The Reginald Perrin Omnibus Read Online Free Page B

been, shook himself as if to get the last drips off, did up his zip, and left the ‘gents’.
    When Tony Webster came out of the ‘gents’ Reggie tried not to look embarrassed. He bought a bacardi and coke for Tony’s dolly bird. She was wearing a mini-skirt that was short but not too short, and a thin lace blouse that you could almost see through. She had a flat chest and artificial blonde hair. Reggie didn’t imagine that Tony Webster had any problems in bed.
    He walked home the long way, across the park. There were cricketers practising in the nets, and he watched some children clambering over a brightly coloured tubular dragon erected for them by the Parks Department.
    He plunged into the quiet jungle of the Poets’ Estate. He sauntered along Masefield Grove. How was it that his legs kept going forward like this, even though he wasn’t telling them to? He looked down at his legs, and they seemed to be separate beings, strolling along down there. It was lucky they weren’t keen on mountaineering, dragging him up Annapurna on their holidays.
    The pollen count was high, and he could hear Peter Cartwright sneezing inside Number 11, Tennyson Avenue.
    He walked slowly up Coleridge Close. His neighbours at Number 18, the Milfords, were watering those parts of their front garden which were already in shadow. Later they would go for a snifter at the golf club.
    His neighbours at Number 22, the Wisemans, had been told that the golf club had no vacancies.
    ‘You’re late,’ said Elizabeth.
    ‘I missed the train,’ he lied.
    ‘I don’t mind, but it’s all dried up,’ she said.
    He hadn’t the energy to explain that man had only existed for a minimal proportion of this earth’s history, Britain was only a small island, he was just one insignificant speck which would be gone for ever in another thirty years, and it really didn’t matter if two small lamb chops were all dried up.
    He ate his dried-up lamb chops in the back garden, on the ‘patio’, underneath the laburnums. A magpie fluttered hesitantly over the garden, and small birds whose names he didn’t know were flitting from bush to bush.
    ‘I thought we might go for a run tomorrow,’ he said.
    ‘That would be nice,’ said Elizabeth.
    ‘I thought we might take Tom and Linda and the kids, seeing that they haven’t got their car.’
    That would be nice,’ she said.
    Their daughter Linda had married an estate agent, who had just driven his car into the wall of one of his firm’s properties, a house valued, until the accident, at £26,995. They had two small children.
    ‘I thought we might run over to Hartcliffe House and see what that new game reserve’s like,’ he said.
    ‘That would be nice,’ she said.
    He rang Linda and Tom. The plan was accepted with enthusiasm.
    Over his coffee he studied his maps, working out a route that would avoid the traffic.
    ‘You remind me of your father, sitting there like that with your maps,’ said Elizabeth.
    Reggie’s father was always poring over maps and saying: ‘Right, then, what’s the plan of action?’ and then telling you what the plan of action was.
    ‘You’re getting more like him every day,’ said Elizabeth.
    She meant it kindly, so Reggie didn’t show that he was hurt.
    ‘Right, then, what’s the plan of action for Sunday?’ he said. ‘We drive down to see your mother in the morning, right?’
    Elizabeth smiled with relief, because he hadn’t called her mother a hippopotamus.

Saturday

    A long line of steaming cars growled sinuously into the Hartcliffe Game Reserve. They were queuing to get in, and soon they would be queuing to get out. It seemed as if the whole world was on safari in Surrey.
    Behind them, hidden by a discreet ridge, was the stately home itself. On their left were the toilets and a souvenir stall. On their right was the Tasteebite Cafeteria.
    They paid their £1.50, and got their souvenir programme. Ahead of them the newly-built road wound over the grassy slopes in a