The Novel Habits of Happiness

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “You saw the meerkats?” Isabel asked. “Were they lovely, darling?”

  “Lots of meerkats,” said Charlie.

  “So I see. And any other animals?”

  “They were sleeping,” said Charlie. “Even the lions.”

  “Oh well,” said Isabel. “We can get by without lions, I think.” She did not like lions, those always rather restless, discontented creatures, even when filmed in the wild. They were, of course, high-ranking felines, and, much as she liked cats, she had always felt they were intrinsically psychopathic in their approach to life. They were capable of affection, but only intermittently and always on their terms. No cat, she thought, would make a sacrifice for its owner, whereas dogs did—readily and without question—and meant it too.

  Stories of friendship between people and lions were dubious, in Isabel’s view. Elsa, the famous lioness of Born Free, put on a good act of being on the side of the Adamsons but would have eaten them if she had been really hungry. And had that happened, the story of Born Free might have been somewhat different. The publishers would have had to publish an incomplete manuscript, explaining in the introduction that the book would have been a bit longer had the authors not been consumed by the subject of their story, but asking, nonetheless, for the reader’s understanding.

  The lions in Edinburgh Zoo were certainly well fed and well looked-after—a pensionable position, with lots of raw meat, that any lion in the wild might gladly accept. Yet there were some places that large animals simply should not be. She recalled a story told her by a friend who had been obliged to attend a conference in Las Vegas and who had stayed in one of the large hotels there. This hotel had, as many of them did, a casino on its ground floor, and the hotel guests were compelled to walk through this casino in order to get to their rooms. “I was walking,” said her friend, “through this hell of tinkling, flashing gambling machines and was suddenly confronted with a large glass-walled cage—in which there was a lion. A live lion.”

  Isabel had been speechless. She was only half American—through her sainted mother—but that was enough to make her blush with shame for the mere fact that Las Vegas existed. There was so much of which America could be proud: it had made New York and San Francisco, along with a hundred other cities with parks and art galleries and universities, but then it had gone and spawned Las Vegas, a place that carried vulgarity and venality to undreamed-of heights. And yet people loved it, and flocked there in their millions, to marvel at the entirely false, to be married in Elvis chapels, to lose money and to listen to flashy crooners singing about love. Perhaps this was a concomitant of freedom: if people were free, then some of them, at least, would be free of the constraints of good taste. Perhaps Las Vegas was just a great big cultural burp, of the sort that you are bound to get in a free society where people can burp if they wish. Perhaps lions in casinos were what you got if you said: There are no limits—everything is possible. She imagined, though, the casino lion escaping—delicious thought—and suddenly finding a way out of its durance vile, romping through the crowds of gamblers, scattering the croupiers, sending the pole dancers up their poles to escape, pouncing on the waitresses with their trays of complimentary drinks, drowning the sound of cascading money with its roars of anguish and anger.

  “People were tapping on the glass,” her friend continued, “and the lion paced backwards and forwards. There were the bones of its dinner on the floor. It lived there, it seemed.” She paused, and looked at Isabel with melancholy eyes. “It lived there.”

  This memory of human perversity made her frown, and Jamie noticed it. He was accustomed to Isabel’s patterns of thought, and knew that there were unanticipated avenues always opening up. Down one of these she might suddenly wander, even if only for a few seconds, while she wrestled with some question that most of us rarely thought about, or never dreamed existed. I am married to a philosopher, he thought. What else can I expect?

  “Thinking?” he asked.

  “Of meerkats,” answered Charlie.

  Jamie ruffled the boy’s hair. “Not you—Mummy.”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “Of lions…and what it is to be a lion.”

  “I never think of lions,” said Jamie. “Or hardly ever.”

  “I don’t exactly make a habit of it,” said Isabel. And turning to Charlie, she reached down and picked him up. “Time for your bath, my darling. You may bring your meerkat, but don’t drop him in the water.”

  Jamie was now off duty as far as looking after Charlie was concerned. He went off to practise a piece for a concert the following week, and as she ran Charlie’s bath she heard the rumble of the bassoon in the background. Violins sang, brass crowed, while bassoons, she felt, rumbled according to a Richter scale all of their own. Charlie was allowed to have something they called a Saturday Bath, in which the bathtub was filled almost to its brim. This allowed him to duck himself under the water in a game that he called Big Submarines. Isabel watched closely: Big Submarines was a physical game, and from time to time he had to be restrained from slopping almost the entire contents of the bath on to the floor. He was like a seal, she thought, or an otter perhaps, as otters were as playful as four-year-old boys, and as slippery. Big Submarines was a bad name for this game, as submarines, especially big ones, were stately, rather considered boats that slid up and down through the water without anything approaching exuberance.

  “What are the rules of Big Submarines?” she once asked.

  Charlie had looked at her with surprise. “No rules,” he said.

  “Does the biggest submarine win?”

  He looked slightly resentful. Adults should not interfere in games; they did not understand. “The good submarine wins,” he announced.

  “Ah,” said Isabel. “That’s good to hear.” A mental image came to her of a good submarine—painted white, perhaps, with a crew that eschewed swearing (at sea) and hard liquor (when ashore), engaged in heroic acts, never used, as most submarines were, to intimidate others. But there were no such submarines—not in the world we knew. There were only dark prowlers bristling with weapons. One nuclear submarine, armed with its Trident missiles, could destroy our planet as we knew it. One submarine, she thought; one. In such a world, what chance did a good submarine have?

  On that particular evening, the game of submarines seemed to fizzle out rather quickly. Charlie was tired; she could see that.

  “Time for your story,” she said. “Babar tonight.” And added, “Again.” Like any child, Charlie liked the same story time and time again. The Adventures of Babar had been a favourite for the past few weeks, and attempts to move on to something new had been stoutly resisted by Charlie himself.

  Isabel dried him and put him into his pyjamas. She noticed that these pyjamas had pictures of ducks on them. There was another pair with anchors, and one with small, friendly rockets travelling through fields of stars and moons. Adult pyjamas, she thought, say nothing.

  “Babar!” demanded Charlie, and snuggled down in his bed, holding his mother’s hand. Isabel felt an overwhelming tenderness. My little boy; this little creature I have created; the person I love more than anything or anybody in this world; who means absolutely everything to me; who provides my answers in the way in which no philosophy, however brilliant, can ever do; mine.

  They began Babar, right from the beginning. Isabel had toyed with censoring the scene in which Babar’s mother is shot by a cruel hunter—some parents skip that page—but she had decided not to shield Charlie from the truth, even if the truth was fictional. He had asked her why the hunter had shot Babar’s mother, and she had replied that it was because he was cruel, and cruel people did unkind things since they did not think of the feelings of others. And that, she thought, was as far as one might get in any attempt to explain the cruelties of this world to a four-year-old. She wondered whether more sophisticated explanations could get much further: ultimately it was a matter of the absence of human sympathy. One might dig deeper: the aetiology of evil could be complex and t
endentious. What made Hitler what he was? A sense of historical injustice? Personal failure? A malignant, psychopathic personality? The desire to harm those he believed had harmed him? Auden had reflected on this in his disowned poem, “September 1, 1939,” where he had alluded to the lesson that “all school children learn / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return…” And he was right, in that respect at least. Evil was repaid with evil—but only by those who were themselves evil; which brought one back to where one started.

  “Go on,” said Charlie.

  Babar wandered from the forest and found himself, by sleight of improbable geography, in a French city. Now the transformation comes; he meets the old lady who takes him to the department store to buy him clothes. He is introduced into European society and acquires its baggage. He returns to the Kingdom of the Elephants in a green car and with all the accoutrements of French civilisation. When the King’s position becomes vacant after he has eaten a poisonous mushroom, Babar is appointed, and Celeste becomes his Queen. They rule Celesteville with integrity and a sound instinct for orderly planning: rows of neat houses are constructed for the elephants; savagery is repelled.

  Charlie’s eyes began to close; it was time to leave Celesteville. Isabel bent forward and kissed him on the brow. He lived in a world of friendly stuffed toys, of talking elephants, and meerkats too. How long would it last? When would this childhood bubble be penetrated by images of conflict, of bionic superheroes, of pyrotechnics and explosions that made the world of older children what it was? At six, at seven, when the purveyors of these things realised there was money to be made from children? Don’t grow up too quickly, she whispered.

  —

  JAMIE FINISHED HIS PRACTICE and came into the kitchen.

  “Asleep?” he asked, nodding his head in the direction of Charlie’s bedroom upstairs.

  “Out for the count.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Jamie. “He ran everywhere in the Zoo. Ran. I had to chase after him constantly.”

  “He’s a boy,” said Isabel. “Haven’t you noticed how boys seem to run everywhere? Girls don’t. They walk or skip, but boys tear about.”

  Jamie went to the fridge and extracted a half-full bottle of New Zealand white wine. He poured a glass for Isabel and then one for himself. They touched glasses; they always did that; Edinburgh crystal to Edinburgh crystal.

  “I was…” He did not finish, as the doorbell sounded. He looked at Isabel enquiringly. “Expecting anybody?”

  She shook her head. “No. The Lifeboats?” A neighbour collected for the lifeboats charity. It was a popular cause—even amongst the land-bound.

  Isabel shrugged. “Could be.”

  Jamie went to answer the door. After a minute or so Isabel heard voices in the hall and went to investigate.

  It was her friend Sam. “I was passing by. I’m not going to stay because you’ll be getting ready for dinner and I don’t want to hold you back.”

  Isabel assured her they had plenty of time. “Dinner isn’t always planned in this house. Sometimes it just happens.”

  Sam smiled. She had a husband who could not cook, whereas Isabel had Jamie, who cooked rather well—or so Sam had heard. The injustice of it, some said; to look like that and to be able to cook.

  “Perhaps Jamie could teach Eric one of these days. Nothing too sophisticated, but to be able to make an omelette would be useful.”

  Jamie laughed. “I’m sure that Eric would be a perfectly good cook. Or even is a perfectly good cook. Some husbands don’t let on, you know; they can cook quite well, but it’s not in their interests for anybody to know it.”

  Isabel offered Sam a glass of wine, and she accepted. “But just a small one,” said Sam. “I don’t want to roll home.”

  The three of them sat down at the kitchen table. Sam, who was in her mid-forties, had been a friend of Isabel’s for some years, having been introduced to her by a mutual friend. She was an attractive woman who liked to wear ethnic clothing, on this occasion an embroidered Indian blouse and an elaborate brass necklace, also Indian.

  “Eddie said you were in the delicatessen the other day,” Isabel remarked. “He said you were hoping to see me.”

  Sam took a sip of her wine. “Yes, I did—or rather, do. I do want to see you.”

  Isabel smiled. “Well, here I am.”

  Sam put down her glass, fingering the stem as she did so. “You know that you have a reputation for helping people.”

  Isabel blushed. “I don’t do any more than most people do.”

  Sam held up a hand. “But you do. I know that you’re modest about it.”

  There was an awkward silence. Isabel looked at Jamie, who met her gaze briefly, and then looked down at the floor. She knew that he was concerned about her readiness to help people in all sorts of difficulties. “You can’t do everything,” he had said to her. “You can’t take on the troubles of the whole world.” She knew that he was right, but it had always been hard for her to turn down a direct appeal, especially from somebody she knew. Certainly, if Sam were in some sort of difficulty, Isabel would find it almost impossible to say no to her.

  “Are you in trouble?” Isabel asked.

  Sam laughed. “No, not me. My life is too uneventful for trouble—or for real trouble. No, not me, but…”

  “Somebody you know?”

  Sam nodded. “Not trouble as such, but…well, troubled. There’s a difference.”

  Isabel agreed. “Of course.”

  “There’s a woman downstairs in my building, in the ground-floor flat,” Sam continued. “She moved in about six months ago. Her husband’s a pipe major in the Army. They no longer live together, and I’ve only met him briefly, when he’s been round to pick up their son. But I’ve got to know her reasonably well.”

  Isabel was busy avoiding Jamie’s eye. He looked at her, glanced away and then looked at her again.

  “Her name is Kirsten. The boy’s called Harry,” Sam continued. “He’s six. A rather serious-looking little boy. I see her taking him off to South Morningside School every morning if I look out of my window at the right time. The two of them walk off, hand in hand.” She paused. “Your wee Charlie hasn’t started yet, has he?”

  “At nursery. Two days a week.”

  Sam nodded. “Mine are growing up so fast. Fiona’s fourteen now, you know, and Nicholas is twelve, and is shooting up like a bean-pole.”

  Isabel thought of Charlie, upstairs with his new stuffed meerkat on his pillow. He had been a baby just a few months ago, it seemed, and she had thought it would never end. I thought that love would last for ever. I was wrong; that line of Auden’s that contained a truth about everything, not just love. And we had to act as if things were not going to end, because if we did not, then we would do so little in life. People still planted oak trees and created gardens, which they might not do with quite the same enthusiasm, or would not do at all, if they stopped to think of the brevity of life.

  “I feel rather sorry for her. I know that being a single parent is pretty common these days, but it can’t be much easier than it’s ever been. In other words, it’s tough.”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “I can just imagine. It’s twice as tough. I don’t know if I’d be able to cope.”

  Sam thought that Isabel would manage very well. “You might surprise yourself, you know.” She paused. “She dropped in the other morning after she had taken him to school. She works part-time, three days a week, I think, as some sort of receptionist—while he’s at school.”

  Isabel nodded. “And?”

  “And she told me the most extraordinary story. Well, I don’t know if everybody would find it extraordinary, but I did. Apparently the boy is convinced that he’s had another life. He’s adamant about it, and talks about it every day, she said. He says that he had another mother—another family—he’s matter-of-fact about it, but she’s understandably worried.”

  Isabel said that she could imagine it would be unsettling for any parent. “But it’s
not all that unusual, is it? I’ve heard of things like that, haven’t you?”

  “Vaguely,” said Sam. “I think I read about something of the sort. But somehow this seems rather different.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s very specific. He’s come up with a name for the family, as well as a very detailed description of the place he lived. And he’s been consistent.”

  Isabel looked out of the window. She wondered how she would feel if Charlie were suddenly to claim to have been somebody else? She would treat it, she imagined, as a figment of childish imagination: very young children simply did not grasp the difference between truth and falsehood. Charlie had announced a few days earlier that he had seen a squirrel wearing pyjamas. He had sounded so convincing, and had appeared hurt that he had not been believed. “He was,” he protested. “He was.”

  Sam continued: “She’s spoken to various people about it. She took it up with her doctor, and he said that he could arrange an appointment with the child psychiatry services at the Sick Kids’ Hospital. That happened, she said, and they saw him. But at the end of it they explained to her that he seemed an entirely normal young boy. They reminded her that children could create elaborate stories and then forget about them. They said it was harmless.”

  “And it probably is,” said Isabel.

  “I thought that too,” said Sam. “But she’s really concerned about it. She feels that there’s nobody she can discuss it with. Harry’s father is very dismissive of the whole thing, as is his teacher.”

  “She has you to talk to,” said Isabel. “That must help.”

  “Perhaps, but I think she wants to speak to somebody other than a neighbour. And then she said something that made me think of you.”

  Isabel was silent, but she already knew that she would have to help.

  Sam was looking at her intently. “She said that she wanted to put her mind at rest, and the way to do this would be to investigate the story. She says that Harry has half convinced her that what he says is true, and that if she could just look into it and establish that there’s no truth in what he says, then she’ll feel much easier about it.”