The Bottle Factory Outing Read online

  Everyone shook hands with them when they came into work, all the tired bottling men in their green overalls and trilby hats. One by one they took it in turn to step away from the rusted machinery slowly revolving in the centre of the floor. They left the steel rods squirting out wine, pumped up from the cellar beneath into the dark rotating bottles, bashfully to hold the cool outstretched fingers of the English ladies. Freda found the ritual charming. It established contact with the elusive Vittorio, if only fleetingly. ‘Bongiorno,’ she trilled, over and over.

  They worked from eleven in the morning till three in the afternoon. They weren’t supposed to have a break for lunch, but most days Freda bullied Brenda into going over the road to the public house to share one hot sausage and one vodka and lime. Maria, who started at eight and left at two, could not bring herself to go with them. She brought sandwiches made of salami, the left-overs from her nephew’s restaurant, wrapped up in a headscarf. She wore the black dresses she had carried from Italy twenty years before, and after midday, when the damp got to her bones, she climbed into a mail bag for warmth. All the same she suffered dreadfully from chilblains, and Freda persuaded her to wear mittens. She worshipped Freda, whom she thought bold and dashing and resourceful. What style she had – the large English girl with the milk-white skin and eyelids stained the colour of cornflowers. How easily she had wrought improvements in their daily labour. Refusing to stoop over the wooden labelling bench, she had complained loudly of a pain in her splendid back and found beer crates for them to sit on. She had purchased rubber gloves from the Co-op to protect her mauve and shining nails; she had insisted that the Mrs Brenda do the same. She had contrived an Outing into the landscape, a day under the sky and the trees. Best of all, she had condoned the wearing of mail bags and advised the use of mittens. At the sight of Freda, Maria’s large pale face flushed pink with pleasure; she stamped her feet to ease her chilblains and swung her head from side to side. But for the cramp in her knee, she would have risen and genuflected.

  ‘Hey up,’ said Freda, when the round of handshaking was completed. ‘You’re wearing your sexy nylons again.’ She was looking at the grey football socks on Maria’s stumpy legs.

  With joy Maria rocked back and forth on her beer crate. ‘Aye, aye,’ she moaned, rolling her eyes and darting glances at Freda, magnificent in her purple trousers and hand-made Cossack boots. She understood little of the conversation: the English girl gabbled her words so fast.

  The ground floor of the factory was open to the street and the loading bay. In summer the stone walls kept the bottling area cool, in winter the temperature dropped below freezing. The men stamped their feet, blew on their fingers and pulled their trilby hats about their ears. On the stone columns that supported the floor above, the men had glued pictures from magazines – a view of Naples, a stout young lady standing in a garden, someone’s son who had studied hard at night, bettered himself and passed an examination. Above the cardboard boxes stacked in rows twelve foot high, there was a picture of the Virgin holding her baby and a plaque of the Sacred Heart, sore wounded, nailed like a football rosette to the green painted wall. The work-benches faced a row of windows overlooking the back wall of the chip-shop and an inch of sky.

  In vain Freda had tried to tell the men how low their wages were by other standards, how severely they were exploited. They listened politely but without comprehension. To them Mr Paganotti was a wise father, a padrone who had plucked them from the arid slopes of their mountain region and set them down in a land of milk and honey. What did she know of their lives before the coming of Mr Paganotti? They were contadini who had grown wheat and corn and grapes, but only with tremendous labour, such as made their work in the factory seem like one long afternoon of play. Sometimes they had managed a harvest of plums and apples. They had kept chickens and a cow or two. In every way they were peasants, dulled by poverty. But then there had been a miracle. Mr Paganotti in his infinite wisdom had picked four men from the village of Caprara and brought them to Hope Street, and when they had settled they sent for their wives and their sons and their cousins and they saved their wages and together bought one house, then two, until in time each owned a little brick house in the suburbs with hot water running from a tap and a lavatory that flushed. Gone were the terracotta roofs of the farm-houses they had known, the stone sinks, the primitive wood-burning stoves. Only the religious pictures remained and the statues of Christ on the cross. As the children of the first generation of workers grew up, their parents were diligent in conveying just how munificent was the generosity of Mr Paganotti. They remained a close and isolated community. No one ever left the factory to take other employment; the sons were encouraged to go on to University and become doctors and accountants. Those who did not have the ability joined their fathers on the factory floor. They had changed little in thirty years – even Mr Paganotti could not understand the language they spoke, the dialetto bolognese that was older than Italian and closer to French. If there was a confrontation between himself and one of the cellar-men, Rossi the manager, who alone had adapted himself to the English way of life, was called in to act as interpreter. In spite of their good fortune they still stood like beasts of the field, tending Mr Paganotti’s machines.

  It was Brenda’s job to rinse out the sponges in the morning and to tip the glue from the pot into the shallow trays on the benches. She didn’t mind fetching the glue pot from beneath old Luigi’s place, but she had to go to the Ladies’ washroom to wet the sponges. She always ran straight across the factory floor without looking to right or left, in case Rossi caught sight of her, flying through the door of the washroom and out again with her sponges dripping, as if she was the last runner in a relay race. It looked as if she was really zealous and interested in what she was doing.

  ‘You overdo it,’ said Freda. She had slapped the little glittering labels into the glue and stacked a dozen bottles of wine in a neat triangle on the bench top. She maintained it was all the same wine – it was just the labels that were different. Today it was Rose Anjou and it was fractionally pinker than the Beaujolais – it could have been the tint of the glass bottles or dilution with water.

  Brenda had only used one tray of labels when she was distracted by old Luigi at the far end of the line of benches. He stood with his feet wide apart to balance himself, on lengths of planking laid over the concrete floor to lessen the cold. He was muttering and pulling faces at the women. Freda, as she worked, talked incessantly and dramatically. She twisted and turned on her beer crate, she thumped the bottles down into the cardboard box at her side, she stamped her feet for emphasis. Each time that she got up to reach with her rubber-gloved fingers for another label, and sank backwards on to her upturned crate, the frail old man rose in the air and settled again. As the morning wore on and he trotted more and more frequently to refill his little plastic beaker at the wine barrel reserved for the men, so his muttering became wilder, his glances less discreet. He loathed the English women; he held them in scorn. He would not shake hands with them in the morning; he refused to contribute to the Outing. Alone of all the Italians in the factory, he neither admired nor took pleasure in the appearance of Freda; if he could, he would have burnt her beer crate in the market square.

  Freda was saying to Maria: ‘You must support the Unions. It’s your duty. It’s no good burying your head in the sand. Know what I mean?’

  ‘Aye, aye,’ intoned Maria, wiping gently the neck of the bottle with her honey-coloured sponge.

  ‘We could do with a bloody Union man here – the cold, the conditions. Talk about A Day in the Life Of – don’t you know about the Factories Act?’

  Above the hostile shoulder of Luigi, Brenda saw Rossi’s face at the window of the office. She tried to avert her eyes, but he was jumping up and down, jerking his curly head in the direction of the door and smiling with all his teeth showing.

  ‘Freda,’ she hissed, out of the corner of her mouth.

  ‘We shouldn’t be working in a temperat
ure like this,’ said Freda. ‘It’s against the law.’

  ‘Freda – he’s at it again.’

  ‘Old Piggynotty could be prosecuted.’ Down slammed Freda’s boots on the planking. The smell of talcum powder, dry and sweet, rose from the armpits of her grey angora jumper as she jabbed with her sponge at a completed bottle of Rose Anjou. ‘Know what I mean?’

  As if lassoed by an invisible rope, Brenda was dragged from her place at the bench. Unwillingly she passed the grimacing Luigi and walked between the avenue of shelves filled with brandy bottles, towards the office. Rossi stood in the doorway waiting for her. ‘I have something to show you,’ he confided in a feverish manner, and was off, trotting towards the pass door, peering over his plump shoulder at her to make certain she was following. She was convinced all the men were looking at her. They tittered and insinuated, anchored to the bottling plant shuddering in the centre of the floor. They knew, she was sure, about Rossi: his childless marriage to an elderly wife called Bruna, his frequent trips into the basement, his sudden disappearances into the groaning lift in the corner behind the boxes, and always, like the smoke from a cigarette, herself trailing in his wake. Looking very serious, as if the matter was both urgent and highly secret, she descended the steps into the cellar.

  Rossi was running across the stone floor beneath the whitewashed arches hung with cobwebs. He made a small dandified skip into the air as he leapt the rubber hose that lolled like a snake between the barrels of wine. She always felt at a disadvantage in the cellar. Reverently she tip-toed deeper into the shadows cast by the little hanging lights. But for the sour smell of vinegar and the constant hum of machinery as the hose pumped wine to the floor above, she might have been in church. Rossi was bobbing about in the darkness, whispering ‘Missy Brenda, come over here. I have a little drink for you.’ He had a white overall, to show he was more important than the men, with PAGANOTTI embroidered on the pocket, and he wore suede shoes stained with wine.

  ‘How kind of you,’ said Brenda.

  He took a medicine bottle from his pocket and poured the contents into two glasses that he kept on a shelf in one of the alcoves, ready for when he lured her down there. She had only been working in the factory for four weeks and it had started on her third day. He’d said then she ought to learn more about the cooling process.

  ‘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 laughter. ‘Does he feel your chests?’

  ‘All over, really,’ admitted Brenda, not liking to go into details – Freda could be very crude in her humour if given the facts. ‘Sometimes we go upstairs among all that old furniture.’

  ‘Upstairs? When?’

  ‘Often. I told you, but you wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘You must have encouraged him. You must have egged him on.’

  ‘I never. I never did any such thing.’

  Freda couldn’t get over it. She stared at Brenda lying full length upon the bed like a neglected doll – cobwebs stuck in her hair, her mouth slightly open and two little pegs of teeth protruding.

  ‘I don’t understand you at all. You must be mad. You’re not telling me he rushes out while we’re all bottling away and ties you up with his bootlaces and rushes off into the cellar? You’re not telling me I wouldn’t have noticed something?’

  Brenda had no reply to that.

  ‘You shouldn’t have talked to him so much. You’re always talking to him, mouthing away at him as if he’s stone deaf.’

  Brenda gazed up at the ceiling defensively, the padded shoulders of her coat grotesquely lifted about her ears.

  ‘I’m only saying my words clearly. His English is poor.’

  ‘You look like Edward G. Robinson lying there.’

 
‘You talk to Vittorio,’ cried Brenda, stung by Freda’s unkindness. She wanted sympathy and understanding, not criticism.

  ‘That’s different,’ Freda said, and was forlornly aware it was the truth. Vittorio wasn’t rushing her down into the cellar to fumble at her chests. She knew Brenda wasn’t making it up. Though she lacked imagination, Brenda would go to any lengths rather than cause herself embarrassment. It was her upbringing. As a child she had been taught it was rude to say no, unless she didn’t mean it. If she was offered another piece of cake and she wanted it she was obliged to refuse out of politeness. And if she didn’t want it she had to say yes, even if it choked her. It was involved but understandable. There had been other small incidents that illustrated her extraordinary capacity for remaining passive while put upon. There had been the man on the bus who felt her leg almost to her knickers without her saying anything, until she had to move because it was her stop and then she’d said, ‘Excuse me, I’m sorry.’ And the woman with the trumpet who had stopped her in the street and asked her if she could borrow a room to practice in. Brenda loathed music. When Freda opened the door to the trumpet player and told her what to do with her instrument, Brenda hid behind the wardrobe.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’ asked Freda more gently – she looked so dusty and pathetic lying there – ‘I would have put him in his place.’

  ‘I did,’ protested Brenda, ‘Often.’

  Freda started to laugh again. ‘How on earth did you say my mother had died.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Brenda. ‘He did. I was trying to stop him fiddling with me and I mentioned the funeral we saw this morning.’

  ‘You driva me wilda,’ mimicked Freda. ‘Justa when I thinka I have you in my graspa you talka abouta da funerelo—’

  ‘Stop it,’ Brenda said.

  ‘You putta me offa ma spaghetti …’ And Freda shook with laughter.

  Sulkily Brenda closed her eyes.

  After a moment Freda remembered Vittorio and decided she would go downstairs and ring up Maria to ask her to pop in for a cup of tea. If Rossi had told everyone about her loss it was quite possible Vittorio felt sad for her. Perhaps he had said something tender when he heard the news – like ‘Poor child – poor grieving child’– maybe he was only waiting for an excuse to come round and offer his condolences. She had to know. ‘