The Bottle Factory Outing - Beryl Bainbridge [52]
‘We go now,’ he called, ‘to safari park, yes?’
Rossi seemed not to hear. He caught a glimpse of Mrs Brenda leaning back exhausted against the front seat, face streaked with rain.
‘Do you know the way?’ asked Patrick opening the rear window, eyes obscured by the peak of his cap.
‘Ah,’ said Salvatore, ‘we will follow the signposts. You follow me. I lead.’
And he ran enthusiastically back to the car and leapt inside, his coat still over his head, and started the engine. He reversed on to the verge, turned the car and drove deeper into the park.
Brenda couldn’t turn round. She knew that on the back seat, secured between the bulk of Patrick and Vittorio, Freda sat like a large bedraggled doll, chin sunk on to her chest. They couldn’t possibly drive all the way back to London like that, it wasn’t right. She ought to be laid down properly and allowed to rest. There was such a thing as rigor mortis. She had a dreadful image of Freda, shaped like a sheepskin armchair, impossibly wedged in the doorway of the car. I do wonder where you are, she thought. It was so apparent to her that Freda was anywhere but in the back of the Cortina. Sheep, she knew, just lay and unravelled away, and hens were like burst pillow-cases – but not people, not Freda. She dwelt on the idea of something like an escape hatch under water, through which Freda had slowly shot to the surface, leaving her purple jumper and her hand-made boots behind. Even now she had beached on some pleasant island and was drying in the sun. Smiling, she glanced out of the window and was bewildered to find the car was winding down a slope towards a collection of farm buildings set about with paddocks and gently rising hills. Through the branches of sycamore she saw an ornamental lake ringed with pink flamingos. It had stopped raining. There were people removing raincoats and furling umbrellas and a coach painted like a rainbow outside a cafeteria.
‘What the devil is this?’ asked Patrick. ‘This isn’t the way.’
He watched astonished as a mud-caked elephant appeared from beneath the trees and trod ponderously over the grass. The mini halted and Rossi braked; he sat quite still with his hands resting on the column of the steering wheel, unconscious of his surroundings.
Salvatore and his passengers spilled gawping from the car. They ran like children across the gravel and gestured at the dusty elephant beginning to sink to its knees in the paddock.
‘Get out,’ said Patrick. ‘Go and ask what they’re up to.’ He sounded, but for his accent, remarkably like Freda.
Thoughtfully Brenda joined the workers gazing at the jungle beast settling into the ground.
‘But we are out,’ cried Salvatore, clutching at her arm.
‘We are not confined. Where is the tigers? The little children is everywhere.’ And she soothed him and said she thought perhaps elephants weren’t dangerous, though privately she didn’t like the look of the huge animal lying like a heap of ashes on the open field.
They had come to a children’s zoo. There were kiosks selling candy floss and a helter-skelter greasily plummeting to a pan of sand. In a compound there were goats with tufted beards nibbling pink-lipped at handfuls of brown hay. ‘Poof,’ she went, inhaling a whiff of the white-washed stall and observing their stern yellow eyes fixed upon her.
They looked at donkeys and a calf splotched with brown lying woodenly beside a cow, and above them in the grey sky patched with blue an aeroplane swam like a duck towards the city. Aldo bought a postcard of a monkey eating a banana to take home to his children. ‘To remind me of this day,’ he told Brenda, grinning at her from beneath his wierdly buckled hat; and she ran conspicuous with swollen eyelids out of the gift shop and up a hill to a line of telescopes pointing like guns at the far-off park. She put her eye to the lens and swung the black cylinder in an arc, trying to find the cut-down oak and the piece of grass on which they had laid the tablecloth. It all looked the same. She couldn’t