The Novel Habits of Happiness

by Alexander McCall Smith

  She had first become involved with the Institute when she had got to know an Australian philosopher, a visiting fellow whom she had helped in a personal search. The following year Isabel herself had been asked to read a paper at the Institute and had written for this occasion a piece on justice between the generations: “Do the young really have to support the old?” They did, she had argued, although not because the old were old, but because they were people. That had gone down well, even if it had led to a spectacular exchange of divergent views—accompanied by accusations of ageism directed, oddly enough, against one of the older participants by one of the younger ones.

  Her connection with the Institute had been strengthened when she heard that Edward and Cheryl Mendelson were to spend the summer there, each working on books that they hoped to finish. They came from New York, where Edward was a professor at Columbia, and from where, as W. H. Auden’s literary executor, he ran the poet’s affairs. Edward had a book of essays to complete, and Cheryl was putting the finishing touches to a study of the history of marriage. It was Isabel’s interest in Auden that had first put her in touch with Edward: she had written to him with a query about one of his books, and he had responded helpfully. The correspondence had deepened and become quite regular; she very much appreciated his willingness to explain the more obscure poems in the poet’s canon.

  “What on earth does he mean here?” she asked about these poems. “Am I missing the point?”

  She sometimes was.

  “He can be somewhat opaque at times,” sighed Edward. “But that’s part of the charm, I think, and there’s always a meaning there. It just might be that the references, shall we say, are not always immediately obvious.”

  “He knew so much, didn’t he? Theology, science, opera—they’re all there in the poems.”

  Edward nodded. “Yes,” he said simply. “All of that—and much more.”

  Edward greeted her as she went up the stairs to the coffee room. “Cheryl’s going to be coming in a bit later,” he said. “She’ll be sorry if she misses you. I hope that you can stay until she comes back.” He hesitated. “Or perhaps I shouldn’t ask you. I know how busy you are.”

  “Absolutely everybody’s busy,” said Isabel, thinking of the one truly idle friend she had, who always complained of having far too much to do. “But I’m happy to linger. I’m in denial about the state of my desk.”

  “Like so many of us,” said Edward.

  She knew that he was being polite; he should have said you rather than us. “Not you,” she said. “I can imagine your desk, and it’ll be a paragon of…” She struggled to find the right word. How did one describe the state of being uncluttered? “Unclutteredness.” She rather liked the idea of a category of people singled out for their tidy desks, unlike those whose desks were piled high with papers. Desk guilt, she thought; it could be a useful new term to join all the other available forms of guilt and self-reproach. Desk guilt, gym guilt, chocolate guilt…It was another case for compound nouns, she thought, although the effort of translating it all into German would be enough to give rise in itself to guilt, or perhaps to compound noun anxiety, which would sound so much more credible in German, where the word Angst could be tacked on to just about everything. She paused at that. Angst was different from guilt, and the distinction should be maintained: one could feel angst about something that one knew one should not feel guilty about; angst had nothing to do—or not necessarily so—with any personal failure.

  On the landing at the top of the stairs, Edward glanced in the direction of the coffee room. “I need to talk to you,” he said, his voice lowered.

  “Over coffee?”

  Edward shook his head. “In private. I can go and fetch you a cup of coffee, if you like, but we need to talk in my room.”

  Isabel was concerned. “Is everything all right?”

  He assured her it was. “No, nothing’s going wrong as far as we’re concerned. Our work is going very well, and we’re enjoying ourselves. It’s more a question of…” He broke off before continuing, “Look, I’ll join you in my room in a moment—I’ll get the coffee. Just wait for me there.”

  She knew where his room was—a small study at the end of the sort of meandering corridor that was typical of so many Edinburgh buildings. Cheryl’s room was next door, and Isabel had visited them both in their respective offices shortly after they arrived. The door was ajar, and she entered the room and sat down on the armchair near the window. The room overlooked a small, three-sided courtyard; facing east, it was still benefiting from the morning sun. This had a buttery quality to it; it played upon her arms as she waited and she felt its heat, rather like the warm breath of some invisible creature. She looked up at the ceiling, with its elaborate cornice. This followed the Greek key design that had been so popular during Edinburgh’s eighteenth-century enthusiasm for all things Greek—when the city’s ambition had been to re-create the Parthenon on the Calton Hill and when people began to refer to Edinburgh as the Athens of the North. She smiled at the thought. Money had run out after the construction of nothing more than a set of imposing pillars topped by lintels; these remained, a reminder of the perils of civic vanity. In Isabel’s view, though, they were just right for the city; a completed Parthenon would have been too much—in bad taste, perhaps, whereas a manifestly uncompleted Parthenon was just right. Failure often had a certain style that success simply did not have.

  Edward appeared, bearing two cups of coffee. He handed one to her, and then he crossed the room to take his seat behind the desk. The coffee was piping hot, with small wisps of steam still rising from its surface. Isabel raised the cup to her lips, but put it down without taking a sip. Edward looked apologetic.

  “Sorry, it’s too hot,” he said. “Give it a moment.”

  Isabel smiled. “Coffee’s getting hotter and hotter, it seems. Global warming, perhaps.”

  They laughed.

  “You have to be careful,” said Edward. “In some coffee places you now see warning notices: Our coffee is served at…and then they give the temperature. I suppose they’re worried about being sued.”

  “Everybody’s worried about that,” said Isabel. “I was in a shop the other day—just a small place—and there was a large sign on the wall that simply said: The management is not responsible. That was all.”

  “A general disclaimer,” said Edward.

  “Of course one can understand it,” said Isabel. “We’re so obsessed with protecting people from themselves—and protecting ourselves from others while we’re about it.” She thought of another example; there were so many once one began to think about it. This time it was Charlie’s nursery; they had taken the children to the museum and had sent a letter to the parents telling them that a full risk-assessment survey had been carried out, and that this had included psychological risk. She told Edward about this. “You can just see them—visiting the museum with their clipboards, ticking off each risk one by one. Were there any obviously unsafe electrical installations? Were the stairs the sort of stairs down which children might fall? Were there things that the children might see in the museum that were disturbing and might lead to nightmares?”

  Edward laughed as Isabel continued. “Of course, Scottish history is full of disturbing things. Look at Mary, Queen of Scots—her secretary murdered before her eyes, her husband blown up, or strangled, or whatever it was. Any visitor to a Scottish museum may well come away quite traumatised.”

  She stopped herself. Edward had said that there was something he needed to talk to her about—and she had led the conversation into the sixteenth century. It was so easily done, she thought…

  She tried her coffee again. The management is not responsible for the coffee. “You said there was something?”

  Edward nodded. “I wanted to have a word with you before we went into the common room. There are a couple of visitors this morning. I thought I should let you know.”

  “But there always are visitors here, aren’t there?”


  “Yes, but these are…Well, I recall a conversation we had a couple of years ago when I was last here. You know how you can forget vast swathes of experience and then you remember something that somebody said to you on a particular occasion; you remember it in great detail; you remember every word.”

  Yes, Isabel thought. She remembered conversations she had had in which nothing notable had been said, but of which every word had been laid down in memory. There had been a conversation with a friend when she was seventeen. They had been for a walk together on Cramond beach, and the friend had suddenly said that there were some beaches that were sand and some that were made of crushed shells, and that sometimes it was hard to tell which was which. And then the friend had suddenly changed the subject and said that seaweed was very good for you and that was why the Japanese, who ate a lot of seaweed, she claimed, lived such long lives. “They go on and on,” she said. It was an odd, inconsequential conversation, but she remembered it word for word.

  “Yes,” she said to Edward. “Sometimes that happens.”

  “It was a discussion about having enemies,” said Edward. “I can’t remember how we arrived at that topic, but we did. And then you said to me, ‘Some people seem to have an awful lot of enemies. They go through life gathering them in the same way as other people acquire friends.’ And then you said to me that you didn’t think you had any enemies—at least not ones you knew about—and then you corrected yourself and said that you did: you had two enemies, although you felt reluctant to call them that because you thought it was wrong to keep a state of enmity alive.”

  Isabel made a careless gesture. “I said all that?”

  “Yes, you did—and more.”

  She looked amused. “There’s a certain embarrassment in being reminded of what you said. Politicians face it all the time, don’t they? They have their words quoted back to them and then they have to work out how what they said can be reinterpreted in an entirely different way.”

  “I hope I don’t embarrass you,” said Edward. “But I do remember it all rather well, for some odd reason. I then asked you who your enemies were, and you told me. You said, ‘There’s a Professor Christopher Dove down in London.’ ”

  Isabel groaned. “Oh dear.”

  “And then,” Edward continued, “you said that there was an éminence grise behind this Christopher Dove, and he was called Robert Lettuce.”

  Isabel made a gesture of defeat. “Yes, I probably said all that. I feel a bit awkward about it, and they’re not real enemies in the sense that I don’t think much about them, and I doubt if they sit there plotting my downfall, but…but I’m wary of them, I suppose. Dove is a slippery piece of work and Lettuce is a great pompous whale. I suppose if I were to continue the marine metaphor, Dove is a shark and Lettuce is a whale, or perhaps a sea lettuce—there is such a thing, you know—it’s a sort of seaweed.” She trailed off. “Why…”

  “They’re in the common room,” said Edward quietly. “They’re here.”

  Isabel opened her mouth to say something, but realised that she did not know what to say.

  “Yes,” said Edward. “So I thought I should warn you. It wouldn’t do, I think, to go into a room and discover that it was full of one’s enemies.”

  Isabel struggled with herself. They were not real enemies; she liked neither of them, but that did not mean that they were people she would avoid at all cost. “I’ll be able to cope,” she said. “I appreciate the warning, but I don’t mind meeting them again.”

  Edward still looked concerned. “Are you sure?”

  She stood up. “Yes, perfectly sure. Let’s take our coffee into the common room.”

  “If you wish…”

  “I think we should.” We should; but it was not a matter in which she should involve Edward—the presence of Dove and Lettuce were not an issue for him. “Or should I say I should. I mean…” She stumbled on the words; this was getting complicated. “That’s to say, I can’t exactly avoid them, and why should I, after all?”

  Edward spoke sympathetically. “Well then,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  As they left the room, she asked him, in a lowered voice, why Dove and Lettuce were there. “Are they on visiting fellowships?” She assumed that this would be the case, as visiting fellowships were the core of the Institute’s work; they were its raison d’être.

  Edward shrugged. “I have no idea. Perhaps they are. Or perhaps they know somebody here and have just dropped in. It’s a sociable place.” He thought for a moment. “I didn’t see their names on this term’s programme. So I think we can assume that this is just a casual visit.”

  Isabel felt relieved. “I know I shouldn’t be uncharitable, but I couldn’t bear the thought of their being here…here in Edinburgh for any length of time. I know that’s childish. I know. But that’s the way I feel.”

  They had reached the end of the corridor and their conversation had to end. From the open door of the common room, they heard voices. Somebody said something and there was laughter. Elsewhere in the building a telephone rang.

  She took a deep breath. She had no reason to be afraid of either Dove or Lettuce, and she would not allow them to intimidate her. But in her heart she found herself back at school, at the age of fourteen, when there had been a bully a few years her senior who had made her dread going into the refectory at lunchtime because this girl would take a seat near a prospective victim and stare at her. It was done quite subtly; on most occasions nothing was said, the bully relying on the power of the contemptuous glance, the look of amused appraisal. Look at her hair, might be the implicit message picked up by others and sniggered over; or her skin! There was nothing on which one could put one’s finger, but the behaviour was unambiguous. Others laughed, grateful, perhaps, that they were not the target; a few girls tried to resist it, but the bully seemed to have the psychological advantage and triumphed. And then she was knocked off her bicycle by a speeding motorist and was obliged to spend four months in a wheelchair. Suddenly her spell was broken, and she became an object of pity. Somebody wrote on the wall of the toilets: Serves her right. No name was given, but they all knew who was being referred to. Isabel thought for a moment that what had happened somehow affirmed that there was some justice somewhere—some force that restored the balance. But then she decided that this was not so; we want there to be such a thing, she told herself, but there isn’t. That was one of the earliest instances of the inner philosophical debate that became the background music to her life. She went on to think: But perhaps we need to believe in justice; perhaps we need to think that people will be served right for what they do, just as we need to believe in free will—even in the face of powerful arguments against it.

  Do we ever escape from the fears of childhood, from the little things that worry us or frighten us, from the superstitions and concerns that things will suddenly go wrong and we shall be in trouble? For many, that is what childhood amounts to: a hive whose honey is fear and worry. The familiarity of the reference puzzled her as she composed herself for her entry into the common room; our thoughts are not always our own but are framed in the words of others.

  She entered the room first, with Edward following her, and for a moment the conversation stopped. She saw the room as one might see a painting, with the models posed in their appointed places, immobile under the painter’s gaze. Dove was standing near the window, looking contemplative, a cup and saucer in his hands; Professor Lettuce, seated on a chair near the fireplace, was about to take a bite out of a biscuit, his hand poised before his mouth, but arrested in movement, like a child caught dipping into the biscuit barrel; a young woman in jeans and a loose red top, her hair piled up on her head in an old-fashioned hairstyle that looked like Athena’s helmet, was perched on the edge of a couch, while a middle-aged man, whom Isabel had seen on a previous visit, sat next to her, his hands raised as if to emphasise a point he was making.

  The conversation faltered. The man on the couch had been saying something but his words tra
iled off: “…unless anybody could show otherwise, which, of course…”

  Dove looked round sharply; Professor Lettuce lowered the biscuit.

  Isabel seized the advantage that her sudden entrance gave her. She was no longer trembling. This was her city; they were in Edinburgh, where she lived.

  “Well, my goodness,” she said. “Professor Lettuce and…and Christopher. What a pleasant surprise.” She tried to sound sincere, but she felt that the irony behind the word pleasant had surfaced. Hypocrisy required practice, she thought, and I am short of that. She thought of Charlie: he had been exposed to the Pinocchio story at nursery—a young woman from Italy, working for a few months as an assistant, had told the children about it and he had in turn quizzed Jamie about long noses and lies, all the while clutching his own nose to reassure himself that it had not grown. Had he told lies—already? Very small children did not understand the difference between truth and lies, and so when they said things that were untrue, these were not real lies; a lie required intent to deceive, and Charlie surely lacked that.

  The man on the couch stood up. “It’s Miss Dalhousie, isn’t it?”

  Isabel looked at him; she remembered now who he was. Edward had explained that there was an acting director, as the last director of the Institute had left to take up a chair in South Australia. The post was now temporarily held by a man who was about to retire from another department of the University. Isabel had met him, and struggled to remember his name.

  “George Herrithew,” he said, sensing her uncertainty. “We met at that seminar…the one on…”