The Reginald Perrin Omnibus (18 page)

But it was all right, it was good, almost as good as last night. He eased himself gently out of ecstasy into calm, held a gentle hand on Elizabeth’s right breast, caressed it gratefully, wishing he could explain to her that it was the last time, wishing he didn’t have to deceive her.

Tomorrow his speech. Tonight, tired. Pyjama trousers crumpled beneath him. Too tired. Falling. Falling into sleep. Up early tomorrow. Falling.

‘Goodnight, darling,’ from Elizabeth.

‘Good-bye,’ from himself, far below.

Friday

So tired. He gave his limbs the relevant messages, telling them to hop out of bed and get things moving, but nothing happened. Mutiny. A general strike. 1926 all over again. His legs and arms had got him pinned down. His neck was in the thick of it, too.

Come on, lads. Let’s have you. Wakey wakey rise and shine! I know you’re fed up to the back teeth with being bits of me, always taking orders. Believe me, I’m tired of being the boss. I’m tired of the responsibility, so tired that I’m prepared to leave my wife, whom I love.

After tomorrow everything will be different. So what about it, limbs? See me through one more day, eh? Let’s not have an energy crisis today.

Slowly the spasm passed. He got out of bed very gingerly. His legs felt weak. His head buzzed and on the way to the bathroom he thought he was going to faint.

He bent his head over the washbasin and poured cold water over it. This wouldn’t do at all, not on the day of his big speech.

He opened the frosted glass window and gazed out over the back garden, gulping in the misty air.

He dressed carefully, dark suit, white shirt, brand new British Fruit Association tie, blue with the somewhat unfortunate symbol of two apples and a banana picked out in gold.

He climbed up into the loft, collected his £320 from beneath the old curtains in his tuck box, put some of the money in his wallet and distributed the rest around the pockets of his suit.

He went down into the kitchen. Elizabeth handed him his breakfast – two eggs, a rasher of bacon, and mushrooms.

‘You’re looking very smart,’ she said.

He shrugged. He hadn’t told her about his speech. It would only make him more nervous if she knew.

He had to force the breakfast down.

‘Are you feeling all right?’ said Elizabeth.

‘I’ve got a bit of an earwig.’

‘What on earth do you mean – an earwig?’

‘Sorry. Not earwig. Headache.’

This was dreadful. At another time it might be amusing to call headaches earwigs. He couldn’t imagine anything more boring than calling them headaches all the time. But not now.

She was watching him closely. He must apologize. Allay her earwigs. Not earwigs. Fears.

‘Parsnips,’ he said.

Not parsnips. Pardon.

‘Parsnips?’

‘C.J. asked if we could give him some parsnips,’ he improvised feebly.

‘What on earth does he want parsnips for?’

‘He didn’t say.’

This was terrible. She’d be calling the doctor before you could say parsnips. Not parsnips. Jack Robinson.

He finished his breakfast. Elizabeth gave him the parsnips. He picked up his briefcase, which contained the unfinished notes for his speech, the black wig and the false beard. He kissed Elizabeth good-bye, told her that he’d be working late that night and would see her at the hospital in Worthing the next day, and set off for the station. The mist was beginning to thin.

On his way to the station, Reggie was happy to report full cooperation from every limb. Even the potentially recalcitrant neck was doing its bit – to wit, joining the head to the body in such a way that the former could be swivelled upon the latter without falling off.

He stood at his usual place on the platform, in front of the door marked ‘Isolation telephone’. The pollen count was low, and Peter Cartwright was blessedly free from sneezing.

On the train Reggie studied the programme for day three of the conference.

At Waterloo he took good care to avoid the cracked old woman, and deposited his parsnips in a litter bin before leaving the station.

The sun shimmered sadistically through the great glass windows. The filing cabinets shone with green venom. Reggie’s mouth was dry, his forehead stretched tight. He wanted to scream.

C.J. rang to wish him luck with his speech. Somehow he managed to speak normally, to use all the right words, to avoid saying, ‘Earwig very much’.

He tried to work on his speech but the sentences wouldn’t form themselves. His bank rang to say that they had received four more cheques, each cashed in his name for the sum of thirty pounds. He expressed the necessary alarm.

At quarter to eleven he decided that he could bear it no longer.

‘Well,’ he said to Joan, sitting at her desk with nothing to do, because he had given her nothing to do. ‘Well, I’m off.’

‘Good luck with your speech,’ she said.

He would never see her again, but he couldn’t kiss her in the middle of the open-plan office.

‘Good-bye,’ he said.

‘Well, off you go then if you’re going,’ she said. Had she really no inkling?

Bilberry Hall was a long, white Regency building with green shutters, set in rolling wooded country between Potters Bar and Hertford. Reggie walked over the gravel to the front door with sinking heart and slightly unsteady feet. He had already drunk six large whiskies.

He was ushered into the spacious dining room. The tables had been arranged in three long rows, and there was a buzz of serious conversation from the dark-suited delegates. Above their heads hung the controversial International Fruit Year symbol – the intertwined fruits of all the nations.

Reggie took his seat and apologized profusely for his late arrival, which he attributed to a broken fan belt. He attacked his avocado vinaigrette vigorously, and caught everybody up half-way through the chicken
à la reine
.

‘You missed a stimulating session this morning, Mr Perrin,’ said Dr L. Hump, his neighbour on his left. Dr Hump had a round, bald head.

‘Yes,’ said Reggie.

Dr Hump filled Reggie’s glass with rich, perfumy Alsatian wine.

This’ll give you Dutch courage,’ he said.

Reggie took a big draught of the wine. He had suddenly lost his appetite.

‘Sir Elwyn gave us a fascinating analysis of the pesticide issue,’ said Dr L. Hump.

‘You are Mr Senior Sales Executive Perrin?’ said a serious man with blond hair, sitting opposite Reggie and eating a nut cutlet specially prepared for him.

‘Yes.’

‘I am Professor Knud Pedersen, University of Uppsala. You are giving a most stimulating talk to us, I think.’

‘Let’s hope so.’

Reggie’s neighbour on his right introduced himself as Sir Elwyn Watkins. He signalled unobtrusively to a waiter to fill Reggie’s glass.

‘Dutch courage. Great advantage of you post-prandialites,’ he said. ‘You missed a very good little talk from Dr Hump. He touched mainly on the role of fruit in a competitive society. His thesis was, in a nutshell, that fruit should not be – indeed cannot be – less or indeed more competitive than the society for which – and indeed by which – it is produced.’

‘That’s very interesting,’ said Reggie.

The walls of the dining room were hung with still lifes of fruit, and there were enormous bowls of fruit on the tables.

‘Those pears are conference pears, and those apples are conference apples,’ he said. ‘Joke,’ he explained.

During the sweet, Dr Hump and Sir Elwyn Watkins were engaged in conversation with their other neighbours. Reggie became acutely conscious that nobody was talking to him. He was Goofy Perrin again. Coconut Matting Perrin who feared that the girls would laugh at his thin hairy legs when he played tennis. He drained his third glass of Alsatian wine. His eyes met Professor Pedersen’s. The author of the lecture on ‘Aspects of Dietary Conscience’ looked as if this little gathering was rather below his lofty intellect. Reggie smiled at him and tried to think of something stimulating to say, something worthy of consideration by the famous agrarian philosopher.

‘You’re Swedish, aren’t you?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ admitted the blond vegetarian patiently.

‘I’m not Swedish,’ said Reggie.

My God, I’m drunk, he thought.

‘I wonder if you could pass me the earwig,’ he said to Dr Hump.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Dr Hump.

‘When I say the earwig I mean the water jug,’ said Reggie.

Dr Hump gave him a strange look. Then he gave him the water jug.

Reggie sat on the platform in the conference hall and faced a sea of two hundred and fifty earnest faces. Beneath the faces, on two hundred and fifty lapels, two hundred and fifty International Fruit Year symbols were pinned, and another huge International Fruit Year symbol hung threateningly over the speaker’s rostrum. At the back of the platform there was a large mural representing the British Fruit Association – two huge red apples and a vast yellow banana.

The Chairman of the British Fruit Association, W. F. Malham, CBFA (Chairman of the British Fruit Association), rose to speak.

‘Welcome back,’ he said. ‘We have had an excellent and fruity lunch (laughter). Now, if we can still concentrate (laughter), we come to what will undoubtedly be the high spot, the undoubted high spot, of our first talk this afternoon. I refer of course to none other than . . .’ He hunted frantically for his notes. ‘None other than . . .’ He looked around for help but none was forthcoming. ‘None other than our first speaker this afternoon. Indeed he is well-known to many of us, if not more, and his subject today . . . his subject today is the subject for which he is well-known to many of us. In fact he needs no introduction from me. So here he is.’

W. F. Malham, CBFA, sat down and wiped his red face with a large handkerchief. Reggie stood up. There was applause. He walked forward to the rostrum, desperately trying not to lurch. He tried to arrange his notes systematically.

‘Thank you,’ he began. ‘Thank you very much, Mr Whatever Your Name Is.’ There was some laughter and applause. W. F. Malham, CBFA, turned crimson. ‘When they said to me, “Reginald I. Perrin, you’re a senior sales earwig at Sunshine Desserts. Would you like to talk on ‘Are We Getting Our Just Desserts?’” my first thought was. What a pathetic title for a talk. And my second thought was also, What a pathetic title for a talk.

But I decided to come here, because what I have to say is important. Fruit these days is graded, standardized, sprayed, seeded, frozen, artificially coloured. Taste doesn’t matter, only appearance. If a survey showed that housewives prefer pink square bananas, they would get pink square bananas.’

Reggie looked down at the people sitting in rows on cheap wooden chairs in the high, well-proportioned room. Behind them, through the windows in the north-facing wall of the house, he could see the tops of fine old oak trees.

‘People are graded too,’ he said. ‘They’re sorted out, the ones that look right are packed off to management training schemes. They’re standardized, they’re sprayed with the profit motive so that no nasty unmanagerial thoughts can survive on them, their politics are dyed a nice safe pale blue, their social conscience is deep frozen. I’m not so worried about the permissive society. I’m more worried about all those homogenized twits who decide that all their brewery’s pubs should have green doors, or that the menu should say “eggs styled to choice” or something equally pathetic’

He was doing well. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Professor Pedersen staring at him.

‘I see Professor Pedersen’s in the audience tonight,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a big hand for Professor Pedersen.’

There was a surprised pause, then a smattering of applause, which grew slowly into a tolerable ovation. Professor Pedersen, greatly embarrassed, rose briefly to give curt acknowledgement.

‘If we’ve ever complained about these things, we’ve been told we stand in the way of progress,’ said Reggie, when the applause had died down. ‘Progress. There’s a word that begs the pardon. I beg your parsnips – I mean . . .
I
beg your pardon – it doesn’t beg the pardon – it begs the question.’

He paused, totally confused. There was a groundswell of uneasy murmurings. He glared at the audience until at last there was silence.

‘Where was I? Oh yes. Progress. Growth. That’s another one. We must have growth. Six per cent per year or whatever it is. More people driving more washing machines on bigger lorries down wider motorways. More scientists analysing the effects of more pesticides. More chemicals to cure the pollution caused by more chemicals. More boring speeches to fill up more boring conferences. More luxury desserts, so that more and more people can enjoy a life increasingly superior to that lived by more and more other people. Are those our just desserts? Society functions best if I over-eat, so I buy too many slimming aids, so I fall ill, so I buy too many pills. We have to have a surfeit of dotes in order to sell our surfeit of antidotes. Well, it’s got to stop.