The Bottle Factory Outing - Beryl Bainbridge [16]
‘I wonder,’ said Brenda aloud, ‘what the kitten thinks now its mummy doesn’t like it.’
She wished someone would try to savage her every time she made a friendly gesture. She was just working out how happily she could exist, left entirely alone, when there was a knock at the front door. She wanted instantly to hide, but she knew it was no use, so she ran down the stairs with a fixed smile on her face, ready to leave immediately should it be Vittorio with his little silken Zapata moustache flopping above his mouth, or Freda back from her shopping. It was neither. It was Patrick in a shiny black suit and a clean white shirt with a badly frayed collar.
‘My word,’ she said, letting him into the dark hall, ‘you do look smart.’
His appearance alarmed her. He was so evidently out to impress, she would not have been surprised if, like a conjurer, he had whipped a vase of flowers from behind his back and presented them to her.
‘Ah well,’ he said, holding a canvas bag for her inspection, ‘didn’t I leave early to get me tools?’
She led him up the stairs, pulling faces as she went to relieve her feelings, sticking her tongue out at the brown-painted walls, telling him silently to drop dead and leave her alone. As they turned to go up the second flight of stairs, passing the cooker and the pungent slice of meat under its tea-towel, she was forced to smile at him and say insincerely: ‘It is kind of you, Patrick, to give up your time.’
The bathroom had a geyser riveted to the wall above a large tub stained with rust.
‘It’s old,’ said Patrick, looking at the four curved feet splayed out upon the cracked lino and the dust lying like a carpet beneath the belly of the bath.
Outside the window, open to relieve the odour of stale urine, the yard lay like a jigsaw puzzle, dissected by washing line and paving stone. On the back wall, above the black and barren stem of the rambling rose, stood a row of tin cans and broken bottles placed to repel small boys.
‘That’s it,’ said Brenda pointing at the offending cistern in its bed of cement. Patrick climbed on to the lavatory seat in his sparkling boots and fiddled with the chain. ‘It won’t flush,’ he said. Along the line of his sleeve appeared beads of plaster and a smear of rust.
‘Your clothes—’ began Brenda.
But already he was removing his jacket and handing it to her for safety. Lifting the heavy lid of the cistern, enough for him to get an arm in up to the elbow, he splashed about in the water, his shoulders raised so that she could see the elasticated top of his underpants holding his shirt in check.
‘It’s the ballcock,’ he volunteered.
‘Is that bad?’ she asked, praying it was and he would give up and go home quick.
‘Don’t you fret. I can do it,’ he assured her. ‘Nothing simpler.’
He jumped to the floor and looked in his tool bag for a spanner and a ball of string. She could see the damp cuff of his shirt clinging to the shape of his wrist.
‘Look at that,’ she said. ‘You’re ruining your shirt.’
‘I was wondering,’ he asked, his Brylcreamed head bent low. ‘Would you have any objection to me removing me shirt?’
‘I don’t mind,’ she cried, though secretly she did, and her eyes narrowed as she spoke.
Without his shirt, his hands and head looked as if they belonged to someone else, so red and full of blood against the white softness of his trunk. He had a nice chest, not at all pimply, with only a dusting of freckles