The Bottle Factory Outing - Beryl Bainbridge [42]
Struggling to her feet, the tide of players rushing away from her, Freda returned, scarlet in the face, to the tree stump and turned the tap of the wine barrel.
Presently Vittorio came to see if she was all right. He looked at her spoilt face and disturbed hair.
‘You want a little rest?’ he said.
‘My back,’ she said abstractedly, as if it was an old burden she was used to bearing alone. She refused to meet his eye and winced bravely and bit her lip.
‘Have you hurt your back again?’ asked Brenda, leaving the game and looking at her anxiously. It seemed to Freda that wherever Vittorio went, Brenda followed. She stood very close to him, as if they were both united by their concern for her.
‘Play on,’ said Freda nobly, waving her hand selflessly at the make-shift football pitch, though she would have liked to catch Brenda a stinging slap across the face. She sank down with extreme caution on to the grass and closed her eyes.
‘She’s got a bad back,’ said Brenda. ‘It plays up from time to time. That’s why she has to sit on a beer crate to do her labelling.’
‘Perhaps a little sleep will do her good,’ Vittorio said, as if speaking of his grandmother; and they went away together.
When Freda opened her eyes, her head turned resolutely from the happy team of workmates, she was astonished to see a row of horses at the boundary of the field, flowing along the blue line of the firs. She sat up, shielding her eyes from the sun, absorbed in the sight, touched by some chord of memory, and watched them turn from mauve to chestnut brown as they swerved, two abreast, away from the trees and began to canter across the park. At this distance they resembled an illustration she had seen in a war book, sepia-tinted, of cavalry on the march. They came nearer, the thud of hooves muffled by the grass, and she saw that there were three riders each leading a saddleless horse on a long rein, and they were no longer brown but jet black from head to tail with trappings of dark leather burnished by the sun. Now she knew who they were. She could see quite clearly the peaked caps of the mounted men, the mustard jackets buttoned at the throat. The game of football broke up. The workers flocked to the tree stump to refresh themselves with wine. They gazed in awe and pleasure at the animals and the proud uniformed men sweeping towards them.
‘It’s them,’ cried Freda, getting to her feet and tugging Brenda by the arm. ‘The other morning in the street – there were hundreds of them.’
She stared in recognition at the riders, red-cheeked and bright-eyed as if risen from Flanders field, the dead young ones come back to ride again.
‘It can’t be them,’ said Brenda ‘We’re miles away.’
Rossi, cherubic face beaming with hospitality, ran to the horses. The men reined in and slowed their mounts to a walk. Circling the oak, Rossi at their rumps, the animals snorted, flared nostrils lined with purple.
The soldiers looked down at the ill-assorted group, at the blonde girl in her sheepskin coat, the dishevelled black-suited workers, the paper cups strewn on the ground. Brenda, with her formidable nose in the air and an utterly misleading expression of haughtiness in her somewhat hooded eyes, spun on the grass like a bird caught in a net. She was terrified of the prancing beasts.
‘You will have a little wine?’ said Rossi, and he twinkled back to the barrel and turned the tap and rinsed out grass stalks from the cups, pouring the red wine on to the ground and refilling the beakers to the brim. Like a woman holding up refreshments to the liberating troops he smiled coyly and held out his arms. The three young soldiers dismounted. The horses pawed the turf and bent their necks, the clipped manes standing like a pelt of fur along the curve of their necks, the tails, dense as soot, swishing flies from their dark and steaming haunches.
The riders