The Bottle Factory Outing - Beryl Bainbridge [17]
‘Jesus, it’s cold,’ he said, feeling the chill air coming from the window.
‘You could borrow my dressing gown,’ said Brenda, and he protested there was no need, the small pout of his beer belly overlapping the waistband of his trousers as he twisted to thank her.
‘But you must,’ she insisted, thinking there was very much a need; she couldn’t bear to have him standing there half-naked. She went down the stairs, closing the bathroom door carefully behind her. She stood on the landing for a moment in case Freda had returned, but all was quiet and she crept like a thief into her room and went to the wardrobe, lifting out her dressing-gown, tugging it free from its place between Freda’s dresses hung in polythene wrappers. The bottle of brandy, wedged in the folds of a purple cloak, fell on its side and rolled to the edge of the door. Thrusting it further into the recesses of the wardrobe, she ran back upstairs with her dressing-gown still on its hanger.
‘That’s nice,’ he said, as she helped him into it.
Her fingers brushed the top of his arm rough with goose-pimples, and she stepped back not meaning to have touched him. The sleeves only came down to his elbows, and when he climbed back on to the lavatory the pleats of the bright blue dressing-gown swirled out like a skirt above his trousers and the gleaming tops of his cherry-blossom boots.
At first Vittorio sat on the chair by the gas fire where Freda had placed him, but she needed a man to open the bottle of wine he had brought and they both stood by the table, she fiddling with two glasses and he with the bottle between his knees to drag out the cork. He wore a black polonecked jumper and a coat of real leather with two stylish vents at the back.
‘It’s strange,’ she said, sipping her wine. ‘I loved her, but we were not close.’
‘Yes,’ he replied, averting his eyes from her black nylon negligée, looking instead at the cheap utility furniture and the curved railings of the balcony reflecting the light of the street lamp.
‘Are you close to your mother?’ she asked him, not quite at ease, wishing almost he hadn’t come. He said No, she lived in Italy.
‘To your heart,’ she persisted, touching her breast and looking at him earnestly. She was dreadfully hungry. The hairdresser had made her wait a long time and she hadn’t had any lunch.
‘Brenda has gone to the pictures to see Super Dick, she told him, thinking it was a provocative title. She walked back and forth from the table to the window.
‘I would have thought …’ he began, but she lowered her head and he fell silent.
‘Brenda’s different from me,’ she murmured. ‘When I found her on the Finchley Road I did think …’ and she too trailed into silence and left the sentence unfinished.
He had brought her a peach in a skein of tissue paper and she rolled the fruit between her palms.
‘How kind of you,’ she said, lifting his beautiful coat from the bed and taking it to the wardrobe in case she spilled wine upon it. When she opened the door a bottle of brandy rolled from the hem of her cloak and fell on to the nail of her big bare toe.
‘Christ,’ she cried, bringing her hand to her mouth and contracting her foot with the pain. ‘Brenda,’ she told him, voice husky with suppressed violence, ‘never puts anything away.’
She stuffed the bottle behind the hanging dresses and prayed he hadn’t noticed. She didn’t know how to broach the subject of food: if she mentioned the steak it might seem as if she were forcing him to stay – as if it were all planned. She poured herself out another glass of wine and gulped it down. He wasn’t very talkative; he was making her do all the work. If he went quite soon she could eat the steak herself and the salad. She hadn’t had time to make the