This is the story of Freda and Brenda, an ill-assorted couple of young women who have ended up sharing a bedsit together and working in the same 'bottle factory' – actually an Italian run wine importers, though the two women are indeed responsible for filling and labelling the bottles. Brenda, middle-class and well brought up, has run away from her drunken husband, while Freda, lush and overweight, has no family apart from an old aunty up north. Their backgrounds are completely different, but so also is the way they view the world. Freda longs for romance, and mostly manages to keep up the fantasy that one day it will happen, hopefully with handsome Vittorio, the trainee manager. Brenda is a pessimist, and disapproves of Freda's warm imaginings. Their diverse reactions to the house they live in typifies their differences.
There was a bathroom up a flight of stairs and a window on the landing bordered with little panes of stained glass. Freda thought it was beautiful. When she chose, the washing on the line, the fragments of tree and brick, were tinted pink and gold. Brenda, avoiding the coloured squares, saw only a back yard grey with soot and a stunted rambling rose that never bloomed sprawled against the crumbling surface of the wall. She felt it was unwise to see things as other than they were.
Ironically, it is scrawny, badly dressed Brenda who seems to attract male attention, particularly that of Mr Rossi, the manager, who every day finds a reason to call her into storerooms and basements and fumble desperately with her clothing. She wishes he wouldn't, but she has been too well brought up to give offence.
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 practise in. Brenda loathed music. When Freda opened the door to the trumpet player and told her what to do with her trumpet, Brenda hid behind the wardrobe.
Freda, desperate to get Vittorio to declare himself as she is quite unrealistically sure he wants to do, has arranged an outing for the factory workers – she imagines the two of them wandering off hand in hand in the glorious countryside, a seduction, a marriage. A coach has been hired, but on the morning of the outing it fails to appear, and most of the men, Italian peasants quite bemused by the ways of the country they find themselves in, shuffle off home with their bags of sandwiches. Freda, however, not to be defeated, manages to get a small group into Mr Rossi's car – herself and Brenda, Vittorio, and Irish Patrick who has taken a shine to Brenda. They end up in Windsor Great Park, and there a very surprising and shocking event takes place …
This is a really funny novel. Yes, it's black comedy, but there's nothing wrong with that, and I was smiling and chuckling all the way through. Freda and Brenda are wonderfully conceived characters – Brenda undoubtedly based on Bainbridge herself, who said on her later Desert Island Discs recording that when she was young and lived in London, married men were always coming round and flinging themselves at her and that she had been brought up to believe it was rude to say no. As for Freda, she is appalling and adorable in about equal measure – underneath her robust and forceful exterior is a sad, needy woman who longs for a beautiful husband, adorable children, and a castle in Italy to go with them. In actual fact she will eventually end up in Italy, though not quite in the manner she had imagined.
There's a film, with Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French, but I'm not sure if I want to see it. As you can tell, I really really loved this novel. Bainbridge has become one of my absolute top favourite novelists, along with Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green – oh, and Jane Austen of course. A small but select group (there are probably a few more, but these are who spring to mind right now). Luckily she wrote a good many novels and so even though I've now read six, there are lots more to look forward to. Hooray for Annabel and Beryl Bainbridge Week – even though it's now finished.
