The Bottle Factory Outing - Beryl Bainbridge [60]
Brenda wished he wouldn’t talk in that ridiculous accent. Everything he said was a question. She knew the sort of trouble he meant. Stanley didn’t like the police either, though God knows why: they had often brought him home when he had fallen into a ditch on the way back from the Little Legion. The park at night reminded her of the countryside she had left: the lights of the town twinkling away to the right, the spidery branches of the trees – if she opened the window she might hear the hooting of an owl.
‘Isn’t it peaceful,’ she murmured, though nobody heard.
On the rare occasions when she and Stanley had gone out together, walking the three miles to the village, she had always complained of a stitch in her side. More than once she had sneered at the type of entertainment offered in the Legion – the smart alec in the teddy-boy suit clutching a microphone and singing ‘Delilah’ at the top of his lungs. They thought her stuck-up in the Legion, even though she broadened her vowels when she spoke to them, even though she tried to play billiards. It wasn’t as if she was too different from the others, there were plenty of Polish labourers left over from the war, and Pakistani immigrants who worked in the mills. She was always very polite to everyone. She never made a scene, not even when Stanley fell down the step into the Gents and cut his fore-head, but he seemed constantly uneasy in her presence. He struck her repeatedly and painfully on the thigh and told her to sup up. When they were given a lift home in a car the farmhouse sat in the valley like an orange square, tiny – his mother’s window was lit by a lamp that was never extinguished, not even in sleep. The white gate at the roadside shone in the headlamps. The path down to the house was worn with rivulets of rain. Stones littered the way. Sheep floundered to their feet as Stanley ran zigzag down the slope, urinating as he went. The whole earth swelled upwards like a vast warm bosom.
‘It was my fault,’ she suddenly said. She was unaware that Rossi had cried out a moment previously the name of Mr Paganotti. ‘I shouldn’t have been nasty to her. I shouldn’t have upset her. Then she wouldn’t have gone to the bushes in the first place.’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ shouted Patrick. He leaned forwards in his seat and attempted to put an arm about her shoulder in an awkward gesture of sympathy, and Freda slithered slowly downwards along the plastic seating. They got out of the car in a panic, slamming the doors and running to the tree stump as if it was a place of refuge. Rossi was moaning. He ran in a circle round and round the oak and the empty barrel of wine. All at once he darted away into the darkness. They could hear for a moment the rush of his body and the low keening he made; then he had gone. They strained their eyes trying to see into the blackness.
‘Where’s he gone?’ whispered Patrick.
‘He will come back,’ said Vittorio. ‘He is very highly strung. Very sensitive. He will come back.’ He had a nice voice, caressing; he sounded full of compassion.
Brenda was shivering without her cloak. The men went back to the car and called her when they had propped Freda upright. She hurled herself into the front seat and curled up with her arms about her knees and pressed her chattering teeth against her wrists.
Patrick was giving up the idea of trying to make the Italians confess. They were too foreign – Vittorio clammed up like a shell and Rossi somewhere out there in the darkness blubbing like a baby. They must get back to London quick and put Freda somewhere for the night. He regretted that he had wasted so much time rushing about the countryside. In the morning he would either have thought of something or would get on the boat home and leave them to sort it out. He had a radio he could pawn, and a fellow he knew at the bar of the Waterford Castle owed him a few quid. Brenda was no use to him. She never said what she meant. She