The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge Read Free Book Online

and a lump of meat, curiously flattened
     and spiked with garlic, lying on a plate beneath a clean teatowel.
    At four-thirty the landlady came up from her basement flat on her way to her pottery class at the Arts Centre. She unlocked
     the back door and turfed the pregnant cat out on to the concrete patio.
    ‘Damn thing,’ she said, smiling at Brenda crouched on the stairs.
    The cat, with sloping belly, stood on its hind legs and scrambled frantically with outstretched claws at the pane of glass.
     Freda said the landlady hadn’t enough to occupy her time, going off to throw pots like that; but Brenda thought it was an
     inconsiderate judgment: they had never seen what she did on her clay wheel – she might have been another Henry Moore for all
     they knew.
    ‘Shut up,’ said Brenda when the landlady had gone. She peered through the bannister rails at the cat running on the spot,
     irritated by the noise of its paws on the glass panels of the door.
    She had come home exhausted from her thieving. Repeating her performance with the wardrobe, she had retrieved the brandy bottle
     from its place behind the lavatory bowl and buried it beneath the load of washing. When she wheeled the basket down the alleyway,
     she imagined the bottle breaking and the liquid trickling through the slats of woven straw and Rossi, like a bloodhound scenting
     the trail of alcohol, running up the street after her, nose quivering, black curls blown backwards in the wind. He would call
     the police and have her arrested. Worse still, he might seize her by the arm and whisper insidiously into her ear his sensual
     desires, demanding she remain passive while he committed an offence in exchange for his not informing on her.
    Outside the back door the agitation of the cat increased. She thought about letting it in, but she didn’t dare: it might ravish
     Freda’s steak and piddle on the lino. From behind the basement door came the piteous cries of its last kitten. The landlady
     had kept it, out of concern for the mother’s feelings, but lately the cat had taken to biting it ferociously about the ears.
     Freda thought the animal ought to be sent to the vet and aborted: it was sheer wantoness to produce more offspring – she pointed
     out that if human beings had the same fertility rate a woman could have three hundred babies in five years. She said you’d
     need 2,000 eggs a week to give them all a good breakfast.
    ‘I wonder,’ said Brenda aloud, ‘what the kitten thinks now its mummy doesn’t like it.’
    She wished someone would try to savage her every time she made a friendly gesture. She was just working out how happily she
     could exist, left entirely alone, when there was a knock at the front door. She wanted instantly to hide, but she knew it
     was no use, so she ran down the stairs with a fixed smile on her face, ready to leave immediately should it be Vittorio with
     his little silken Zapata moustache flopping above his mouth, or Freda back from her shopping. It was neither. It was Patrick
     in a shiny black suit and a clean white shirt with a badly frayed collar.
    ‘My word,’ she said, letting him into the dark hall, ‘you do look smart.’
    His appearance alarmed her. He was so evidently out to impress, she would not have been surprised if, like a conjurer, he
     had whipped a vase of flowers from behind his back and presented them to her.
    ‘Ah well,’ he said, holding a canvas bag for her inspection, ‘didn’t I leave early to get me tools?’
    She led him up the stairs, pulling faces as she went to relieve her feelings, sticking her tongue out at the brown-painted
     walls, telling him silently to drop dead and leave her alone. As they turned to go up the second flight of stairs, passing
     the cooker and the pungent slice of meat under its tea-towel, she was forced to smile at him and say insincerely: ‘It is kind
     of you, Patrick, to give up your time.’
    The bathroom had a geyser riveted to the wall above a large tub