The Bottle Factory Outing (2 page)

Brenda broke into a run as soon as they left the house. A stream of traffic going very fast caused her to halt at the intersection
of Park Road and Hope Street.

‘Fool,’ shouted Freda, walking leisurely behind her.

‘We’re late,’ wailed Brenda. ‘We’ve not been on time yet.’

‘Foreigners,’ Freda said carefully, ‘understand about the artistic temperament.’ She walked on in television serials very
occasionally, either as a barmaid or a lady agitator.

‘I hate being conspicuous. You know how I hate it.’

‘You surprise me,’ said Freda.

Brenda was so cold she was dressed onion-fashion in layers – pullovers and scarves and a double sheet of newspaper under her
vest. She wore no make-up. Sometimes, when she suffered from the toothache, she affected a woollen balaclava that her husband
had worn on the farm.

Freda walked towards the sweet-shop to buy her cigarettes. ‘Calm yourself,’ she called, as the dithering Brenda ran up and
down the pavement. ‘Nobody will say a word about the time. Not a bloody word.’

Brenda knew it was true. She also knew there was a reason for it, an explanation that Freda refused to credit.
Freda hinted Brenda was trying to draw attention to herself.

‘I ask you,’ she had shouted quite loudly, ‘is it likely, the way you’re got up?’ And she had laughed.

Brenda begged her to keep her eyes open so that she would observe the precise moment she was plucked from the bench, but Freda
never bothered. She was always turned to Maria, talking about politics or the theatre, and Brenda couldn’t very well tug at
her arm with Rossi looking on so eagerly from behind the window of his office. Brenda disappeared for what seemed like hours,
either down into the cloistered chill of the cellar or upstairs amidst the stored furniture. Freda had never noticed.

Majestically Freda came out of the sweet-shop and strolled up the street. She was like a ballroom dancer moving in time to
some slow waltz, pointing her feet delicately as she advanced, swaying from side to side in her purple cloak, one hand raised
slightly with wrist arched, as if she dangled a fan. She looked with interest into the basements of the Victorian houses and
thought how disordered were the middle classes – the lack of carpeting, the identical shabby rocking-chairs set against the
walls, the mania for stripped wood as if under the illusion they lived in log cabins in the outback. She saw herself with
Vittorio, sprawled in an embrace upon the bare boards, toes pointing at the ceiling. Brenda was scurrying into the distance:
as she ran she brushed the bulky side of a privet hedge with the padded shoulders of her over-large coat – the landlady had
discarded it when her grand-dad died, intending it for the bin-men. Freda
wouldn’t walk with her dressed like that; she made her run on ahead.

The wine factory was on the corner of the street next to the Greek chip-shop. It was three storeys high with its paintwork
peeling and the name PAGANOTTI on a brass plate above the door. The lorries parked in the main street and caused traffic jams.
There was an alleyway and a fire escape loaded with boxes and plastic containers, and a side door made of iron, outside which
Brenda was waiting, shoulders hunched against the wind.

‘Please keep your eye on me. It’s not much to ask.’

‘Shut up,’ said Freda, patting her hair into place. No matter how rushed she was for time she managed to paint the lids of
her eyes cobalt blue and to coat her lashes with vaseline.

Everyone shook hands with them when they came into work, all the tired bottling men in their green overalls and trilby hats.
One by one they took it in turn to step away from the rusted machinery slowly revolving in the centre of the floor. They left
the steel rods squirting out wine, pumped up from the cellar beneath into the dark rotating bottles, bashfully to hold the
cool outstretched fingers of the English ladies. Freda found the ritual charming. It established contact with the elusive
Vittorio, if only fleetingly. ‘
Bongiorno
,’ she trilled, over and over.

They worked from eleven in the morning till three in the afternoon. They weren’t supposed to have a break for lunch, but most
days Freda bullied Brenda into going over the road to the public house to share one hot sausage and one vodka and lime. Maria,
who started at eight and
left at two, could not bring herself to go with them. She brought sandwiches made of salami, the left-overs from her nephew’s
restaurant, wrapped up in a headscarf. She wore the black dresses she had carried from Italy twenty years before, and after
midday, when the damp got to her bones, she climbed into a mail bag for warmth. All the same she suffered dreadfully from
chilblains, and Freda persuaded her to wear mittens. She worshipped Freda, whom she thought bold and dashing and resourceful.
What style she had – the large English girl with the milk-white skin and eyelids stained the colour of cornflowers. How easily
she had wrought improvements in their daily labour. Refusing to stoop over the wooden labelling bench, she had complained
loudly of a pain in her splendid back and found beer crates for them to sit on. She had purchased rubber gloves from the Co-op
to protect her mauve and shining nails; she had insisted that the Mrs Brenda do the same. She had contrived an Outing into
the landscape, a day under the sky and the trees. Best of all, she had condoned the wearing of mail bags and advised the use
of mittens. At the sight of Freda, Maria’s large pale face flushed pink with pleasure; she stamped her feet to ease her chilblains
and swung her head from side to side. But for the cramp in her knee, she would have risen and genuflected.

‘Hey up,’ said Freda, when the round of handshaking was completed. ‘You’re wearing your sexy nylons again.’ She was looking
at the grey football socks on Maria’s stumpy legs.

With joy Maria rocked back and forth on her beer crate. ‘Aye, aye,’ she moaned, rolling her eyes and darting
glances at Freda, magnificent in her purple trousers and hand-made Cossack boots. She understood little of the conversation:
the English girl gabbled her words so fast.

The ground floor of the factory was open to the street and the loading bay. In summer the stone walls kept the bottling area
cool, in winter the temperature dropped below freezing. The men stamped their feet, blew on their fingers and pulled their
trilby hats about their ears. On the stone columns that supported the floor above, the men had glued pictures from magazines
– a view of Naples, a stout young lady standing in a garden, someone’s son who had studied hard at night, bettered himself
and passed an examination. Above the cardboard boxes stacked in rows twelve foot high, there was a picture of the Virgin holding
her baby and a plaque of the Sacred Heart, sore wounded, nailed like a football rosette to the green painted wall. The work-benches
faced a row of windows overlooking the back wall of the chip-shop and an inch of sky.

In vain Freda had tried to tell the men how low their wages were by other standards, how severely they were exploited. They
listened politely but without comprehension. To them Mr Paganotti was a wise father, a
padrone
who had plucked them from the arid slopes of their mountain region and set them down in a land of milk and honey. What did
she know of their lives before the coming of Mr Paganotti? They were
contadini
who had grown wheat and corn and grapes, but only with tremendous labour, such as made their work in the factory seem like
one long afternoon of play. Sometimes they had managed a harvest of plums and apples. They had kept chickens
and a cow or two. In every way they were peasants, dulled by poverty. But then there had been a miracle. Mr Paganotti in
his infinite wisdom had picked four men from the village of Caprara and brought them to Hope Street, and when they had settled
they sent for their wives and their sons and their cousins and they saved their wages and together bought one house, then
two, until in time each owned a little brick house in the suburbs with hot water running from a tap and a lavatory that flushed.
Gone were the terracotta roofs of the farm-houses they had known, the stone sinks, the primitive wood-burning stoves. Only
the religious pictures remained and the statues of Christ on the cross. As the children of the first generation of workers
grew up, their parents were diligent in conveying just how munificent was the generosity of Mr Paganotti. They remained a
close and isolated community. No one ever left the factory to take other employment; the sons were encouraged to go on to
University and become doctors and accountants. Those who did not have the ability joined their fathers on the factory floor.
They had changed little in thirty years – even Mr Paganotti could not understand the language they spoke, the
dialetto bolognese
that was older than Italian and closer to French. If there was a confrontation between himself and one of the cellar-men,
Rossi the manager, who alone had adapted himself to the English way of life, was called in to act as interpreter. In spite
of their good fortune they still stood like beasts of the field, tending Mr Paganotti’s machines.

It was Brenda’s job to rinse out the sponges in the morning and to tip the glue from the pot into the shallow
trays on the benches. She didn’t mind fetching the glue pot from beneath old Luigi’s place, but she had to go to the Ladies’
washroom to wet the sponges. She always ran straight across the factory floor without looking to right or left, in case Rossi
caught sight of her, flying through the door of the washroom and out again with her sponges dripping, as if she was the last
runner in a relay race. It looked as if she was really zealous and interested in what she was doing.

‘You overdo it,’ said Freda. She had slapped the little glittering labels into the glue and stacked a dozen bottles of wine
in a neat triangle on the bench top. She maintained it was all the same wine – it was just the labels that were different.
Today it was Rose Anjou and it was fractionally pinker than the Beaujolais – it could have been the tint of the glass bottles
or dilution with water.

Brenda had only used one tray of labels when she was distracted by old Luigi at the far end of the line of benches. He stood
with his feet wide apart to balance himself, on lengths of planking laid over the concrete floor to lessen the cold. He was
muttering and pulling faces at the women. Freda, as she worked, talked incessantly and dramatically. She twisted and turned
on her beer crate, she thumped the bottles down into the cardboard box at her side, she stamped her feet for emphasis. Each
time that she got up to reach with her rubber-gloved fingers for another label, and sank backwards on to her upturned crate,
the frail old man rose in the air and settled again. As the morning wore on and he trotted more and more frequently to refill
his little plastic beaker at the wine barrel reserved for the men, so his muttering became
wilder, his glances less discreet. He loathed the English women; he held them in scorn. He would not shake hands with them
in the morning; he refused to contribute to the Outing. Alone of all the Italians in the factory, he neither admired nor took
pleasure in the appearance of Freda; if he could, he would have burnt her beer crate in the market square.

Freda was saying to Maria: ‘You must support the Unions. It’s your duty. It’s no good burying your head in the sand. Know
what I mean?’

‘Aye, aye,’ intoned Maria, wiping gently the neck of the bottle with her honey-coloured sponge.

‘We could do with a bloody Union man here – the cold, the conditions. Talk about A Day in the Life Of – don’t you know about
the Factories Act?’

Above the hostile shoulder of Luigi, Brenda saw Rossi’s face at the window of the office. She tried to avert her eyes, but
he was jumping up and down, jerking his curly head in the direction of the door and smiling with all his teeth showing.

‘Freda,’ she hissed, out of the corner of her mouth.

‘We shouldn’t be working in a temperature like this,’ said Freda. ‘It’s against the law.’

‘Freda – he’s at it again.’

‘Old Piggynotty could be prosecuted.’ Down slammed Freda’s boots on the planking. The smell of talcum powder, dry and sweet,
rose from the armpits of her grey angora jumper as she jabbed with her sponge at a completed bottle of Rose Anjou. ‘Know what
I mean?’

As if lassoed by an invisible rope, Brenda was dragged from her place at the bench. Unwillingly she passed the
grimacing Luigi and walked between the avenue of shelves filled with brandy bottles, towards the office. Rossi stood in the
doorway waiting for her. ‘I have something to show you,’ he confided in a feverish manner, and was off, trotting towards
the pass door, peering over his plump shoulder at her to make certain she was following. She was convinced all the men were
looking at her. They tittered and insinuated, anchored to the bottling plant shuddering in the centre of the floor. They
knew, she was sure, about Rossi: his childless marriage to an elderly wife called Bruna, his frequent trips into the basement,
his sudden disappearances into the groaning lift in the corner behind the boxes, and always, like the smoke from a cigarette,
herself trailing in his wake. Looking very serious, as if the matter was both urgent and highly secret, she descended the
steps into the cellar.

Rossi was running across the stone floor beneath the whitewashed arches hung with cobwebs. He made a small dandified skip
into the air as he leapt the rubber hose that lolled like a snake between the barrels of wine. She always felt at a disadvantage
in the cellar. Reverently she tip-toed deeper into the shadows cast by the little hanging lights. But for the sour smell
of vinegar and the constant hum of machinery as the hose pumped wine to the floor above, she might have been in church. Rossi
was bobbing about in the darkness, whispering ‘Missy Brenda, come over here. I have a little drink for you.’ He had a white
overall, to show he was more important than the men, with PAGANOTTI embroidered on the pocket, and he wore suede shoes stained
with wine.