The Bottle Factory Outing - Beryl Bainbridge [7]
‘You like?’
‘Yes, thank you very much.’
‘You like me?’
‘Oh yes, you’re very nice.’
He was holding her wrist, tipping the glass backwards, trying to make her drink more rapidly. It was a kind of liqueur brandy, very hot and thick like syrup of figs, and it always made her feel silly. She could feel him trembling.
‘What’s it called?’ she asked him, though she knew.
‘Marsalla. You are a nice girl – very nice.’
She couldn’t think how to discourage him – she didn’t want to lose her job and she hated giving offence. He had a funny way of pinching her all over, as if she was a mattress whose stuffing needed distributing more evenly. She stood there wriggling, saying breathlessly ‘Please don’t, Rossi,’ but he tickled and she gave little smothered laughs and gasps that he took for encouragement.
‘You are a nice clean girl.’
‘Oh, thank you.’
He was interfering with her clothes, pushing his hands beneath her tweed coat and plucking away at her jumpers and vest, shredding little pieces of newspaper with his nails. She tried to have a chat with him to calm him down.
‘I’m so excited about the election, Rossi.’
‘So many clothes.’
‘Please don’t. Are you? Oh stop it.’
‘Why you have so much clothes?’
‘Freda says she’s going to vote Communist.’
‘You like me?’ he pleaded, pinching the skin of her back as much as he was able.
‘Don’t do that. Consider—’
‘Why don’t you like me?’
‘Your wife. I do like you, I do really. We saw a funeral today. It was a nice funeral.’
He didn’t know what she meant. He was trying to kiss her. He had a mouth like a baby’s, sulky, with the underlip drooping, set in a round dimpled face. Suck, suck, suck, went his moist little lips at her neck.
‘There were lots of flowers. Freda cried when she saw the coffin.’
He paused, startled. In the gloom his eyebrows rose in bewilderment. ‘A funeral? Your mammy has died?’ Shocked, he left off trying to unravel her defences of wool and tweed and paper. She didn’t know what to say. She was very tempted to assent.
‘Well, in a manner of speaking – more Freda’s than mine.’
‘Freda’s mammy is dead?’
She hung her head as if overcome, thinking of Al Jolson down on one knee with one hand in its white glove, upraised. Her own hand, unnaturally pink in its rubber covering, hovered above his shoulder. She was still clutching her sponge.
In the Ladies’ washroom Freda was mystified. She combed her hair at the blotched mirror and asked suspiciously: ‘What have we got the day off for? Why have I got to take you home?’
Brenda didn’t reply. She was adjusting her clothing, shaking free the fragments of paper that fell from her vest.
‘Have you got your toothache again?’ Freda was annoyed at having to leave early. It didn’t suit her; she hadn’t had her talk with Vittorio. ‘Look at the state of you. You’ve got cobwebs in your hair.’
‘I’m taking you home,’ said Brenda. ‘On account of your mammy.’
‘Me what?’
‘I had to say she wasn’t well.’ She looked at Freda, who for once was speechless. Her mother had died when she was twelve and she had been brought up by an aunt in Newcastle. ‘Actually I said we went to her funeral. I couldn’t help it, Freda. You never take any notice of me.’
She was whispering in case Rossi was outside the door listening. Freda started to laugh – she never did anything quietly.
‘Sssh,’ said Brenda desperately, jumping up and down in embarrassment, releasing a fresh fall of newsprint on to the washroom floor.
In the alleyway, Patrick, the Irish van driver, was inhaling a cigarette. Elbow at an angle and shoulders hunched, he stared at them curiously through a cloud of smoke.
‘She’s hysterical,’ explained Brenda, gripping the giggling Freda fiercely by the arm and steering her out into the street.
Later, in the security of the sparsely furnished room, Freda was inclined to get at the truth. ‘In the cellar?’ she queried. ‘But what does he do?’
‘Nothing really. He sort of fumbles.’
‘Fumbles?’ repeated Freda and snorted to suppress