The Bottle Factory Outing (5 page)

Slumped dripping upon the carpet, she gazed into the glowing mantel of the fire and rehearsed a small wistful smile.

Brenda waited a long time on the stairs to see who would arrive first. She had read Freda’s note suggesting she go to the
pictures – it was not so much a suggestion as a command: there was even 40p left on the mantelpiece. She must have been to
the post office to draw out her savings. There was a bowl of salad on the landing and a lump of meat, curiously flattened
and spiked with garlic, lying on a plate beneath a clean teatowel.

At four-thirty the landlady came up from her basement flat on her way to her pottery class at the Arts Centre. She unlocked
the back door and turfed the pregnant cat out on to the concrete patio.

‘Damn thing,’ she said, smiling at Brenda crouched on the stairs.

The cat, with sloping belly, stood on its hind legs and scrambled frantically with outstretched claws at the pane of glass.
Freda said the landlady hadn’t enough to occupy her time, going off to throw pots like that; but Brenda thought it was an
inconsiderate judgment: they had never seen what she did on her clay wheel – she might have been another Henry Moore for all
they knew.

‘Shut up,’ said Brenda when the landlady had gone. She peered through the bannister rails at the cat running on the spot,
irritated by the noise of its paws on the glass panels of the door.

She had come home exhausted from her thieving. Repeating her performance with the wardrobe, she had retrieved the brandy bottle
from its place behind the lavatory bowl and buried it beneath the load of washing. When she wheeled the basket down the alleyway,
she imagined the bottle breaking and the liquid trickling through the slats of woven straw and Rossi, like a bloodhound scenting
the trail of alcohol, running up the street after her, nose quivering, black curls blown backwards in the wind. He would call
the police and have her arrested. Worse still, he might seize her by the arm and whisper insidiously into her ear his sensual
desires, demanding she remain passive while he committed an offence in exchange for his not informing on her.

Outside the back door the agitation of the cat increased. She thought about letting it in, but she didn’t dare: it might ravish
Freda’s steak and piddle on the lino. From behind the basement door came the piteous cries of its last kitten. The landlady
had kept it, out of concern for the mother’s feelings, but lately the cat had taken to biting it ferociously about the ears.
Freda thought the animal ought to be sent to the vet and aborted: it was sheer wantoness to produce more offspring – she pointed
out that if human beings had the same fertility rate a woman could have three hundred babies in five years. She said you’d
need 2,000 eggs a week to give them all a good breakfast.

‘I wonder,’ said Brenda aloud, ‘what the kitten thinks now its mummy doesn’t like it.’

She wished someone would try to savage her every time she made a friendly gesture. She was just working out how happily she
could exist, left entirely alone, when there was a knock at the front door. She wanted instantly to hide, but she knew it
was no use, so she ran down the stairs with a fixed smile on her face, ready to leave immediately should it be Vittorio with
his little silken Zapata moustache flopping above his mouth, or Freda back from her shopping. It was neither. It was Patrick
in a shiny black suit and a clean white shirt with a badly frayed collar.

‘My word,’ she said, letting him into the dark hall, ‘you do look smart.’

His appearance alarmed her. He was so evidently out to impress, she would not have been surprised if, like a conjurer, he
had whipped a vase of flowers from behind his back and presented them to her.

‘Ah well,’ he said, holding a canvas bag for her inspection, ‘didn’t I leave early to get me tools?’

She led him up the stairs, pulling faces as she went to relieve her feelings, sticking her tongue out at the brown-painted
walls, telling him silently to drop dead and leave her alone. As they turned to go up the second flight of stairs, passing
the cooker and the pungent slice of meat under its tea-towel, she was forced to smile at him and say insincerely: ‘It is kind
of you, Patrick, to give up your time.’

The bathroom had a geyser riveted to the wall above a large tub stained with rust.

‘It’s old,’ said Patrick, looking at the four curved feet splayed out upon the cracked lino and the dust lying like a carpet
beneath the belly of the bath.

Outside the window, open to relieve the odour of stale urine, the yard lay like a jigsaw puzzle, dissected by washing line
and paving stone. On the back wall, above the black and barren stem of the rambling rose, stood a row of tin cans and broken
bottles placed to repel small boys.

‘That’s it,’ said Brenda pointing at the offending cistern in its bed of cement. Patrick climbed on to the lavatory seat in
his sparkling boots and fiddled with the chain. ‘It won’t flush,’ he said. Along the line of his sleeve appeared beads of
plaster and a smear of rust.

‘Your clothes—’ began Brenda.

But already he was removing his jacket and handing it to her for safety. Lifting the heavy lid of the cistern, enough for
him to get an arm in up to the elbow, he splashed about in the water, his shoulders raised so that
she could see the elasticated top of his underpants holding his shirt in check.

‘It’s the ballcock,’ he volunteered.

‘Is that bad?’ she asked, praying it was and he would give up and go home quick.

‘Don’t you fret. I can do it,’ he assured her. ‘Nothing simpler.’

He jumped to the floor and looked in his tool bag for a spanner and a ball of string. She could see the damp cuff of his shirt
clinging to the shape of his wrist.

‘Look at that,’ she said. ‘You’re ruining your shirt.’

‘I was wondering,’ he asked, his Brylcreamed head bent low. ‘Would you have any objection to me removing me shirt?’

‘I don’t mind,’ she cried, though secretly she did, and her eyes narrowed as she spoke.

Without his shirt, his hands and head looked as if they belonged to someone else, so red and full of blood against the white
softness of his trunk. He had a nice chest, not at all pimply, with only a dusting of freckles between his shoulders. When
he swung up a sleeve to release his shirt she glimpsed the bright ginger pit of his arm. Back he climbed on to the lavatory
seat to probe about among the pipes and the plaster, and she hung his shirt on a nail behind the door and caught a faint smell
of mould, as if he never aired his clothes but packed them halfdried into a drawer.

‘Jesus, it’s cold,’ he said, feeling the chill air coming from the window.

‘You could borrow my dressing gown,’ said Brenda, and he protested there was no need, the small pout of
his beer belly overlapping the waistband of his trousers as he twisted to thank her.

‘But you must,’ she insisted, thinking there was very much a need; she couldn’t bear to have him standing there half-naked.
She went down the stairs, closing the bathroom door carefully behind her. She stood on the landing for a moment in case Freda
had returned, but all was quiet and she crept like a thief into her room and went to the wardrobe, lifting out her dressing-gown,
tugging it free from its place between Freda’s dresses hung in polythene wrappers. The bottle of brandy, wedged in the folds
of a purple cloak, fell on its side and rolled to the edge of the door. Thrusting it further into the recesses of the wardrobe,
she ran back upstairs with her dressing-gown still on its hanger.

‘That’s nice,’ he said, as she helped him into it.

Her fingers brushed the top of his arm rough with goose-pimples, and she stepped back not meaning to have touched him. The
sleeves only came down to his elbows, and when he climbed back on to the lavatory the pleats of the bright blue dressing-gown
swirled out like a skirt above his trousers and the gleaming tops of his cherry-blossom boots.

At first Vittorio sat on the chair by the gas fire where Freda had placed him, but she needed a man to open the bottle of
wine he had brought and they both stood by the table, she fiddling with two glasses and he with the bottle between his knees
to drag out the cork. He wore a black polonecked jumper and a coat of real leather with two stylish vents at the back.

‘It’s strange,’ she said, sipping her wine. ‘I loved her, but we were not close.’

‘Yes,’ he replied, averting his eyes from her black nylon negligée, looking instead at the cheap utility furniture and the
curved railings of the balcony reflecting the light of the street lamp.

‘Are you close to your mother?’ she asked him, not quite at ease, wishing almost he hadn’t come. He said No, she lived in
Italy.

‘To your heart,’ she persisted, touching her breast and looking at him earnestly. She was dreadfully hungry. The hairdresser
had made her wait a long time and she hadn’t had any lunch.

‘Brenda has gone to the pictures to see
Super Dick
, she told him, thinking it was a provocative title. She walked back and forth from the table to the window.

‘I would have thought …’ he began, but she lowered her head and he fell silent.

‘Brenda’s different from me,’ she murmured. ‘When I found her on the Finchley Road I did think …’ and she too trailed
into silence and left the sentence unfinished.

He had brought her a peach in a skein of tissue paper and she rolled the fruit between her palms.

‘How kind of you,’ she said, lifting his beautiful coat from the bed and taking it to the wardrobe in case she spilled wine
upon it. When she opened the door a bottle of brandy rolled from the hem of her cloak and fell on to the nail of her big bare
toe.

‘Christ,’ she cried, bringing her hand to her mouth and contracting her foot with the pain. ‘Brenda,’ she told
him, voice husky with suppressed violence, ‘never puts anything away.’

She stuffed the bottle behind the hanging dresses and prayed he hadn’t noticed. She didn’t know how to broach the subject
of food: if she mentioned the steak it might seem as if she were forcing him to stay – as if it were all planned. She poured
herself out another glass of wine and gulped it down. He wasn’t very talkative; he was making her do all the work. If he went
quite soon she could eat the steak herself and the salad. She hadn’t had time to make the garlic dressing, and how could she
go out now on to the landing and start messing about with lemons. She was sweating from the pain of her crushed foot and the
low rumblings of her empty stomach. Unable to contain herself, she nibbled a chocolate biscuit that Brenda had left on the
mantelpiece and listened to the sound of hammering one floor above.

‘I could do with some tea,’ said Patrick, and Brenda had to nod her head as if it was quite all right and tiptoe down the
stairs again.

She was always amazed at how seemingly-shy people constantly asked for things without a trace of embarrassment. How could
she boil a kettle with Vittorio and Freda only inches away? The gas made a funny whining sound before the water warmed up,
and Freda was bound to rush out on to the landing and create a scene. Hardly breathing, she lifted the kettle from the stove
and was grateful that it was already half-filled with water. When she struck a match to light the gas, the ignition and flare
of the sulphur were like the launching of a rocket. She
trembled and dropped the matchstick on to the lino. Suddenly from behind the shut door, Freda began to sing. Under strain
as she was, Brenda couldn’t help smiling. Freda must have found the brandy bottle. She knew exactly how Freda must look at
this moment, having seen her in the same state every Friday night after her visit to the theatrical pub. She would be standing
poised like a Greek statue, head bent low so that her hair spilled about her face, one arm raised high in the air, one knee
slightly flexed. Clicking her finger and thumb together, she would begin to glide in a small circle, round and round:

MacArthur’s Park is lying in the rain …

I don’t think that I can take it,

For it took so long to bake it,

And I’ll never find the recipe again.

The kettle began its weird sighing.

‘Oh-o. No. Ohohoh,’ roared Freda behind the door. ‘Ohoho-oh-no-ohoh …’

She’s always thinking about food, thought Brenda unfairly. She felt obliged to tell Patrick why the tea was lukewarm.

‘You see, Freda’s got a friend in and I’m not supposed to be here.’

He looked at her over the rim of his cup and didn’t understand.

‘A man. She’s got a gentleman caller and she told me to go out.’

‘It’s your room,’ he said. ‘You’ve every right to occupy your own room.’

‘Well, it’s difficult. I quite see I’m in the way.’

She felt a bit foolish. She was conscious she was clipping the ends of her words and mimicking the way he spoke, as if she
too came from the bogs of Tipperary.

‘She expects you to leave your room if she has a fella in, then?’

‘It’s reasonable, I’m thinking,’ she said, and blushed.

‘You know,’ said Patrick, ‘I think a lot of you. No, honest to God I do. I don’t like to think of her making a monkey out
of you. Why, if I thought that, I’d throttle her – I would so.’

He had little freckles above the line of his upper lip so that the shape of his mouth was blurred. He put down his cup upon
the side of the bath and wound a length of string tightly between his clenched fingers.

Vittorio had sat on the edge of the bed now, because Freda, undulating her Amazonian hips and pointing one foot at him, was
moving more and more wildly about the room. He felt threatened by her size and the volume of her voice, and there was a rim
of dried blood along the cuticle of her big toe. He scuffed his suede boots beneath the iron frame of the double bed and kicked
a book across the carpet.

‘I read a lot,’ said Freda, coming to rest beside him, the halo of her washed hair fanning out about her rosy cheeks. ‘Poetry,
Philosophy, Politics. The three pee’s.’ And she gave a loud, moist giggle.