The Bottle Factory Outing - Beryl Bainbridge [59]
‘I didn’t hear,’ she said.
He took her by the arm and stood murmuring into her ear. The men sat on a low fence and looked in the opposite direction.
‘Did he say anything?’
‘He said Vittorio was in the bushes before he was.’
Patrick swore.
‘Will you give up now?’ she said. ‘Can’t we go to a police station?’
They were cheating Freda out of her death. She knew that if it had been her that had been found dead under the sky, Freda would have beat her breast and shrieked her lamentation. This way, this stuffing into cars and secret consultations, was belittling to her. You’d have thought Patrick would have known how to treat the dead, being Irish – all that weeping and wailing and fluttering of candles through the night. She gave the purple cloak to Vittorio and told him to tuck it about Freda. It wasn’t until she was actually sitting in the car that she realised she was dressed all in black; her woollen dress, her dark stockings, even her shoes in shadow beneath the dashboard were entirely suitable for a funeral. She would have liked to tell Rossi but she didn’t want to be flippant. He was adjusting the driving mirror, twisting it this way and that – possibly he was trying to avoid the reflection of Freda’s head sunk upon her breast. She tried to escape into sleep as the car wound down the path, the red mini in front of them, but she was wide-awake, her brain teeming with images: the edge of the table cloth blowing upwards in the wind, horses racing beside the trees, the white ball leaping towards the sky. The headlamps of the Cortina caught the distempered wall of the open-air café; the metal umbrellas wavered and were gone. She thought as they began to climb the hill that she heard the sound of an elephant trumpeting down in the paddock. Patrick and Vittorio began a desultory conversation interspersed with long silences – something about the climate of Italy. They sounded as if they had just met while waiting for a train.
‘In the south it is different.’
‘So I’ve heard. I read a bit once in a paper about Naples.’
‘That too is hot,’ said Vittorio.
‘Dirty place by all accounts,’ Patrick said.
‘It is a port. You know, the docks – refuse – fruit.’
‘Terrible stink in the summer. Like bodies rotting.’ He reddened. Even in the dark Patrick blushed like a woman, though no one could see him.
When they entered the north side of the Park, Rossi drove very slowly. The red mini was out of sight. Already it had flashed past the picnic area and was out of the Park approaching the roundabout.
The headlamps of the Cortina pierced the darkness. Brenda saw the dull gleam of the timber fence in the distance. The car crawled along the verge and stopped. Rossi switched off the engine. There was a little silvery noise as the key dangled for one instant in the ignition. They could hear one another breathing. When the wind rustled through the black grass it was like a long-drawnout sigh.
‘Well,’ said Patrick, ‘we got to get something settled. Between the four of us.’
Five, thought Brenda. As her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness she could make out the shape of the cut-down oak and the grey mass of the bushes beyond. They’d left a barrel of wine on the stump of the tree. If they intended to go on hiding Freda, they ought to get rid of that barrel – it was circumstantial evidence.
‘It is best,’ said Vittorio, ‘if we tell each other the truth.’ He sounded a long way off, as if he was outside some-where, calling to them. ‘For myself I have nothing to hide.’ He could not however help putting his hands over his face in a gesture of despair.
‘Well, I have,’ Patrick said. ‘I’ve been in trouble before with the police.’
Brenda stopped herself in the nick of time from turning round. She trembled at the narrow escape and the implications of his words. She’d been alone with him in the bathroom for hours – she’d even locked the door – and she’d have gone a walk with him in the woods if he had asked her, simply to get away from Rossi.
He said: ‘Nothing I’d be ashamed to tell me own mother. Fights, I mean – having a drop too much.