The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge Read Free Book Online Page A

stained with rust.
    ‘It’s old,’ said Patrick, looking at the four curved feet splayed out upon the cracked lino and the dust lying like a carpet
     beneath the belly of the bath.
    Outside the window, open to relieve the odour of stale urine, the yard lay like a jigsaw puzzle, dissected by washing line
     and paving stone. On the back wall, above the black and barren stem of the rambling rose, stood a row of tin cans and broken
     bottles placed to repel small boys.
    ‘That’s it,’ said Brenda pointing at the offending cistern in its bed of cement. Patrick climbed on to the lavatory seat in
     his sparkling boots and fiddled with the chain. ‘It won’t flush,’ he said. Along the line of his sleeve appeared beads of
     plaster and a smear of rust.
    ‘Your clothes—’ began Brenda.
    But already he was removing his jacket and handing it to her for safety. Lifting the heavy lid of the cistern, enough for
     him to get an arm in up to the elbow, he splashed about in the water, his shoulders raised so thatshe could see the elasticated top of his underpants holding his shirt in check.
    ‘It’s the ballcock,’ he volunteered.
    ‘Is that bad?’ she asked, praying it was and he would give up and go home quick.
    ‘Don’t you fret. I can do it,’ he assured her. ‘Nothing simpler.’
    He jumped to the floor and looked in his tool bag for a spanner and a ball of string. She could see the damp cuff of his shirt
     clinging to the shape of his wrist.
    ‘Look at that,’ she said. ‘You’re ruining your shirt.’
    ‘I was wondering,’ he asked, his Brylcreamed head bent low. ‘Would you have any objection to me removing me shirt?’
    ‘I don’t mind,’ she cried, though secretly she did, and her eyes narrowed as she spoke.
    Without his shirt, his hands and head looked as if they belonged to someone else, so red and full of blood against the white
     softness of his trunk. He had a nice chest, not at all pimply, with only a dusting of freckles between his shoulders. When
     he swung up a sleeve to release his shirt she glimpsed the bright ginger pit of his arm. Back he climbed on to the lavatory
     seat to probe about among the pipes and the plaster, and she hung his shirt on a nail behind the door and caught a faint smell
     of mould, as if he never aired his clothes but packed them halfdried into a drawer.
    ‘Jesus, it’s cold,’ he said, feeling the chill air coming from the window.
    ‘You could borrow my dressing gown,’ said Brenda, and he protested there was no need, the small pout ofhis beer belly overlapping the waistband of his trousers as he twisted to thank her.
    ‘But you must,’ she insisted, thinking there was very much a need; she couldn’t bear to have him standing there half-naked.
     She went down the stairs, closing the bathroom door carefully behind her. She stood on the landing for a moment in case Freda
     had returned, but all was quiet and she crept like a thief into her room and went to the wardrobe, lifting out her dressing-gown,
     tugging it free from its place between Freda’s dresses hung in polythene wrappers. The bottle of brandy, wedged in the folds
     of a purple cloak, fell on its side and rolled to the edge of the door. Thrusting it further into the recesses of the wardrobe,
     she ran back upstairs with her dressing-gown still on its hanger.
    ‘That’s nice,’ he said, as she helped him into it.
    Her fingers brushed the top of his arm rough with goose-pimples, and she stepped back not meaning to have touched him. The
     sleeves only came down to his elbows, and when he climbed back on to the lavatory the pleats of the bright blue dressing-gown
     swirled out like a skirt above his trousers and the gleaming tops of his cherry-blossom boots.
    At first Vittorio sat on the chair by the gas fire where Freda had placed him, but she needed a man to open the bottle of
     wine he had brought and they both stood by the table, she fiddling with two glasses and he with the bottle between his