at it with a handkerchief,
‘that what we’ve done is very wrong.’

He was like a child being scolded. He tossed his head at the injustice of it and refused to speak.

‘Police,’ she said, thinking of the night they had taken Mrs Haddon away, ‘ask an awful lot of questions – all sorts of things
that don’t seem to have anything to do with what actually happened. They’ll want to know what she said to you when you went
into the bushes. Patrick’s hinting something funny went on.’

He said: ‘It is all happening too quick. I cannot think.’ But he was once again the cellar manager whose eye was anxious,
almost calculating.

‘Well, you’d better. I’m warning you. Patrick thinks you hurt Freda.’ She was speaking too quickly for him.
‘Don’t you see? He’s got that cut on the eye and he had a fight with her in the church.’

‘He never like Mrs Freda—’

‘He threw stones at her when she was in the woods—’

‘He knock Aldo to the ground. He is a violent man.’

‘Yes,’ she said. They were piling blame upon the Irish-man, brick by brick; they sat there silently remembering.

After a while she said: ‘You’ve got nothing to be worried about. We ought to go to the police now.’

‘No.’

‘It’s your car she’s sitting in. You’ve got the licence.’

‘It’s not my fault.’

‘Well, they’ll want to know why you let them put her in your car.’

He did see what she meant but he shook his head. ‘No police.’

‘Why on earth not?’ She was getting quite irritated by him. She wanted it all settled and the landlady told and the aunt in
Newcastle informed – she might even ring Stanley. ‘Patrick,’ she said loudly, speaking very slowly and pronouncing every word
clearly, ‘is trying to blame you. He says there was glass under her jumper. And I saw you go into the bushes. I’ll have to
tell the police. If you tell lies they always find out and it looks worse.’

‘What glass is this?’ he asked. ‘What glass under her jumper?’

‘Not under it. Stuck in the fluff in the back. And he wanted to know about your watch.’

‘My watch,’ he repeated in a low voice and stared blankly at the smashed time-piece on his wrist.

A long sigh escaped him. He played idly with his mud-stained handkerchief.

‘It’s all for the best,’ she said.

Haltingly he began to tell her a story.

‘When Mrs Freda come into the office and say she tell me to leave you alone, I am very angry. She mention Mr Paganotti . .
.’

As he remembered the incident he flushed with renewed rage. She had been so bullying and unladylike, thumping her fist on
his desk like a man. He had not known how to deal with her. When his wife had come
to the factory with her niece from Casalecchio di Reno he could hardly breathe for fear Freda would march in and denounce
him. When she did come, and asked him if she could use the telephone, his heart had nearly stopped beating. How could he let
her use the phone with his wife sitting on her chair, listening? Hadn’t he told his wife that Mr Paganotti had arranged the
Outing long ago and no women were going? Freda had stood there smiling, shuffling his beautifully ordered labels on their
shelves. He did not dare tell her to go away. Her pink lips had glistened; she had been so confident. And later Vittorio had
seemed upset and anxious. Twice he went to the main door of the factory and looked up and down the road …

‘But I didn’t believe her. I think she just say it to upset me.’

She was always upsetting people, he thought, interfering between him and Mrs Brenda, causing everybody trouble. She had made
advances to Vittorio. She had invited him round to her room and given him brandy stolen from Mr Paganotti. She wanted him
to take her out to a restaurant. In the office she had whispered into Vittorio’s ear as if they were betrothed …

‘And Vittorio did not want to come on the Outing. In the street I have to persuade him. He want to go home. He say she is
always arguing.’

Vittorio had made him ring the coach firm and cancel the van, so that nobody could go into the country. It was not good having
to ring the man and tell him he did not want his van. He had felt ashamed doing such a thing. Vittorio had said they must
go to the factory on the
Sunday as if nothing happen … then they would all go home … only, when they got to the factory, it seemed a pity
to waste the day, he had his sandwiches … besides his cousin Aldo Gamberini insist they go, and Salvatore have his car
…

‘When we play the football I think we are all having a good time. The little confusion in the fortress – pah, it is all forgotten.
When we go on the horses I think Vittorio too is happy. He look at Freda as if he love her.’

It was true. Vittorio was an educated man: Mr Paganotti, his uncle, had put him through college. He had studied art – poetry.
When he had looked at Mrs Freda on her horse it was as if he were reading something in one of his books. He was learning something.
It was not just the wine that made him smile at her so. It had seemed a simple thing to suggest that Vittorio take her into
the woods. How could he refuse? The sun was shining – the little birds were singing.

‘I want us all to be happy, all to go into the woods for a little jump out. I ask Vittorio to take Freda for a walk. The men
are happy playing football – the four of us – but he is angry. He say Freda will tell his uncle, Mr Paganotti, that he go
to her room and try to get into the bed. I want to help my friend. I wait a little.’

The wine had made him excited. When he had walked over the grass his head was filled with pictures of Freda – alone in her
room in a black gown drinking Mr Paganotti’s brandy – lying on her back in the sunshine. When she rode the black horse her
buttocks were like two round melons.

‘I go into the bushes to ask Freda not to go to Mr
Paganotti.’ Rossi began to tremble. He crumpled his hand-kerchief into his palm.

‘Go on,’ said Brenda. ‘What did she say?’

‘I do not see her. She is talking to Vittorio.’

‘She couldn’t have been.’ Brenda was bursting with resentments. She didn’t understand why Vittorio had told lies about Freda;
she didn’t understand why Rossi pretended Vittorio had been in the bushes. She wanted to hit the little Italian sitting there
not telling her the truth – she wanted to go home.

‘Well,’ she said nastily, ‘it seems fishy to me. And I don’t suppose the police will like it either.’

Suddenly she didn’t want to wear the purple cloak any longer; it wasn’t her property. She unfastened the collar and shrugged
it from her shoulders. She didn’t know why she was so bothered about the truth. Who was
she
to sit in judgment? It wasn’t going to make any difference to Freda.

More patiently she said: ‘But I did see you come out of the bushes. I didn’t see Vittorio. And you were crying in the car.’

‘I walk around for a few minutes. I look at you and you are like a little girl on the grass. Then I see Vittorio go away and
I go into the bushes again. I am thinking she is asleep. And when I realise—’

He stopped and lowered his eyes beginning to fill with tears. She began to cry too, out of sheer tiredness, quietly, with
a great deal of sniffing.

It was almost dark now. The cafeteria was closing. There were lights coming on among the trees and the distant sound of metal
doors being bolted. A cart with
a hose attachment moved slowly along the road towards the lion enclosure. Patrick was disturbed that she had been absent
so long. They had gone to the car to look for her. The men had called her name along the hedgerow.

‘I didn’t hear,’ she said.

He took her by the arm and stood murmuring into her ear. The men sat on a low fence and looked in the opposite direction.

‘Did he say anything?’

‘He said Vittorio was in the bushes before he was.’

Patrick swore.

‘Will you give up now?’ she said. ‘Can’t we go to a police station?’

They were cheating Freda out of her death. She knew that if it had been her that had been found dead under the sky, Freda
would have beat her breast and shrieked her lamentation. This way, this stuffing into cars and secret consultations, was belittling
to her. You’d have thought Patrick would have known how to treat the dead, being Irish – all that weeping and wailing and
fluttering of candles through the night. She gave the purple cloak to Vittorio and told him to tuck it about Freda. It wasn’t
until she was actually sitting in the car that she realised she was dressed all in black; her woollen dress, her dark stockings,
even her shoes in shadow beneath the dashboard were entirely suitable for a funeral. She would have liked to tell Rossi but
she didn’t want to be flippant. He was adjusting the driving mirror, twisting it this way and that – possibly he was trying
to avoid the reflection of Freda’s head sunk upon her breast. She tried to escape into sleep as the car wound down the
path, the red mini in front of them, but she was wide-awake, her brain teeming with images: the edge of the table cloth blowing
upwards in the wind, horses racing beside the trees, the white ball leaping towards the sky. The headlamps of the Cortina
caught the distempered wall of the open-air café; the metal umbrellas wavered and were gone. She thought as they began to
climb the hill that she heard the sound of an elephant trumpeting down in the paddock. Patrick and Vittorio began a desultory
conversation interspersed with long silences – something about the climate of Italy. They sounded as if they had just met
while waiting for a train.

‘In the south it is different.’

‘So I’ve heard. I read a bit once in a paper about Naples.’

‘That too is hot,’ said Vittorio.

‘Dirty place by all accounts,’ Patrick said.

‘It is a port. You know, the docks – refuse – fruit.’

‘Terrible stink in the summer. Like bodies rotting.’ He reddened. Even in the dark Patrick blushed like a woman, though no
one could see him.

When they entered the north side of the Park, Rossi drove very slowly. The red mini was out of sight. Already it had flashed
past the picnic area and was out of the Park approaching the roundabout.

The headlamps of the Cortina pierced the darkness. Brenda saw the dull gleam of the timber fence in the distance. The car
crawled along the verge and stopped. Rossi switched off the engine. There was a little silvery noise as the key dangled for
one instant in the ignition. They could hear one another breathing. When the wind
rustled through the black grass it was like a long-drawnout sigh.

‘Well,’ said Patrick, ‘we got to get something settled. Between the four of us.’

Five, thought Brenda. As her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness she could make out the shape of the cut-down oak and the
grey mass of the bushes beyond. They’d left a barrel of wine on the stump of the tree. If they intended to go on hiding Freda,
they ought to get rid of that barrel – it was circumstantial evidence.

‘It is best,’ said Vittorio, ‘if we tell each other the truth.’ He sounded a long way off, as if he was outside some-where,
calling to them. ‘For myself I have nothing to hide.’ He could not however help putting his hands over his face in a gesture
of despair.

‘Well, I have,’ Patrick said. ‘I’ve been in trouble before with the police.’

Brenda stopped herself in the nick of time from turning round. She trembled at the narrow escape and the implications of
his words. She’d been alone with him in the bathroom for hours – she’d even locked the door – and she’d have gone a walk with
him in the woods if he had asked her, simply to get away from Rossi.

He said: ‘Nothing I’d be ashamed to tell me own mother. Fights, I mean – having a drop too much. I don’t want to put meself
in their hands. Before you know where you are, you’ve said one thing, and haven’t they written it down as something else?’

Brenda wished he wouldn’t talk in that ridiculous accent. Everything he said was a question. She knew the sort of trouble
he meant. Stanley didn’t like the police
either, though God knows why: they had often brought him home when he had fallen into a ditch on the way back from the Little
Legion. The park at night reminded her of the countryside she had left: the lights of the town twinkling away to the right,
the spidery branches of the trees – if she opened the window she might hear the hooting of an owl.