The Bottle Factory Outing (4 page)

Freda found the fortune-telling satisfactory, though the reference to men in uniform and horses galloping was difficult to
understand. She had a cousin in the navy but she knew nothing about horses. There was a lot of weeping and wailing and people
walking in procession – that was the funeral of course. She was going on a long journey by land and sea – it could only refer
to the Outing; possibly there would be a lake in the grounds of the Stately Home and she and Vittorio would drift beneath
the branches of a weeping willow, alone in a rowing boat. She would trail her hand in the water and tilt her head so that
any sunlight available would catch her golden hair and blind him as he rowed. She wasn’t sure about the white dress Maria
saw, a long flowing dress with flowers at the waist. White was not her colour – she preferred something more definite. Maria
visualised
problems, seeing Freda wasn’t a Catholic, and Freda said actually she was very high-church and often went to mass. She was
a little taken aback at what Maria implied– she herself had not been thinking along such ambitious lines.

‘I’m not keen on white, am I?’ she asked, looking over her shoulder for confirmation, and saw Brenda at the table, her head
silhouetted against the panes of glass, the room grown dark and the sky lying yellow above the roof tops, as if snow was on
the way. ‘It can’t snow,’ she cried, striding to the window and peering out into the street. ‘Not with the Outing next week.’

She shook Brenda by the shoulder as if asking for a denial and saw she had been weeping.

In bed that night Freda wanted to know what had been

wrong.

‘You were crying. Were you upset about Rossi?’

‘I wasn’t crying. It was your cigarette smoke.’

‘Shall I give Rossi a piece of my mind? I could say I was going to inform Mr Paganotti.’ She was elated at the prospect. She
saw herself confronting the foreign capitalist at his desk. While she was about it she would tell him the conditions in his
factory were sub-standard.

‘Don’t you dare,’ said Brenda. ‘I don’t want any fuss.’

Below in the street she heard the distant tipsy singing of Irishmen leaving the public house on the corner. From the embankment
came the low demented wail of the express as it left London for the North.

‘Don’t you miss the country?’ Freda asked. ‘The long quiet nights?’

‘It wasn’t quiet,’ said Brenda, thinking of the cries of sheep, the snapping of twigs in the hedge as cattle blundered in
the dark field, the tiny scratchings of shrews on the oilcloth of the kitchen shelf. ‘Once his mother locked me in the barn
with the geese.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘She just did. She shouted things outside and threw stones at the tin roof. The geese didn’t like it.’

‘What things?’

‘This and that.’

‘What did he say when you told him?’

‘I didn’t. I didn’t like.’

‘You know,’ cried Freda, sitting up in bed and dislodging the faded pink eiderdown, ‘you’re a born victim, that’s what you
are. You ask for trouble. One day you’ll go too far.’ She lay down again and rubbed her toes together to warm them. ‘It’s
probably all that crouching you did under dining-room tables during the war.’

‘I never. I was never a war baby.’ Brenda wished she would stop getting at her. Freda had a way of talking late at night that
unwound her and sent her off into sleep while Brenda was left wide awake and anxious.

‘It did make sense,’ said Freda. ‘The tall man and the journey.’

‘That dress …’ Brenda said.

‘I don’t get that. I’m not keen on white.’

‘It’s a wedding dress,’ said Brenda.

All night Freda heaved and flounced beyond the line of books and the bolster encased in red satin. She flung her arm across
the pillow and trapped strands of Brenda’s hair. From her throat, as she dreamed, came the gurgle
of unintelligible words. Brenda huddled on the extreme edge of the bed, holding her share of the blankets in both fists,
staring at the cream-painted door shimmering in the light of the street lamp. She remembered her husband coming home from
the Legion, dragging her from bed to look at the moon through a telescope. She hated treading through the wet grass with
the hem of her nightgown clinging to her ankles and him belching from his intake of Newcastle brown ale. He balanced the
telescope on the stone wall and held it steady while she squatted shivering, leap-frog fashion, amidst the nettles, and squinted
up at the heavens. The size of the moon, magnified and close, appalled her; she shrank from its size and its stillness, as
it hung there like some great golf ball struck into the clouds. She shut her eyes at the memory, and unbidden came a picture
of the grey farmhouse she had left, the glimmer of birch trees down by the stream, the vast curve of the worn and ancient
moors rolling beyond the yard. It had been spring when she had gone there as a bride: there were lambs lying limp in the field,
and he had freshly painted the window-sills for her and the rain barrel and the five-barred gate leading on to the moor. Her
wedding dress, chosen and paid for by her mother, had been of cream lace with a little cloth hat to match, sewn with lillies
of the valley. She wanted to wear a string of simple daisies about her neck, but Mother said she didn’t have to look like
a fool even if she was one. At the reception, when she stood with her new husband, Stanley, to greet their guests, his mother
had leaned forwards to kiss her on the cheek and bitten her ear.

She dozed and woke as Freda turned violently, tumbling books over the curve of the dividing bolster. It happened every night,
the pitching of books into Brenda’s half of the bed, and she lay with them digging into her shoulder and her hip, making no
effort to dislodge them, her hands thrust into the pockets of her overcoat for warmth. At five the bed quivered as the tube
train began to rumble beneath the waking street. Across the park the gibbons in the zoo leapt to the top of their wire cages
and began to scream.

Brenda picked up two bottles of brandy and made small sounds of disapproval. ‘Dear me,’ she said, ‘these are awful mucky.’

Save for old Luigi working away like a conveyor belt, she was alone. Rossi had gone into the city with Mr Paganotti, the men
were herded into the concrete bunker at the rear of the building and Maria was eating her salami sandwiches on a heap of sacks
near the loading bay. Tut-tutting as she went, Brenda grasped the bottles in her arms and walked to the wash room. Freda’s
shopping basket on wheels, loaded with dirty washing, stood against the wall. She put the bottles on the stone floor and
began to drag Mr Paganotti’s wardrobe away from the door of the first toilet. Having made a space big enough for her to squeeze
through, she snatched one bottle of brandy by the neck, placed her back to the door and shoved. It was jammed. Turning round
in the confined space, she leant against the wardrobe and kicked out violently with her shoe. The door sprang open and thudded
against the wall; the noise reverberated throughout the wash-room. She put the brandy behind the lavatory bowl, closed the
door and dragged the wardrobe back into place. Trembling, she carried the remaining bottle to the sink and dabbed at it with
her sponge. ‘Never again, God,’ she murmured. ‘Never again.’

Freda had planned it. She said she’d better stay at home for a few days seeing she was in mourning. They would think it callous
otherwise, now that they knew of her loss. She bet anything old Piggynotty wouldn’t pay her for time off. It was sensible
to take a sample of the firm’s products in lieu of wages.

‘I can’t do it,’ Brenda said desperately. ‘I’ll have a heart attack.’

‘You’ll have one if you don’t,’ warned Freda menacingly. What with the cost of living and the oil crisis they deserved something
to make life more bearable. ‘Look at us,’ she said brutally, ‘the way we scrape along. Never a penny over at the end of the
week. We can’t afford to breathe.’

‘We never could,’ said Brenda. ‘It’s never been any different.’

She bent down and adjusted a vest that had draped itself over the side of the shopping basket. It was perfectly clean. Freda
had just thrown anything in, mainly clothing from Brenda’s drawer. The door opened behind her and the bog-roll man entered
the washroom, his arms full of newspapers. He wasn’t supposed to go near the toilets until after four o’clock, when all the
women had gone home. He was short and bulky with a little moustache thin as a pencil line along his lip.

‘I have come to place the toilet rolls,’ he said, looking at her in a bold way and lingering on the bolstered front of her
tweed coat. ‘There are no rolls,’ he continued. ‘I have a shortage.’

‘This was awfully dirty,’ said Brenda, giving a last wipe with her sponge at the glistening bottle of brandy, and moving to
the door. He put both arms out to capture
her, hugging her to his green overalls. He smelt of wine
and garlic and Jeyes fluid.

‘You want to give me a little kiss?’

‘No, not really,’ she said, smiling politely and shaking her head so that the bristles on his chin scraped her cheek.

Tearing herself free she stumbled from the washroom and ran back to her beer crate and her labels. She supposed it was the
fumes from the wine that kept them all in a constant state of lust. It wasn’t as if she set out to be desirable.

Maria appeared from the direction of the loading bay, a beaker in her hand, walking very fast and taking tiny steps as if
she was still in her mail bag.

‘You’re early,’ said Brenda. ‘You’ve another ten minutes till the hooter goes.’

‘I am to look in the box,’ Maria told her, waving her arm in the air and spilling Beaujolais on to the floor. ‘I am wanting
shoes.’

In the corner, beneath the burglar alarm, were two large crates filled with old clothing of all descriptions. Mr Paganotti
had a large number of elderly relatives living and dying in England, and hardly a month went by without his becoming the chief
beneficiary of yet another will. A few choice articles of furniture he kept for his mansion near Windsor. Some things he sent
to the salerooms; others he stored in the washroom, or upstairs on the first floor. The rest, the debris of a lifetime, he
placed in boxes on the factory floor for the benefit of his workers. There were numerous pyjamas and nightgowns, golfing
shoes in two tones, yellowing stays and white-flannel trousers and striped waistcoats mouldy
with damp. There was a notice pinned to the wall, stating in Italian that Mr Paganotti was delighted if his employees found
use for the contents – ‘Please put 2p in the tea-caddy placed for the purpose.’ Rossi emptied the caddy every two days in
case Patrick the van driver was tempted to help himself to the proceeds.

Brenda was thirsty. She tried sipping Maria’s wine, but it gave her an ache at the back of her jaw.

‘Oooh,’ she wailed, ‘it’s horrible.’

Maria, still rummaging for shoes, cackled with laughter and threw ties, and undergarments of incredible dimensions, on to
the floor.

The machine Mr Paganotti had provided for hot drinks was out of order. When Brenda inserted her metal token and pressed the
button marked ‘Cocoa’, a thin stream of soup trickled into her cup. Patrick, come in from the street to be out of the wind,
smiled at her sympathetically. He never knew what to do with himself in the lunch hour – the men he worked with couldn’t
understand a word he uttered, and Rossi treated him with suspicion, seeing he was Irish, following him about the factory
in case he slipped a bomb beneath the cardboard boxes and blew them all to pieces.

‘Look at that,’ said Brenda. ‘It’s never cocoa.’

‘The machine’s busted,’ he told her, giving it an enormous clout with his fist. He had large hands, discoloured with brown
freckles, and badly bitten nails. One ear was slightly swollen where he had banged it falling down the steps of the Princess
Beatrice the previous night, and there was a cut on his lip.

‘Everything breaks,’ said Brenda, ‘All sorts of things
break down these days. Electric kettles and washing machines and telephones.’

‘You’re right at that,’ he agreed, jingling the coins in the pocket of his overalls and nodding his cropped head. He would
have suited long hair, Brenda thought. It would have toned down his ears and covered his neck, which was broad and mottled
with old adolescent scars.

‘Our toilet’s been broken for three weeks,’ she told him.

‘We can’t get a plumber. The landlady’s tried.’

‘Is that a fact? Broken is it?’

‘Plumbers don’t live here any more,’ explained Brenda, echoing what Freda had told her. ‘It’s on account of the high rents.
Plumbers can’t afford to live. It’s the same with window cleaners,’ she added.

‘I’ll fix it for you,’ he said. And too late she realised what she had done.

‘Oh no really, there’s no need,’ she protested.

But he wouldn’t be put off. ‘I’ll be glad to. I’m good at the plumbing. Will I bring the tools round after work?

‘It’s not my toilet,’ said Brenda. ‘I’m not sure that the landlady—’

‘I’ll fetch the wherewithal from me lodgings and be round when I’m finished.’

‘You’re very kind,’ said Brenda feebly, and returned with her beaker of soup to the bench. She stared at a bottle of Chateau
Neuf du Pape and dreaded what Freda would say. She could almost hear her – ‘You did what? You asked that lout from the bogs
of Tipperary to mend our loo?’ She wondered if she could sneak him upstairs without Freda knowing, or the landlady for that
matter.
Perhaps she could persuade him to wrap a duster round the end of his hammer.

Freda was not enjoying being off work. She hadn’t the money to go down town and enjoy her leisure. She polished the surrounds
of the floor and wedged the window open with Brenda’s tennis racket. The room lacked character, she thought, looking critically
at the yellow utility furniture and the ladies in crinolines walking in pairs across the wallpaper. There was no colour scheme
– nothing matched; there was no unity of design. Every time she made some little improvement, like arranging a curtain round
the washbasin near the door, it only drew attention to the cracked tiles and the yards of antiquated piping climbing in convoluted
loops up the wall. On the shelf she had improvised above the fireplace were some paperbacks, two library books and a bottle
of H.P. sauce that Brenda had carelessly placed. Dissatisfied by all she saw, she went discontentedly on to the landing and
carried the milk bottles downstairs. Lying on the doormat was an envelope addressed to her. When she opened it she thought
she might faint. It was as if life until this moment had been spent underground or beneath the sluggish waters of a river.
Now, as she read the words he had written, she shot to the surface, up into the blinding sunlight and the sweet-tasting air:

My dear Freda,

If it is permissible may I call after work to offer my respects.

Your friend,

Vittorio.

She clutched the note to her breast and flew in her fluffy bedroom-slippers up the stairs. Why can’t life always be like this,
she thought, smiling and smiling at the lovely room with its cheerful wallpaper and the gay curtain that hid the waste-pipe
of the washbasin. She revolved slowly in front of the open window, the street turning with her: the shining bonnets of the
cars at the kerb, the spearheads of the painted railings, the thin black trees that were bouncing in the wind. Above the gardens
devoid of leaf save for laurel bush and privet hedge, the pigeons rose and dipped and rose again, lifting to the rooftops.
A woman in a long plaid skirt blew like a paper boat along the pavement.

Freda couldn’t stop smiling. She closed the window and boiled a kettle of water, reaching to the shelf above the cooker for
her toilet bag with her own special soap and her own clean flannel. She’d had to hide her things from Brenda, who was less
than fussy – who could wipe her neck or her shoes on the dishcloth or her underclothes, all with equal impartiality, if nothing
else was available. She’d have to tell her to go out for the evening. Anywhere would do: there was a new film on at the Odeon
called
Super Dick.
She carried the blue plastic bowl filled with warm water into the living room and knelt in front of the gas fire. Grown solemn
now and a little peaked, the tender sensual smile gone from her mouth, she curled her pudgy toes on the worn hearthrug and
began to wash herself. It would be nice to buy a piece of steak for Vittorio. She couldn’t afford any for herself, but he’d
appreciate her appetite was poor the day after her mother’s funeral. And she’d provide a salad of lettuce
and green peppers and make a real dressing of garlic and lemon juice, such as he was used to. As for Brenda, she could go
to the chippie for her supper. She was always saying she didn’t care for food, that it was sheer affectation to put herbs
in things. People who baked food in the oven, she said, were daft – you could fry everything in a pan twice as quick. Despite
her private schooling and her advantages, she’d been brought up on spam and chips and powdered eggs, and it was no wonder
her husband Stanley had gone to the Little Legion every night. She couldn’t understand why suddenly she felt such resentment
towards Brenda – the thought of her was spoiling her anticipation of the night to come. She frowned and slapped the soapy
flannel against the soft contours of her arm. It’s my room, she told herself. I found it. I have every right to take my chances,
to live my life. She felt refined out of existence by the sameness and regularity of each day, the brushing of her clothes
in the morning and the cleaning of her teeth at night. ‘There is something more,’ she murmured, her lips moving, her eyes
fixed on the mutilated pattern of the rug. ‘I am not Brenda – I do want something.’ She had been squeezing the flannel in
her hands, and the carpet was quite sodden with water. Shuffling backwards on her knees she dried herself on a towel. It would
have been better if Vittorio had given her more time to prepare for his visit: she hated rushing down town and returning
home with minutes to spare, her face all red from the hair-dryer. How should she behave when he came? There was no question
of outright seduction – not when she was so recently bereaved. Perhaps she could be silent
and rather wistful – not exactly droopy, but less aggressive than he had previously known her – so as to arouse his protective
feelings. Come the day of the Outing she might then lay her hand on his sleeve and thank him for his understanding. Absently
she stroked the edge of the wooden fender, thick with dust, and tilted her head backwards to avoid the heat of the fire which
already had begun to mottle the smoothness of her pale cheeks. She stared at the ceiling and her mouth opened to emit a sound
half-way between a sigh and a groan – ‘Aaah,’ she went, kneeling as if in supplication. ‘Aaaah, Vittorio!’ Was she right about
his feelings for her? He must like her. Otherwise why did he spend every afternoon chatting to her? And she’d seen the way
his eyes flickered up and down her jumper when he thought she wasn’t watching. He did fancy her, but how could she encourage
him? God knows what Brenda had said or done to get Rossi into such a state of randy expectancy, but whatever it was it wouldn’t
work for Vittorio. He was a man of sensibilities and everything was against her – his background, his nationality, the particular
regard he had for women or a category of womanhood to which she did not belong. By the strength of her sloping shoulders,
the broad curve of her throat, the dimpled vastness of her columnar thighs, she would manoeuvre him into her arms. I will
be one of those women, she thought, painted naked on ceilings, lolling amidst rose-coloured clouds. She straightened and stared
at a chair. She imagined how she might mesmerise him with her wide blue eyes. Wearing a see-through dressing-gown chosen
from a Littlewoods catalogue, she would open the door to him:
‘Forgive me, I have been resting – the strain you know. My mother was particularly dear to me—’ All Italians, all foreigners
were dotty about their mothers; he would expect it of her. She would not actually have to gnash her teeth but imply that she
did so – internally. Rumpling her newly washed hair, the black nylon sleeve of her gown sliding back to reveal one elbow,
she would press her hand to her brow and tell him the doctor had prescribed sedatives: ‘Do sit down, we are quite alone. Brenda
has elected to go to the cinema.’ Against her will her mind dwelt on an image of Brenda in the cellar, cobwebs lacing her
hair, and Rossi, hands trembling, tearing her newspaper to shreds. I will rip you to pieces, she thought; and her hand flew
to her mouth as if she had spoken aloud. Beyond the romantic dreams, the little girl waiting to be cuddled, it was power of
a kind she was after. It is not so much that I want him, she thought, but that I would like him to want me.