Does Rossi ever get his thingy out?’ she asked, looking in her purse for money.
Brenda pretended to be asleep; she stirred on the bed and sighed as if she were dreaming. It took some time to bring Maria to the telephone. Such a thing had never happened to her before at work and Freda was worried the pips would go before her message was understood. She had to bellow down the phone to explain who she was. Brenda could hear her quite plainly.
‘Maria, Maria. It’s me, Freda. You know – Freda – Maria –’ She sounded as if she was going to burst into the love song from West Side Story. ‘Maria … I want you to come to tea … this afternoon … after work … Can you hear me, Maria? … to tea. Here at my house. You come here. No, today … to Freda. No I don’t want any tea … I want to give you some …’
‘Is she coming?’ asked Brenda.
‘God knows,’ said Freda, and she went upstairs to the bathroom, taking a pan of water with her to flush down the lavatory. The cistern had been broken for ten days and the landlady said she couldn’t find a plumber to mend it. Only Freda was inconvenienced. Brenda, who would have died rather than let the other occupants of the house know she used the toilet, usually went round the corner to the tube station.
Maria came at half-past two carrying a packet of tea and a bag of sugar. She entered the room timidly, her hands in their darned mittens, outstretched.
‘La povera orfanella,’ she murmured with emotion, embracing Freda, burying her head in the girl’s ample shoulder. Awkwardly she patted her back and made little mewing sounds, and when she emerged again her face held such an expression of genuine perplexity and pain that it awakened feelings of remorse in Brenda.
Brenda sat Maria in the armchair by the hearth, to warm herself at the gas fire. Freda moved about the room slowly and with dignity, emptying tea-leaves into the china pot, putting the blue cups on the table, ready for the kettle to boil. Now and then she would stare out of the window with a far-away look in her eyes, as if she was remembering lost faces and lost laughter and the joy of a mother’s love. After a decent interval, when the tea was poured and the biscuit tin handed round, she asked:
‘And what did Vittorio say? Did he say anything?’
‘Pah,’ exclaimed Maria contemptuously, slapping the air with the flat of her hand. ‘What could he say? Nobody work the day of their mammy’s funeral.’
‘I mean, was he sorry?’
When she understood, Maria said Vittorio had looked very sad. They were all sad, but not so sad as Mr Rossi; he was the saddest of them all, pale and dejected-looking as if it was a personal loss.
‘She’s in love with Vittorio,’ Brenda said quickly, in case Freda flew into a paddy on the spot and explained the exact reason for Mr Rossi’s dejection. Maria, after an initial moment of surprise, her mouth open, her eyes bewildered, stamped her feet approvingly on the threadbare carpet. Such a match – the tall young landowner and the blonde English girl built like a tree. She recalled she could read the future in the tea-cups; a cook had taught her when she was in service in a house in Holland Park. She sat well forwards in the armchair, black-clad knees wide apart, and stared into the depths of Freda’s cup.
‘There is a tall man,’ she began, ‘and a journey.’
Brenda withdrew into a corner of the room, seating herself at the table beside the window. Across the road on the balcony of the third floor an elderly woman in a blue dressing-gown and a hat with a rose pinned to the brim waved and gesticulated for help. Brenda knew her gas fire had blown up or she was out of paraffin or the cat had gone missing. It was unfortunate that Freda had rented a room opposite a building devoted to the old and infirm – there was always someone in need of assistance. Once Freda had become involved with a Miss Deansgate on the second floor, who had been a milliner for royalty; and every day for three weeks she took her bowls of soup and cups of tea, feeding her drop by drop from a tin spoon with a long handle that Miss Deansgate claimed had belonged to Queen Victoria’s butler. Freda took Brenda to visit her, but she didn’t enjoy it – the old woman had no stockings and her ankles were dirty and she sat on the lavatory and had to be helped back to bed. There was a funny smell in the living room. The sheets were yellow and the frill of the pillow-case stained, as if she dribbled as she slept. Miss Deansgate begged Freda not to let the ambulance take her away; but she was dying, and in the end they laid her on the stretcher under a red blanket, looking very cheerful and Christmassy, and off she went, sliding a little on her canvas bed, as they bore her at a slant down the flight of stairs. She didn’t come back, and Freda used the butler’s spoon with the long handle to eat her porridge with in the morning.
Resolutely Brenda turned her eyes away from the woman with the rose in her hat. She looked at Freda and Maria by the fire, crouched over the drained cup as if the future lay there like a photograph. The murmurings of their voices and the hiss of the gas fire merged. A memory came to her. She was walking down a lane between green fields, bending her head to watch her own two feet in shiny shoes pacing the grey road. Behind her someone urged her to hurry; she could feel in the small of her back the round insistent tip of an umbrella propelling her forwards. She stumbled on the rough road, and as she fell she saw out of the corner of her eye a single scarlet poppy blowing in the brown ditch. She opened her eyes quickly, thinking ‘Why can’t they leave me alone?’ and she was still there on the balcony, the woman demanding attention. Brenda wanted to bang on the window and tell her to go away. She hated the implied need, the intrusion on her privacy. Life was absurd, she thought, bouncing her up and down as if she were a rubber ball. She longed to lose height and roll away into a corner and be forgotten. Distress at her own conciliatory nature rose in her throat and lodged there like a stone. She swallowed and pouted her lips.
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 Nort
h.
‘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.
3
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.
The Bottle Factory Outing Page 3
