‘Battery,’ said Berthea simply. ‘If nothing happens when you turn the key, it means that your battery’s dead.’
Terence digested this. ‘Dead?’
‘Well, batteries don’t necessarily die with such finality,’ said Berthea. ‘They have what I suppose you, Terence dear, might call a near-death experience.’
The metaphor was exactly what Terence needed to grasp the state of his battery. ‘Ah! I see. So a battery that has a near-death experience comes back? Its life isn’t entirely over?’
‘Precisely,’ said Berthea. ‘And what you can do is you can give the battery more . . . more life force.’
‘More electricity?’
‘Yes. You charge it, you see. You take electricity from the mains and you put it in the battery. Then the starter motor will - or may - work. I think perhaps that is what you should do.’
Terence nodded. He had seen where the battery of the Morris Traveller was, and although he was not sure how to remove it, he knew that he had a long extension cord in the garage. Mr Jones, the man who came to cut the lawn, used it to enable him to take the electric lawn mower to the far end of the garden. Now, if Terence simply removed the plug socket from the end of the extension cable he could then separate the two wires, strip them at the ends, and wind them round the terminals of the battery. Then he could turn on the switch at the wall and revitalise the battery in that way.
It seemed simple, and he decided that he would do it while Berthea finished reading her newspaper and drinking her coffee. She thought he was impractical - oh, he knew that, all right. Well, he would show her.
44. Don’t Try This at Home
Terence Moongrove left Berthea in the kitchen and made his way to the garage off to one side of the house. Mr Marchbanks, who had rescued Terence’s Morris Traveller, had pushed the car into the garage with its nose facing outward, pending some resolution of its mechanical plight. He had rescued Terence on many occasions before and knew the car well; indeed, he had fixed it several times over the last few months.
‘They make new cars, Mr Moongrove,’ he had observed to Terence the last time that the car had been in his garage. ‘Have you ever thought of getting something a bit more up to date? Not that I’ve got anything against Morris Travellers, of course. Just asking.’
Terence frowned. ‘But should we be rushing around replacing our cars all the time?’ he asked.
‘How long have you had this Morris?’
‘Oh, not all that long. Thirty years - something like that.’
Mr Marchbanks sighed. ‘I wouldn’t call it rushing around replacing a car if you got a new one now. Some people change their car every three years, you know. Alfie Bismarck down the road gets a new Jag every year. Regular as clockwork.’
Terence shook his head. He disapproved of Alfie Bismarck. ‘I would certainly not get a new Traveller every year,’ he said. ‘Out of the question.’
‘You couldn’t, Mr Moongrove. They don’t make Travellers any more.’
Terence expressed surprise. ‘But they’re such good cars,’ he said. ‘With this wood and everything.’
Mr Marchbanks explained that very few cars were made of wood now; only the Morgan, which had a chassis made of Belgian ash. But it was no use trying to talk to Terence Moongrove about Morgans, Mr Marchbanks thought: he was dangerous enough in a Morris Traveller and would be lethal in anything more powerful.
Now, as he stood in front of the static Morris Traveller, Terence wondered whether he should telephone Mr Marchbanks and ask for advice on how to charge the battery. He almost did, but in the end decided not to; he was looking forward to announcing to Berthea that he had fixed the car himself. He was fond of his sister but she tended to condescend to him, and he felt it was about time that it was brought home to her that there was something he could do.
He went inside the garage. He had seen Mr Jones hang the extension cable on a hook at the back. He was another one, he thought; he also believed that Terence Moongrove was incapable, in this case of looking after his own garden tools. Ever since that incident with the rake - which was not my fault, Terence muttered to himself - Mr Jones had stacked the tools away somewhere and wouldn’t tell him where they were. He had thought of inviting the gardener to join in the sacred dance, but was not going to do so now - not after the language he used. Such a person would certainly not fit in with the other adherents of paneurhythmy. What if somebody inadvertently trod on his toes and he said some of the things that Terence Moongrove had heard him say? Perhaps the Beings of Light would not understand the words and would therefore not be distressed; one could never tell.
The cable was where he had thought. Unhooking it, Terence examined the end and saw that there was a square plastic box attached to it. He knew what that was: those holes received the plug, obviously, but the whole thing could be taken off if one simply removed the screws. He made short work of it, using a screwdriver that had been left lying around by Mr Jones, or Mr Marchbanks, or possibly that boy from down the road who always seemed to be fiddling about in his garage.
It was now a simple enough business to strip off a small amount of outer cable covering and end up with a reasonable length of separated wires, one black and one red, it being an old-fashioned cable. Terence now plugged the other end of the cable into the mains. He knew exactly where the battery was, and how to open the bonnet of the car; he had watched Mr Marchbanks do this often enough and it took only a small amount of fumbling with the catch to reveal what he was looking for.
Terence remembered what his sister had said: the electricity from the mains would run into the battery and charge it. He was not sure how long this would take, but he would err on the side of caution and give it at least two minutes. That should do it.
He attached the black wire to one of the terminals and the red wire to the other. Then he surveyed his handiwork. It was quite an interesting business, he thought. Perhaps he could enrol for one of those courses that taught you home mechanics. That would mean that he would have to trouble Mr Marchbanks a bit less frequently. He could even have conversations with him about mechanical matters. He had heard Mr Marchbanks talking about big ends and he would be able to discuss them with him. Big ends were a problem, he knew, judging from Mr Marchbanks’s grave expression when he spoke of them, and there was obviously a lot to be said about them. But that could come later; for the moment there was the issue of the charging of the battery.
The socket into which the plug end of the cable had been inserted was on the garage wall immediately beside the car. This meant that when Terence turned it on with his right hand, his left hand was touching the side of the Morris Traveller. So when, with a flash, the entire car went live, Terence received the current through his left hand.
There was an explosive sound. There was a small wisp of smoke. There was a slightly acrid smell, as of burned rubber. Terence, half thrown from the side of the car, half felled, slumped over the front mudguard. Then he rolled sideways, cutting himself on the bumper as he did so and ending up on the concrete floor of the garage. There his face came to rest on the oily patch where the Morris Traveller had, while undergoing surgery from Mr Marchbanks, discharged half its oil; the blood of the car and the blood of its owner for a moment mixed.
45. In the Ambulance
Berthea Snark, having finished her coffee and been depressed by the newspapers, had left the kitchen and gone into the drawing room at the front of the house. She had been cast into gloom by what she had read in the newspapers about the banking difficulties that the country was experiencing. It was not that she feared for her own situation - she made a reasonable income from her psychotherapeutic practice and had also received, as had Terence, a half-share of their father’s estate on his death. That was more than enough for anybody, since Walter Moongrove had been a successful London stockbroker of the old type - upright and financially righteous in every respect. How he would have disapproved of these people who had got us into this trouble - the reckless bankers who inv
ented money, just invented it, she thought.
She mused on the Freudian view of the banking crisis. Financial systems were not abstract entities dreamed up by dispassionate architects: they were human working practices caught up in the messy real world. That meant that the psychopathology of those people running such systems would determine the operation of the system; Berthea was sure of it. And therein lay the problem: banks had been taken over by the wrong types.
The real key to the crisis, then, was this: if banks were run by hoarders, then they would be slow to lend money they did not have. They would accumulate rather than dispose of money, and they would never risk funds they did not have. So what one wanted, then, was a class of bankers who were predominantly retentives - people who had not moved from an early stage of infantile sexuality to the more mature stage. In other words, a good banker would be one who had moved on from the oral stage of early infancy but had not progressed beyond the next stage. They were the ones. But recruitment might be difficult. She could determine if they were at that stage of course, but she was not sure whether the sort of questions one had to ask would be easy to ask in a job interview.
She was thinking of this - and smiling to herself - as she entered the drawing room. That was the wonderful thing about Freudian theory, she thought: it gave one an acute insight into all aspects of human behaviour, including history and, as she had just imagined, economics; even mechanics, even Morris Travellers . . .
She looked out of the window towards the garage. What on earth was Terence up to? Looking at his Morris. That would not do much good. She would have to speak to him about a new car - indeed, she wondered whether she should not have a word with Mr Marchbanks and get him to arrange it. She could easily fund it - not that Terence was short of funds, but he had difficulty in spending money on himself; retentive in that respect, she decided, but not in others. He was very generous when it came to presents and sharing.
What was he doing? Terence sometimes talked about resolving problems through meditation. One could summon up great energy, he claimed, simply by thinking hard about something. He even hinted that he had seen objects levitated by this method, but declined to give concrete instances. ‘You’ll see, Berthy,’ he said. ‘One day you’ll see.’
And now she did. Now she saw Terence suddenly slump forward and fall across the front of the car. Then she saw him drop to the ground, where he remained, motionless. For a moment Berthea was unable to do anything. Then, with remarkable clarity of purpose, she suppressed the urge to run out to her brother’s side and instead spun round, snatched up the telephone and called for an ambulance. That coolness of purpose, which resulted in the arrival of the ambulance within minutes, saved the life of Terence Moongrove.
The telephone call made, Berthea ran out to the garage. She moved the inert form of her brother away from the side of the car. She saw the oil on the side of his face, and the blood. She bent down and tried to establish whether he was breathing; he was not. She let out a wail and pounded on his chest; she positioned his head to ensure unblocked airways. A stroke, she thought. A stroke.
Before she knew it she heard the sound of the ambulance’s siren, and then it was pulling up right there.
‘My brother,’ she said. ‘My brother . . .’
There was an ambulance man and an ambulance woman. They crouched beside Terence and moved him gently onto a stretcher. Then they whisked the stretcher into the back of the ambulance.
‘I want to be with him. He’s my brother . . .’
‘All right, dear,’ said the ambulance man. ‘Sit with Holly in the back.’
Berthea was to have only a vague recollection of what happened in the ambulance on its breakneck journey to the hospital. Holly, the ambulance woman, worked on Terence’s chest. She applied an instrument that looked like some sort of iron. Terence shuddered. She felt his pulse; she did something else. Berthea wept. My brother, my only brother.
She closed her eyes and she saw Terence, not as a man, but as a little boy. She saw him standing with his teddy bear and then bending down and putting the limbs of the teddy bear through the motions of dance. Had it begun that early? she wondered. Were those the seeds of all this, of the sacred dance? Watch children playing, she had always advised; see them enact their inner dramas with their toys.
Poor Terence. Poor, dear, gentle Terence. He had been searching for something all his life - he said as much himself - and he had never found it. And that thing, of course, was love, although he never saw it that way. He said that he was looking for enlightenment, for beauty; he said that he was looking for the sacred principle that informed the world. And all the time he was looking for that simple thing that all of us look for; that we yearn for throughout our lives. Just to be loved. That was all.
She took her brother’s hand and held it lightly. There was oil on it, or blood, she was not sure which. When had she last held his hand? When had she last held anybody’s hand? That simple gesture of fellow feeling, which expresses ordinary human solidarity, which says: you are not alone, I am with you. I am here.
46. Terence Moongrove has a Near-death Experience
At some point on the journey between the Moongrove Queen Anne house and the Accident and Emergency Department at Cheltenham General Hospital, Terence’s heart, which had stopped as a result of his coming into contact with an electrically live Morris Traveller, began to beat again. It had been still for a very few minutes, not long enough for the memories and attitudes stored somewhere in his brain to fade as their supporting cells died. But it was a close-run thing, and the ambulance lost no time in its journey to hospital, nor did anybody linger as Terence was wheeled in on a trolley and rushed into the care of his doctors.
Berthea had no time to reflect on the fact that she had saved her brother’s life. She sat fretting outside the ward where the doctors first assessed and then stabilised his condition, and when a nurse came out and whispered to her, ‘He’s coming round just fine - a few little burns on his hand but nothing much else,’ Berthea wept with relief. Not long after, she was ushered into the ward to stand at his bedside and find him looking at her with an expression of slight puzzlement.
‘What happened?’ Berthea asked. It was a trite thing to say to one who had just returned from the dead, and an insensitive thing too, even if not quite as tactless, perhaps, as asking, ‘What on earth did you do?’ - which is, of course, what she meant.
‘The Morris’s battery must have been faulty,’ said Terence. ‘I was charging it and I think that it exploded, or something like that.’ He waved a hand in the air to demonstrate the vagaries of car batteries.
Berthea frowned. ‘I didn’t know you had a battery charger,’ she said.
This remark was greeted by another expression of puzzlement from Terence. ‘Battery charger . . . ?’ He did not complete his sentence: Berthea was staring at him with a look that he knew well, a look made up of a mixture of incredulity and irritation. She began to say something, but thought better of it; a reunion with a brother saved from death was hardly the time to comment on a lack of technical understanding. There would be time for that later on. Or perhaps not; he would not change. All she could hope was that the divinity that hedges about those whose concerns run to sacred dance and Beings of Light would somehow be kind to him and protect him from the worst dangers of this world. And lightning, she reflected, tended not to strike in the same place twice. Could one say that same thing, though, of electricity? Somehow she thought not.
‘The important thing,’ Berthea muttered, ‘is that you did not die.’
Terence thought about this for a moment. ‘But I did,’ he said. ‘I died. The ambulance man told the doctor that my heart had stopped when they picked me up. And I saw them trying to start it in the ambulance with that pad thing. A battery charger perhaps.’
Berthea looked doubtful. ‘You saw that? But your eyes were quite closed, Terence. I was there, remember? I was in the ambulance with you.’
Terence nodded. ‘Yes, I sa
w you. I saw you sitting . . .’ He hesitated for a moment as he clarified his recollection. ‘You were sitting at the back, at my left side. You were holding a handkerchief in your hand and twisting it round and round. I saw you. I also saw you take my hand and look at the blood that was on it. Here, you see, where the bandage is.’
Berthea said nothing. She had the handkerchief in her pocket, and she remembered that she had twisted it so tightly that the fabric had torn.
‘You see,’ Terence continued, ‘I had died and I was hovering - that’s the only word for it - hovering at the top of the ambulance, looking down. I saw everything - you and the ambulance man and my own body lying there. It was very clear.
‘And then I was called away for a few minutes. I was led through a tunnel of some sort, a tunnel that had light at the end. Very bright, lovely light. And there were people there - very gentle people - who took my hand and said that I was forgiven. They said that they understood and I was not to worry about anything. And the AA was there too - some AA men in their uniforms, but with a light behind them, shining. They said I was not to worry about the Morris - they were very kind.’
Berthea could not contain her surprise. ‘AA men?’
‘Yes,’ said Terence. ‘They were not the usual AA men who come to help me with the car in Cheltenham. I did not know who these ones were. But one of them said, “Don’t imagine that there are no AA men in heaven. We’re here too. We’re ready.”
‘And then somebody came to my side and said to me, “It is not your time yet; you must go back. There is work for you to do.”’ Terence paused and looked at his sister. ‘Do you believe me, Berthy? Or do you think I’m making all this up?’
Berthea thought for a moment. She had read of near-death experiences and knew their general shape. People who had died - at least in the sense of their heart having stopped - upon recovery sometimes reported going through a tunnel and being ushered into the presence of light. They were sincere in these accounts, and often withheld them from others because they feared ridicule. She had put all this down to the last flickerings of oxygen-deprived consciousness, although the common features of these experiences were puzzling; if all this was entirely subjective, then surely accounts of these experiences would differ widely? Of course, Terence had introduced precisely such a subjective factor: AA men. That was ludicrous really, unless the AA men were symbolic of something - of care and attention and kindness to those in need. And why should they not be such symbols? In the iconography of European painting it was St Christopher who performed such a role; in the iconography of a society in which saints and their doings were becoming a distant memory, meaningless to so many, perhaps it was appropriate that AA men should fulfil the role saints had previously had.
Corduroy Mansions cm-1 Page 16