The Bottle Factory Outing - Beryl Bainbridge [55]
‘Siberian camels,’ called the driver, ‘to our left,’ and a murmur of appreciation rustled through the bus.
Brenda didn’t faint. She revived in a moment and her sensitive skin became blotchy with colour and she lay back deathly cold and very frightened.
‘Bear up,’ said Patrick. ‘Take hold of yourself.’
She longed for him to take hold of her. She wanted to be protected. She wanted her hand held, but she couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t he that frightened her.
‘What are we doing?’ she asked, in much the same way as she had asked the dead Freda where she had gone.
‘I’m telling you,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking. I’ve got to be careful.’
‘But if Rossi – hurt Freda—’
‘Do you think we’ll get that bunch to split on him?’ said Patrick scathingly, and he looked through the driving window at the red mini crawling between two ragged llamas. ‘That lot will stick together. They’d be out of their minds with fear that Mr Paganotti would give them the sack. It’ll be me that’ll get it. They’ll all swear that I vanished for hours and came out of the bushes with me eye cracked open.’
They had come to a second gate and there was a further delay. At a squalid ditch another batch of flamingos pecked at the bank and teetered on Belsen legs over the mud. They looked obscene, as if they bled all over.
‘Was she bleeding?’ she cried out loud, and Rossi twitched as if he had been stung.
‘Sssh,’ Patrick said. ‘Her neck was broke.’
It occurred to her that he was cleverer than she had ever imagined. Worn at a jaunty angle over his large ears, the cloth cap she had previously thought common became stylish in her eyes. His face assumed a strength of character she had not noticed before. Vittorio, turning anxiously to look at them, moustaches lank, seemed insipid by comparison. Even the boots with scarlet laces appeared a shade affected.
‘Sit up,’ said Patrick. ‘Pull yourself together.’ He was altogether like Freda.
The bus passed under the second gate and traversed an empty field strewn with cabbages and turned sharply left into an arena of sand and dead trees, the whole fenced about with sheets of tin, dark green, dented in places and emitting a weird moaning noise as they vibrated in the wind. On hillocks of baked mud men postured holding whips, rifles slung upon their backs. Clothed in rags, the inmates squatted in the dirt and dipped bald heads and ripped their breasts apart. ‘Vultures,’ breathed the passengers and shivered in their seats. The men with guns stood motionless posing for photographs. The snout of a baboon was seen at the top of a slope. ‘Ooooh’ went the occupants of the bus, levelling cameras at the window and craning their necks to see beyond the slopes. ‘Wait on,’ said the driver, tooting his horn, and the armed guards ran up the hills cracking their whips. Barking like dogs, a hoard of baboons, pink-arsed and hideous, swept over the ridge and bounded across the grey sand. They leapt to the top of a large rock and huddled together holding their young.
‘Poor little things,’ said Brenda. They were so ugly, so human in their aspect, so vicious in their glances.
‘They’d have your guts for garters,’ Patrick said. ‘They’d tear you limb from limb.’
She thought of Freda sitting in the car under the trees, growing cold – it was a pity they hadn’t let the Cortina into the reserve. Nobody would ever have known: a door jerked open, a quick shove – they could say her heart had stopped. She shivered at her own audacity. She tried to remember how Freda had looked when she cantered over the park on the black horse, but she couldn’t. It was as if a chasm had opened between them, leaving Freda on one brink and herself on another. The gap was widening hour by hour. She felt like crying and asking some-one for forgiveness.
‘Listen,’ said Patrick. ‘You believe I didn’t touch her?’
Her eyes were shining, the tears only just held back and she cleared her throat before she replied. ‘Yes, I do. Don’t be silly.