The Novel Habits of Happiness

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Don’t worry,” said Mick. “We only hear what we want to hear.”

  “Like most people,” said Cat.

  Was that true? Isabel answered her own question, privately, with a convinced no. The trouble with generalisations was that they were generalisations, which in itself was a generalisation.

  —

  THE WARMTH OF THE EVENING meant that they were able to sit outside on the lawn before dinner. Jamie had put out the white-painted garden furniture—the metal table and its four chairs—and had placed on the table alongside the vegetarian canapés a plate of smoked salmon and brown bread triangles. A bottle of prosecco, hastily chilled in the kitchen freezer, stood in a ceramic wine cooler.

  They sat down, and Jamie poured the wine. “I was going to make Bellinis,” he said. “But I didn’t have any peaches. There were a couple of pears in the larder, but I don’t think you can use pears for Bellinis.”

  “I’ve already had my fruit for the day,” said Cat.

  Isabel looked at her. “Five pieces? Isn’t that the Government recommendation?”

  “It’s none of their business,” said Jamie.

  Isabel disagreed. “Oh, I think it is. If the Government has to pick up the bill when we get ill, then surely it has the right to tell us how to avoid getting ill in the first place.”

  Jamie agreed, reluctantly, and with qualification. “To an extent, yes. But where does it stop? Wear cycling helmets when you use your bike? Don’t drink more than two units of alcohol a day? Don’t stay out in the sun in case you get sunburnt? Use dental floss?”

  “But you should,” said Cat. “Of course you should use it. And if anybody doesn’t know that, then the Government has every right to tell them. Don’t you use dental floss?” She paused, but did not wait for an answer. “Did I tell you what I saw at the airport?”

  “What airport?” asked Jamie.

  “At the airport in Cyprus. Last year, when I went there. There was a British family waiting to go home. Typical stodgy-looking parents in straw hats and three kids.” As Cat spoke, Isabel thought: You sound so dismissive—you would never wear a straw hat at an airport, would you?

  “The kids were about, oh, eight, nine, something like that,” Cat continued. “But they were bright red from being in the sun—absolutely bright red. Lobsters. Their parents had obviously let them go out without any sun block and they’d been fried.”

  Jamie said, “There’ll always be parents like that. You can’t make people intelligent.”

  “Yes you can,” said Mick. “You can educate them.”

  “Get them to see how stupid they are?” asked Cat.

  Isabel felt the need to save Cat from sounding too intolerant; Cat was, after all, her niece. She raised her glass. “To the Government,” she said.

  Mick looked puzzled. “The Government?” he asked. “Seriously?”

  Isabel smiled. Were there people who sat about in the garden and toasted their government? Is this what I’ve become? “Not entirely. I suppose I don’t wish them ill, of course. I may not have voted for them, but once they’re in, well, they’re the Government and they have a thankless task.”

  “You get the governments you deserve,” said Jamie. “Isn’t that what people say?”

  “Except it isn’t true,” offered Isabel. “Lots of people get governments they really don’t deserve. Look at the Kurds.”

  “I don’t want to talk about the Government,” said Cat. She was staring at her glass. “Who invented Bellinis?”

  “That’s more to the point,” muttered Jamie.

  Mick knew the answer. “They were invented in a bar in Venice,” he said. “Harry’s Bar.”

  Isabel said, “Famous, wasn’t it? Hemingway?” She realised, though, that Hemingway might mean nothing to them, although Jamie was well read and would know.

  But Mick nodded. “Actually, I’ve been there.” He looked almost apologetic.

  Jamie was watching him. “And what’s it like?”

  “It’s a bar, even if it’s the most famous one in the world—probably. And yes, Hemingway went there a lot, as did just about everybody else. Truman Capote, Noel Coward and so on. There’s a story that on one particular day in the thirties there were four kings or queens all having lunch at Harry’s at the same time. King Alfonso of Spain, the King of Greece and a couple of others.”

  They were just people, thought Isabel. Nothing more than that. People.

  “Drinking Bellinis?” asked Jamie.

  “Maybe. The owner thought that their pink colour reminded him of a passage in a Bellini painting.”

  Isabel watched Mick intently as he gave this explanation, then, when he had finished and her gaze met his, she looked away sharply. There were two things that struck her forcibly: the first of these was that he knew who invented Bellinis: that was not something that could be described as being in common knowledge—not by any means. The second thing was that he had referred to a passage in a painting. Who, other than those with a knowledge of art history and criticism, talked about passages?

  There was a lull in the conversation. There was a limit to what could be said about Bellinis, and Isabel thought they had probably reached it. She took a further sip of her wine. It was sweet on the tongue; too sweet for her, and the addition of peaches would have made it intolerable. Jamie had a sweet tooth, but she did not. The prosecco made her tongue feel furry; she would have preferred something drier.

  “Where do you live, Mick?” she asked. “Around here?”

  He shook his head. “The other side of town.”

  “Ah.” She waited.

  “The New Town,” he added.

  The New Town was the part of the city built after the spine of buildings running down from the Castle had become overcrowded and too insanitary, even by the standards of the eighteenth century. The term new was relative: it was new in Georgian times.

  Cat provided further details. “He lives in Drummond Place.”

  “That’s a particularly nice part of town,” said Isabel. “Those gardens…” She might have added that it was expensive, which it was, but everywhere was expensive these days.

  “It was my father’s house,” said Mick. “He died three years ago and I got the house. Or flat, rather. It’s not the whole house—there are two flats. Mine and one up at the top.”

  “Mick has the basement, the ground floor, and the first floor,” explained Cat. “It’s one of those roomy New Town flats.”

  “You’re very fortunate,” said Isabel.

  “Didn’t that painter live somewhere there?” Jamie asked. “McTaggart?”

  “Yes,” said Mick. “He did. On our side of the square. And there was an order of nuns. They had three houses, including ours.”

  Isabel had heard of that. The nuns had left forty or fifty years ago and had moved to the south side of the city. She tried to remember the name of their order…

  “The Sisters of the Community of the Holy Souls,” said Mick. “I came across some papers they’d left behind. I found some invitations they’d typed out for a leaving party. Reverend Mother would like to invite you, along with other neighbours, to a party to mark our departure for Salisbury Place. RSVP.”

  Jamie grinned. “Some party,” he said.

  “You don’t know,” snapped Isabel; nuns could hold parties if they wished.

  He looked at her, hurt, and she regretted what she had said. “Sorry. It’s just that I think that nuns probably like parties in the same way as the rest of us.”

  He was chastened too. “Yes, you’re right.”

  Isabel reached for one of Jamie’s buttered triangles of brown bread, placing a small piece of salmon on top of it. “I hear you’re a dishwasher engineer,” she said as she prepared the bread.

  Mick looked at her in puzzlement. “What?”

  Cat frowned. “Dishwashers?” And then, she smiled. “Oh, that. Mick fixed my dishwasher.”

  “Well, not really,” said Mick. “There was something stuck in the drain
at the back. I just pushed that through, and then it went. Well, there was that seal as well, I suppose.”

  Isabel swallowed her brown bread. It was Eddie. Eddie had got things wrong. “I thought you did it professionally,” she said.

  Mick laughed. “No, I wish I could.”

  “So what do you do?” Isabel asked.

  Cat intervened. “Mick keeps pretty busy,” she said.

  Isabel saw that she was closing down the conversation and judged that she should not persist. She looked at her watch. “Do you think that dinner’s ready now?” she asked.

  Jamie picked up the empty prosecco bottle and rose to his feet. “Yes,” he said. “Let’s go inside.”

  —

  SHE LAY NEXT TO JAMIE. They were covered only by a sheet, as the night seemed to have become warmer and there was no need for anything more. The light had just been switched off and her eyes were not yet accustomed to the dark; slowly, though, the shapes in the room sorted themselves out, emerged from the gloom: the large wardrobe they shared; the ornate chest of drawers that had belonged to her mother’s family in Mobile and had been brought across the Atlantic, losing several carved wooden adornments in the process; the chair on which Jamie draped his clothes rather than put them in the washing basket. And Jamie himself came into focus, a shape beside her, a head on a pillow, with eyes open as he had not yet gone off to sleep.

  She talked to him quietly, in not much more than a whisper. There was no need for quiet, other than an odd, unrequested respect for the night. “A mystery,” she said. “We’re none the wiser really.”

  “Mick?”

  “Yes.”

  Jamie turned to face her. She reached out and touched his cheek, gently, and then withdrew it. She did that sometimes because she felt that she wanted to see that he was real. He did not seem to mind.

  “He seems all right,” said Jamie. “I quite liked him, but you never know with her, do you? None of them seem to last.”

  “No, they don’t. But did you see her eyes? Did you see the way she looked at him?”

  He was non-committal. “I suppose I could tell she’s a bit smitten.”

  “Much more than that,” said Isabel. “She took him up to see Charlie. I went with them. You were in the kitchen.”

  “And?”

  “I saw how she looked at him when they were in Charlie’s room.”

  “And?”

  Isabel hesitated. Then she decided. “Broody,” she said. “Unmistakable.”

  Jamie said nothing for a while, and she wondered whether he had dropped off to sleep. Sometimes their conversations in bed ended that way; she would suddenly realise that he had gone to sleep while she was still talking.

  “Another thing,” she said. “Another really extraordinary thing.”

  “Yes,” he muttered drowsily.

  “Didn’t you think he looked just like you?”

  Again there was a silence. He might have been awoken by this strange, even unsettling observation, but he did not stir, saying only, in the thick voice of near-sleep, “Me? I don’t think so. But if you say so, maybe. Maybe a bit. But who cares? Who…”

  His voice trailed off. She turned over. She was thinking of the nuns and their party. There might have been a small amount of sherry—not much; no Bellinis, of course, although the nuns would have liked them, she thought: Bellinis and smoked salmon. And then they all left, and went somewhere else where they did whatever it was that nuns did—kept the world out, perhaps; or sallied forth to make it a bit better here and there; lived out their years as best they could. Which is what we all do, she thought, as sleep came to her; we live out our years as best we can, not knowing their number, not really knowing, in the case of most of us, why we do what we do and how we came to be where we are; thinking we know it, but suspecting that we do not really know.

  ISABEL HAD BEEN IN TOUCH with Kirsten, suggesting that she come round for afternoon tea the following day.

  “With Harry,” she added. “Bring him after school.”

  “They’ve just broken up for the summer. He’s on holiday.” She paused. “Are you sure?”

  “I’d like to meet him.” And then she asked, “Can we talk about it? I mean, can I talk to him about…his previous life?” She felt slightly foolish, but that was what the boy himself had been talking about.

  Kirsten had reassured her that Harry was quite open about it. “He seems quite happy to speak about it. But I don’t think you should go into this business of wanting to go back.”

  “Of course not.”

  “The doctors said that we should ignore that. Or one of them said that; another said that we needed to talk that through.”

  “I’ll keep off that,” said Isabel.

  She asked Jamie to take Charlie to the Blackford Pond while the visit was taking place. Charlie admired older children and would distract Harry with his attention; the long-suffering ducks at Blackford Pond were capable of providing seemingly endless entertainment for the price of a bag of bread crusts.

  Kirsten was early, and Isabel was still working in her study when she arrived. She had been editing a particularly opaque article and was beginning to ask herself why she had accepted it for publication. But the letter had been sent, and the author, a post-doctoral fellow at a university in New Zealand, had already been in touch to express his delight at the decision. “This makes all the difference to me,” he had written. “It’s my first publication, you see, and…well, I’m just over the moon—I really am. My wife is having a baby, as it happens, and this is the icing on the cake. First baby, first publication!” She would persist, but it was trying, and the sound of the doorbell was a welcome release.

  Harry was standing next to his mother on the doorstep, clinging to the fabric of her jeans, a small hand pinched tight for security. He was wearing a striped shirt of a sort that Jamie had bought for Charlie; small red shoes with white laces; stains on the legs of his trousers—mud, she thought; that aversion of eyes with which small children will express their embarrassment. Kirsten had said that he had just turned seven, but he looked slightly younger than that, she thought: five or six—no more.

  Kirsten attempted to introduce Isabel, but the boy looked away, and then stared fixedly at the ground.

  “You must say hello,” said his mother. “Come on, Harry. It’s rude not to say hello to Isabel.”

  Isabel bent down. “I’ve got a little boy too,” she whispered. “He’s not here, but he said you can look at his cars. He’s got some cars.”

  Harry looked up and met her gaze. She was struck by the colour of his eyes: they were grey, or seemed to be grey in this light, and had an unexpected softness to them, like the eyes of some timid, small creature, which is what he was, of course.

  She straightened up and led them into the hall.

  “I know where some of the cars are,” she said to Harry. “Would you like to see them?”

  “Aye.” The voice was barely audible; the response Scottish.

  “Yes? They’re in the kitchen. One has a battery, you know, and makes a noise.”

  “We’ll like that, won’t we, Harry?” said Kirsten. “A car that makes a noise.”

  Once in the kitchen, Isabel switched on the kettle and invited Kirsten to sit at the table. A small box of toy cars, jumbled together in democratic confusion, was taken from a cupboard under the sink. Harry watched intently.

  “This is the one with the battery,” said Isabel. “You see, if you put this switch on—here—just like that, the lights go on. And if you press this button here, then the siren sounds. This is a police car, you see.”

  Harry took the toy and examined it carefully. “Police cars have blue lights,” he said.

  “So they do,” said Isabel cheerfully. “But this police car, I think, comes from China, and the Chinese police, it would seem, prefer green lights.”

  Harry pressed the button to sound the siren, but there was silence.

  “Their siren must be broken,” said Isabel. “They�
��ll just have to drive carefully.”

  While Harry busied himself with the cars, Isabel served Kirsten tea. They talked about local politics: a developer was planning to build on a piece of land currently cherished by dog owners and walkers. Kirsten had signed the petition to oppose this, but was doubtful as to whether the local council was listening. Isabel said that she thought they did listen—sometimes—but that one had to shout to get attention.

  Harry seemed to have become more relaxed, and Kirsten, exchanging a glance with Isabel, brought him into the conversation.

  “You should tell Isabel all about where you lived before,” she said. “She might like to hear about it.”

  “I’d love that,” said Isabel.

  Harry had been looking with admiration at a small, battered tow-truck. He spun its wheels contemplatively. “It was near the sea,” he said.

  He had an unusually mature voice, thought Isabel; each word was clearly articulated, and spoken with an almost pedantic deliberation. She encouraged him. “I’d love to live beside the sea. You’re lucky that you did.” She paused. “Did you swim in it?”

  Harry seemed to think for a moment. “Sometimes. There was a beach with black rocks. The water was cold, though. I sometimes swam with my brother. And the dog. The dog liked to swim.”

  “They do, don’t they?” said Isabel. “What was your dog called?”

  He did not answer immediately. But then he said, “I don’t know his name.”

  Isabel probed. “You can’t remember? Or nobody ever told you?”

  He looked up at her. He was a very beautiful child, she thought; and where did the great eyes come from? From this family or the last one? No, she told herself; that was ridiculous.

  “Nobody used his name. They called him…No, they called him nothing.”

  “I see. But what sort of dog was he? I like dogs, you know. Do you like them?”

  He nodded. “I like dogs a lot.”

  “And they like us, don’t they? Or most dogs do. I suppose there are some bad dogs who don’t like people all that much, but most dogs are friendly.” She returned to her question. “But what sort of dog was he? What did he look like?”