by David Nobbs
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.
He didn’t actually solve the clues in that time, of course. In the spaces of the crossword he wrote: ‘My name is Reginald Iolanthe Perrin. My mother couldn’t appear in our local Gilbert and Sullivan Society production of Iolanthe, because I was on the way, so they named me after it instead. I’m glad it wasn’t The Pirates of Penzance.’
He put the paper away in his briefcase, and said to the compartment, ‘Very easy today.’
They arrived at Waterloo Station eleven minutes late. The loudspeaker announcement blamed ‘reaction to rolling stock shortages at Nine Elms’.
The slightly fat girl left the compartment first. The upholstery had made little red lines on the back of her thighs.
The computer decided that the three most popular ice cream flavours were book-ends, West Germany and pumice stone. This was found to be due to an electrical fault, the cards were rapidly checked by hand, and this time the three most popular flavours were found to be mango delight, cumquat surprise, and strawberry and lychee ripple.
Reggie held a meeting of the exotic ices team in his office at ten-thirty. Tony Webster wore a double-breasted grey suit with a discreetly floral shirt and matching tie. His clothes were modern without being too modern. Esther Pigeon wore an orange sleeveless blouse and a green maxi-skirt with long side vents. Morris Coates from the advertising agency wore flared green corduroy trousers, a purple shirt, a huge white tie, a brown suede jacket and black boots.
‘What is this?’ said Reggie. ‘A fashion show?’
David Harris-Jones telephoned at ten thirty-five to say that he was ill in bed with stomach trouble, the result of eating forty-three ice creams.
Joan provided coffee. Reggie explained that there would be trial sales campaigns of the three flavours in two areas – Hertfordshire and East Lancashire. David Harris-Jones would be in control of Hertfordshire and Tony Webster of East Lancashire, with Reggie controlling the whole operation.
‘Great,’ said Tony Webster.
Esther Pigeon gave them the results of her survey. 73% of housewives in East Lancashire and 81% in Hertfordshire had expressed interest in the concept of exotic ice creams. Only 8% in Hertfordshire and 14% in East Lancashire had expressed positive hostility, while 5% had expressed latent hostility. In Hertfordshire 96.3% of the 20% who formed 50% of consumer spending potential were in favour. Among the unemployed only 0.1% were in favour. 0.6% had told her where they could put the exotic ice creams.
‘What does all this mean in laymen’s terms?’ said Reggie.
‘This would be regarded as a reasonably satisfactory basis for introducing the product in the canvassed areas,’ said Esther Pigeon.
The sun was streaming in on to the dark green filing cabinets, and Reggie watched the bits of dust that were floating around in its rays. He could feel his shivering again, like a subdued shuddering from his engine room. Suddenly he realized that Esther Pigeon was talking.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I missed that. I was looking at the rays of dust in the sun. They’re rather pretty.’
There was a pause. Morris Coates flicked cigarette ash on to the floor.
‘I was saying that there were interesting variations from town to town,’ said Esther Pigeon, who had huggable knees but an indeterminate face, and was usually ignored by 92.7% of the men on the Bakerloo Line. ‘There was a lot of interest in Hitchin and Hertford, but Welwyn Garden City was positively lukewarm.’
‘Hitchin has a very nice church,’ said Reggie. It slipped out before he could stop it. Everyone stared at him. He was sweating profusely.
‘It’s very hot in here,’ he said. ‘Take your jackets off if you want to.’
The men took their jackets off and rolled up their sleeves. Reggie had the hairiest forearms, followed by Esther Pigeon.
He was very conscious of his grubby white shirt. The sartorial revolution had passed him by. He resented these well-dressed young men. He resented Esther Pigeon, whose vital statistics were 36-32-38. He resented Tony Webster who sat quietly, confident yet not too confident, content to wait for his inevitable promotion. He resented the film of skin which was spreading across their forgotten coffees.
They turned to the question of advertising.
‘I was just thinking, off the top of the head, beautiful girl,’ said Morris Coates. ‘Yoga position, which let’s face it can be a pretty sexy position, something like, I’m not a writer, I find it much easier to meditate – with a cumquat surprise ice cream – one of the new range of exotic ice creams from Sunshine.’
‘Ludicrous,’ said Reggie.
Morris Coates flushed.
‘I’m just exploring angles,’ he said. ‘We’ll have a whole team on this. I’m just sounding things out.’
It wasn’t any use being angry with Morris Coates. It wasn’t his fault. Somebody had to man the third-rate advertising agencies. If it wasn’t him, it would be somebody else.
‘What about sex?’ said Morris Coates.
‘What about something like, off the top of the head, I like to stroke my nipple with a strawberry and lychee ripple,’ said Reggie.
Morris Coates turned red. Esther Pigeon examined her finger nails. Tony Webster smiled faintly.
‘All right, fair enough, sex is a bum steer,’ said Morris Coates. ‘Perhaps we just go for something plain and factual, with a good up-beat picture. But then you’re up against the fact that an ice cream carton per se doesn’t look up-beat. Just thinking aloud. Sorry.’
‘Well I’ll be interested to see what you come up with,’ said Reggie.
‘Incidentally,’ said Morris Coates, ‘is the concept of a ripple, in the ice cream sense of the word, fully understood by the public?’
‘In the Forest of Dean, in 1967, 97.3% of housewives understood the concept of a ripple in the ice cream sense of the word,’ said Esther Pigeon.
‘Does that answer your question?’ said Reggie.
‘Yes. Fine,’ said Morris Coates.
Reggie stood up. The sweat was pouring off him. His pants had stuck to his trousers. He must get rid of them before he said something terrible.
To his relief they all stood up.
‘Well anyway we’ll expect something from you soon, Morris,’ he said. They shook hands. He avoided Morris’s eyes. ‘Fine. We’ll be in touch,’ he said.
He shook hands with Esther Pigeon.
‘Well, thank you again, Miss Pigeon,’ he said, avoiding her eye. ‘That was a very comprehensive and helpful report.’
‘This is a potential break-through in the field of quality desserts,’ said Esther Pigeon.
When Morris Coates and Esther Pigeon had gone, Tony Webster said, ‘I must say how much I admired the way you handled Morris and his third-rate ideas.’
Reggie looked into Tony’s eyes, searching for hints of sarcasm or sincerity. Tony’s eyes looked back, blue, bright, cold, with no hint of anything whatsoever.
Reggie couldn’t bear the thought of going to the Feathers for lunch. He must get away. He must be able to breathe.
It was very hot and sticky. He walked across Waterloo Bridge. It was low tide. A barge was chugging slowly upstream. In the Strand he saw a collision between two cars driven by driving instructors. Both men had sunburnt left arms.
Reggie realized that he was hungry. He went into an Italian restaurant and sat down at a table near the door. On the wall opposite him there was a huge photograph of Florence.
The waiter slid up to his table as if on castors and smiled with all the vivacity of sunny Italy. He was wearing a blue-striped jersey. Everything irritated Reggie, the long menu with its English translations, the chianti flasks hanging from the ceiling, the smiling waiter, sautéed in smug servility.
‘Ravioli,’ he said.
‘Yes sir. And to follow? We have excellent sole today.’
‘Ravioli.’
‘No main course, sir?’
‘Yes. Ravioli. I want ravioli followed by ravioli. I like ravioli.’
The waiter slid off towards the kitchens. The restaurant was filling up rapidly. Soon Reggie’s ravioli arrived. It was excellent.
A couple in their mid-thirties joined him at his table. He finished his ravioli. The waiter took it away and brought his ravioli. The couple looked at it with well-bred surprise.
The second plate of ravioli didn’t taste as good as the first, but Reggie ploughed on gamely. He felt that their table was much too small, and all the tables were too close together. He came out in a prickly sweat. The couple must be staring straight into his revolting, champing jaws.
They were clearly in love, and they talked animatedl
y about their many interesting friends. Reggie wanted to tell them that he too had an attractive wife, and two fully grown children, one of whom had herself given birth, in her turn, to two more children. He wanted to tell them that he had friends too, even though he rarely saw them these days. He wanted to tell them that his own life had not been without its moments of tenderness, that he was not always a solitary muncher at the world’s crowded tables.
Their heads dipped towards the River Arno as they ate their minestrone. Reggie finished his second plate of ravioli. The waiter slid complacently up to the table with the sweet trolley.
‘Ravioli, please,’ said Reggie.
The waiter goggled at him.
‘More ravioli, sir?’
‘It’s very good. Quite superb.’
‘Ravioli, sir, is not a sweet. Try zabaglione, sir. Is a sweet.’
‘Look, I want ravioli. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Reggie glared defiantly at the happy couple. He caressed one of their feet under the table with his shoe. The man put his arm round the woman’s waist and squeezed it. Reggie drew his shoe tenderly up a leg. The woman held the man’s hand and squeezed it.
Their main course arrived. Reggie watched them eating, their jaws moving rhythmically, and he felt that he never wanted to eat anything again.
His third plate of ravioli arrived. He ate it slowly, grimly, forcing it down.
Every now and then he touched the happy couple’s legs with his feet. This made them increasingly tender towards each other, and their increasing tenderness made Reggie increasingly miserable.
He shovelled two more envelopes of ravioli into his mouth and chewed desperately. Then he kicked out viciously with his foot. The happy man gave an exclamation of pain, and a mouthful of half-chewed stuffed marrow fell onto the table.
During the afternoon the merciless sun crept round the windows of Reggie’s office. It shone on Joan Greengross’s thin arms, which were sunburnt except for the vaccination mark. It mocked the dark green filing cabinets, the sales graphs, the eight postcards from Shanklin (IOW), the picture of the Hong Kong waterfront which illustrated May and June on the Chinese calendar.
