The Bottle Factory Outing Read Online Free PDF Page A

smell in the living room. The sheets were yellow and the
     frill of the pillow-case stained, as if she dribbled as she slept. Miss Deansgate begged Freda not to let the ambulance take
     her away; but she was dying, and in the end they laid her on the stretcher under a red blanket, looking very cheerful and
     Christmassy, and off she went, sliding a little on her canvas bed, as they bore her at a slant down the flight of stairs.
     She didn’t come back, and Freda used the butler’s spoon with the long handle to eat her porridge with in the morning.
    Resolutely Brenda turned her eyes away from the woman with the rose in her hat. She looked at Freda and Maria by the fire,
     crouched over the drained cup as if the future lay there like a photograph. The murmurings of their voices and the hiss of
     the gas fire merged. A memory came to her. She was walking down a lane between green fields, bending her head to watch her
     own two feet in shiny shoes pacing the grey road. Behind hersomeone urged her to hurry; she could feel in the small of her back the round insistent tip of an umbrella propelling her
     forwards. She stumbled on the rough road, and as she fell she saw out of the corner of her eye a single scarlet poppy blowing
     in the brown ditch. She opened her eyes quickly, thinking ‘Why can’t they leave me alone?’ and she was still there on the
     balcony, the woman demanding attention. Brenda wanted to bang on the window and tell her to go away. She hated the implied
     need, the intrusion on her privacy. Life was absurd, she thought, bouncing her up and down as if she were a rubber ball. She
     longed to lose height and roll away into a corner and be forgotten. Distress at her own conciliatory nature rose in her throat
     and lodged there like a stone. She swallowed and pouted her lips.
    Freda found the fortune-telling satisfactory, though the reference to men in uniform and horses galloping was difficult to
     understand. She had a cousin in the navy but she knew nothing about horses. There was a lot of weeping and wailing and people
     walking in procession – that was the funeral of course. She was going on a long journey by land and sea – it could only refer
     to the Outing; possibly there would be a lake in the grounds of the Stately Home and she and Vittorio would drift beneath
     the branches of a weeping willow, alone in a rowing boat. She would trail her hand in the water and tilt her head so that
     any sunlight available would catch her golden hair and blind him as he rowed. She wasn’t sure about the white dress Maria
     saw, a long flowing dress with flowers at the waist. White was not her colour – she preferred something more definite. Maria
     visualisedproblems, seeing Freda wasn’t a Catholic, and Freda said actually she was very high-church and often went to mass. She was
     a little taken aback at what Maria implied– she herself had not been thinking along such ambitious lines.
    ‘I’m not keen on white, am I?’ she asked, looking over her shoulder for confirmation, and saw Brenda at the table, her head
     silhouetted against the panes of glass, the room grown dark and the sky lying yellow above the roof tops, as if snow was on
     the way. ‘It can’t snow,’ she cried, striding to the window and peering out into the street. ‘Not with the Outing next week.’
    She shook Brenda by the shoulder as if asking for a denial and saw she had been weeping.
    In bed that night Freda wanted to know what had been
    wrong.
    ‘You were crying. Were you upset about Rossi?’
    ‘I wasn’t crying. It was your cigarette smoke.’
    ‘Shall I give Rossi a piece of my mind? I could say I was going to inform Mr Paganotti.’ She was elated at the prospect. She
     saw herself confronting the foreign capitalist at his desk. While she was about it she would tell him the conditions in his
     factory were sub-standard.
    ‘Don’t you dare,’ said Brenda. ‘I don’t want any fuss.’
    Below in the street she heard the