Alexander McCall Smith - Corduroy Mansions

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.

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 Marchbanks 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 . . .’

‘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.

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.