He dusted his hands on the side of his jeans. “I was wondering …,” he began.
“Do you need a lift up there?”
She had not intended to say this; it just came out.
He smiled. “Well, I wouldn’t mind. I was going to catch a train, but I’d have to walk down to the station and get a ticket …” He shrugged, and smiled in a self-consciously helpless way. “And I’d far rather travel in a car like yours than in a train.”
“Why not?”
“That’s great.”
She glanced into the open-top car. “Have you got a suitcase? There’s not all that much room, but I can shift my things a bit.”
He had only a small bag, which he went into the hotel to retrieve. While he did that, Barbara moved the car to the side of the parking place and took stock of her situation. One should not give lifts to a stranger; that was now an elementary precaution, which anybody would be considered very unwise to ignore. The days of hitchhikers standing by the roadside seemed to be well and truly over, such was the distrust that prevailed. Everybody was a potential assailant; nobody spoke to one another for fear of being misinterpreted; nobody comforted another, put an arm around a shoulder—to do so would be to invite accusation. And yet here I am, thought Barbara, picking up a man whose name I don’t even know, allowing him to get into the car, and driving off to London. Anything could happen.
She reached for the key in the ignition. The simplest thing to do, the safest thing, would be to start the engine and drive out while he was fetching his bag. She turned the key and the engine sprang to life.
43. Terence’s Battery Has a Near-Death Experience
“I CAN’T START IT,” said Terence Moongrove, coming back into the kitchen where his sister, Berthea Snark, was reading a newspaper.
Terence’s Morris Traveller had been towed back to the house the previous evening by the proprietor of a local garage, who, knowing the car well, had encountered it on the roadside and returned it to its home while Terence and Berthea were having dinner. He had refused payment, an act of kindness that had deeply impressed Berthea.
“That sort of thing would never happen in London,” she said. “Nobody would be that kind.”
“Oh, I’m sure that people in London are as kind as anywhere else,” said Terence. “They just don’t have the time to show it.”
“I doubt it,” said Berthea. “Too many people. It changes one’s attitude to others. Simple social psychology. Put a whole lot of rats in a cage and they fight. Put one or two in and they get along reasonably well.”
Terence looked doubtful. “Are you sure about that? I mean, about people? I can understand about rats—nasty, long-tailed creatures. And those teeth! Have you seen their teeth, Berthy? They’ve got long, slightly curved teeth, like that. Jolly sharp, I imagine.” He paused. “But people? Do they really fight just because there’s a lot of them in the same space? Look at the Japanese. Their cities are jolly full of people. Have you seen the pictures of their train stations? They have these men who wear white gloves and push people into the carriages so that the doors can close. What a horrible job, Berthy—I wouldn’t do it for a hundred pounds. I really wouldn’t.
“Yet the Japanese don’t fight with one another,” Terence went on. “They behave terribly well. Japanese cities are not like our cities at night—with all that shouting and heaven knows what. And—”
“That’s alcohol,” Berthea interjected. “And the Japanese have manners. They’re very particular about how to behave and that means that everybody gets on very well with one another even in a confined space. Manners, Terence. Something we’re losing sight of. We laugh at people who bow to one another but the bow is an act of respect, and respect leads to considerate behaviour. We could learn a lot from the Japanese. In particular, we could learn how to live harmoniously in crowded spaces. We could learn about territory.”
Terence thought about this. “We must rise above the territorial,” he said. “Obviously our territory is finite, and we will find ourselves contesting it. But if we project ourselves onto another, altogether higher plane, then physical territory will matter much less.”
Berthea pursed her lips. “Not everyone,” she said, “can exist on a higher plane. I, for example—”
“But you could!” interrupted Terence. “You really could, Berthy! You need to try, that’s all.”
Berthea sighed. “What you describe as a higher plane, Terence, is probably just a slightly altered mental state. A dissociative state, I’d say. Anybody can experience that.”
Terence looked out of the window. “You can’t say that. You’re just reducing it to a matter of brain chemistry. It’s more than that.”
“You’re wrong,” said Berthea. “I am not a reductionist in that way. If I were, I can assure you that I would not be a psychoanalyst. All I’m pointing out to you is that there are dissociative states of mind that can be mistaken for something else. A state of religious ecstasy might involve dissociation. Or even the state of mind that one is in when one is driving and suddenly realises that one has covered quite some distance and not really been aware of it.”
She realised that the motoring example might be a sensitive one. Did Terence drive, she wondered, while he was on a higher plane? Or did he come down from the higher plane before he started to drive, and then return to it later on? Either way, she was not sure whether she would be at all confident making any car journey with him other than the relatively direct one from the railway station to his house. That took them along quiet residential roads, where nobody would be held up by the Morris Traveller’s customary speed of twenty miles per hour or Terence’s habit of driving in the middle of the road.
Now, seated in Terence’s kitchen on Saturday morning, with the newspaper in front of her and a cup of coffee at her side, Berthea listened while Terence described his efforts to start the Morris Traveller.
“Mr. Marchbanks told me that he had put some petrol in,” he said. “He had a can of petrol in his truck and he realised that I might have run out, so he put it in. But it still won’t start.”
Berthea frowned. “Does it make any noise at all?”
“No,” said Terence. “It’s as quiet as anything. Nothing happens. Nothing at all. It’s as if it’s in one of your dissociative states.”
“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 invented 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. March
banks 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 …”
Corduroy Mansions Page 16
