‘My watch,’ he repeated in a low voice and stared blankly at the smashed time-piece on his wrist.
A long sigh escaped him. He played idly with his mud-stained handkerchief.
‘It’s all for the best,’ she said.
Haltingly he began to tell her a story.
‘When Mrs Freda come into the office and say she tell me to leave you alone, I am very angry. She mention Mr Paganotti . . .’
As he remembered the incident he flushed with renewed rage. She had been so bullying and unladylike, thumping her fist on his desk like a man. He had not known how to deal with her. When his wife had come to the factory with her niece from Casalecchio di Reno he could hardly breathe for fear Freda would march in and denounce him. When she did come, and asked him if she could use the telephone, his heart had nearly stopped beating. How could he let her use the phone with his wife sitting on her chair, listening? Hadn’t he told his wife that Mr Paganotti had arranged the Outing long ago and no women were going? Freda had stood there smiling, shuffling his beautifully ordered labels on their shelves. He did not dare tell her to go away. Her pink lips had glistened; she had been so confident. And later Vittorio had seemed upset and anxious. Twice he went to the main door of the factory and looked up and down the road …
‘But I didn’t believe her. I think she just say it to upset me.’
She was always upsetting people, he thought, interfering between him and Mrs Brenda, causing everybody trouble. She had made advances to Vittorio. She had invited him round to her room and given him brandy stolen from Mr Paganotti. She wanted him to take her out to a restaurant. In the office she had whispered into Vittorio’s ear as if they were betrothed …
‘And Vittorio did not want to come on the Outing. In the street I have to persuade him. He want to go home. He say she is always arguing.’
Vittorio had made him ring the coach firm and cancel the van, so that nobody could go into the country. It was not good having to ring the man and tell him he did not want his van. He had felt ashamed doing such a thing. Vittorio had said they must go to the factory on the Sunday as if nothing happen … then they would all go home … only, when they got to the factory, it seemed a pity to waste the day, he had his sandwiches … besides his cousin Aldo Gamberini insist they go, and Salvatore have his car …
‘When we play the football I think we are all having a good time. The little confusion in the fortress – pah, it is all forgotten. When we go on the horses I think Vittorio too is happy. He look at Freda as if he love her.’
It was true. Vittorio was an educated man: Mr Paganotti, his uncle, had put him through college. He had studied art – poetry. When he had looked at Mrs Freda on her horse it was as if he were reading something in one of his books. He was learning something. It was not just the wine that made him smile at her so. It had seemed a simple thing to suggest that Vittorio take her into the woods. How could he refuse? The sun was shining – the little birds were singing.
‘I want us all to be happy, all to go into the woods for a little jump out. I ask Vittorio to take Freda for a walk. The men are happy playing football – the four of us – but he is angry. He say Freda will tell his uncle, Mr Paganotti, that he go to her room and try to get into the bed. I want to help my friend. I wait a little.’
The wine had made him excited. When he had walked over the grass his head was filled with pictures of Freda – alone in her room in a black gown drinking Mr Paganotti’s brandy – lying on her back in the sunshine. When she rode the black horse her buttocks were like two round melons.
‘I go into the bushes to ask Freda not to go to Mr Paganotti.’ Rossi began to tremble. He crumpled his hand-kerchief into his palm.
‘Go on,’ said Brenda. ‘What did she say?’
‘I do not see her. She is talking to Vittorio.’
‘She couldn’t have been.’ Brenda was bursting with resentments. She didn’t understand why Vittorio had told lies about Freda; she didn’t understand why Rossi pretended Vittorio had been in the bushes. She wanted to hit the little Italian sitting there not telling her the truth – she wanted to go home.
‘Well,’ she said nastily, ‘it seems fishy to me. And I don’t suppose the police will like it either.’
Suddenly she didn’t want to wear the purple cloak any longer; it wasn’t her property. She unfastened the collar and shrugged it from her shoulders. She didn’t know why she was so bothered about the truth. Who was she to sit in judgment? It wasn’t going to make any difference to Freda.
More patiently she said: ‘But I did see you come out of the bushes. I didn’t see Vittorio. And you were crying in the car.’
‘I walk around for a few minutes. I look at you and you are like a little girl on the grass. Then I see Vittorio go away and I go into the bushes again. I am thinking she is asleep. And when I realise—’
He stopped and lowered his eyes beginning to fill with tears. She began to cry too, out of sheer tiredness, quietly, with a great deal of sniffing.
It was almost dark now. The cafeteria was closing. There were lights coming on among the trees and the distant sound of metal doors being bolted. A cart with a hose attachment moved slowly along the road towards the lion enclosure. Patrick was disturbed that she had been absent so long. They had gone to the car to look for her. The men had called her name along the hedgerow.
‘I didn’t hear,’ she said.
He took her by the arm and stood murmuring into her ear. The men sat on a low fence and looked in the opposite direction.
‘Did he say anything?’
‘He said Vittorio was in the bushes before he was.’
Patrick swore.
‘Will you give up now?’ she said. ‘Can’t we go to a police station?’
They were cheating Freda out of her death. She knew that if it had been her that had been found dead under the sky, Freda would have beat her breast and shrieked her lamentation. This way, this stuffing into cars and secret consultations, was belittling to her. You’d have thought Patrick would have known how to treat the dead, being Irish – all that weeping and wailing and fluttering of candles through the night. She gave the purple cloak to Vittorio and told him to tuck it about Freda. It wasn’t until she was actually sitting in the car that she realised she was dressed all in black; her woollen dress, her dark stockings, even her shoes in shadow beneath the dashboard were entirely suitable for a funeral. She would have liked to tell Rossi but she didn’t want to be flippant. He was adjusting the driving mirror, twisting it this way and that – possibly he was trying to avoid the reflection of Freda’s head sunk upon her breast. She tried to escape into sleep as the car wound down the path, the red mini in front of them, but she was wide-awake, her brain teeming with images: the edge of the table cloth blowing upwards in the wind, horses racing beside the trees, the white ball leaping towards the sky. The headlamps of the Cortina caught the distempered wall of the open-air café; the metal umbrellas wavered and were gone. She thought as they began to climb the hill that she heard the sound of an elephant trumpeting down in the paddock. Patrick and Vittorio began a desultory conversation interspersed with long silences – something about the climate of Italy. They sounded as if they had just met while waiting for a train.
‘In the south it is different.’
‘So I’ve heard. I read a bit once in a paper about Naples.’
‘That too is hot,’ said Vittorio.
‘Dirty place by all accounts,’ Patrick said.
‘It is a port. You know, the docks – refuse – fruit.’
‘Terrible stink in the summer. Like bodies rotting.’ He reddened. Even in the dark Patrick blushed like a woman, though no one could see him.
When they entered the north side of the Park, Rossi drove very slowly. The red mini was out of sight. Already it had flashed past the picnic area and was out of the Park approaching the roundabout.
The headlamps of the Cortina pierced the darkness. Brenda saw the dull gleam of the timber fence in th
e distance. The car crawled along the verge and stopped. Rossi switched off the engine. There was a little silvery noise as the key dangled for one instant in the ignition. They could hear one another breathing. When the wind rustled through the black grass it was like a long-drawnout sigh.
‘Well,’ said Patrick, ‘we got to get something settled. Between the four of us.’
Five, thought Brenda. As her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness she could make out the shape of the cut-down oak and the grey mass of the bushes beyond. They’d left a barrel of wine on the stump of the tree. If they intended to go on hiding Freda, they ought to get rid of that barrel – it was circumstantial evidence.
‘It is best,’ said Vittorio, ‘if we tell each other the truth.’ He sounded a long way off, as if he was outside some-where, calling to them. ‘For myself I have nothing to hide.’ He could not however help putting his hands over his face in a gesture of despair.
‘Well, I have,’ Patrick said. ‘I’ve been in trouble before with the police.’
Brenda stopped herself in the nick of time from turning round. She trembled at the narrow escape and the implications of his words. She’d been alone with him in the bathroom for hours – she’d even locked the door – and she’d have gone a walk with him in the woods if he had asked her, simply to get away from Rossi.
He said: ‘Nothing I’d be ashamed to tell me own mother. Fights, I mean – having a drop too much. I don’t want to put meself in their hands. Before you know where you are, you’ve said one thing, and haven’t they written it down as something else?’
Brenda wished he wouldn’t talk in that ridiculous accent. Everything he said was a question. She knew the sort of trouble he meant. Stanley didn’t like the police either, though God knows why: they had often brought him home when he had fallen into a ditch on the way back from the Little Legion. The park at night reminded her of the countryside she had left: the lights of the town twinkling away to the right, the spidery branches of the trees – if she opened the window she might hear the hooting of an owl.
‘Isn’t it peaceful,’ she murmured, though nobody heard.
On the rare occasions when she and Stanley had gone out together, walking the three miles to the village, she had always complained of a stitch in her side. More than once she had sneered at the type of entertainment offered in the Legion – the smart alec in the teddy-boy suit clutching a microphone and singing ‘Delilah’ at the top of his lungs. They thought her stuck-up in the Legion, even though she broadened her vowels when she spoke to them, even though she tried to play billiards. It wasn’t as if she was too different from the others, there were plenty of Polish labourers left over from the war, and Pakistani immigrants who worked in the mills. She was always very polite to everyone. She never made a scene, not even when Stanley fell down the step into the Gents and cut his fore-head, but he seemed constantly uneasy in her presence. He struck her repeatedly and painfully on the thigh and told her to sup up. When they were given a lift home in a car the farmhouse sat in the valley like an orange square, tiny – his mother’s window was lit by a lamp that was never extinguished, not even in sleep. The white gate at the roadside shone in the headlamps. The path down to the house was worn with rivulets of rain. Stones littered the way. Sheep floundered to their feet as Stanley ran zigzag down the slope, urinating as he went. The whole earth swelled upwards like a vast warm bosom.
‘It was my fault,’ she suddenly said. She was unaware that Rossi had cried out a moment previously the name of Mr Paganotti. ‘I shouldn’t have been nasty to her. I shouldn’t have upset her. Then she wouldn’t have gone to the bushes in the first place.’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ shouted Patrick. He leaned forwards in his seat and attempted to put an arm about her shoulder in an awkward gesture of sympathy, and Freda slithered slowly downwards along the plastic seating. They got out of the car in a panic, slamming the doors and running to the tree stump as if it was a place of refuge. Rossi was moaning. He ran in a circle round and round the oak and the empty barrel of wine. All at once he darted away into the darkness. They could hear for a moment the rush of his body and the low keening he made; then he had gone. They strained their eyes trying to see into the blackness.
‘Where’s he gone?’ whispered Patrick.
‘He will come back,’ said Vittorio. ‘He is very highly strung. Very sensitive. He will come back.’ He had a nice voice, caressing; he sounded full of compassion.
Brenda was shivering without her cloak. The men went back to the car and called her when they had propped Freda upright. She hurled herself into the front seat and curled up with her arms about her knees and pressed her chattering teeth against her wrists.
Patrick was giving up the idea of trying to make the Italians confess. They were too foreign – Vittorio clammed up like a shell and Rossi somewhere out there in the darkness blubbing like a baby. They must get back to London quick and put Freda somewhere for the night. He regretted that he had wasted so much time rushing about the countryside. In the morning he would either have thought of something or would get on the boat home and leave them to sort it out. He had a radio he could pawn, and a fellow he knew at the bar of the Waterford Castle owed him a few quid. Brenda was no use to him. She never said what she meant. She would hide him one moment if she was asked, and betray him the next.
Vittorio had a pain in his chest. His head ached. Had she been alive, Freda would have been stroking his thigh in the dark. Perhaps she was the lucky one, to go quickly and so young. For himself, years hence, there might be disease – pain: like an olive left on the ground he would wither and turn black. Gloomily he shifted his knee and imagined Freda had grown very cold: the chill of her shoulder as it pressed against him, struck him like a blow. The rim of her ear, dimly seen through the fronds of hair, burned like ice.
Now and then a car came swishing up the road; light splashed over the windows like a deluge of water and drained away instantly. After a quarter of an hour had passed Rossi came back to the car and lowered himself into the driving seat. He was breathing heavily as if he had run for miles. Vittorio said something to him and he nodded his head. When he switched on the engine, his fingers in the tiny illumination were soiled, the nails rimmed with dirt.
On the motorway the Cortina kept to the slow lane and was constantly overtaken.
‘Faster,’ urged Patrick, but Rossi took no heed.
Brenda hated going fast: it was dreadful having to trust her life to someone else. At any moment Rossi could lose control of the wheel and spin them all to pieces. Danger was all around her: the people hurtling along the road, the aeroplanes overhead coming in to land, sailing like railway carriages above the fragile fences – an aircraft, leaving the landing strip of the nearby airport, zoomed upwards on a collision course. She kept one hand on the button of the door, ready to jump out should the car swerve or the planes begin to fall.
‘Step on it,’ said Patrick, like a gangster in a movie.
‘We’ve got to dump her somewhere for the night.’ And they rocked together as they drove.
Brenda was searching the outskirts of the town for resting places for Freda. She recoiled from the word ‘dump’ – surely he couldn’t be serious? So many discoveries about him in so short a time made her tremble all over with misgivings. She saw the doorway of a church, a partially demolished house. At Shepherds Bush a black angel flew on a plinth amidst the poplar trees. They passed the green dome of the Music Hall. They spun through the park – a dog stood frozen in the yellow wedge of the headlamps – and into the glare of the High Street. The clock outside the launderette stood at five minutes to nine as they turned the corner and drew up outside the shuttered factory.
The mini took a wrong turning just off the M1. The men were philosophical. They had the remains of the wine to sustain them.
‘Such a way to behave,’ said Salvatore, thinking of the wanton figure in the back of the Cortina.
‘But splendid on a horse,’ Gino observed grudging
ly. He preferred thinner women; he was himself puny in stature, brittle in the leg and cavernous in the cheek.
Aldo seemed disconcerted that once again his cousin had disappeared. He had come to the factory in Rossi’s car and dreaded lest he have to return by tube. He was fuddled by the Beaujolais and weary from his game of football. Salvatore was willing to go out of his way and take him to his door, but Aldo wouldn’t hear of it.
‘I came with him,’ he said stubbornly. ‘I will return with him.’
It seemed obvious that Rossi would take the English women to their house. Possibly she would have to be lifted in some way up the stairs. They agreed they would have a lot to tell their fellow workers when they met in the morning – the coming and going in the fortress … the argument between Vittorio and Rossi … the rowing between the two English ladies … the return of the Irishman with his face torn … the sight of Mrs Freda being supported from the bushes … If only Amelio and Stefano had been there to see how it was.
There followed a time of silence while they thought of the less fortunate members of the party who had never journeyed beyond the wall of the factory.
‘Surely,’ said Aldo, ‘they will have their money back.’
They almost missed Rossi’s car parked at the side of the road. They had not thought it would be there; they expected to find it outside the house of the English girls. They stopped and walked back to the alleyway. The shutter was rolled up. It was unheard of; it was unauthorised. How could Rossi be so bold as to enter Mr Paganotti’s business premises after closing time? Never, except at Christmas when Mr Paganotti held a little party in his office and danced stiffly with his secretary, had they known such a thing. They stole up the alleyway and hovered outside the pass door. Gino removed his hat. Pushing the heavy door inwards, they crept down the passageway to the bottling floor. It was dark save for a single yellow bulb burning beneath the roof. The plant stood silent under its ragged cover; a rat rustled beneath the cardboard boxes. Mrs Brenda was slumped on a crate by the wall. Vittorio and Rossi, heaving and straining, were pushing Mrs Freda, stretched out upon a trolley, into the mouth of the lift.
The Bottle Factory Outing Page 14