The Bottle Factory Outing - Beryl Bainbridge [49]
‘I wouldn’t disturb her,’ advised Patrick.
‘But we are all going to the safari park. It was Freda’s idea.’ She pulled down the foot of her black stocking to cover her naked toe and struggled to keep her balance. ‘Rossi’s in an awful state,’ she whispered, hanging on to Patrick’s arm and wriggling into her shoes. ‘Freda’s had words with him. He’s crying.’ She looked briefly at the parked car.
‘That’s bad,’ said Patrick. ‘That’s very bad.’
‘I don’t know what she said to upset him so much. I know she doesn’t mean to be cruel. Honestly, Patrick, she’d give you the coat off her back if you needed it. It’s just that she gets carried away.’ She felt compelled to defend Freda. She herself had been sufficiently carried away to utter words that she now regretted. She should never have told Freda that she jiggled in her sleep. It was unforgivable. If you hadn’t gone on about Stanley, she thought, I would never have mentioned it. She brushed down her cloak and walked towards the rhododendrons. I’m sorry, she said in her head. Don’t be cross Freda. It wasn’t true.
‘I wouldn’t wake her just now,’ said Patrick. He laid his hand on her arm to detain her.
‘Your eye,’ she said. ‘It’s bleeding.’
She sought a way into the bushes, using her shoulder to prise apart the leathery leaves.
‘Don’t,’ said Patrick, more firmly, and she looked back at him and thought he looked quite old, his face shadowy under the peak of his cloth cap.
‘Freda,’ she called, ‘Freda, it’s me.’
She struggled through the bushes, hands raised to ward off the bouncing leaves, and entered a clearing floored with tangled grass on which lay Freda, flat on her back with ankles crossed.
‘Freda – we’re going to the safari park.’
Freda looked disgruntled, her mouth sucked inwards. The blue eyes stared fixedly at the sky. Under the dark leaves her skin assumed a greenish tinge, the cheeks brindled with crimson and spotted with raindrops. For a moment Brenda thought she was weeping. Her painted nails, black in the shaded light, rested on the woollen swell of her stomach.
‘Freda,’ said Brenda again, and stopped.
Freda’s eyes stayed open. A grey insect, sensitively quivering, dawdled on the slope of her thumb. Brenda knelt on the ground and touched the curled edges of hair turning brass-coloured in the rain. She couldn’t understand why Freda’s face, normally so pale and luminous, now burned with eternal anger, mottled and pitted with irregular patches of brown as if the leaves had stencilled rusty shadows on her cheeks. Only the nose was right, moulded in wax, the nostrils etched with pink. Where are you, she thought, where have you gone? She peered at her, trying to see what was different. It was as if somebody had disconnected the current, switched off the light … she’d gone out. Oh, she did feel sad then. Lonely. The terrible pious curve of her hands on the purple jumper – never again to jiggle her bosoms in the dark.
‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘Please.’
She became very thoughtful, as if she had all the time in the world.
‘Stanley,’ she said out loud and watched a ladybird with speckled back laboriously climb a stalk of grass.
Freda’s face, splintered into a thousand smiles and grimaces of rage, leapt at her from every leaf dipping under the onslaught of the rain. She laid her hand fleetingly upon the purple legs crossed on the grass.
‘Little one,’ she said, and rose to her feet again and left Freda alone.
7
In all the muddle of explanations and beginnings of sentences that were never completed, one thing remained clear. There was some reason, not yet clearly understood, for not fetching either the police or an ambulance.
Patrick had led Brenda to the car and ordered Rossi into the front seat. He called Vittorio, who came slowly over the grass fastening his duffel coat and carelessly holding the embroidered tablecloth.
‘There’s been an accident,’ Patrick told him when the door was closed. ‘To Freda.’
Aldo Gamberini, shut outside on the grass, ran to the red mini to be out of the rain.
‘But