The Novel Habits of Happiness

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Now Charlie lay on the top of his bed, still deep in sleep, a copy of The Adventures of Babar open on his chest. Isabel gazed at him for a full minute, allowing herself to be enveloped in fondness and pride. This little boy is my creation. That was the essential miracle of motherhood: creation. In having a child you created another centre of consciousness, which meant, in fact, another world. It was that simple fact that was so astounding. It was one thing to create some object in the external world: to build a house or make a piece of furniture; or even, perhaps, to write a symphony or a poem; but admirable though such achievements might be, they were nothing compared with the making of a life.

  She stepped forward and gently moved the open book off him. As she did so, her hand touched his chest lightly, and she felt the movement of his breathing. That was another miracle: that tiny pump that was his heart, destined, if he was lucky, to beat without stop for decades, to see him through whatever it was that he was going to go through: joy, sorrow, love, disappointment, anxiety, triumph—all the things that made up our lives.

  He stirred, but it was only a stirring in sleep: it would be another fifteen or twenty minutes before they would hear him wake up. There would be the whirring of the digger or the sounds of some awful crisis at the fort: the cries of plastic people being knocked over by a plastic projectile. How perilous was the plastic life, and yet they did not give up: the plastic hearts on both sides were brave.

  She went downstairs and switched on the kettle for a cup of tea. Isabel allowed herself two cups of coffee a day, but could drink as much tea as she liked. Now, standing at the kitchen counter waiting for the kettle to boil, she was reminded of the fact that she had not been able to exchange more than a couple of words with Cat when she had been at the delicatessen. Cat had been busy when Isabel arrived and had gone out on some errand when the time came for her to leave. Her niece’s cheerfulness pleased her; Cat could be difficult at times, but was engaging company when she was in the right mood. That depended, Isabel had discovered, on what was happening in her far-from-simple love life. Mick was evidently a good choice.

  Isabel made up her mind quite quickly. It had been a rather extraordinary day, with its meeting with Christopher Dove and Professor Lettuce, and then the unsettling conversation with Kirsten. Jamie liked impromptu social occasions, just as she did, and if Cat and Mick had nothing better to do…

  She dialled Cat’s mobile number from the phone in the kitchen.

  “Can you talk?” Isabel always began that way when she dialled a mobile number. People could be doing all sorts of things when they answered their mobile—one never knew.

  Cat sounded breezy. “Natch.”

  Isabel thought: Does anyone still say natch? Clearly at least one person did. But then Cat also said fab from time to time, when everyone else was saying cool or even wicked, which was good, although good itself had become bad.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t have the chance to speak to you earlier on. I was with somebody, as you saw.”

  “No worries.”

  “I wanted to—”

  She was interrupted by Cat. “I should have come over and thanked you for Saturday. I hear you were kept pretty busy.”

  “Yes, we were,” said Isabel. “But I was happy to do it. Any time. But what I was phoning about was this: dinner. I know it’s no notice, but if you and your friend are free this evening, why not come round? Kitchen supper. I’ve got a casserole in the freezer.”

  There was a brief silence at the other end of the line before Cat said, “Okay. But one thing: Mick’s vegetarian. Is that all right?”

  Isabel assured her that would present no problem. She almost said “No worries” but did not. Instead she said, “Quiche. I’ll do a quiche instead. We all like that.”

  “Mick loves quiche.”

  “I’m so glad.” A ridiculous thing to say, she thought. It was as if loving quiche was an indication of character, or attitude. Perhaps it was: Had there not been some discussion about whether real men liked quiche? Was it a sign that one was a new man if one ate quiche? Was quiche the bellwether for all sorts of things?

  They agreed the time and rang off. Mick, thought Isabel. Mick. Mick? Michaels were more often Mike than Mick. Micky sounded almost juvenile; it was also a good name for a pugilist or a jockey perhaps, because of its jaunty, confident feel. And yet she knew that there was no reason to imagine that a person’s name would reflect his character; if we chose our names, then they might say something about us, but our names were the one thing that generally we had no hand in choosing.

  No sooner had she thought this than she realised that, as with most conclusions about anything, there were exceptions. There were cases where people did make a choice about the name by which they chose to be known. She knew a number of people who had done just that; who had two given names and who had chosen to abandon the first of these in favour of the second. On her mother’s side of the family there had been her much younger cousin Eugenia Dawn Martin, whose parents had intended her to be Eugenia first and foremost, but who opted at the age of fifteen for Dawn. Teasing by other children had ensured that: Eugenia? Nobody’s called Eugenia. Jeanie, perhaps, but not Eugenia. Isabel had understood; she liked the name Eugenia, but imagined that Eugenias themselves might have qualms about the old-fashioned sound to it. Some names just had the feel that they had had their day. It was the same with Ruby; that sounded old-fashioned, although it was a warm name, a friendly name, and she hoped that it would become popular again.

  She had friends, too, who as adults had changed their name altogether because they felt that the name they had used up to that point did not reflect the way they wanted others to think of them. An unwanted shortening might be abandoned, as had been the case with a boy she had known in childhood as Chuck. This name had seen him through university and into his profession, but when he had become a partner in a staid firm of Edinburgh lawyers he had suddenly become George. He had sent out a note to his friends and acquaintances: “I hope you don’t mind my telling you,” he wrote, “that I have chosen to be called George rather than Chuck. My initials, of course, remain the same: CGM.” Most people assumed that the G stood for George, but Isabel knew that it was, in fact, Geoffrey. The George came from nowhere, it seemed; it was an act of self-definition—or professional self-preservation, perhaps. Would the staid clients whom she imagined the staid firm had want to entrust their affairs to a lawyer called Chuck?

  “Would you be happy with a lawyer called Chuck?” she had asked Jamie.

  He had been surprised that the question even needed to be asked.

  “Of course. Not that I even have a lawyer.”

  “But if you had to get one?”

  Jamie shrugged. “Chuck would do fine.” He thought for a moment. “But I might feel uncomfortable going to a dentist called Dr. de Sade.”

  Isabel laughed. “Poor Dr. de Sade would have so few patients, and would wonder why. My practice advertises pain-free dentistry, but somehow we get nowhere…”

  She made her tea, and sat down to read the paper. But she could not concentrate on the content. It was a short step from thinking about the choosing of names to thinking about babies. What if she had a girl? No forts, no diggers, and the plastic people would have romances and intrigues rather than battles. There would be dolls, who would have tumultuous inner lives, as dolls owned by little girls seemed to have. They were always waiting for telephone calls from other dolls and planning tea parties. Isabel smiled. She and Jamie would not encourage such stereotypes, although stereotypes were such fun to think about—almost seditiously—and were, one had to admit, so very often completely true. Yes, girls liked dolls and boys liked toy trucks. They just did. It was nothing to do with the toys their parents gave them. You could give boys dolls for every birthday, but that would only break their hearts, and they would acquire toy trucks clandestinely. A life of crime might be launched in that way—unwittingly—by parents who meant well.

  She finished her cup of tea and
set aside the newspaper, with its uncompleted crossword. She had tried, but was not in the mood to pit her wits against the Scotsman’s compiler, even if the clue If slipped a drink by this apparent Scandinavian, don’t touch it! (6,4) had leapt to the eye and resulted in her pencilling in Mickey Finn.

  That had reminded her, of course, that she would be meeting Mick that evening and that she needed to make an effort to like him. She had to like him; or she had to at least try to like him. Cat had had such terrible boyfriends in the past, but Isabel felt that it was her moral duty to approach each of them with an open mind. To do otherwise, to decide against them in advance, was to judge people whom she had never met, and she knew she should not do that. And quite apart from any moral considerations, the law of probability surely dictated that sooner or later Cat would come up with somebody to whom objection would not be taken. Perhaps it was Mick. Perhaps. She looked at her dishwasher. I shall not associate him with dishwashers, she told herself. I shall not. I shall not. She knew that these associations did not help; she had made a similar mistake with Cat’s Toby—condemned for his crushed-strawberry trousers—and she would avoid doing the same thing with Mick.

  “Cat’s coming for dinner this evening,” she said to Jamie when he came home at five. “I hope you don’t mind. I organised it on the spur of the moment.”

  “Fine,” said Jamie, adding, “Diversion.”

  “And she’s bringing her new boyfriend,” Isabel went on. “He’s called Mick.”

  Isabel was watching Jamie’s expression. She imagined she detected a flicker of distaste.

  “Mick,” she said. “I don’t know his other name—all I know is that he’s Mick.”

  Jamie smiled. “The name has unfortunate associations for me.”

  So that was it. Isabel waited.

  “There was a boy called Mick at school,” Jamie said. “I didn’t know him, as he was a couple of years ahead of me. He was a bully. He broke my friend’s nose when he hit him. He was much bigger than the rest of us at the time. His nickname was The Fridge.”

  Or Dishwasher, thought Isabel.

  “I was thinking about names and their associations,” she said. “A name can be ruined for us just because we’ve disliked some person who happens to be called that.”

  “That Mick did it for me,” said Jamie.

  “Try to put it behind you,” said Isabel. “I’m sure that Cat’s Mick will be quite different from The Fridge.”

  Jamie said that he thought she was right. Then he said something about his rehearsal and the conductor’s radical interpretation of the composer’s intentions. Isabel only half listened; orchestral gossip was lost on her, except when it came to the emotional entanglements of musicians. Jamie had said that there was currently a romance in that particular orchestra that had caused both players involved to miss their cue. The whole orchestra had laughed, he said. “They were staring at one another, lost in thought, and forgot to play.”

  “How romantic,” said Isabel.

  “But not career-enhancing.”

  “No,” she said. “Romance rarely is.”

  “Except sometimes,” added Jamie. “What about actresses who sleep their way to the top?”

  Isabel smiled. “Unheard of,” she said. “And it doesn’t happen much in engineering, either. Would you care to cross a bridge designed by the contractor’s girlfriend?”

  “Or boyfriend,” said Jamie.

  “I’m happy to be corrected,” said Isabel. “And in neither case would I trust the bridge.”

  —

  JAMIE OFFERED TO COOK. As well as the quiche that Isabel had promised, he prepared a plate of vegetarian canapés—asparagus rolled in filo pastry—to be served with pre-dinner drinks. It was a warm evening, and the Edinburgh air, normally bracing even in high summer, was heavy. While he busied himself in the kitchen, Isabel put Charlie to bed. For the bedtime story there was a further episode of Babar, repeated for the nth time but seemingly every bit as fascinating to Charlie as on the first hearing.

  Charlie was sleepy, and Isabel thought that he would drop off before the story’s denouement. That suited her, as it would give her time to have a leisurely bath before Cat and Mick arrived at half past seven. She watched Charlie struggle against sleep; that was such a major difference, she thought, between children and adults: How many adults fend off sleep in order to milk the day of its last moments of consciousness? Adults greeted sleep with enthusiasm—looked forward to it, indeed—whereas for children sleep came as a thief, a spoiler of fun.

  Then Charlie said something, looking up at her, eyes heavy-lidded with tiredness, but with the urgency with which a young child will seek the answer to a question that has suddenly come to mind. “Does Babar cook with Delia?” he asked.

  Isabel lowered the book. She could not imagine that she had heard him correctly. “What was that, darling?”

  “Does Babar use Delia? In his kitchen? In Celesteville? Like Daddy?”

  She struggled with her composure: a child’s questions should not be greeted with laughter. Delia was Delia Smith, the English cookery writer whose books Jamie liked to use. Her name had become a shibboleth for entry into a certain sort of kitchen, and men, in particular, relied on her with all the zeal of converts. Delia had taught the British male, including Scotsmen, how to boil an egg: straight into boiling water, one minute there, and then six minutes standing off the boil. Perfect.

  “My darling, of course Babar uses Delia. All the elephants use Delia’s recipes. Of course they do, darling.”

  The answer seemed to reassure him, and his eyes, losing their battle against sleep, closed. Isabel sat still for a moment, listening to the deepening of Charlie’s breathing, and then she tucked in the sheet that covered him—it was too hot for his duvet. Against the white of the linen, his pyjamas were bright red; the spaceships had been replaced by cowboys riding lickety-split across the fabric; cowboys, she noticed, waving flags and what looked like bandanas rather than guns. Jamie had laughed at that. “One can go too far in distorting the truth,” he said. “Cowboys did have guns, you know. Whereas these cowboys are…galloping because they’re late for their therapy appointments?”

  She took a final glance at Charlie: a loving look can be as much a caress as any physical touching. Then she turned out the ceiling light, leaving only his small nightlight glowing in its place on the wall near his bookcase. Charlie shifted slightly in his sleep. She smiled at him and began to make her way downstairs.

  —

  CAT HAD WARNED ISABEL that they might be late.

  “Understandable,” Isabel said to Jamie. “I gave them virtually no notice.”

  “I don’t want to be too late,” said Jamie. “I’m teaching first thing tomorrow.”

  “Cat never overstays her welcome,” Isabel reassured him. “She’s very responsive to the awkward silence.”

  Jamie looked thoughtful. “What do we know about Mick?”

  Isabel was determined to be positive. “He comes with a perfectly good report from Eddie,” she said. “He described him as all right.”

  “Hardly a gushing recommendation.”

  Isabel said that it was about as enthusiastic as Eddie would get. The next step up was ace, and Isabel had only heard him give that accolade to a popular politician who made extravagant promises. He was ace, said Eddie, because it’s about time somebody did something about people not having enough money to lead a decent life. Isabel agreed about that, of course: in a wealthy society there was no excuse for deprivation, but were we wealthy enough to abolish poverty? Could anybody abolish poverty altogether? She tried to explain the difference between funded promises and unfunded promises, but Eddie would have none of it. “Of course we’ve got the money,” he said. “Look at the cars people drive. Look at the Mercedes and Audis and so on. Thousands of them all over the place.”

  “Many of them bought on credit,” Isabel pointed out mildly.

  Eddie was not for turning. “No, that guy’s ace,” he said.
<
br />   “His heart is in the right place, perhaps,” said Isabel. “But there are limits to what any government can do.”

  “Same old, same old,” muttered Eddie. “Talking him down, just because he has the courage to believe.”

  She did not answer that because she thought it might take too long, and because idealism was a delicate plant, so easily discouraged.

  “He’s a bit ace,” she conceded. “Ace, to a certain extent.”

  “There you are,” crowed Eddie. “I knew you’d see reason.”

  But now Jamie was asking about Mick. “What does he do—this Mick character? Did Cat ever tell you?”

  “She has said very little about him. In fact, I only learned about him through Eddie. You know how she plays her cards close to her chest.”

  “Don’t I just,” muttered Jamie. “But what’s his job?”

  “He fixes dishwashers.”

  Jamie was silent. Then he said, “I see.”

  “I know it sounds surprising,” said Isabel. “But why should it? Is it because we just don’t mix much with dishwasher engineers? You mix with musicians, and I mix with philosophers. Perhaps we need to get out a bit more.”

  Jamie looked embarrassed. “I wasn’t being snobbish.”

  Isabel grinned. “No, of course not.”

  “It’s just that you assume that people who go out together will have something in common. Do you think that somebody like Cat will have that much in common with—”