Alexander McCall Smith - Corduroy Mansions

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.

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 they?’

‘And then I changed seats and found myself opposite a man who sucked air through his false teeth,’ Berthea went on. ‘He did that until blessedly he fell asleep.’

‘Terribly tiresome,’ said Terence. ‘Still, here you are, and you can put your old feet up and nobody is going to talk on a mobile or suck air through his teeth. I promise.’

Berthea reached out and touched her brother appreciatively on the arm. ‘Thank you, dear. You are an oasis, you know. A real oasis.’

He may have been an oasis, but she was not entirely sure whether she approved of the reference to her old feet . Chronologically, her feet might have been slightly older than his, she being a few years his senior. But even if her feet were in their early sixties, they were, she felt, in rather good shape for their age. The problem with Terence, she thought, was that he had not aged along with everybody else. He imagined that life was yet to happen, whereas in fact it had already largely happened for him.

These thoughts were nothing new to Berthea. And that, she reflected, was the central stumbling block in her relationship with her brother. They were exactly where they had always been - as siblings often tended to be in their relations with one another. She saw it so often in her professional life - people came to her with the emotional baggage of family relationships and, on analysis, this was found to be baggage they had been bearing all their lives. They thought the same things about their brothers or sisters that they had thought when they were ten, twelve, eighteen, twenty-six, forty - and so on. Nothing changed.

The Morris moved off, its tiny engine labouring as Terence moved through the gears.

‘I’ve made a leek pie for tonight,’ he said. ‘And we can have a glass of my latest batch of elderflower wine. Very tasty.’

‘Perfect,’ said Berthea.

‘And then tomorrow morning you might care to join me for my paneurhythmy,’ he continued. ‘Forty-five minutes. That’s all.’

Berthea looked steadily ahead. ‘Your sacred dancing? This Bulgarian stuff?’

‘Precisely,’ said Terence. ‘I have looked up what time dawn may be expected tomorrow, and we must be ready to align the meridians and chakras. The Beings of Light will be in attendance.’

Berthea looked out of the window. She was not sure who the Beings of Light were. Were they residents of Cheltenham or were they, as Terence himself might put it, resident on some other plane not immediately visible to us?

‘I shall do my best,’ she said. ‘Although you will have to explain things to me, Terence. My rather literal mind, I’m afraid, precludes my full participation.’

Terence smiled benignly. ‘Peter Deunov met many who felt the same way,’ he said. ‘They inevitably stayed to dance. Many of them danced until they could dance no more, and were absorbed by Spirit.’

They drove on in silence as Berthea digested this information. I must not let this distress me, she told herself. The fact that my brother thinks about the world very differently from me is no reflection on my own Weltanschauung . It simply is not. But that, of course, is a difficult thing to accept, and I must remain calm.

They turned off the main road and onto a smaller road that meandered gently downhill, and it was here that the engine of the old Morris, which had been running quietly enough until then, gave a loud cough, expressed in the form of a backfire, and then became silent. Slowly the car came to a halt at the side of the road.

For a short time, Terence sat glumly behind the wheel, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. Then he turned to his sister.

‘The car has stopped,’ he said. ‘I’m terribly sorry about this. It really has stopped.’

Berthea looked at her brother. ‘So it appears.’

There was another silence. From the engine there came a slight ticking sound, and Berthea briefly thought that this might be a sign of life, but it was merely the sound of cooling metal. Above them, sitting on the branch of a tree, a large blackbird looked down and uttered a few notes of song.

‘That’s so beautiful,’ said Terence, looking up. ‘Birdsong is so pure.’

‘It is,’ said Berthea. ‘Very pure.’

Terence drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. ‘I should perhaps get out and take a look at the engine,’ he said.

Berthea took a deep breath. ‘Is there much point?’

But Terence had already opened his door and walked round to stand in front of the bonnet. Berthea joined him.

‘It’s extraordinary,’ said Terence, gazing at the bull nose of the vehicle. ‘It’s extraordinary how an engine can be humming along in a spirit of perfect contentment one moment and then the next it is silent. As if the energy fields have all suddenly dissipated. Cars, you see, have chakras, just as people do.’

Berthea spoke quietly. ‘How about calling the AA?’

Terence shook his head. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘I’ve called them rather a lot, you see. They know my car. They are quite pure beings, but I don’t know if I should bother them again.’

‘When did you call them last?’ asked Berthea.

Terence hesitated. ‘Not all that long ago, I’m afraid.’ He sighed. ‘Well, to be precise, I called them on the way to the station. We had a little episode just a little bit further down the road. Not far from here, in fact.’

‘Not far from here?’ repeated Berthea.

Terence nodded.

‘Do you think,’ Berthea began, ‘that it may be something to do with the energy fields round here? Perhaps we’re on a ley line.’

Terence looked at her with sudden interest. ‘Do you really think so? They said something about petrol, you know, but I wonder . . .’

By the time her brother’s leek pie was ready, Berthea had largely recovered from the irritation she had felt during the longish walk from the collapsed Morris 1000 Traveller to Terence’s Queen Anne house just outside the bounds of the town. He had helped her with her luggage - a small overnight case - but she had been obliged to carry her own briefcase, which was stuffed with papers and books for weekend perusal. Terence’s library, although extensive, was full of books that she found vague and unsatisfactory, gaseous indeed - there would be no intellectual meat for her there .