He said: ‘Be quiet, I’m thinking,’ and he drummed his fingers on the back of her seat.
Aldo Gamberini came to the side window. ‘We go now.’ He pointed to the hill and the row of telescopes. ‘The wild ones are that way.’ He peered through the glass at the silent Rossi.
‘Tell him it’s all right,’ prompted Patrick. ‘Go on.’ And he prodded Rossi, who stirred at last, listlessly and with great effort as if emerging from a deep sleep. ‘Tell him we’ll follow.’
The two cars moved down the road away from the helter-skelter and the dozing elephant. They passed a house behind a wire fence and an open air cafe. Above painted tables the multi-coloured petals of aluminium umbrellas still dripped from the rain. There were public conveniences marked ‘Tarzan’ and ‘Jane’, screened by saplings of silver birch and a toll box manned by a ranger in a boy-scout hat.
Vittorio paid the entrance fee – Patrick hadn’t got any money and Rossi never moved. Brenda didn’t think he was mean. It was just that he was in a state of shock and nothing got through to him. Since her own fit of weeping she was feeling much better, and she couldn’t think why he was still so upset; he made her feel she was shallow for recovering so quickly. She wondered if it was safe to let him drive them through a herd of wild animals – they might all end up in a ravine.
The man in the toll box thumped the roof of the Cortina and told them to get out. ‘You can’t go through in that. Everybody out.’
‘We can’t get out,’ said Patrick. The mini, revving its engine a few yards ahead, tooted an impatient horn.
‘Why he tell us to get out?’ asked Vittorio, gripping the handle of the door in alarm.
‘It’s the sliding roof,’ explained Brenda. ‘It’s not safe. The lions might rip it off.’
‘Down there,’ directed the helpful ranger, pointing further down the path at a rustic shelter thatched with straw. ‘Catch your bus from there and park your car under the trees.’
They waited some minutes for the bus to arrive. They sat in a row with shoulders pressed together as if they had got into the habit of leaning on each other. Over-head the sky paled in patches leaving dark pockets filled with rain. The red mini waited for them, the men hardly understanding what was happening – they glanced curiously at the Cortina parked under the trees with Mrs Freda alone on the back seat.
The safari bus when it came was painted with black stripes like a zebra. It looked as if a whole pride of lions had hurled themselves at the rusty bonnet and ill-fitting windows and torn the tyres to ribbons. The driver was dressed in a camouflaged jacket of mottled green and a hat to match, one side caught up at the side as if he were a Canadian Mountie. When he opened the double doors at the back of the van, Brenda saw he was wearing plastic sandals, bright orange and practically luminous, and striped socks.
She nudged Patrick, who was edging forwards to climb into the bus, and he stopped abruptly and asked ‘What’s up, what’s wrong?’ frowning and looking about in an alarmed way. The driver was beckoning her and she couldn’t tell Patrick about the socks.
‘Nothing,’ she said, ‘nothing.’ And she clambered into the van and sat near the window.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Patrick sitting heavily beside her and tugging at her cloak.
‘His shoes,’ she whispered, ‘and his socks.’
‘His what?’
‘Look at his feet.’
‘For the love of God – what are you on about?’
She sighed and settled herself more comfortably on the wooden bench. The driver stretched out a speckled hand shaking with palsy and started the engine.
‘He’s got Parkinson’s,’ she said. ‘He shouldn’t be driving a bus.’
Patrick was staring at Rossi’s hand, braced against the green slats of the seat in front.
‘Will you look at that?’ he said, nudging her with his elbow.
‘Not Rossi – the driver. Either that or he’s over a hundred.’
‘Do you see his watch?’
She looked without interest at the damaged time piece. ‘He broke it playing football.’
‘Is that what he said?’
‘He didn’t say anything. I don’t think he cares about his watch being broken.’
‘When we got – her – up from the ground there was bits of glass – there was a piece stuck to her jumper – at the back.’
She listened and watched a dead fly, relic of a previous summer, quivering on the window pane. The bus rattled over ruts in the gravel path and bounced down a lane towards a metal fence covered with wire netting and patrolled by men with rifles.
‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘do you think it’s dangerous?’
‘Will you listen to what I’m saying. Rossi was in the bushes with her before anybody else. His watch is bust. I told you – I seen the pieces.’
‘What pieces?’
‘Sweet Jesus,’ he murmured. ‘Your brain’s addled with the shock. I can’t make you see how serious it is. I can’t get any sense out of that Vittorio and none out of you.’ He sounded pained as if she had let him down. He stared gloomily ahead and watched the barricade slowly rising in the air.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I don’t seem able to take it in. I don’t know why we didn’t get a policeman. I don’t—’
‘For God’s sake, will you think about me. I was seen. Wasn’t I seen in that Protestant chapel having a barney with her?’
‘But you said you didn’t hit her,’ she said primly.
‘I didn’t. I didn’t lay a finger on her. She thumped me.
She pushed me into some hole in the wall and shut me in. I had a devil of a time explaining what I was doing in there.’
‘She locked you in a hole?’ Her mouth began to turn up at the corners – she couldn’t help admiring the spirit of Freda.
‘And she hit me in the eye with a bloody big stone.’
‘Where?’
Vittorio turned and looked at them. He had dark circles under his eyes and his lashes were stuck together. ‘What is wrong?’ he hissed. ‘Everyone is looking.’
‘Sssh,’ reproved Brenda. ‘People are looking.’ After a few moments she whispered: ‘Where did she hit you with a stone?’
‘In the woods.’
‘You said you didn’t go into the woods.’
‘Well, I did. I was minding me own business, throwing pebbles at birds, and she chucks a bloody big boulder through the trees at me.’
‘You shouldn’t have thrown pebbles at birds,’ Brenda said, shocked at his unkindness.
They drove through a field of ostriches who fled bedraggled at their approach and disappeared into some trees. It didn’t look like a park. The grass was patchy and littered with lumps of dung; the leaves hung tattered from the branches.
‘Isn’t it messy?’ she whispered in Rossi’s ear, but he didn’t reply. He was holding his wrist with one hand and hiding his shattered watch.
Brenda went pale. Beads of perspiration broke out on her temples. She struggled to open a window.
‘You can’t,’ said Patrick. It’s not allowed to open the windows. What’s the matter with you?’ And he stared at her ashen face and her pale lips parting as she fought for breath. ‘Get your head down,’ he ordered, and thrust her roughly towards the floor littered with cigarette ends. The blood pounded in her ears.
‘Siberian camels,’ called the driver, ‘to our left,’ and a murmur of appreciation rustled through the bus.
Brenda didn’t faint. She revived in a moment and her sensitive skin became blotchy with colour and she lay back deathly cold and very frightened.
‘Bear up,’ said Patrick. ‘Take hold of yourself.’
She longed for him to take hold of her. She wanted to be protected. She wanted her hand held, but she couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t he that frightened her.
‘What are we doing?’ she asked, in much the same way as she had asked the dead Freda where she had gone.
‘I’m telling you,’ he said. ‘I�
�m thinking. I’ve got to be careful.’
‘But if Rossi – hurt Freda—’
‘Do you think we’ll get that bunch to split on him?’ said Patrick scathingly, and he looked through the driving window at the red mini crawling between two ragged llamas. ‘That lot will stick together. They’d be out of their minds with fear that Mr Paganotti would give them the sack. It’ll be me that’ll get it. They’ll all swear that I vanished for hours and came out of the bushes with me eye cracked open.’
They had come to a second gate and there was a further delay. At a squalid ditch another batch of flamingos pecked at the bank and teetered on Belsen legs over the mud. They looked obscene, as if they bled all over.
‘Was she bleeding?’ she cried out loud, and Rossi twitched as if he had been stung.
‘Sssh,’ Patrick said. ‘Her neck was broke.’
It occurred to her that he was cleverer than she had ever imagined. Worn at a jaunty angle over his large ears, the cloth cap she had previously thought common became stylish in her eyes. His face assumed a strength of character she had not noticed before. Vittorio, turning anxiously to look at them, moustaches lank, seemed insipid by comparison. Even the boots with scarlet laces appeared a shade affected.
‘Sit up,’ said Patrick. ‘Pull yourself together.’ He was altogether like Freda.
The bus passed under the second gate and traversed an empty field strewn with cabbages and turned sharply left into an arena of sand and dead trees, the whole fenced about with sheets of tin, dark green, dented in places and emitting a weird moaning noise as they vibrated in the wind. On hillocks of baked mud men postured holding whips, rifles slung upon their backs. Clothed in rags, the inmates squatted in the dirt and dipped bald heads and ripped their breasts apart. ‘Vultures,’ breathed the passengers and shivered in their seats. The men with guns stood motionless posing for photographs. The snout of a baboon was seen at the top of a slope. ‘Ooooh’ went the occupants of the bus, levelling cameras at the window and craning their necks to see beyond the slopes. ‘Wait on,’ said the driver, tooting his horn, and the armed guards ran up the hills cracking their whips. Barking like dogs, a hoard of baboons, pink-arsed and hideous, swept over the ridge and bounded across the grey sand. They leapt to the top of a large rock and huddled together holding their young.
‘Poor little things,’ said Brenda. They were so ugly, so human in their aspect, so vicious in their glances.
‘They’d have your guts for garters,’ Patrick said. ‘They’d tear you limb from limb.’
She thought of Freda sitting in the car under the trees, growing cold – it was a pity they hadn’t let the Cortina into the reserve. Nobody would ever have known: a door jerked open, a quick shove – they could say her heart had stopped. She shivered at her own audacity. She tried to remember how Freda had looked when she cantered over the park on the black horse, but she couldn’t. It was as if a chasm had opened between them, leaving Freda on one brink and herself on another. The gap was widening hour by hour. She felt like crying and asking some-one for forgiveness.
‘Listen,’ said Patrick. ‘You believe I didn’t touch her?’
Her eyes were shining, the tears only just held back and she cleared her throat before she replied. ‘Yes, I do. Don’t be silly.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I am, I am.’
It was meaningless really, and he knew it. She had the kind of temperament that stopped her from being truthful. All the same, he thought he might persuade her.
‘What we do,’ he said, ‘is to get her back to London and put her somewhere while I think how to make Rossi tell us what happened. In your room—’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t do that.’
‘For me.’
His face loomed over her; he bared his teeth like a baboon. He’d told Vittorio he had never been in the woods. She had heard him. He said he’d been in the town. He was so anxious they shouldn’t go to the police … Freda had a graze on her cheek … He was looking at her imploringly. She wondered if he guessed what she was thinking; despite herself she couldn’t help recoiling from him and pressing closer to the windows.
As they left the arena a solitary monkey leapt to the top of the slope and stood upright. Dangling a long thin penis like a scarlet lupin, it swung its arms in rage.
The lions and tigers were a disappointment. They lay in lusher pastures under the feathery branches of horse-chestnut trees and slept.
‘They are not wild,’ cried Rossi, and he unclasped his hands and banged on the window with his fist.
When they returned to the bus shelter, Patrick suggested they should all go for a cup of tea in the cafeteria. Aldo Gamberini tiptoed slyly to the Cortina and rapped with his knuckles on the glass.
‘For God’s sake,’ shouted Patrick, and he leapt across the gravel and knocked Aldo on his back upon the grass. ‘Haven’t we had enough agitation for one day? Can’t you see the woman’s sleeping it off?’
The men murmured at Aldo’s rough treatment. Patrick put his hand to his forehead and forced himself to smile. He helped Aldo to his feet and brushed him down with his large mauve hand scratched in a score of places. The workers were not rash enough to criticise him; every week he came into work with his face gashed or his mouth bruised from asserting himself outside the public house on a Saturday night. They closed ranks about the demoralised Aldo, and Patrick led the way down the road to the cafe with Brenda and Vittorio lagging two paces behind.
They had tea paid for by Vittorio, who seemed quite ready to put his hand in his pocket, and packets of dry little biscuits gritty with raisins. The men sprawled across the soiled tables and passed the postcard of the monkey from hand to hand. A waitress with enormous breasts wiped at the plastic cloths with a square of rag and was openly admired. She had yellow hair and a faint ginger down on her narrow lip. Freda, thought Brenda and closed her eyes, but already she could no longer visualise clearly that round face with the painted lids.
After a time Rossi left the café and wandered about outside, hands behind his back and chin sunk on his chest. Patrick nudged Brenda and indicated she should go outside and talk to him.
‘No,’ she protested, pursing her mouth edged with crumbs, and he pinched her quite hard on her thigh and frowned.
‘Talk to him, that’s all I ask.’
He wasn’t as he had been in the bathroom. He was no longer shy and full of reverence. She bridled and moved her leg away and chipped a raisin from her tooth.
Vittorio was perpetually in the dark – the strange accent of the Irishman and the mumblings of Brenda confused him. He listened politely to the men discussing the placid lions, nodding in all the right places, his eyes continually flickering from Brenda to Patrick and back again. Under his fingers the picture postcard buckled at the corners. Patrick removed his cap and laid it on a ledge. Exposed, his flaring ears burned pinkly beneath his copper-coloured hair. I don’t like him without his hat, thought Brenda. Come to think of it, she didn’t like him at all. She actually preferred Rossi with his trouble-some ways and his black and tangled curls. Excusing herself, she pushed her way from the table and went outside on to the lawn. They paced in silence for a time, up and down the path outside the window. They could hear the clatter of cups and the hiss of the coffee machine. Now and then she sensed Patrick’s face at the glass, and when they reached the corner of the café building she took Rossi by the arm and marched him away to a ditch at the side of a fence and leapt clear over it into a field. He dithered on the other side and was reluctant to follow.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I want to tell you something,’ and he scrambled awkwardly over the cut in the ground, dipping one foot into muddy water and shaking it like a dog, one suede shoe turned black and the turn-up of his trouser soaked.
‘Never mind,’ she said impatiently, and she ducked down behind a hillock of damp grass and smoothed her purple cloak. ‘You must know,’ she said, when he had sat down beside her, fussing about his saturated s
hoe and sulkily wiping at it with a handkerchief, ‘that what we’ve done is very wrong.’
He was like a child being scolded. He tossed his head at the injustice of it and refused to speak.
‘Police,’ she said, thinking of the night they had taken Mrs Haddon away, ‘ask an awful lot of questions – all sorts of things that don’t seem to have anything to do with what actually happened. They’ll want to know what she said to you when you went into the bushes. Patrick’s hinting something funny went on.’
He said: ‘It is all happening too quick. I cannot think.’ But he was once again the cellar manager whose eye was anxious, almost calculating.
‘Well, you’d better. I’m warning you. Patrick thinks you hurt Freda.’ She was speaking too quickly for him. ‘Don’t you see? He’s got that cut on the eye and he had a fight with her in the church.’
‘He never like Mrs Freda—’
‘He threw stones at her when she was in the woods—’
‘He knock Aldo to the ground. He is a violent man.’
‘Yes,’ she said. They were piling blame upon the Irish-man, brick by brick; they sat there silently remembering.
After a while she said: ‘You’ve got nothing to be worried about. We ought to go to the police now.’
‘No.’
‘It’s your car she’s sitting in. You’ve got the licence.’
‘It’s not my fault.’
‘Well, they’ll want to know why you let them put her in your car.’
He did see what she meant but he shook his head. ‘No police.’
‘Why on earth not?’ She was getting quite irritated by him. She wanted it all settled and the landlady told and the aunt in Newcastle informed – she might even ring Stanley. ‘Patrick,’ she said loudly, speaking very slowly and pronouncing every word clearly, ‘is trying to blame you. He says there was glass under her jumper. And I saw you go into the bushes. I’ll have to tell the police. If you tell lies they always find out and it looks worse.’
‘What glass is this?’ he asked. ‘What glass under her jumper?’
‘Not under it. Stuck in the fluff in the back. And he wanted to know about your watch.’
The Bottle Factory Outing Page 13
