The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge Page A

uncomfortable. He tried to make love to her but it didn’t work.
    ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked aggressively, pulling his hair quite viciously as he lay stranded upon her.
    ‘The toilet,’ he said. ‘There are peoples in the toilet. I could not gain entrance.’
    He was minus his shoes, but he still wore his trousers and his jumper that was a bit chewed at the collar.
    Brenda could hear knocking at the front door, growing louder and louder. She watched Patrick screwing a hook into the ceiling
     above the cistern.
    ‘It’s a bit Heath Robinson, isn’t it?’ she ventured, as he wound a length of string from the ballcock up to the hook in the
     plaster and down again to the metal eyelet of the lavatory chain.
    She unlocked the bathroom door and stood listening. Freda had stopped singing, and the nurses on the ground floor had let
     someone into the hall. There was a murmur of voices, then silence, until she heard the dialing of the telephone. She couldn’t
     hear the conversation, but quite soon the receiver was replaced and someone began to climb the stairs. Whoever it was halted
     outside Freda’s room and rapped repeatedly on the panel of the door. She won’t like that, thought Brenda, and then she heard
     the voice of her mother-in-law.
    ‘I have come to see Brenda.’
    ‘I’m afraid she is not at home.’
    ‘I’ll wait then.’
    There was a pause before Freda answered, her voice charged with hostility. ‘You can’t wait. It’s not convenient.’
    ‘I shall wait none the less.’
    Turning the curve of the stairs Brenda saw Mrs Haddon on the landing and Freda, hair dishevelled, straddling the threshold
     of the door.
    ‘It’s all right,’ called Brenda. ‘I’m here.’
    ‘I want my photographs,’ said Mrs Haddon, turning to face her.
    ‘I want those pictures of my Stanley as a child.’
    Brenda hadn’t got them. She knew they were still in the kitchen drawer of the farmhouse, where they had always been, beneath
     the pre-war knitting patterns, but it was no use telling her so. Mrs Haddon was smiling firmly, nodding her head, the ends
     of her floral headscarf tied under the determined thrust of her chin.
    ‘Go downstairs,’ ordered Brenda. ‘I’ll get them.’
    She frowned meaningfully at Freda who stepped aside, overwhelmed by her air of authority, and allowed her to enter the front
     room. Vittorio was standing at the foot of the bed, flushed and untidy. He wore a jumper that was unravelling at the neckline
     and he clutched his shoes to his breast. Brenda ignored him. She stooped to pick a book at random from the floor and went
     out again on to the landing. Mrs Haddon, a large plastic handbag at her feet, had obediently retreated down the stairs and
     was grasping the bannister rail for support. Fancy her coming all that way from Ramsbottom, Brenda thought, all on her own
     on the coach in her nice camel coat.
    ‘Here,’ she said, holding out the book. ‘They’re all inside.’
    They looked at each other. For a moment it might have been Stanley pleading to be understood – the same round eyes filled
     with perplexity behind the rims of the lightbrown spectacles, the same wide mouth puckered at the corners. I can’t say anything,
     she thought – nothing that’s true.
    Mrs Haddon lowered her eyes and bent to pick up her handbag. Freda, looking down, was taken by surprise at her appearance
     – such a pretty woman, rouge on her cheeks, a little tilted nose. She was taking something out of her bag and showing it to
     her daughter-in-law with an expression of eager expectancy that was quite touching to watch. From the way Brenda spoke about
     her in the past Freda had imagined her with cow-dung on her gumboots and straw in her hair.
    ‘Why?’ she heard Brenda say in a flat voice, not at all grateful – and then there was a scream. The sound, shivering above
     the well of the stairs, caused Freda to tremble from head to foot. She saw Brenda strike Mrs Haddon somewhere about