The Reginald Perrin Omnibus Read Online Free Page A

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.
    Everything was normal, yet nothing was normal. There he was, dictating away, apparently in full command of himself, and yet everything was different. There was no longer anything to prevent his doing the most outrageous things. There was nothing to stop him holding a ceilidh in the Dispatch Department. Yet he didn’t. Very much the reverse.
    He felt an impulse to go down to C.J.’s office, walk up to C.J.’s desk, and expose himself. One pull on his zip, and, hey presto, a life’s work undone. That was power.
    ‘Are you all right?’ said Joan.
    ‘Of course I am. Why?’
    ‘We’re in the middle of a letter, and you haven’t spoken for ten minutes.’
    He felt he owed her an explanation.
    ‘Sorry. I’m rather full of ravioli,’ he said.
    He finished the letter. Joan was looking a little alarmed.
    ‘One more letter,’ he said. ‘To the Traffic Manager, British Rail, Southern Region. Dear Sir, Every morning my train, which is due at Waterloo at eight fifty-eight, is exactly eleven minutes late. This is infuriating. This morning, for reasons which I need not go into here, I caught a later train, which was due in at nine twenty-eight. This train was also exactly eleven minutes late. Why don’t you re-time your trains to arrive eleven minutes later? They would then be on time every morning. Yours faithfully, Reginald I. Perrin.’
    Reggie had four whiskies at the Feathers. Davina stood very close to him. Owen Lewis from Crumbles told three dirty stories. Reggie went to the ‘gents’ and before he had started Tony Webster came in and stood at the next urinal. There was a slot machine on which was written: ‘The chocolate in this machine tastes of rubber.’ Reggie couldn’t go. He never could when Tony Webster was standing beside him. He pretended that he’d