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not conceive of what she would say about denial, beyond pointing out that it happened. She could emphasise that one should not deny, but everybody knew that anyway. Could she say, then, that denial was a good thing? That would be original at least. And then, when challenged in interviews—she would be invited onto all the best chat shows—she could simply deny that she said it in the first place, thereby making a very vivid point about denial.
The daydream ended, and so, eventually, did the journey. The man with the ill-fitting teeth had dozed off and remained asleep until shortly before Cheltenham. Berthea looked out of the window at the passing countryside. London seemed so far away, almost a different country from this world of fields and narrow lanes and slower lives. She thought: What if I packed everything up and came to live out here, perhaps sharing with Terence? She was on her way to spend the weekend with her brother, Terence Moongrove, who had more than once suggested that she might care to share his house in Cheltenham. It was easily large enough for two, he said, and she could even have a separate entrance if she wished. She had declined his offer, although it distressed her to do so. Terence was lonely—he was one of the loneliest men she knew—and it would have meant so much to him to have her living with him.
But she could not. She was a psychoanalyst, and she imagined that it would take time to build up a practice in a place like Cheltenham. She knew that there was an Institute of Psychotherapy in the West Country—she had met some of its members at conferences—but was there enough neurosis to keep them all going? Human unhappiness, of course, was universal, but somehow she imagined that it did not occur with quite the same intensity in the little villages that the train was flashing past. What was there to be anxious about out here? Why feel inadequate or troubled when nobody was paying much attention to you because the hay had to be got in or the cows milked, or whatever it was that people did in such places? If they did any of that any more, she reflected; or were they all plugged into the Web, running hedge funds from the ends of these little lanes?
Of course, Cheltenham was slightly different. It was a place where people went to the races or retired to or came to make and sell pottery. And not all of these people would be free of the neuroses they had brought with them from somewhere else. So perhaps she might not be completely without something to do after all.
But no, she could not share with poor Terence. And if she sold up in London and bought her own house here, then Terence would simply be in and out of her door every day. And he had a habit of just sitting there, going on and on about Nepal or his collection of amulets or whatever it was that he was enthusing over at the time. Sacred dance, she remembered, was his current interest. He had got hold of a book by a Bulgarian mystic called Peter Deunov, who had developed a system of dance called paneurhythmy. He had gone to Bulgaria, she believed, and danced on a mountain there; she had received a postcard which simply said “Love in the morning,” and, beneath that, “Terence.”
She smiled as she alighted from the train. Dear Terence. For all his faults, he was her brother, and he meant well, even if it was sometimes rather difficult to work out exactly what it was that he meant.
28. Beings of Light
TERENCE MOONGROVE, searcher after truth—and self—had parked his Morris 1000 Traveller in the spot where he always collected his sister, Berthea Snark, when she came down to Cheltenham to visit him. She knew where to look, and spotted him immediately and waved to him as he sat in the car, his large round spectacles catching the light. Her wave was the signal for him to sound the horn of the ancient vehicle.
“I’ve had a very difficult trip down,” she said as she eased herself into the passenger seat of the half-timbered car. “The woman opposite me insisted on conducting a conversation on her mobile phone in a very loud voice, as per usual.”
“Very tiresome,” said Terence, reaching forward to turn the key in the ignition. “Such people really are the end, aren’t