The Bottle Factory Outing: Beryl Bainbridge

“She’d always wanted to go to Spain–she was very interested in flamenco dancing.”

In Beryl Bainbridge’s darkly funny novel, The Bottle Factory Outing, two roommates in a London boarding house, complete opposites in character and temperament, both work in an Italian-run, wine-bottling factory. Both young women have problems with men. Theatrical Freda, “she walked on in television serials very occasionally, either as a barmaid or as a lady agitator,” a large, domineering blonde, has a crush on trainee manager, Vittorio while Brenda, who’s fled a husband and a fearsome mother-in-law, spends most of her working day fending off the advances of her married boss, Rossi. Unfortunately Brenda, who never wants to make waves, and never wants to offend anyone, sends Rossi mixed signals. She tries to avoid his frantic requests that she join  him in the cellar for a quick grope while he plies her with wine, but she’s so passive, she goes along hoping, futilely, that she can thwart his more aggressive moves.

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 her 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.

Freda took Brenda under her wing after meeting her in a butcher’s shop but what attracted Freda to Brenda in the first place,”Brenda’s lack of control, her passion,” has grown stale. Now Freda is mostly annoyed by Brenda:

“You’re a born victim, that’s what you are. You ask for trouble. One day you’ll go too far.”

She lay down again and rubbed her toes together to warm them. “It’s probably all that crouching you did under dining-room tables during the war.”

The novels centres on, as the title suggests, a work outing arranged by Freda who is trying various tactics to ramp up her relationship with Vittorio, and she decides “she would have a better chance of seducing him if she could get him out into the open air.” The outing is supposed to include a visit to a stately home and a relaxed picnic. Of course, on the day of the outing everything goes horribly wrong, and while, by the time the outing takes place, numerous things have already gone badly in the lives of Freda and Brenda, author Beryl Bainbridge exceeds reader expectations as the plot takes an extremely dark, twisted turn.

 

When you read a book for the second, or as in this case, the third time, new things seep out of the pages. For this reading, I was struck by how Freda and Brenda drove people to extreme behaviour. There’s Brenda’s “obviously deranged” mother-in-law trying to kill her, and what exactly did happened in Brenda’s marriage? It must have taken a great deal of bad behaviour for passive Brenda to take action. Then there’s Irishman, Patrick, who’s attracted to Brenda and who offers to come and fix her toilet. He’s another man who misreads Brenda’s rather limp signals. He’s also the odd man out at work:

Rossi treated him with suspicion, seeing he was Irish, following him about the factory in case he slipped a bomb beneath the cardboard boxes and blew them all to pieces.

And then there’s Freda, militant, aggressive Freda, who pulls out all the stops to lure Vittorio to her room in a shabby boarding house. Freda also drives men crazy, and there’s something nastily funny about how these two women handle the men in their lives. Freda pursues Vittorio avidly, and Brenda, tries, rather meekly, to fight men off. It takes the factory outing to bring these situations to a head with some very unpleasant results.

There’s a wonderful sense of comic timing to the novel–the attempted seductions and the thwarted seductions, along with the comic comings and goings that reminded me of a Shakespearean comedy, but also there’s wonderful timing in the silent, ignored horror of lives glimpsed off in the sidelines:

Brenda withdrew into a corner of the room, seating herself at the table beside the window. Across the road on the balcony of the third floor an elderly woman in a blue dressing gown and hat with a rose pinned to the brim waved and gesticulated for help. Brenda knew her gas fire had blown up or she was out of paraffin or the cat had gone missing. It was unfortunate that Freda had rented a room opposite a building devoted to the old and infirm-there always someone in need of assistance.

Here is Max’s review

Review copy

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