Alexander McCall Smith - The Dog Who Came In From The Cold

Mr Marchbanks was wide-eyed. “Amorous, Mr Moongrove? Well, bless me! They say that these cars do help a bit in that department.”

“I always control myself,” said Terence quickly. “I’m sure that the Highway Code has something to say about amorousness and cars.” He paused, composing himself after the admission. “But I do find that people look at me with what I’m tempted to describe as respect. Very strange.”

And now that respect had meant that a car that had been thinking of claiming his parking spot near the station yielded when the driver saw him coming. Terence slipped into the parking place and, with time on his hands, walked into the station to buy a newspaper before Berthea arrived. So spent, the time passed quickly and there she was, his sister, carrying her weekend bag and waving to him from the end of the platform. Dear Berthy, he thought. So many things change in the world, but she always looks the same: same funny old jumper and odd-looking skirt; same old weekend bag, a holdall that she had had for ages and ages and which Uncle Edgar bought to take to Madeira.

And Berthea, for her part, looking down the platform, saw her brother walking towards her and thought: Dear Terence! What a disaster area he is! That defeated old cardigan and those shoes with the Velcro fastenings. And his ghastly glasses. Oh dear! He must be the only Porsche driver in the world – in the whole world – who wears shoes with Velcro fastenings. What a distinction to have in this life.

“Berthy!” exclaimed Terence, looking at his watch. “Your train’s arrived on the dot – on the absolute dot. Just as Mussolini promised it would. Only he wasn’t talking about England, was he? And he made such a beastly mess of Italy, didn’t he?”

Berthea leaned forward and kissed him lightly on his left cheek. “I have stopped noticing when trains arrive or do not arrive,” she said. “My life is quite full enough without that to exercise me.”

“Time is relative,” said Terence, reaching to take her holdall from her. “It’s a tyranny we invent for ourselves.”

“Mmm,” said Berthea.

“And anyway,” said Terence, “Like you, I find myself far too busy to think about time.”

Berthea threw him a sideways glance. Her brother, as far as she knew, had absolutely nothing to do – apart from his ridiculous sacred dancing and the occasional meetings of the various lunatic societies to which he belonged. How could he possibly be busy?

They made their way to the car. “I’ve got a nice surprise for you,” said Terence as he opened the passenger door for her.

“I’ve already seen this car,” said Berthea. “And I must say …”

He cut her short. “No, not the car. It’s nothing to do with the car. It’s a surprise for you at the house.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. I’ve got some people staying there. Roger and Claire. They’re terribly nice people. You’ll like them, I know it. They’re writing a book together, and they’re staying with me while they do it.” He laughed modestly. “I suppose that makes me a sort of patron of literature. Like those people who had salons. Madame de Staël, and people like that.”

Berthea said nothing. She was not going to like Roger and Claire – she knew it.

“Their book is very important,” said Terence. “It’s going to change the way we think about so much.”

Berthea looked out of the window. “How long is it going to take for them to write this magnum opus?” she asked.

“Four years,” said Terence. Then he added. “That’s for volume one, of course.” He paused. “And, listen, Berthy, it’s very unkind of you to call it a magnum opus in that sarcastic tone. Naughty, naughty! I’ve read about salons, you know, and there was a very strict etiquette, which included not saying anything nasty about the books of those present. Which in this case means Rog and Claire.”

Berthea sighed. Madame de Staël. Rog and Claire. Five minutes in my brother’s company and I’m already wading in a morass of intellectual treacle.

But the conversation soon moved on, as it always did with Terence. Flight of ideas, thought Berthea – but not quite. It was true that Terence could talk at great length – and frequently did – but there was usually a reasonable connection between the topics he rambled on about. A true example of flight of ideas would go from this to that at the bat of an eyelid, and that would, of course, be indicative of bipolar disorder or attention deficit disorder, or even schizophrenia. No, Terence was afflicted with none of those things – Berthea’s trained eye could spot that well enough. His problem, she thought, was more one of magical thinking. He had spoken to her – as well as to Mr Marchbanks – about the memory of water, and that was a good example of the problem. He wanted the world to be otherwise than it really was; he wanted to see causality and connection where none really existed. He wanted to believe that pure thought could change the world.

She paused. Who doesn’t? she asked herself. As children we try to create the world along the lines we want it to be. We wish an imagined world into existence through play – castles and kingdoms, fairies and elves, imaginary friends – but at some point we have to let go of it. Santa Claus dies; for all of us a personally felt demise that brings down one of the great pillars of that self-created world. From then on, although reality asserts itself for most of us, for some the memory of that power to create, the memory of that universe of the imagining, persists. It is this that tempts us still to believe that the world actually functions in ways other than those that we understand through our senses. How sad, she thought, and she was reminded of those patients of hers who were stuck in some earlier stage of their development, for example the city trader who sat in her consulting room once a month and repetitively recited, in loving, nostalgic detail, the events of his eighth year, when the world was innocent and fresh and he was happy. And then wept – not every session, but often enough – for everything that he had lost. Slowly she was leading him to an understanding of why he mourned, laying bare his unhappiness.

Or how about the woman who would talk only of her mother, and of what mother had thought about things. Everything triggered a maternal memory; Berthea had given her a cup of tea, and she had launched into a long description of the china her mother had once possessed but which had been broken by the removal men. Removal men, Berthea had written in her notes, and underlined the words. Removal men were such a powerful metaphor for brutal change, for dispossession, for the shattering of the security of the domestic universe. They came and put our life into boxes and took it away. Boxes, wrote Berthea, and underlined that too.

She glanced at Terence beside her, at the wheel of his Porsche. Then she looked at the speedometer. Twenty-eight miles per hour, and they were out of the speed limit zone, as Terence’s house was just into the country on the very fringes of Cheltenham. Poor Terence, with his magical thinking, and his Porsche …

“I do like this little car of yours, Terence,” said Berthea. “But you must miss that old Morris of yours.”

“Morris is gone,” said Terence firmly. “Mr Marchbanks took him away.”

Berthea smiled. Morris is gone. The title of a novel, perhaps. Or a song, like that haunting one she had heard the other day, “Tortoise Regrets Hare”. Terence regrets Morris. Morris gone.

“Yes, maybe he’s gone,” Berthea said. “But don’t you miss familiar objects, once they break or are replaced or whatever? I do. I had to throw out an old pair of slippers the other day. You know, those sheepskin ones – I used to bring them down here for the weekend and pad about your house in them. Frightfully comfortable.”