The Reginald Perrin Omnibus (61 page)

Reggie was not unduly upset that the bubble did not burst. He was content to wait until the new arrivals had settled in.

Not everybody approved the new appointments, especially that of Seamus Finnegan as Admin Officer. ‘I didn’t get where I am today by having Irish labourers promoted over my head,’ was one anonymous comment. But, bearing in mind Reggie’s new reputation as a genius, everybody was happy to give them a chance.

One morning Reggie visited the new arrivals in their identical offices on the third floor. Each office had a green carpet, a teak veneer desk, expandable grey wall filing units, two cacti, three chairs, and an inspiring view over a heavily pitted open-air National Car Park.

Tom’s desk was covered in pieces of paper on which he had written various slogans and hand-outs. On the floor around the dark green waste-paper basket were many crumpled up pieces of badly aimed waste paper.

‘How’s it going?’ said Reggie.

‘I’m not really a slogan person,’ said Tom.

‘Nonsense. Read me some.’

On the filing units, Tom had placed photos of Linda and the children.

‘Perrin Products are very good, because they are very bad,’ he read.

‘Excellent,’ said Reggie. ‘The essential paradox in a nutshell.’

‘Go to Grot shops and get an eyeful

Of Perrin Products with a wide range of goods that are really pretty awful.’

‘Very good.’

‘It doesn’t rhyme properly.’

‘It almost rhymes, Tom.’

‘I have the feeling my stuff isn’t snappy enough.’

‘It’s exactly what I’m paying you for, Tom.’

Jimmy was staring blankly at a blank piece of paper. There were two neat piles of paper on his desk, and six sharpened pencils of equal length. He had added no decoration to the office.

‘How’s it coming along, Jimmy?’ Reggie asked.

‘Mustn’t grumble. Learning the ropes.’

‘Any ideas?’

‘Not yet. Fly in the ointment.’

‘Keep up the good work, Jimmy.’

Doc Morrissey had drawn pictures of naked girls on all the pieces of paper on his desk.

‘Well, how’s advanced planning coming along?’ said Reggie.

‘I did have one idea,’ said Doc Morrissey.

‘What’s that?’

‘January sales.’

‘Yes. A nice idea, but something similar has been done before.’

‘In September.’

‘I see. Yes.’

‘With . . . er . . . I don’t know whether I’m on the lines, Reggie, but I have tried to understand your . . . er . philosophy . . . with the prices of everything going up instead of down.’

‘I see.’

‘I just thought it would be different.’

‘It is. It is. I wish I’d thought of it myself.’

To Reggie’s surprise the walls of Seamus Finnegan’s office were covered in neat graphs and well-ordered lists. Three photographs of Arkle provided a more human touch.

‘How’s it going, Seamus?’ said Reggie.

‘Slowly, sir. It’s a new field for me and thoroughness, he’s the man for me, he’s the fellow.’

‘Quite. What are all these graphs and things?’

‘Well, sir, I find there has been a considerable disimprovement in organization of late. We are running, at a rough calculation, at only 63 per cent of internal capacity. Production methods leave much to be desired and delivery to the shops is a horse of a similar complexion.’

Seamus had his window wide open and warm sunshine was flooding in.

‘You seem to be doing pretty well.’

‘If I may say so, sir, without courting immodesty, I am in the way of being a bit of an organizational genius. You may recall my mentioning the fact.’

‘I certainly do, yes.’

‘It is a quality that I have not had much opportunity to develop in a world that had me marked up for an ignorant Irish git from the land of the bogs and the little people.’

‘A mistake I certainly didn’t make.’

‘You most assuredly did not, sir. May I ask how exactly you spotted my qualities for the job?’

‘Instinct, Seamus. Call it instinct.’

Towards the end of July, Reggie called a planning meeting in Conference Room B. Reggie sat at one end of the oblong table and Elizabeth at the other. Seated on one side of the table were C.J., David Harris-Jones, Tom, and Seamus Finnegan. Seated on the other side were Tony Webster, Doc Morrissey and Jimmy. Beside Jimmy, on the floor, was his old tuck box. It was ten-thirty on a shirt-sleeve morning. In front of each person was a blotter and a glass.

Under each person’s armpits were two spreading patches of damp.

Three carafes of water stood in the middle of the table.

Reggie began with a general homily on the success of the firm, and asked Elizabeth to chair the meeting.

Elizabeth explained that she would call everyone in turn to report on their progress. She would start with the Coordinator for European Expansion.

C.J. – for it was he – explained that they had secured shop sites in Amsterdam, Düsseldorf and Paris, and were in the middle of negotiations in Rotterdam, Cologne and Brussels. They were examining the possibility of opening a Eurogrot factory in Luxembourg, with a fleet of Grotmaster lorries, but these developments would not occur until they had at least a dozen European outlets. It was no use putting the cart before the. horse. He gave the meeting to understand that neither he nor his betrothed had ever put the cart before the horse. If they had, he intimated, it might have been a case of the tail wagging the dog.

David Harris-Jones, the Head of Expansion (UK), explained that the British end of the operation now extended to sixty-one shops, with five more in the pipeline. The possibility of a separate Scottish enterprise, with exactly the same range but everything tartan, was being considered. He recommended that a committee of inquiry should be established to study its feasibility. David Harris-Jones summed up the UK prospects in one well-chosen word: super.

Tony Webster, Deputy Head of Expansion (UK), reported on the achievements of individual shops and the lessons that could be learnt from them in the siting and design of future shops. David Harris-Jones had described the prospects as Super. Tony Webster would go further. They were Great.

Seamus Finnegan, Admin Officer, outlined the organizational changes that were needed. Streamlining, Mr Finnegan suggested, was the man who would lead them on their way. Close behind would be those two splendid fellows, centralization and rationalization. Everyone was impressed. The appointment of the greying son of Erin was regarded as Reggie’s master stroke, and Reggie hid his chagrin with difficulty.

Joan brought in coffee and a selection of biscuits, including rich tea, rich osborne and garibaldi.

‘You can see how prosperous we are,’ said Reggie, ‘from our wide range of pumice stones.’

‘Pumice stones?’ said C.J.

‘When I say pumice stones, I mean biscuits,’ said Reggie. ‘What does it matter what we call things?’

Elizabeth, C.J., David and Tony avoided each other’s eyes in embarrassment.

Reggie held a garibaldi aloft.

‘Garibaldi was a great man,’ he said. ‘He made the biscuits run on time.’

Doc Morrissey, Head of Forward Planning, explained his idea for the September sales, and also suggested the creation of Grot trading stamps, enabling the holder to collect a range of even more useless items from Grot redemption centres. The less stamps you had, the more you would collect.

Tom, Head of Publicity, gave some of his ideas for adverts, slogans and publicity hand-outs. There is not space to reveal them all in this modest tome, but perhaps his best effort was the slogan:

‘Grot’s the ideal place for gifts,

Because it’s all on one floor so there aren’t any lifts.’

Jimmy, Head of Creative Thinking, spoke last. The leathery ex-soldier stood rigid from a mixture of habit, sciatica and embarrassment.

‘Not come up with much,’ he said. ‘New business, feeling my way, walk before you can fly.’

‘Come come,’ said Reggie. ‘I know you’ve got one or two exhibits in that Pandora’s box of yours.’

Jimmy’s weatherbeaten face flushed like an Arctic dawn.

‘Couple of things here,’ he said, and he lifted from his tuck box a very complicated, messily constructed machine – a mass of wheels, pulleys and chains, like a cross between the insides of a clock, a pit-head wheel, a mangle, a big dipper and a praying mantis. He placed it on the table and began to turn a handle. The machine clanked, clattered, rotated, slid, rose and fell.

Everybody watched in rapt silence.

‘It’s great,’ pronounced Tony Webster.

‘Super,’ affirmed David Harris-Jones.

‘It makes Heath Robinson look like Le Corbusier,’ said Seamus Finnegan. ‘It is a nag of distinct possibilities.’

‘What is it?’ said C.J.

That was the only snag. Jimmy had no idea what it was.

‘It isn’t anything,’ he said.

‘Brilliant,’ said Tony Webster. ‘Completely useless.’

‘I didn’t get where I am today without knowing a completely useless machine when I see one,’ said C.J.

‘It should be possible to refine it until all its functions cancel out all its other functions,’ said Seamus Finnegan.

‘Well done, Jimmy,’ said Elizabeth.

‘Another idea here,’ said Jimmy, emboldened by his success.

He produced a squat, mis-shapen object like an upside-down kiln covered in huge warts.

This was greeted with less than widespread enthusiasm. The reluctance of the British public to buy upside-down kilns covered in huge warts is a sine qua non in trading circles.

Reggie permitted himself a smile. This was more like it.

‘What is it?’ said Doc Morrissey hoarsely.

Jimmy’s courage, so potent during tactical exercises on Lüneburg Heath, failed him now.

‘Guess,’ he said lamely.

‘I didn’t get where I am today by guessing what upside-down kilns covered in huge warts are,’ said C.J.

‘You have to guess,’ said Jimmy stubbornly, hoping that someone would hit upon a suggestion less foolish than his own.

‘Oh, I see,’ said David Harris-Jones. ‘We call it the “Guess What It’s For”. A sort of extension of our game with no rules. Hours of fun for all the family.’

‘Not a bad idea,’ said Tom.

‘A gelding of an intriguing hue,’ said Seamus Finnegan.

‘Well done,’ said Elizabeth.

Jimmy shuddered. Elizabeth’s phrase had reminded him of Clive ‘Lofty’ Anstruther, and the glory that might have been.

Failure is a perverse mistress. Fear her, and she is in your bed before you can say redundancy. Court her, and she hides coyly behind life’s haystacks.

So it was with Reggie. The greater efforts he made to fail, the greater his success became.

Summer ripened into autumn, and the success of Perrin Products and of Grot continued unabated.

Seamus Finnegan’s reorganizations were already paying dividends. The first European shops were opened, and business was brisk. Tom’s adverts became a minor cult. In a medium where slick rubs shoulders with smooth, his clumsy efforts caused laughter and admiration. After he had been dubbed the McGonagall of Admass, there was no looking back. And Jimmy’s useless machine and his Guess What It’s For proved highly promising sellers. A leading colour supplement reflected – in black and white – upon the relationship between art and commerce. Commerce, it suggested, habitually paddled in the waters where art had bathed. If it found the water not to be too cold, it ventured further in. Thus it should not be surprising to anybody that, two decades after the heyday of Theatre of the Absurd, we should find ourselves with Commerce of the Absurd.

The cruet sets with no holes in them were displayed at the Design Centre.

Other shops copied Grot, but they had not the same aura of exclusivity.

Perhaps the greatest success of all was Doc Morrissey’s idea for January sales in September. Messages like ‘Great January Sale – four months early’, ‘Giant Rubbish Sale’, ‘Huge Increases’, ‘50 per cent on everything’ received saturation coverage on television and radio.

Outside the Grot shop in Oxford Street, Europe’s premier shopping blot, people began to queue two days before the sales.

ITN reporter Fergus Clitheroe interviewed the front runners.

‘Where are you from?’ he asked a heavily bearded giant.

‘Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory of Australia,’ replied the hirsute man-mountain. ‘Do you want a tube of Fosters?’

‘But if you waited a fortnight, you could get all the stuff you wanted for fifty per cent less.’

‘Wouldn’t be interviewed on television, would I? Do you want a tube of Fosters?’

Two schoolboys explained that they were playing truant from school and if they bought Christmas presents in the sale people would know that they loved them because they’d spent so much. A cockney lady said, ‘It’s a sale, innit? That’s good enough for me,’ and a dark sallow melancholy Welshman said, ‘Queueing’s in my blood, see. My mam missed the whole of the 1936 Derby. She was queueing for the ladies, see. Minding her P’s and Q’s, you might say. The war was the time, you queued to join queues then. Nowadays it’s just the Bolshoi and the sales. People are friendly in queues, see. Like the old days. Can’t get the queueing in Lampeter, see. Under-population, that’s the bugbear.’

And of course, when the triumphant September sales ended, and all the prices were reduced by fifty per cent again, there were further queues from bargain hunters. Doc Morrissey had invented the fifty week a year sales.

Clearly, more desperate measures were needed from Reggie, if Grot were ever to be destroyed.

A golden opportunity for self-destruction soon presented itself.

Chapter 24

On Monday, October the fourth, as Reggie was getting out of bed, Simon Watkins, MP for Climthorpe, collapsed and died after an all night sitting in the House of Commons.

The weather was cloudy but dry. Breakfast was perfect. Ponsonby was listless. The newspapers were gloomy. Reggie’s motions were adequate.

One of the less gloomy newspaper articles was in the
Guardian
. It was an in-depth interview with Reggie Perrin.

‘I’ll show them,’ thought Reggie, as he read of his success. ‘I’ll give them “middle-aged fairy story”.’