The Reginald Perrin Omnibus (2 page)

‘It depends on the question,’ said Reggie.

This one’s very personal indeed.’ C.J. directed the aluminium spotlight on his desk towards Reggie’s face, as if it could dazzle even when it wasn’t switched on. ‘Are you losing your drive?’ he asked.

‘No, C.J.,’ said Reggie. ‘I’m not losing my drive.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said C.J. ‘We aren’t one of those dreadful firms that believe a chap’s no good after he’s fortysix.’

Before lunch Reggie went to see Doc Morrissey in the little surgery on the ground floor, next to the amenities room.

C.J. had given Sunshine Desserts everything that he thought a first-rate firm ought to have. He’d given it an amenities room, with a darts board and a three-quarter size table tennis table. He’d given it a sports ground in Chigwell, shared with the National Bank of Japan, and it wasn’t his fault that the cricket pitch had been ruined by moles. He’d given it an amateur dramatic society, which had performed works by authors as diverse in spirit as Shaw, Ibsen, Rattigan, Coward and Briggs from the Dispatch Department. And he had given it Doc Morrissey.

Doc Morrissey was a small wizened man with folds of empty skin on his face and, whatever illness you had, he had it worse.

‘My legs feel very heavy,’ said Reggie. ‘And every now and then a shiver passes right through me. I think I may be sickening for summer ‘flu.’

The walls were decorated with diagrams of the human body. Doc Morrissey stuck a thermometer into Reggie’s mouth.

‘Elizabeth all right?’ said Doc Morrissey.

‘She’s very well,’ said Reggie through the thermometer.

‘Don’t talk,’ said Doc Morrissey. ‘Bowel movements up to scratch?’

Reggie nodded.

‘How’s that boy of yours doing?’ said Doc Morrissey.

Reggie gave a thumbs down.

‘Difficult profession, acting. He should stick to the amateur stuff like his father,’ said Doc Morrissey.

Reggie was a pillar of the Sunshine Dramatic Society. He had once played Othello to Edna Meadowes from Packing’s Desdemona.

‘Any chest pains?’ said Doc Morrissey.

Reggie shook his head.

‘Where are you going for your holidays this year?’ said Doc Morrissey.

Reggie tried to represent Pembrokeshire in mime.

Doc Morrissey removed the thermometer.

‘Pembrokeshire,’ said Reggie.

‘Your temperature’s normal anyway,’ said Doc Morrissey.

He examined Reggie’s eyes, tongue, chest and reflexes.

‘Have you been feeling listless and lazy?’ said Doc Morrissey. ‘Unable to concentrate? Lost your zest for living? Lots of headaches? Falling asleep during
Play for Today?
Can’t finish the crossword like you used to? Nasty taste in the mornings? Keep thinking about naked sportswomen?’

Reggie felt excited. These were the exact symptoms of his malaise. People said Doc Morrissey was no good, all he ever did was give you two aspirins. It wasn’t true. The little man was a miracle worker.

‘Yes, I have. That’s exactly how I’ve been feeling,’ he said.

‘It’s funny. So have I. I wonder what it is,’ said Doc Morrissey.

He gave Reggie two aspirins.

Maurice Harcourt laid on a very good ice cream tasting. Nobody from head office liked visiting Acton. They hated the factory, with its peeling cream and green frontage, halfway between an Odeon cinema and an East German bus station. It reminded them that the firm didn’t only make plans and decisions, but also jellies and creamed rice. It reminded them that it owned a small fleet of bright red lorries with ‘Try Sunshine Flans – they’re flan-tastic’ painted in yellow letters on both sides. It reminded them that C.J. had bought two lorries with moulded backs in the shape of jellies. Acton was dusty and commonplace, but everyone agreed that Maurice Harcourt laid on a very good ice cream tasting.

Reggie had invited a good cross-section of palates. On a long table at one end of the first floor conference room there were eighteen large containers, each one holding ice cream of a different flavour. Everyone had a card with the eighteen flavours printed on it, and there were six columns marked: ‘Taste’, ‘Originality’, ‘Texture’, ‘Consumer Appeal’, ‘Appearance’ and ‘Remarks’. The sun shone in on them as they went about their work.

This pineapple one is too sickly, darling,’ said Davina Letts-Wilkinson, who was forty-eight, with greying hair dyed silver, lines on her face, and the best legs in the convenience foodstuffs industry.

‘Mark it down,’ said Reggie.

‘I like the mango,’ said Tim Parker from Flans.

Tony Webster was filling in his card most assiduously. So was David Harris-Jones.

‘This lime’s bloody diabolical,’ said Ron Napier, representing the taste buds of the Transport Department.

‘Write it all down,’ said Reggie.

Davina kept following him round the room, and he knew that Joan Greengross was watching them. The ice creams made him feel sick, his brain was beating against his forehead, and his legs were like lead.

‘Isn’t this terrific?’ said David Harris-Jones.

‘Yes,’ said Reggie.

‘A sophisticated little lychee,’ said Colin Edmundes from Admin., whose reputation for wit depended entirely on his adaptation of existing witticisms. ‘But I think you’ll be distressed by its cynicism.’

Reggie went up to Joan, wanting to make contact, not wanting her to think that he was interested in Davina Letts-Wilkinson’s legs.

‘Enjoying it?’ he said.

‘It makes a change,’ she said.

‘That’s a nice dress. Is it new?’ he said.

‘You asked me that this morning,’ she said.

Tim Parker took Jenny Costain to Paris. Owen Lewis from Crumbles got Sandra Gostelow drunk at the office party and made her wear yellow oilskins before they did it. But Reggie had never even kissed Joan. She had a husband and three children. And Reggie had a marvellous wife. Elizabeth was a treasure. Everybody said what a treasure Elizabeth was.

Reggie smiled at Maurice Harcourt, and licked his cumquat surprise without enthusiasm.

‘Excuse me,’ he said.

He rushed out and was horribly sick in the ‘ladies’. There wasn’t time to reach the ‘gents’.

They were driven back to head office in the firm’s bright red fourteen-seater bus. The clutch was going. Davina sat next to Reggie. Joan sat behind them. Davina held Reggie’s hand and said, ‘That was a lovely afternoon. Clever old you.’ Her hand was sticky and Reggie was sweating.

At five-thirty they repaired to the Feathers. Faded tartan paper decorated the walls and a faded tartan carpet performed a similar function with regard to the floor. Reggie still felt slightly sick.

The Sunshine crowd were in high spirits. David Harris-Jones had three sherries. Davina stood very close to Reggie. They smoked cigarettes and discussed lung cancer and alcoholism. Tony Webster’s dolly bird arrived. She had slim legs and drank bacardi and coke. Owen Lewis told two dirty stories. Davina said, ‘Sorry, darlings. I must leave you for a minute. Women’s problems.’

While she was away Owen Lewis winked at Reggie and said, ‘You’re on to a good thing there.’

‘Reggie,’ said Colin Edmundes, ‘you have left undone those things that you ought to have done up.’

Reggie did up his zip and left in time to catch the six thirty-eight from Waterloo.

The train was eleven minutes late, due to signal failure at Vauxhall. Reggie dragged his reluctant legs along Station Road, up the snicket, up Wordsworth Drive, turned right into Tennyson Avenue, then left into Coleridge Close. It was quiet on the Poets’ Estate. The white gates barred all vulgar and irrelevant traffic. The air smelt of hot roads. Reggie marched his battle-weary body up the garden path, roses to left of him, roses to right of him, shining white house in front of him. House martins were feeding their first brood under the eaves. The front door opened and there was Elizabeth, tall and blonde, with mauve slacks over her wide thighs and a flowered blue blouse over her shallow breasts.

They ate their liver and bacon in the back garden, on the ‘patio’. Beyond the garden there were silver birch and pine. The liver was done to a turn.

They didn’t speak much. Each knew the other’s opinion on everything from fascism to emulsion paint.

He knew how quiet Elizabeth found it since Mark and Linda had gone. He always intended to make conversation, always felt that in a minute or two he would begin to sparkle, but he never did.

Tonight he felt as if there was a plate of glass between them.

The heat hung stickily. It would grow dark before it grew cool.

Reggie stirred his coffee.

‘Are we going to see the hippopotamus on Sunday?’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ said Elizabeth.

‘I meant your mother. I thought I’d call her a hippopotamus for a change.’

Elizabeth stared at him, her wide mouth open in astonishment.

‘That’s not a very nice thing to say,’ she said.

‘It’s not very nice having a mother-in-law who looks like a hippopotamus,’ he said.

That night Elizabeth read her book for more than half an hour before switching the light off. Reggie didn’t try to make love. It wasn’t the night for it.

He lay awake for several hours. Perhaps he knew that it was only the beginning.

Friday

He got up early, put on a suit with a less suspect zip, and went out into the garden. The sky was a hazy blue, thick with the threat of heat. There were lawns on two different levels. An arch covered in red ramblers led down to the lower level.

An albino blackbird was singing in the Worcester Pearmain tree.

‘Are you aware that you’re different from all the other blackbirds?’ said Reggie. ‘Do you know that you’re a freak?’

Ponsonby, the black and white cat, slunk guiltily into the garden. The albino blackbird flew off with a squawk of alarm.

Reggie’s limbs felt heavy again, but not quite as heavy as on the previous evening.

‘Breakfast’s ready,’ sang out Elizabeth. She wasn’t one to hold a grudge just because you had called her mother a hippopotamus.

He went into the kitchen and ate his bacon and eggs at the blue formica-topped table. Elizabeth watched him with an anxiety that she couldn’t quite conceal, but she made no allusion to his remarks of the previous evening.

‘Who were you talking to in the garden?’ she asked.

‘The blackbird,’ he said. ‘That albino.’

‘It’s going to be another scorcher,’ she said as she handed him his briefcase. She removed a piece of yellow fluff from the seat of his trousers, and kissed him good-bye.

He turned left along Coleridge Close, past the comfortably prosperous houses, but then he had an impulse to make a detour. He turned left into Tennyson Avenue, right into Masefield Grove, and down the little snicket into the park.

He decided to catch the eight forty-six instead of the eight-sixteen.

He crossed the park slowly. One of the keepers gave him a pleasant, contented smile. He went through the park gate into Western Avenue, known locally as ‘the arterial road’. Here the houses were small and semi-detached, and there was an endless roar of traffic.

There was a parade of small shops set back from the main road and called, imaginatively, Western Parade. Reggie went into the corner shop called, imaginatively, The Corner Shop. It sold Mars bars, newspapers, Tizer, cream soda and haircuts.

‘Mirror
please, guv,’ said Reggie.

‘Three new pence,’ said the newsagent.

‘Bar of Fry’s chocolate cream please, mate,’ said Reggie.

‘Going to be another scorcher,’ said the newsagent.

‘Too right, squire,’ said Reggie.

Next door to The Corner Shop was the Blue Parrot Café. Reggie had lived in the area for twenty years and had never been through its portals before.

The café was drab and empty, except for one bus crew eating bacon sandwiches. The eponymous bird had been dead for years.

‘Tea please,’ said Reggie.

‘With?’

‘With.’

He took a gulp of his sweet tea, although normally he didn’t take sugar.

He remembered going to a café just like this, with Steve Watson, when he was a boy. It was on a railway bridge, and when they heard the steamers coming they would rush out to get the numbers.

He opened the
Daily Mirror
. ‘WVS girl ran Hendon witches’ coven’ he read.

They used to stand on the bridge directly over the trains, getting all their clothes covered in smoke. Steve Watson still owed him one and three. He smiled. The bus crew were watching him. He stopped smiling and buried himself in his paper.

‘Peer’s daughter to wed abattoir worker’; ‘Council house armadillo ban protest march row’.

Steve Watson had gone to the council school and without Reggie’s realizing it his parents had knocked the relationship on the head.

He went up to the counter.

‘Cup of char and a wad,’ he said.

‘Come again,’ said the proprietor.

‘Another cup of tea and a slice of that cake,’ said Reggie.

Once Steve’s elder brother had come along and tossed himself off, for sixpence, just before the passing of a double-headed munitions train on the down slow track. Later Reggie’s parents had always sent him down to the country for his holidays, to Chilhampton Ambo, he and his brother Nigel, to his uncle’s farm, to help with the harvest, and get bitten by bugs, and hide in haystacks, and get a fetish about Angela Borrowdale’s riding breeches.

Reggie smiled. Again he caught the bus crew looking at him. Didn’t they have a bus of their own to go to?

He finished his tea, wrote his piece of cake off to experience, and set off for the station.

The eight forty-six was five minutes late. There was a girl aged about twenty in the compartment. She wore a miniskirt and had slightly fat thighs. No-one looked at her thighs yet all the men saw them out of the corner of their eyes. They shared the guilty secret of the girl’s thighs, and Reggie knew that at Waterloo Station they would let her leave the compartment first, they would look furtively at the depression left in the upholstery by her recently-departed bottom, and then they would follow her down the platform.

He folded his paper into quarters to give his pencil some support, puckered his brow in a passable imitation of thought, and filled in the whole crossword in three and a half minutes.