The Bottle Factory Outing

by Beryl Bainbridge

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ Patrick replied, and stared at him without blinking for several seconds.

  The men began to dress, knotting their ties at the throat, adjusting suspenders to concertinaed socks, taking out pocket combs and tidying their damp hair.

  ‘Freda’s gone to sleep in the bushes,’ said Brenda, and looked about for her green shoes.

  ‘I wouldn’t disturb her,’ advised Patrick.

  ‘But we are all going to the safari park. It was Freda’s idea.’ She pulled down the foot of her black stocking to cover her naked toe and struggled to keep her balance. ‘Rossi’s in an awful state,’ she whispered, hanging on to Patrick’s arm and wriggling into her shoes. ‘Freda’s had words with him. He’s crying.’ She looked briefly at the parked car.

  ‘That’s bad,’ said Patrick. ‘That’s very bad.’

  ‘I don’t know what she said to upset him so much. I know she doesn’t mean to be cruel. Honestly, Patrick, she’d give you the coat off her back if you needed it. It’s just that she gets carried away.’ She felt compelled to defend Freda. She herself had been sufficiently carried away to utter words that she now regretted. She should never have told Freda that she jiggled in her sleep. It was unforgivable. If you hadn’t gone on about Stanley, she thought, I would never have mentioned it. She brushed down her cloak and walked towards the rhododendrons. I’m sorry, she said in her head. Don’t be cross Freda. It wasn’t true.

  ‘I wouldn’t wake her just now,’ said Patrick. He laid his hand on her arm to detain her.

  ‘Your eye,’ she said. ‘It’s bleeding.’

  She sought a way into the bushes, using her shoulder to prise apart the leathery leaves.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Patrick, more firmly, and she looked back at him and thought he looked quite old, his face shadowy under the peak of his cloth cap.

  ‘Freda,’ she called, ‘Freda, it’s me.’

  She struggled through the bushes, hands raised to ward off the bouncing leaves, and entered a clearing floored with tangled grass on which lay Freda, flat on her back with ankles crossed.

  ‘Freda – we’re going to the safari park.’

  Freda looked disgruntled, her mouth sucked inwards. The blue eyes stared fixedly at the sky. Under the dark leaves her skin assumed a greenish tinge, the cheeks brindled with crimson and spotted with raindrops. For a moment Brenda thought she was weeping. Her painted nails, black in the shaded light, rested on the woollen swell of her stomach.

  ‘Freda,’ said Brenda again, and stopped.

  Freda’s eyes stayed open. A grey insect, sensitively quivering, dawdled on the slope of her thumb. Brenda knelt on the ground and touched the curled edges of hair turning brass-coloured in the rain. She couldn’t understand why Freda’s face, normally so pale and luminous, now burned with eternal anger, mottled and pitted with irregular patches of brown as if the leaves had stencilled rusty shadows on her cheeks. Only the nose was right, moulded in wax, the nostrils etched with pink. Where are you, she thought, where have you gone? She peered at her, trying to see what was different. It was as if somebody had disconnected the current, switched off the light … she’d gone out. Oh, she did feel sad then. Lonely. The terrible pious curve of her hands on the purple jumper – never again to jiggle her bosoms in the dark.

  ‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘Please.’

  She became very thoughtful, as if she had all the time in the world.

  ‘Stanley,’ she said out loud and watched a ladybird with speckled back laboriously climb a stalk of grass.

  Freda’s face, splintered into a thousand smiles and grimaces of rage, leapt at her from every leaf dipping under the onslaught of the rain. She laid her hand fleetingly upon the purple legs crossed on the grass.

  ‘Little one,’ she said, and rose to her feet again and left Freda alone.

  7

  In all the muddle of explanations and beginnings of sentences that were never completed, one thing remained clear. There was some reason, not yet clearly understood, for not fetching either the police or an ambulance.

  Patrick had led Brenda to the car and ordered Rossi into the front seat. He called Vittorio, who came slowly over the grass fastening his duffel coat and carelessly holding the embroidered tablecloth.

  ‘There’s been an accident,’ Patrick told him when the door was closed. ‘To Freda.’

  Aldo Gamberini, shut outside on the grass, ran to the red mini to be out of the rain.

  ‘But how?’ asked Vittorio. ‘What has happened?’

  ‘She must have had a fall. When I saw her she was lying on her back. Her heart’s stopped beating.’

  Vittorio stared at the Irishman and then at the nape of Rossi’s neck bordered with damp curls. He waited, but no one spoke.

  ‘She is dead?’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘Her back? She is dead of her back?’

  ‘On her back,’ corrected Patrick; and Vittorio shook Brenda by the shoulder, and she said dully: ‘No, it wasn’t her back. You can’t die of a strained back.’

  ‘But we should—’

  ‘Mr Paganotti …’ whimpered Rossi. He continually rubbed the front of his shirt with the palm of his hand, as if fearing that his heart too might cease to beat.

  ‘But we must …’

  Brenda said: ‘We can’t be sure that …’

  ‘How does he know?’ said Vittorio looking at Patrick.

  ‘He wasn’t there. He say he was in the town. How can …’

  ‘Rossi saw her. He went into …’

  ‘I was searching for the ball. I came …’

  ‘You have a bleeding eye,’ said Vittorio, as though he had not noticed it before, and he made as if to touch the cut on Patrick’s face. He had turned very pale. A tear rolled down his cheek, and he wiped it away with his sleeve.

  ‘Where you get that wound? How you …’

  Brenda was folding and refolding the tablecloth, smoothing the petals of the pink flower in the right-hand corner. There was a smear of salad oil and a sweet smell of decaying apples.

  ‘You and Rossi were arguing,’ she said, ‘up by the fence, and I had words with Freda. She went into the bushes.’

  ‘I see her,’ confirmed Vittorio. ‘I think she go – you know – she need to—’

  ‘No,’ Brenda said. ‘She was angry. She said I wasn’t to follow.’

  I can’t, can I, she thought, not now? She hadn’t dared to follow either when the soldiers had come to offer them a ride. How brave Freda had been, climbing aboard that monstrous funeral horse with its flaring nostrils and carved head. She hadn’t looked like a sack of potatoes or a mound of jelly: she was regal in purple and motionless beneath the sky. She did mean it – it wasn’t as if she thought Freda was listening.

  ‘She had a graze on her cheek,’ said Vittorio. ‘She show me.’

  Brenda asked: ‘Did you really try to punch her on the jaw, Patrick?’

  Vittorio suddenly recalled Freda’s return from the beech wood. ‘She tell me she saw you in the trees.’

  They both looked at the Irishman in the peaked cap that shadowed his battered face.

  ‘I never,’ he said, ‘and she didn’t. It’s not me you’re wanting.’

  Vittorio began to tremble. ‘I do not want to think it – you see her first. You came out from behind the bushes in the middle of the football.’

  ‘No,’ said Patrick. ‘He did—’ He tapped Rossi accusingly on the shoulder.

  Through the tear-stained glass Brenda could see the red mini sluiced with rain. A faint sound of voices raised in song came from the interior of the car. Freda, she thought, must be getting awfully wet. What would the aunt in Newcastle say? Freda hadn’t been home for years. She wouldn’t tell her she’d been working in a bottle factory. If she was asked, she’d say she was a secretary, or doing quite well in commercials. Freda would like that. There were the theatrical set at the Friday-night pub in their second-hand clothes, but she didn’t think they would hear about it. There was
n’t anybody else. There wasn’t even a photograph of Freda in the bed-sitting room. She’d never written her a letter or been on holiday with her or shared an adventure – only today and that had gone wrong.

  She watched Vittorio and Patrick, heads bent against the rain, walking away towards the rhododendrons. She wondered if the arrangements for the van had been deliberately sabotaged. Perhaps it had been more convenient for Freda’s plans that Rossi’s car alone had been available for the Outing. It made for a more intimate group. It’s a bit too intimate now, she thought, aware of Rossi beside her, still massaging his heart. There stole over her a regrettable feeling of satisfaction. She suspected it was normal in the circumstances. Superstitions were needed at a time like this. The wrong-doers had to be punished in some way. It was not to be wondered at that God had spoken. She remembered that Stanley and her own mother were great believers in the wrath of God. They both in their separate ways called upon him in times of stress and vengeance. ‘God blast you,’ Stanley had cried often enough when she turned her face to the whitewashed wall to avoid his breath heavy with the scent of hops. ‘My God,’ invoked her mother when hearing of her engagement to the farmer she had met at a Rotary dance.

  ‘What are they doing?’ asked Rossi. ‘Where have they gone?’

  ‘They’ve gone to see Freda.’ She looked curiously at his white face and his doleful mouth perpetually trembling. ‘Tell me what she said to you in the bushes. I won’t tell anyone, honestly.’

  ‘Nothing – she said nothing.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me,’ she confided. ‘I don’t feel very upset.’

  They stared at each other. The pain in his eyes caused her own to fill with tears, but it had nothing to do with Freda. Every time she tried to concentrate on what had happened she was distracted by something trivial: the particular slant of a raindrop in the window, a piece of grass stuck to the rim of her green court shoe, the spread of veins in Rossi’s hand as he gripped the driving wheel.

  ‘Santa Vergine,’ he murmured.

  ‘Look at my shoe,’ she said.

  As she spoke, Rossi saw Vittorio and Patrick returning, running past the tree trunk towards the car. Vittorio slumped on the back seat and covered his face with his hands. He spoke in Italian to Rossi, who muttered and shook his head from side to side. Brenda thought she recognised the word ‘Paganotti’. How they dote on him, she thought. Whatever will they tell him?

  ‘We can’t leave her there,’ said Patrick, ‘that’s for sure. We’ll have to bring her to the car.’

  ‘But there’s people you have to tell. We …’

  ‘There’s more to it,’ whispered Patrick. ‘You don’t just drop dead …’

  ‘Like doctors …’

  ‘Not at her age …’

  ‘She was in an awful state,’ said Brenda, ‘before she went in to the bushes. Sometimes people have heart attacks when they get angry. I know of …’

  ‘Never,’ scoffed Patrick. ‘Wasn’t she always in a bad temper?’

  The implication of his words reached her at last. For the first time since her return to the car she realised that Freda was dead out there in the park, never to live again. She experienced a prolonged bout of shivering followed by noisy intakes of breath and finally began to cry.

  Twice Salvatore had come to the Cortina and been refused admittance. He made gestures outside the window and was waved away. He told his passengers that Rossi looked as sick as a dog and Vittorio too. They made jokes about it. They said it was the English women that had caused nausea, not the wine. They were in the mood to go to the safari park full of wild lions and tigers: they growled ferociously at one another and clawed the covering of the seats. Salvatore defiantly tooted his horn to remind the occupants of the Cortina that they waited. In the meantime they sang loudly and helped themselves to the remainder of the Beaujolais that they had wedged into the back of the car when no one was looking. They watched the comings and goings of Patrick and Vittorio to the clump of bushes bowed under the rain and speculated as to what was going on. The Mrs Freda had drunk too much and was refusing to come out – they were enjoying her favours, the two of them; she had taken them both in her arms; even the weather could not damp her ardour. They were further amused when they finally saw her being helped out of the bushes – the interior of the mini rang with laughter. They stuffed mufflers into their mouths and watched pop-eyed the sight of Vittorio and Patrick unevenly balancing Mrs Freda under the armpits, the sheepskin coat hanging from her shoulders, her feet scuffing the ground. Aye, aye, they agreed, in smothered admiration; she had drunk enough for them all. Her head hung down limply; the dimmed hair, plastered to her cheeks was like a veil.

  ‘We go now,’ called Salvatore sticking his head out of the door as Mrs Freda was bundled into the back seat. Nobody answered. After some time he draped his jacket over his head and ran through the puddles to the Cortina.

  ‘We go now,’ he called, ‘to safari park, yes?’

  Rossi seemed not to hear. He caught a glimpse of Mrs Brenda leaning back exhausted against the front seat, face streaked with rain.

  ‘Do you know the way?’ asked Patrick opening the rear window, eyes obscured by the peak of his cap.

  ‘Ah,’ said Salvatore, ‘we will follow the signposts. You follow me. I lead.’

  And he ran enthusiastically back to the car and leapt inside, his coat still over his head, and started the engine. He reversed on to the verge, turned the car and drove deeper into the park.

  Brenda couldn’t turn round. She knew that on the back seat, secured between the bulk of Patrick and Vittorio, Freda sat like a large bedraggled doll, chin sunk on to her chest. They couldn’t possibly drive all the way back to London like that, it wasn’t right. She ought to be laid down properly and allowed to rest. There was such a thing as rigor mortis. She had a dreadful image of Freda, shaped like a sheepskin armchair, impossibly wedged in the doorway of the car. I do wonder where you are, she thought. It was so apparent to her that Freda was anywhere but in the back of the Cortina. Sheep, she knew, just lay and unravelled away, and hens were like burst pillow-cases – but not people, not Freda. She dwelt on the idea of something like an escape hatch under water, through which Freda had slowly shot to the surface, leaving her purple jumper and her hand-made boots behind. Even now she had beached on some pleasant island and was drying in the sun. Smiling, she glanced out of the window and was bewildered to find the car was winding down a slope towards a collection of farm buildings set about with paddocks and gently rising hills. Through the branches of sycamore she saw an ornamental lake ringed with pink flamingos. It had stopped raining. There were people removing raincoats and furling umbrellas and a coach painted like a rainbow outside a cafeteria.

  ‘What the devil is this?’ asked Patrick. ‘This isn’t the way.’

  He watched astonished as a mud-caked elephant appeared from beneath the trees and trod ponderously over the grass. The mini halted and Rossi braked; he sat quite still with his hands resting on the column of the steering wheel, unconscious of his surroundings.

  Salvatore and his passengers spilled gawping from the car. They ran like children across the gravel and gestured at the dusty elephant beginning to sink to its knees in the paddock.

  ‘Get out,’ said Patrick. ‘Go and ask what they’re up to.’ He sounded, but for his accent, remarkably like Freda.

  Thoughtfully Brenda joined the workers gazing at the jungle beast settling into the ground.

  ‘But we are out,’ cried Salvatore, clutching at her arm.

  ‘We are not confined. Where is the tigers? The little children is everywhere.’ And she soothed him and said she thought perhaps elephants weren’t dangerous, though privately she didn’t like the look of the huge animal lying like a heap of ashes on the open field.

  They had come to a children’s zoo. There were kiosks selling candy floss and a helter-skelter greasily plummeting to a pan of sand. In a compound there were goats with tufted beards n
ibbling pink-lipped at handfuls of brown hay. ‘Poof,’ she went, inhaling a whiff of the white-washed stall and observing their stern yellow eyes fixed upon her.

  They looked at donkeys and a calf splotched with brown lying woodenly beside a cow, and above them in the grey sky patched with blue an aeroplane swam like a duck towards the city. Aldo bought a postcard of a monkey eating a banana to take home to his children. ‘To remind me of this day,’ he told Brenda, grinning at her from beneath his wierdly buckled hat; and she ran conspicuous with swollen eyelids out of the gift shop and up a hill to a line of telescopes pointing like guns at the far-off park. She put her eye to the lens and swung the black cylinder in an arc, trying to find the cut-down oak and the piece of grass on which they had laid the tablecloth. It all looked the same. She couldn’t tell one piece of ground from another: the trees stood identical, the road ran like a grey ribbon to the castle. She was searching for Freda. As she examined the magnified ground, she caught the Cortina enlarged at the side of the path and the blurred shape of Rossi slumped behind the wheel. Guiltily she ran down the hill to the car and said the men were determined to go to the safari enclosure. As she spoke, she closed her eyes to avoid confrontation with Freda.

  ‘Sweet Jesus,’ blasphemed Patrick, ‘what are we to do?’

  ‘We cannot tell them,’ said Vittorio, ‘we should perhaps turn round and go home alone.’ He was desperate to be out of the car and away from his silent companion, yet fearful she would slide sideways at his departure.

  ‘Wait,’ said Patrick, ‘I have to think. I have to decide what’s best.’ And he frowned and fingered the congealed cut at the corner of his eye.

  There was no longer, Brenda thought, any possibility of turning back. It seemed to her that they should have driven hours ago to a hospital or a police station. A faint curiosity rose in her as to the outcome of their actions.

  ‘Why can’t we tell them?’ she asked, watching Salvatore and his men licking ice creams at the side of the road. It was awful not being able to turn round and look at Patrick. She wanted to ask him things. She would have liked to know what he was afraid of.