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By Root 536 0

and if she too could be disgraced then she would not be able to go to Mr Paganotti and report him for his conduct towards Mrs Brenda. Vittorio retorted that if Rossi had behaved indiscreetly with Mrs Brenda then he must take his punishment. He had dishonoured his family by his demeanour. He could not expect that others should lower themselves in order to protect him. Besides, he pointed out, the English women were different. No matter how many times he took Mrs Freda into the woods she would not feel disgraced, she would be flattered. She would run wantonly from under the trees and tell the whole of Windsor Park how beautifully she had been dishonoured.

Though Vittorio was nephew to Mr Paganotti, Rossi was bold enough to lose his temper and speak his mind. He shouted and shook his fists in the air.

The workers turned their faces to the sky, the ground, the flying ball, and missed nothing. Gino, the brother of old Luigi, smote his forehead and murmured his disapproval.

‘Whatever’s going on?’ fretted Freda. Her plump cheeks, childish with dimples and tendrils of disordered hair, quivered as she tried to understand what the two men shouted.

‘Did Patrick do that to you?’ asked Brenda, looking at the graze on Freda’s face.

But she wouldn’t reply. She fidgeted with the sleeves of her coat and longed to join in the battle.

‘It’s probably something to do with us,’ said Brenda unwisely. ‘Maybe he’s telling Vittorio about you going to Mr Paganotti.’

‘You’re a bloody menace,’ hissed Freda, convinced that Brenda was right. ‘Why can’t you stand on your own two feet without dragging me into it?’

‘But you interfere all the time. You wouldn’t let that lady borrow our room to play her trumpet in … You wouldn’t let me talk to Stanley on the phone.’

‘What lady?’ asked Freda, bewildered.

‘If you hadn’t got rid of Patrick he would have stopped Rossi getting at me, and I wouldn’t have had to mention Mr Paganotti.’

‘Your teeth,’ said Freda, ‘are terribly yellow. You should try cleaning them some time.’

The workers, caught between two sets of protagonists, played all the more noisily. They wore themselves out kicking and shouting and running to the limits of the pitch.

Brenda saw Vittorio take hold of Rossi’s hand. They’re making friends, she thought, and she watched curiously as Rossi clutched his wrist. He seemed to be removing something from his arm.

After a time Vittorio stalked away from Rossi and left him alone at the fence.

‘What’s going on?’ called Freda. ‘What was that all about?’

He ignored her completely, running like a bull at the dribbling ball and giving it a tremendous kick in the air. It soared away and hit the branches of an oak tree and fell in a shower of leaves to the grass.

‘You’ll get nowhere talking to him like that,’ said Brenda. ‘He can’t stand domineering women. You frighten him off.’

‘How the hell would you know?’ Pink with contempt, Freda put her hands on her hips and erupted into scornful laughter. ‘You wouldn’t know a real man if you saw one. Rossi and that bloody Irish van-driver—’

‘Stanley was a real man. Stanley wasn’t—’

‘Stanley?’ The way Freda pronounced his name conjured up visions of a monster with two heads. ‘You’re not claiming he was a real man? Dead drunk all the time and—’

‘Only some of the time,’ corrected Brenda, in spite of herself.

‘Good God! Any man that lets his mother run amok with a machine gun—’

‘Please,’ begged Brenda, ‘don’t shout.’

She didn’t want it to go on a moment longer. The hatred she felt frightened her; she tried at all costs to surpress it. As a child her mother had terrified her with moods of violence, had ranted and raved and thrown cups upon the tiled kitchen floor. ‘Come to Mummy,’ she would say when the pieces of crockery had been swept into the dustbin, holding her arms out to the shrinking Brenda as if nothing had happened. The depths of suffering Brenda experienced and the heights of elation when Mummy returned, with tinted hair combed and nose powdered, had caused her for years to feel confused.

‘Don’t you like me talking about your Stanley, then?’