Corduroy Mansions Page 0,65

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