The Bottle Factory Outing (6 page)

‘Such a lot of books,’ he said, moving his feet about and shuffling more volumes into view, and she found she was telling
him about Brenda and the way she
couldn’t bear they make contact in the night.

‘She puts them right down the middle of the bed. It’s frightfully inconvenient.’

‘The books down the bed …?’

‘Well, you know – she doesn’t want to run any risk.’

‘Risk?’ His eyes were wide with astonishment.

‘Oh, come on – you know.’ And she dug him quite painfully in the ribs with her elbow. ‘It’s like this,’ she said, speaking
very slowly, remembering the way Brenda talked to Rossi. ‘She is afraid of life. She does not want to communicate. Know what
I mean?’

The way he sat there so obviously not knowing what she meant, his handsome face solemnly gazing at her, filled her with irritation.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ she asked. ‘Why don’t you relax?’

When he smiled she noticed there was a gap between his front teeth. It gave him the look of an urchin and minimised the sensitive
modelling of his face.

‘You’ve got gaps in your teeth,’ she cried, and fell heavily against him.

He did kiss her then. He put his arm round her, and they thrashed about on the double bed. She clung to him and fastened her
teeth in the woolly shoulder of his polonecked jumper.

‘I have to go to the toilet,’ he said, struggling to his feet and striding to the door. She was left with a shred of wool
stuck to her lip, alone on the rumpled bed. Another little drinky, she told herself, lurching sideways to the floor and going
to the wardrobe to find the bottle of brandy. She didn’t want to be drunk. She didn’t like the way things were going; but
going they were, and she
unscrewed the cap of the bottle and took a swig of the alcohol and wiped her mouth with her hand. The peach he had brought
lay like a road casualty, squashed into the carpet.

When he returned she was aware that he was uncomfortable. He tried to make love to her but it didn’t work.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked aggressively, pulling his hair quite viciously as he lay stranded upon her.

‘The toilet,’ he said. ‘There are peoples in the toilet. I could not gain entrance.’

He was minus his shoes, but he still wore his trousers and his jumper that was a bit chewed at the collar.

Brenda could hear knocking at the front door, growing louder and louder. She watched Patrick screwing a hook into the ceiling
above the cistern.

‘It’s a bit Heath Robinson, isn’t it?’ she ventured, as he wound a length of string from the ballcock up to the hook in the
plaster and down again to the metal eyelet of the lavatory chain.

She unlocked the bathroom door and stood listening. Freda had stopped singing, and the nurses on the ground floor had let
someone into the hall. There was a murmur of voices, then silence, until she heard the dialing of the telephone. She couldn’t
hear the conversation, but quite soon the receiver was replaced and someone began to climb the stairs. Whoever it was halted
outside Freda’s room and rapped repeatedly on the panel of the door. She won’t like that, thought Brenda, and then she heard
the voice of her mother-in-law.

‘I have come to see Brenda.’

‘I’m afraid she is not at home.’

‘I’ll wait then.’

There was a pause before Freda answered, her voice charged with hostility. ‘You can’t wait. It’s not convenient.’

‘I shall wait none the less.’

Turning the curve of the stairs Brenda saw Mrs Haddon on the landing and Freda, hair dishevelled, straddling the threshold
of the door.

‘It’s all right,’ called Brenda. ‘I’m here.’

‘I want my photographs,’ said Mrs Haddon, turning to face her.

‘I want those pictures of my Stanley as a child.’

Brenda hadn’t got them. She knew they were still in the kitchen drawer of the farmhouse, where they had always been, beneath
the pre-war knitting patterns, but it was no use telling her so. Mrs Haddon was smiling firmly, nodding her head, the ends
of her floral headscarf tied under the determined thrust of her chin.

‘Go downstairs,’ ordered Brenda. ‘I’ll get them.’

She frowned meaningfully at Freda who stepped aside, overwhelmed by her air of authority, and allowed her to enter the front
room. Vittorio was standing at the foot of the bed, flushed and untidy. He wore a jumper that was unravelling at the neckline
and he clutched his shoes to his breast. Brenda ignored him. She stooped to pick a book at random from the floor and went
out again on to the landing. Mrs Haddon, a large plastic handbag at her feet, had obediently retreated down the stairs and
was grasping the bannister rail for support. Fancy her coming all that way from Ramsbottom, Brenda thought, all on her own
on the coach in her nice camel coat.

‘Here,’ she said, holding out the book. ‘They’re all inside.’

They looked at each other. For a moment it might have been Stanley pleading to be understood – the same round eyes filled
with perplexity behind the rims of the lightbrown spectacles, the same wide mouth puckered at the corners. I can’t say anything,
she thought – nothing that’s true.

Mrs Haddon lowered her eyes and bent to pick up her handbag. Freda, looking down, was taken by surprise at her appearance
– such a pretty woman, rouge on her cheeks, a little tilted nose. She was taking something out of her bag and showing it to
her daughter-in-law with an expression of eager expectancy that was quite touching to watch. From the way Brenda spoke about
her in the past Freda had imagined her with cow-dung on her gumboots and straw in her hair.

‘Why?’ she heard Brenda say in a flat voice, not at all grateful – and then there was a scream. The sound, shivering above
the well of the stairs, caused Freda to tremble from head to foot. She saw Brenda strike Mrs Haddon somewhere about the chest.
The spectacles balanced on the bridge of the tilted nose jerked forwards. A hand holding a gun swung upwards to save them.
Brenda shouted: ‘Don’t—’ and ‘Why?’ This repetition of an earlier question was spoken on a whining note. She cringed in her
tweed coat, her red hair hanging limply upon the checked collar.

She’s bent on destroying herself, thought Freda, and at that moment there was a small plopping sound as Mrs Haddon squeezed
the trigger.

To see Vittorio hurtling down the stairs, his shoes falling to the carpet as if in pursuit, made Freda admire him all over
again. A man was needed at this moment and he was there acting on her behalf, and it gave her a feeling of comfort and pride,
for she was still trembling. At that moment Patrick the van driver, wearing a short-sleeved garment of powder-blue material,
flung himself round the curve of the stairway and in two bounds leapt to join the struggling Vittorio below. How opportune,
thought Freda, too shocked to question further. They held Mrs Haddon by the arms; they encircled her waist lovingly. Patrick
reached for the gun raised high in the air and entwined his fingers in hers. They swayed, arms dipping up and down, as if
energetically dancing. Brenda, standing apart in the recess of the illlit landing, put her hand to her mouth and bit the
ends of her fingers. She was thin as a stick and behind her closed lids her eyes bulged, round as marbles.

‘Pet,’ cried Freda, launching herself down the stairs at last. ‘My poor pet.’

The men, having manoeuvred Mrs Haddon into the front room, placed her in the best chair by the fire with such force that she
lost her balance. As she tipped backwards, her feet in their neat court shoes flew upwards, and she uttered a tiny cry of
outrage. Vittorio, refined by his experience, put the gun on top of the wardrobe out of harm’s way.

‘That’s my property,’ Mrs Haddon said. ‘I should be glad if you would give it to me.’

Vittorio stroked his drooping moustache and looked at Freda for instructions. She was standing at the window
with Brenda in her arms, observing the police car in the street below, its blue light flashing as it cruised at the kerb.

‘Look at that,’ she cried. ‘The police have come.’

‘I phoned them before I came upstairs,’ said Mrs Haddon. ‘In case they were needed.’ She half-rose to her feet and was thrust
downwards again by the two men. They were not taking any chances.

‘Answer the door,’ commanded Freda, and Patrick did as he was told, running out of the room with the lapels of his dressing-gown
falling open to expose his paper-white chest.

‘We ought to make a cup of tea,’ said Brenda, looking at Stanley’s mother. ‘She’s had a shock.’

Mrs Haddon stared back without pity. ‘I was only aiming at your vocal chords. You always talked too much.’

‘Murderer,’ cried Freda, quivering with indignation as she held Brenda to her breast. ‘You should be put away.’ All the same,
she couldn’t help being awed by the smart little woman on her chair, come all the way from the North by rail or coach, her
handbag on her knee with her powder puff inside, her purse and her little black gun.

Two plain-clothed men and two in uniform came pounding up the hall. They asked a lot of questions about the old lady’s relationship
to Brenda and how she had come to be in possession of the pistol. Mrs Haddon said she only wanted to frighten Brenda to punish
her for leaving Stanley and that she’d saved up her pension for three weeks to buy the weapon. She’d told the lady in the
shop it was for her grandson and the lady had been very helpful. She gave her a card to go with it. She brought
out of her handbag a paper target in red and black to show them.

They looked at it in silence.

After a time the uniformed policemen took her outside to the car, and the chief inspector and a sergeant made them all re-enact
the drama on the stairs. Brenda felt silly holding out the book to the inspector, who was pretending to be Stanley’s mother.
She had to hit him quite hard on the chest and bite her lip in case she smiled. They wanted to know how they could contact
Stanley and where he would be at this moment.

‘At the Little Legion,’ she said. ‘But you better not ring there. He wouldn’t like it.’

Freda shouted interferingly: ‘Good God, he ought to be told. It was a gun she carried, you know, not a bunch of flowers.’

‘It wasn’t a gun,’ muttered Brenda, ‘it was an air pistol,’ though she didn’t know if it made any difference.

Freda told the sergeant that Brenda was separated from her husband. ‘He gave her a very rough time in my opinion.’

‘Quite so,’ said the sergeant, looking at her and at Patrick still clad in the blue dressing-gown.

There was a knock at the door. The two young nurses from the ground floor, little white caps pinned to the frizzed nests of
their hair, wanted to know if they could be of assistance.

‘It’s quite all right,’ Freda told them frostily. ‘It’s just a small family party.’ And down clumped the two girls in their
crackling aprons and sensible shoes, desperate at being excluded from the excitement.

The police inspector asked Brenda finally if she wanted to make a charge.

‘Definitely we do,’ asserted Freda, and Brenda shook her head and said No, she didn’t want to, thank you. Whatever would her
mother say if she did and it got into the papers?

Freda didn’t even bother to show Vittorio to the front door. She was tired now and grumpy. ‘Get to bed,’ she ordered Brenda,
and she jumped between the sheets still in her negligée.

Brenda lay in the darkness unprotected by the bolster and the row of books. She had tried to re-erect the barrier, but Freda
cursed and told her to bloody well stop messing about.

‘He didn’t make it,’ said Freda, mouth crushed against the pillow. ‘He couldn’t get into the loo.’

‘Ah, well—’ began Brenda, and thought better of it.

‘I wonder if those were Maria’s men in uniform?’ mused Freda.

‘What men?’

‘You know – Maria’s men – in my cup.’

‘They weren’t on horseback.’

‘No,’ said Freda. ‘You’re right. What the hell was that Patrick doing running round the house dressed like that?’

‘He was just passing and I didn’t like to say I was going out.’

‘You’re barmy. What you see in him I don’t know.’

‘I don’t see anything,’ protested Brenda. ‘He was just mending the toilet.’

‘Half-naked?’ said Freda. ‘You must be mad.’

When she closed her eyes the bed whirled round and
round. She had to force herself to concentrate on the outline of the window pane.

Brenda said: ‘I don’t think she meant any harm. She was just trying it on.’

‘You need help,’ murmured Freda. ‘You’re a victim. I’ve told you before.’ In the light of the street lamp the room was glamorous
and bathed in silver. The wooden foot of the bed glowed like genuine mahogany. ‘Isn’t it nice?’ she said.

‘Stanley’s mother must be furious she missed me. She always hated being thwarted.’

Brenda wore a small gratified smile. She understood perfectly why Mrs Haddon had wanted to do her damage. Inside her own brain
she had on numerous occasions perpetrated acts of brutality against friends and enemies alike.

‘She needs putting away,’ said Freda, beginning to fall into sleep. ‘You all need putting away.’

For several days Freda was not herself. She suffered outbursts of rage followed by long periods of silence. The rages, which
were habitual, did not disturb Brenda as much as the moments of moody reflection; she could not bear to witness her friend
slumped on her beer crate or in the armchair by the gas fire, deaf to all overtures. It was unnerving to live with. Freda
was so fond of verbalising her emotions. She never brooded. Pain felt, or insults endured, made her the more articulate.
In adversity she saw the funny side. She would spit out words describing in precise detail just how badly she was wounded,
until her shoulders began to shake with the burble of huge choking laughter that finally burst from her.

She took to lying awake at night, counting the prison bars of the balcony palings reflected on the curve of the ceiling. She
watched intently the plummeting bird of the hanging lamp, the bunch of dried leaves in the mantelshelf vase stencilled upon
the gleaming paintwork of the door. When she looked out into the street it was bright as day. The lattices of windows, the
lids of dustbins, the metal flanks of parked cars flashed in the moonlight and dazzled her. Brenda lay in darkness, the lower
half of her face shot away – only the rim of her eyelids touched by light.

‘What’s wrong, love?’ asked Brenda over and over.

But Freda, eyes glittering with fatigue, refused to tell.

She did go to see Rossi. She told him that if there was any more nonsense with Brenda in the cellar she would go to Mr Paganotti
and have him dismissed.

‘Just because you’re the manager,’ she told him spitefully, ‘it doesn’t mean you can wreak your vile will on Brenda.’

‘I do not understand,’ said Rossi, shrinking behind his desk littered with test tubes and sheets of litmus paper. ‘What is
this wreaking? We only do a little fun.’

‘Fun,’ she thundered. ‘Man, I don’t think Mr Paganotti would call it that.’

He hated her. He clenched his chubby fists and scraped his wedding ring across the desk, stuttering his denials. He made the
mistake of trying to humour her.

‘You are a woman of the world,’ he said. But she quelled him with a glance. ‘Watch it,’ she warned, her arms folded, her nostrils
flaring, her silken face poised and tinted like an angel above the powerful wedge of her body.

He lowered his eyes, and back she strode to her bench and the quota of Nuits St Georges.

Maria was curious to know what was wrong, but Freda shook her head with an air of martyrdom, as if her burdens were beyond
comprehension. She had thought Vittorio would never wish to speak to her again after that deplorable evening when she had
drunk too much; but surprisingly he asked her several times if she was feeling better, if she was recovering, as if it had
been she who had been shot at, for she had forgotten she was in mourning for her mother. He even wanted to take her out to
dinner, but she refused. ‘Later,’ she told him, not
caring to shut the door entirely. The thought of a visit to a restaurant, the clatter of knives and forks, the blaze of lights
in gilt mirrors as they drank at the bar, filled her with panic. The effort of keeping her elbows off the table, her knees
together, her voice down and delicately modulated, was beyond her. The scene on the stairs was imprinted upon her imagination;
the inspector’s request to know the particular relationship between the old lady and Brenda rang in her ears. Brenda was surrounded
by people who claimed her as their own. Her father sent postal orders, her mother wielded power by the head-ings of her letters
– ‘Darling’ meant Brenda was in favour; ‘My Dear Brenda’ spelled disapproval, as did the absence of those inked kisses penned
at the bottom of the page. Stanley’s balaclava hung on a hook behind the door. Under the bed, face down in the dust, lay a
wedding photograph of Stanley arm in arm with Brenda, her dress smudged with flowers. His mother had ridden across the country
with a gun to prove she was related by marriage. And Freda had no one to call her own except the distant aunt in Newcastle.

‘I must be ill,’ she thought, ‘bothering about such trifles.’

She went to the theatrical pub to be among people who understood, and was unwise enough to tell her version of Mrs Haddon
on the stairs. She performed modestly and with seriousness, rolling a cigarette nervously between finger and thumb, and was
distressed at the wild hoots of mirth that interrupted her narrative. She joined in the laughter – tears squeezed from the
crinkled corners of her eyes – but she was hollow inside.

Brenda tried to expiate the trouble she had caused.
She said how well Freda looked, how revolting Patrick appeared in his overalls – that hair, those badly bitten nails …

‘You’re no oil painting yourself,’ said Freda, cutting her short. She was grateful to Patrick. After all, the lavatory was
mended, even if every time the chain was pulled the hook tore plaster from the ceiling. Brenda carried her coffee to the bench
and lifted bottles whenever they were needed.

‘Leave off,’ cried Freda sharply. ‘I’m not an invalid.’

Stanley telephoned later in the week. Rossi called Brenda into the office, Freda marching behind with a slender bottle of
Spumanti still in her hand, and he fled from his desk like a rabbit and busied himself at the brandy shelves.

‘I can’t come down, Brenda,’ said Stanley. ‘I can’t leave the hens.’

‘I don’t want to see you,’ mouthed Freda.

‘That’s all right,’ said Brenda. ‘I don’t think there’s much point.’ She was already flattening her vowels to accommodate
him.

‘What’s that you say, Brenda?’ he shouted at the end of the wire.

‘There’s no point you coming down.’

‘I can’t come down, Brenda – not with mother in hospital. They’re sending her home in a day or two, Brenda.’ He would keep
naming her, as if there was some confusion in his mind as to who she was.

‘What’s he say?’ asked Freda, tweaking her severely on the arm, and she said: ‘They’ve put his mother in hospital.’

‘Who’s there, Brenda?’ he said. ‘Who’s that with you, Brenda?’

‘No one. What’s the weather like your end?’

‘You what, Brenda?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to rush now.’

She replaced the receiver quickly and tried not to think about him. She knew he would continue to stand by the windowsill
for several seconds, calling her name down the dead wire, scratching his head when he finally realised she was no longer there.
He would go out into the yard, the doves with pouting breasts asleep on the guttering of the barn roof, and stand with mackintosh
bunched about his waist and relieve himself on the nettles by the ruined pig-sty. At the splattering of water on the leaves,
the doves would rise with a flutter of wings and scatter the bantam hens pecking in the dirt.

‘You’re not firm enough with him,’ reprimanded Freda. ‘You’re too soft with him.’

‘I was always waiting for him to come in or waiting for him to go out,’ said Brenda, as if to excuse herself. She was curious
to know why Freda had defended Patrick earlier in the day. ‘You never used to have a good word to say about him,’ she reminded.

‘I don’t see the point,’ Freda informed her, ‘of denigrating anyone for the way they look. Certainly he’s not of your class
– that’s one thing. But the state of his finger nails has nothing to do with it.’

She looked at Brenda so contemptuously, at the neglected growth of hair and the parched texture of her skin, that Brenda brought
her hand to her mouth to cover the front tooth which was chipped since childhood.

Nevertheless Freda sought out Patrick before she left the factory and told him to leave Brenda alone.

‘There are things,’ she said, finding him in the loading bay, the chill air empurpling his face, ‘that you can’t know about.
Far be it from me to tell anybody how to live their life, but—’ and she waggled a rigid finger at him, ‘you should look for
someone of your own age.’

‘I like her,’ he said stubbornly, ignoring his fellow workers shifting crates of wine on to a lorry. ‘I’d swing for her, that
I would.’

‘I hope,’ said Freda, bewildered by his headstrong declaration, ‘it won’t come to that.’ And she turned on her heel and went
to collect Brenda who was in the washroom rinsing out the sponges for the morning.

‘I can’t understand it,’ she said. ‘Whatever did you do to that Patrick?’

‘I only let him mend the lavatory,’ exclaimed Brenda.

She looked so plain and dowdy in her shabby coat and worn shoes that Freda smiled. It was ridiculous to think of her as a
femme fatale.
Neither Rossi nor Patrick would be described as the catch of the year – unlike Vittorio with his noble birth, his beautiful
moustaches and his expressive brown eyes. In only two days time, on Sunday – for Mr Paganotti was too stingy to allow them
a day off work – they would go on the Outing and picnic together under the trees, discussing where he might take her for dinner.
She would tell him how depressed she had been, how lonely. Looking at her reflection in the mirror, her face appeared fragile
and tinged with silver. She felt the beginnings of restoration.

That night Freda slept more peacefully. At dawn she was awakened by the sound of rain pattering thickly upon the roof. The
noise increased in volume and she sat up to look out of the window, the hem of the white sheet sliding to the folds of her
belly, and saw a troop of horsemen flowing along the river of the street. Drowsily she admired, as if in a dream, the elegant
khaki riders, the swelling calves of their legs bound in puttees, the rows of mustard-coloured hats bobbing up and down as
they cantered toward the crossroads. She didn’t move, she didn’t blink an eyelid – afterwards she thought she might have cried
‘Hurrah’ or tossed a rose from the balcony – and they were gone, the stylish riders and the taffetabrown horses beating a
tattoo on the crest of the road.

It was all going to come true – she knew that now: the journey by land and sea, the uniformed men, the white dress with flowers
at the waist. Perhaps they would live in a flat in Hampstead and have drink on the sideboard, meat in the fridge and Mr Paganotti
to dinner once a month. After they were married she and Vittorio would visit the house-proud aunt in Newcastle and litter
the hall-way with their pig-skin luggage. She would drop her engagement ring into the glass bowl on the dresser for fear she
tore the skin of his back when she held him in her arms. She would smoke in bed and spill talcum powder upon the rug. What
disorder she could create with her paper hankies, the cellophane wrappings of her cigarette packets, the pointilistic pieces
of confetti still trapped within her garments! Auntie would have to lump it. In the summer, staying at his parents’ castle
outside Bologna, she would open
the shutters in the morning to let in the sun and shield her eyes from the blue surge of the sea sparkling beyond the dusty
line of the olive trees that his father owned. Brenda could come too, if his mother had no objection
– and why should she, surrounded by her grandchildren, her lovely bouncing bambinos gurgling beneath the lemon trees?

‘You do look well,’ said Brenda, propped up on the pillows, a plate of porridge balanced on her stomach.

‘I am well,’ cried
Freda, already dressed, sweeping about the room with the transistor radio held to her ear.

She couldn’t wait to tell Maria about the soldiers on horseback.

‘You were right,’ she said, clasping Maria’s hands in her own and dancing her round the cardboard boxes.

The sky was so overcast it was almost dark. The little naked bulbs hanging from the ceiling glowed like small red stars. Outside
the row of windows the rain fell heavily and began to stain the concrete wall of the chip-shop.

Brenda thought Freda must have been dreaming. She hadn’t heard anything, and what was a troop of horsemen doing at that hour
of the morning in the middle of the city?

‘Exercising the animals,’ explained Freda jubilantly, ‘before the traffic got going.’

‘But we’ve never seen them before.’

‘We’ve never been awake at that time.’

‘I have,’ said Brenda gloomily, thinking of the times she had watched the first streaks of the dawn appearing above the rooftops
of the grey houses.

Now that Sunday was so near, Maria had begun to wonder what she might wear on the Outing. She had found a frock in Mr Paganotti’s
boxes. She pulled it out from under the bench and draped it across her portly body, waiting for Freda’s opinion. It was made
of silk, with a pattern of miniature daisies on a band round the hem of the skirt.

‘Haven’t you got anything of your own?’ asked Freda dubiously, looking at the plunging neckline and the absence of sleeves.
‘It’s winter, you know.’

‘Certainly I have nothing,’ Maria said, and she whirled about with the hem of daisies flaring above the folds of her grey
football socks, whooping with laughter and growing red in the face at her exhibitionism.

‘I think it’s very nice,’ said Brenda.

‘By all means wear it,’ cried Freda, too happy to bring Maria down. And she looked about for Vittorio, anxious for him to
know that her period of mourning was over. After all, she knew now that there was something in store for them both. The premonition
of it was becoming stronger by the moment. She felt giddy at the thought of the future, and she longed to experience that
shudder of excitement the sight of him might bring. She plunged down the steps into the basement, her large buttocks quivering
in the brown trousers she had made herself, searching about among the barrels and the yellow containers, and calling his
name for the pleasure it gave her. He wasn’t there.

‘He’s in the office,’ said Brenda, when she returned disconcerted to her bench. ‘Him and Rossi.’

There were clients tasting the wine when she entered.
A middle-aged woman dressed in black and a young girl in a grey coat with a velvet collar.

‘Oh,’ said Freda, ‘I
am
sorry. I thought Vittorio was alone.’ She looked at him tenderly, flashing messages with her eyes, and he hung his head as
if suddenly shy in her presence. ‘I wonder if I might use the telephone
– to confirm the van booking for the Outing.’