The Novel Habits of Happiness

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Jamie was contrite. “I didn’t mean that. I wouldn’t say that to anybody.” He blushed; he remembered that he had muttered those words only three days earlier, when a particularly fussy conductor in Glasgow had laboured a point, keeping the orchestra for fifteen minutes longer than necessary. The cor anglais player had young children to get back to; several brass players had agreed to go to the pub; a cellist had to visit a sick relative in hospital; and Jamie had his train to catch back to Edinburgh. Get a life, Jamie had muttered, and the conductor had overheard, as he looked up sharply in the direction of the woodwind section and the muffled giggles that Jamie’s remark had caused.

  “I’m not holding you up for no reason at all,” the conductor had said drily. “If you had played this passage correctly the first time, it would not have been necessary for us to re-examine it.”

  One of the clarinettists had half turned towards Jamie. “Proves your point,” she whispered.

  “There is no need for wider discussion,” said the conductor, his reedy voice now slightly raised.

  Isabel gazed at Jamie. Of course he did not mean to be disparaging; he was gentle in all his dealings with people, as effortlessly strong men so often are. She had rarely, if ever, heard him raise his voice to anybody, and he was incapable, she felt, of any sort of insensitivity.

  She was thinking. “Why don’t we see what it’s like?”

  Jamie shook his head. “It’ll be awful. It’ll be extremely embarrassing. He’s lost the plot.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Yes, I do. What reasonable, down-to-earth person would offer to write something like that?”

  Isabel picked up the email. “I don’t think we should dismiss him. I think I’ll tell him that the offer was not an unconditional one; that obtaining our approval of the subject was implicit.”

  “Oh well,” said Jamie. “You’re the editor, not me.” He, at least, was thinking of their new baby. “What will we call him? Or her, of course. I think I’d like a girl this time. Would you like that too?”

  A shadow passed over her face. “We can’t count on anything. It may not happen.”

  “I’ll try my best.”

  “And I will too.”

  He grinned. “When should we start?” And immediately he answered his own question. “Now?”

  She dropped the piece of paper, which fluttered down to the floor and lay there, upside down. She could afford to be generous to Professor Trembling. We all had our own ways of going through life; we all loved in our own particular way, and an account of the life of one person, a mother, might contain insights into the moral life—which, after all, was what the Review was meant to be about. Academic journals did not have to be impersonal or desiccated, even if so many of them were just that. Did it matter one whit whom people loved and admired? It did not, she told herself. She remembered Auden’s lines, When I was a boy I had a pumping engine / Thought it every bit as beautiful as you. It did not matter. She knew people who loved people they had not even met; that was not unheard of.

  I look forward to your paper, Professor Trembling, she thought. Please send it to me the moment you’ve finished writing it in your house up at Napa. I await it eagerly. And I hope that you enjoy your time up there and that the weather is kind to you.

  —

  HER RESPONSE WENT OFF, not without some misgiving, but nonetheless giving Professor Trembling due encouragement. That done, she had had the rest of the day to catch up with what she called the “guilt pile”—difficult correspondence that had been shelved for reply at a later date. Grace was coming in later that morning and would be able to collect Charlie from nursery school, which meant that Isabel had until just after three to devote to work. Grace had just returned from holiday, having spent two weeks with her penfriend in the Netherlands. This woman, to whom Grace had first written when she was a girl of sixteen, had proved exceptionally loyal, and the two had exchanged a monthly letter for decades, sharing holidays with each other every second year. Neither had married, and both had similar working lives: Grace had been housekeeper to Isabel’s father and then to Isabel, while Sonja, having started as a chambermaid, had become a deputy housekeeper in the official residence of the Dutch royal family. “She’s very discreet,” said Grace. “They have to be, of course, but she can still tell me interesting, non-controversial things about those Oranges.” Isabel had been amused by the expression—those Oranges—the equivalent of those Joneses next door, and yet accurate enough: they were the House of Orange, after all, which made them Oranges in a sense.

  She had waited for the interesting facts to be divulged, but Grace had at first said nothing. Isabel prompted her. “Such as?” quickly adding, “Of course I don’t mean to pry. Oranges are entitled to as much privacy as anybody else.”

  “She’s called Beatrix,” said Grace, who was ironing one of Jamie’s shirts at the time. “She was the queen over there until a short time ago. Then she handed over. She wasn’t toppled, you know; she just said to her son, ‘That’s quite enough—you take over now.’ And she was entitled to do that, don’t you think?”

  Isabel felt a momentary irritation. Sometimes Grace imagined that Isabel knew nothing, giving explanations of things that were well within common knowledge. Of course I know that she’s called Beatrix, Isabel said to herself. And I know that her mother was called Juliana and that her grandmother was Wilhelmina. I also know that Wilhelmina was one of the first people in the Netherlands to have cosmetic surgery.

  “Beatrix is Queen Juliana’s daughter,” said Isabel testily.

  “I know that,” said Grace. “And the grandmother was Queen Wilhelmina.”

  “She had cosmetic surgery,” Isabel continued.

  Grace was silent, but Isabel noticed that the iron was passed over Jamie’s shirt with more than the usual vigour.

  “She had it a short time before her husband died,” said Isabel. “It gave her a permanent smile.” She paused. “That was a bit of a problem when the King died and there she was, smiling away.”

  Grace lifted the iron off the shirt. “You mean she was smiling at the King’s funeral?”

  “So I’ve read,” said Isabel. “It goes to show that you should be careful about cosmetic surgery.”

  “Couldn’t they remove the smile?”

  “I’m not sure. I have a vague memory that they did, but I’m not sure. It’s one of those things you read and you don’t forget, but you forget where you read it and you also forget exactly what you read.”

  Grace resumed her ironing. “Sonja has a very nice photograph of her standing with Queen Beatrix outside their palace. She has a very nice smile.”

  “Ah,” said Isabel. “A natural one, though.”

  “She likes coffee,” Grace went on.

  “I’m not surprised,” said Isabel. “The Dutch grew coffee in places like Java. There are still a lot of Dutch names out there, I believe.”

  Grace nodded. “Sonja mentioned Java once,” she said.

  Isabel waited for further disclosures, but for a while none came. And she realised, of course, that she should not be interested in royal tittle-tattle, because it tended to be so utterly mundane. And yet it was natural, in a way, to be fascinated by things that are only half revealed. If somebody strives to keep a life private, then it is only natural that we want to find out what it is that is being kept from us. We are naturally inquisitive creatures.

  Then Grace let slip another detail. “She likes to wear orange,” she said. “Not bright orange, of course, but a rather darker version of it. Sonja says she—that’s Queen Beatrix—has some really beautiful shoes that are a sort of deep orange, almost brown, but you can tell that they are orange.”

  “Very appropriate,” said Isabel, and left the conversation at that.

  Now, having dealt with Professor Trembling and his proposed article on his mother, she made a list of the things that remained to be done that day. Several books had arrived for review, and these would have to be dispatched to thei
r reviewers. Two more, one published by Princeton University Press and the other by Oxford University Press, were perched at the edge of her desk and had yet to be allocated to appropriate reviewers. The thought occurred to her that she could send the Oxford book to somebody in Princeton and the Princeton book to somebody in Oxford. She smiled; of all the systems for dealing with books, that would be the weakest, although she remembered that Alistair Clark, an authority on American history and politics, had shelved the books in his library on a geographical basis: books pertaining to Alaska on the top left-hand shelf, those on the Midwest in the middle, those on Florida on the lowest right-hand shelf, and so on, so that the wall of shelves corresponded with the map of the United States. It was a system that must at least have been easy to remember: an alphabetical system was all very well, but if one were to forget the name of an author who wrote about the history of Texas, then at least one would know on which part of the wall of shelves to look—down on the bottom shelf, towards the middle. A variant, of course, might be a political system of shelving: books by authors of a conservative bent of mind would be placed on the right-hand shelves, and those of a more socialist persuasion on the left. Books by women could be in one section, and those by men in another; books by young authors here, by older authors there; books by those authors who were known to like one another could be placed together, while those by authors who felt animosity towards one another would be kept tactfully apart; the possibilities were endless.

  No, the book published by Oxford, On Good Conduct in a Flawed World, was by a theologian and would be allocated to her friend Iain Torrance, who could also be asked to review the Princeton book. It touched on issues in which he had an interest, and he had until recently been at Princeton himself before returning to Scotland. He would be asked to do the two reviews, and she expected him to agree. So that solved that.

  She looked at her watch. It was ten o’clock, and she had been in her study for exactly one and a quarter hours. Normally she would remain there for a further three hours; then it would be time for the light lunch that Isabel prepared for herself: a bowl of soup and an open sandwich. There was plenty for her to do during those three hours: proofs to be corrected, the printer’s bill to be queried, and her own editorial for the anniversary issue to be written—she already knew what she wanted to say—but now she felt disinclined to spend the morning working. She stood up and walked to her window. She felt restless. Another baby? She and Jamie had talked about it so briefly and reached their decision so quickly that an inescapable air of impetuosity hung over it. She did not feel that she had even begun to think through the implications. Her first pregnancy had been relatively uncomplicated, although she had endured, as so many women did, a rather extended period of morning sickness. She could face that, just as she could face the slowness and discomfort she had felt in the last two months before Charlie had arrived; and even the pain of giving birth had been helped by her unusually receptive reaction to the electronic acupuncture device they had given her. She had not expected it to work, but it had, and she had been grateful for it.

  None of that worried her. Nor was she worried by the thought of the practical side of having another baby—the constant changes of clothing, the carting about of all the impedimenta that babies seemed to need, the inevitable sleepless nights. What concerned her was the thought that the family she had become accustomed to—that little group that she and Jamie made up with Charlie—was going to be fundamentally changed. She had not expected to be concerned about that, but she was. She and Jamie had not addressed that in any way, and she thought that they might have done so before embarking on the expansion of their household. As she stood at the window, though, she realised that perhaps there was something else behind her vague disquiet. This was something quite simple: the fear that she was about to do something that could radically change the life she and Jamie had created for themselves. Everything was perfect at the moment—or as close to perfect as might be imagined: she was contented, as was Jamie. But what if he suddenly started to feel oppressed by domesticity, as some men can do? Isabel was aware that some fathers were unsettled by the arrival of a new child; one of her friends had complained that her husband had gone completely off the rails when their child had arrived—had taken to spending long hours in the pub and had even joined a football club. “Very odd,” her friend had complained. “To join a football club when you don’t even play football is pathetic.” Jamie would never get involved in football, she thought; he would never tackle other players—he would give them the ball. That was the way he was; and that was not a sign of weakness; rather it was, she felt, a sign of maturity. Weak men need to score goals; strong men can let others score them, if it makes them feel better.

  Standing before the window, she put a hand on her stomach. Some people claimed they could sense the moment of conception. That was simply unlikely, attractive though the idea might be. What did they think they felt? A flutter? A sudden internal warmth? It was probably indigestion. And there was implantation to think about too. That took place later than many imagined; one could be shopping in the supermarket, peering into the frozen vegetable cabinets, or looking at the price of a tin of artichokes, when suddenly, within one, the results of what had happened days before—in the bedroom rather than in the supermarket—would take place, the tiny journey would be completed, and safe harbour reached; biology was matter-of-fact and was nothing to do with romance. So even now, as she stood in her study, it might be happening…No. She thought it unlikely. It would take time; months rather than weeks—if it happened at all.

  She looked at her watch again. It would be coffee time at the Enlightenment Institute, or almost, and if she called a taxi right now she could be there in time to join them. The one thing she missed about working in a university was the coffee breaks with colleagues and the conversation that entailed. This was not the elevated conversation that people might imagine academics engaged in, but rather ordinary exchanges about who had said what, the events of the previous weekend and how expensive the car repair—and everything else—was. That sort of conversation was the natural cement of any group, something that could be called gossip, but was not quite that. We needed it, she thought, because we were lonely without such exchanges. She had no colleagues on the Review other than the members of the editorial board, whom she rarely saw, or the printer, who for most of the time was just a voice at the other end of a telephone line. She had met him, though, on at least one occasion; his works were in Fife, and he had invited her to go up to Dunfermline to watch the printing of an edition of the Review. The printing works had been noisy, and the smell of ink hung in the air, an acrid but not entirely unpleasant miasma. He had been proud of his print-shop, showing her a large German machine that struck her as being the printing equivalent of a combine harvester: text went in at one end and a bound copy of the book or magazine came out at the other. She noticed this pride as they watched the machine churning out copies of the Review—it was the same expression that she had seen on Jamie’s face when he had brought home his new bassoon. It was a very particular look, she decided: the look of a man who has a new toy—a look that combined wonderment with the simple satisfaction of possession.

  “It’s so different from the presses I trained on,” the printer said above the clatter of the machinery.

  “You used type?”

  “Not the actual type you’re thinking about—not the metal stuff.” For a moment he looked wistful; printing was no longer the craft it once had been. “No, but we did have flexible plates that we put on drums. There was a physical side to it that’s almost gone now.” His voice lowered, and she barely heard what he had to say next. “Like the customers too.”

  She looked at him.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Not all of them. But so many are having all of this done abroad now. China. We’re going to lose all of our skills soon, I fear. We won’t be able to print because we won’t have any trained printers.”

  “Outsourcing?”r />
  He nodded. “That’s what they call it. But it has very bad effects: people are losing the ability to make the things they’ve always made.”

  This reminded her of something. She had read recently that there were virtually no engravers under forty in the country—they simply did not exist. And stone carvers? And watchmakers? And people who could actually repair a car engine rather than just replace the parts?

  She sought to reassure him. “I’m not proposing to take my business anywhere else.” She touched him lightly on the forearm—an oddly intimate gesture in the noisy workplace.

  His expression showed his relief. “I like printing your Review.”

  “Oh…Do you read it?” The question slipped out without her thinking about it.

  He looked down at the ground. “Yes, of course. Well…perhaps not all of it, I’m afraid. I don’t actually read…”

  She was embarrassed. I have put this nice man in a position where he felt he had to claim to read something that he doesn’t read. She reminded herself of what a friend had said about the potential tactlessness of asking others if they had read something: people do not like to confess that they have never read War and Peace. “Do films count?” an anxious friend had once asked her. “Can I say I’ve read something if I’ve seen the film?”

  She glanced at the printer. “It’s not everybody’s cup of tea,” she said quickly.

  This gave him his opportunity. “On which subject,” he said, “we have tea waiting for us up in the office.”

  Now she glanced at the piles of books and papers on her desk. There are no chains, she thought, except those we create for ourselves. That, of course, was not entirely true: there were plenty of chains, real or imaginary, that people created for others—or that desks created, she thought…

  ISABEL HAD LOOSE LINKS with the Enlightenment Institute. There was a separate department of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh—she had worked there years earlier, and still attended their Friday-afternoon seminars when she could—but recently she had found herself having rather more to do with the small institute tucked away on the edge of the Meadows, the green wedge of park that separated the university area from the acres of stone-built Victorian tenements to the south. Its name, of course, was a nod in the direction of the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century—the period when Edinburgh had been the intellectual centre of Europe.