The Novel Habits of Happiness

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “He was black and white. He had black fur and some white fur under his chin. Here.”

  A small hand demonstrated where the white fur was. “He chased rabbits,” he said. “He didn’t eat them—he just chased them.”

  “Well, that’s good,” said Isabel. “It would be sad if he ate the rabbits.”

  Harry replaced the tow-truck and reached for another toy car—a small black taxi. This had small, functioning doors that he now opened. Tiny moulded passengers were visible inside—a man and a woman, immobile on their seats. This was one of Charlie’s favourites.

  “You said something about your brother,” said Isabel after a few moments. “What was his name? Do you remember?”

  There was a silence. The door of the little taxi was closed, then opened again.

  “He’s dead now,” said Harry suddenly.

  Isabel caught her breath. “What was his name, Harry?”

  “Nothing.”

  “He was called nothing?”

  “No. He had a name, but it was nothing. I can’t remember.”

  Isabel looked at Kirsten, who raised an eyebrow.

  “But your brother’s dead, you say?”

  The taxi was placed on the floor and moved slowly backwards and forwards. “He went away. He’s gone now.”

  “And what about the other mummy and daddy? What were their names?”

  It seemed as if the boy was going to ignore the question, but then he spoke. “They’re called Campbell. Mr. Campbell. Mrs. Campbell.”

  “Can you tell me about them? What did he do, Mr. Campbell, your other daddy? Did he have a job?”

  “He worked somewhere else. He didn’t have a job there—not in that house.”

  “And what was his work?” She pointed at the taxi. “Maybe he drove a taxi?”

  He seemed to think about this. “He didn’t tell me.” Then, after a short pause, “I think he had an office. Yes, he had an office. A big office.”

  Isabel considered this reply and thought: He’s making this up—the inconsistencies are just so obvious. First the doubt: He didn’t tell me…and then, almost immediately, the certainty: Yes, he had an office. And then it’s revealed as a big office.

  She concealed her disbelief. “And your mummy? The other mummy?”

  “She was nice.”

  “She was kind to you?”

  “Most of the time.”

  Suddenly he seemed to lose interest in the cars. “Can I have some cake?” he asked. He had seen the cake that Isabel had placed on a plate near the sink. It was a sponge cake dusted with icing sugar.

  Kirsten reprimanded him. “You mustn’t ask for cake, Harry,” she said. “It’s not polite to ask for cake.”

  “Oh, I think it’s perfectly all right,” said Isabel. “Cake is there to be eaten—as a general rule.”

  Harry looked at her appreciatively. “The house was white with blue round the windows,” he announced. “There was a tree behind it and there were some hills too.” He gave the information as if it were a reward for the promise of cake.

  “It must have been very pretty,” said Isabel. “And the lighthouse too—what was that like?”

  “It was white. No, it was sort of grey. It was very big.” He looked up at the ceiling. “As high as that. High as a hill.”

  “Lighthouses warn ships, don’t they? They tell the sailors where the rocks are.”

  But he was not interested in that, and now, in a matter-of-fact tone, continued, “There were some islands. You could see them.”

  Isabel hesitated. She did not want to suggest too much to him: children—and people in general for that matter—tended to tell you what they thought you wanted to hear.

  “There were lots of islands,” he continued. “Some were very big, but there was a small one too. There was an island with lots of hills on it. It was behind the other islands.”

  Isabel nodded. “I see.” She saw that he was looking longingly at the cake. “How silly of me. We forgot to have some cake. Shall we do that now?”

  —

  JAMIE HAD OFFERED to cook again that evening, and she had readily agreed. They had had a busy time of it socially, what with the previous night’s dinner with Cat and Mick, and with a whole stream of other engagements over the previous few weeks: a fortieth birthday party for a colleague of Jamie’s in one of his orchestras, a book launch, a dinner to raise money for a charity that made football fields in deprived areas. Now they were both ready for a quiet night at home, with nobody to entertain or talk to.

  “How do people cope?” asked Jamie as he started to chop onions.

  Isabel, seated at the kitchen table, looked at the fridge door and then at the clock above the doorway. It was a Swiss railway clock that she had found in a shop in Morningside some years ago and bought on impulse. There was something about a Swiss railway clock that inspired confidence: their railways ran on time, of course, and therefore any clock that purported to guide the Swiss railway system would be reliable; more than that, of course—by owning such a clock one was stating one’s wish to have a more ordered life. Isabel had always thought that this was why we bought the things we did—an insight that was as old as the profession of advertising itself.

  But a Swiss railway clock can be as reproachful as it can be inspirational. If you had a Swiss railway clock and it declared the time to be only six-fifteen, then it would surely frown on your opening the fridge door and serving yourself a glass of New Zealand white wine at such an early hour. But if it declared the time to be almost seven-thirty—as the clock now did—then even the Board of Management of the Swiss Railways would not disapprove.

  She echoed Jamie’s question as she rose to her feet and extracted two wine glasses from the cupboard. “How do people cope?”

  “Yes, if they have to do a lot of entertaining because of who they are. Politicians, prime ministers, presidents. These people presumably spend most of their time at official receptions and dinners and so on. It’s my idea of Purgatory.”

  Isabel crossed over to the fridge. There was an unopened bottle of Marlborough Sound sauvignon blanc that she now broached, pouring a glass for herself and one for Jamie. He abandoned his chopping knife for a moment, wiped the onion tears from his eyes and raised his glass to her.

  “It is the onion, memory, that makes me cry,” he said.

  She looked at him. “Who was that again?”

  “It’s a poem by Craig Raine. I love the idea of memory as an onion—layer after layer that we strip away as we remember things. And those layers of memory make us cry, just as onions do.” He nodded towards the board on which the small pile of chopped onions lay.

  She looked into her wine; it was the colour of liquid straw, something between gold and green. “There are different sorts of tears,” she said. “I suppose that we generally equate tears with sorrow, or with being miserable; we forget all those other tearful occasions.”

  “Reunions. Graduations. Weddings.” He paused, and remembered. “Did you realise my eyes were full of tears at our wedding?” There was embarrassment in his tone, and she thought: No matter how far men go in abjuring the straitjacket of old-fashioned masculinity, no matter how new men may become, they will always be ashamed of their tears.

  She wanted to cross the room to embrace him, and the thought came to her that she could do that if she wished, because he was hers, and it meant that she could do something physically impulsive—and possessive—without the slightest feeling of awkwardness.

  But Jamie had turned to address the onions again and the moment passed. Not that Eros felt rebuffed; he dwelt comfortably in their house, an acknowledged but unseen boarder, present when required, but quite content to wait; a remarkably well-behaved presence by the standards of Greek mythology.

  She thought about what Jamie had said. Purgatory? Nobody talked about Purgatory any more, not even the Pope. “Do Catholics—”

  He answered her before she finished the question. “They still believe in it,” said Jamie. “O
ne of the brass players in Scottish Opera is a Catholic, and I asked him once whether he still believed in Purgatory and Hell and all that stuff.”

  She smiled at his use of all that stuff. It was tempting for a lay philosopher to dismiss theology as all that stuff; and some did, of course.

  “And what did he say?”

  Jamie reached for a couple of red peppers awaiting the knife. “He just said, ‘You bet I do.’ Then he said, ‘Are you going to the pub afterwards?’ Brass players are not noted for their subtlety.”

  “Obedience,” mused Isabel. “I could never sign up to a set of religious doctrines. I just couldn’t. Perhaps I have a Protestant soul. I don’t know.”

  “I couldn’t either,” said Jamie. “So that, I suppose, means that I couldn’t be a member of a political party.”

  Isabel disagreed. “Most political parties have room for differences of opinion,” she said. “Except, I suppose, for the Communist Party. It was never a good idea to dissent if you were in the CP. In fact, it could be fatal.”

  She wanted to get back to Purgatory. “Of course modern Catholicism, I gather, doesn’t think of it as a place. It’s meant to be a state—a state of purification from which you’re meant to progress.” She took a sip of her wine. She had let it get too chilled, and the cold had shut down some of the taste. “Maybe it’s a pity that Purgatory isn’t a place any more, because it could be made to measure, so to speak. Those people you mentioned—the ones who have to do too much entertaining—would have a Purgatory of a constant cocktail party. With nowhere to sit.”

  “And tiny canapés,” suggested Jamie. “And bores by the hundreds—the thousands, even—all wanting to talk about…”

  He looked at her expectantly.

  “House prices,” she said.

  “Yes!”

  The subject of bores, though, was a delicate one. Edinburgh had one or two notorious bores whom everybody seemed to know, and they came immediately to Isabel’s mind. And yet she did not want to say anything about them, even to Jamie, who would not repeat it, because she felt bad about labelling them as bores. The knowledge that somebody else has labelled you in some way can be wounding, no matter how true, and did it make a difference if the remark never got back to the person about whom it was made? She thought not. The harm is done when the words are uttered: that is the act of belittlement, the act of diminishing the other, and it is that act which would cause pain to the victim. You said that about me? The wrong was located in the making of the cruel remark, rather than in the pain it might later cause.

  But Jamie was thinking of exactly the same thing. “What was the name of that chap?” he asked. “The famous bore that people speak about?”

  “I don’t think we—” Isabel began, to be cut short by Jamie, who said: “But you must remember. We met him that time when everybody fled.”

  Isabel did not like unkindness; not that Jamie was being uncharitable, but she knew how easily unkindness might intrude, even when one did not mean it. “I’m sure he…”

  “No, remember,” insisted Jamie. “We heard about him from somebody else, who said that he was trapped by him once and he went on and on about how he used to be…”

  “He must have had his good points.”

  It was a valiant attempt by Isabel, but to no avail; Jamie suddenly remembered the name and came out with it. “Of course,” he said. “Of course it was…” And he spoke the name that would be greeted by a sigh when uttered elsewhere.

  Isabel looked down into her glass. “Yes,” she said. “But at least he doesn’t talk about house prices.”

  Jamie rolled his eyes. “House prices. Yes, house prices.”

  But there, she thought—there’s a fascinating subject—one to marvel at, that could chill and depress those who owned no house and render smug those who did. House prices were the great excluder, the subject that determined membership or otherwise. Talk of house prices, she had always felt, was by its very nature cruel.

  She remembered what Kirsten had told her about the flat in Morningside, acquired by her uncle for five hundred pounds all those years ago. Without that, she would have had nowhere to live, presumably, except the Army quarters near Redford Barracks. She thought of Kirsten’s life. What did you do if you were a single parent—as she was—once your child had been put to bed? There would be none of the companionship of preparing a meal together, or sitting in the kitchen while one of you made the meal; there would be none of the relaxed chat that seemed to sit so well with the preparation of ingredients or the stirring of pots. The evening hours surely must hang heavily, as you ate your meal by yourself with only the artificial company of the television to look forward to.

  And yet that, she thought, painted an unduly bleak picture. People could be perfectly happy living their lives alone, or in the company of a child. Some people preferred it that way, and lived by themselves by choice rather than because they had never found somebody to share their life with. For all she knew, Kirsten had left Harry’s father, rather than the other way round. Perhaps the sound of bagpipes had driven her out…

  “What’s so funny?” asked Jamie.

  “I was thinking about living with somebody who played the pipes,” she said. “It could be trying.”

  “That woman who came to see you…”

  Isabel became serious. She had busied herself with Charlie when he and Jamie returned from Blackford Pond. There had been no time for her to tell him about their meeting. Now, as they sat together in the kitchen, she wondered how Harry’s story would sound to him. Jamie was always so rational; so cautious about reaching any conclusions that could not be supported with evidence, distrustful of anything that smacked of mysticism. What would he make of this extraordinary, unlikely tale of a little boy who persisted with detailed claims to a prior existence? “Yes, Kirsten,” she said. “And little Harry. He liked Charlie’s cars.”

  “So I see. I found two in the hall. I trod on one—an old Morris Oxford.”

  She gave him an account of her chat with Harry. Jamie continued with the preparation of the meal, but Isabel could tell that he was listening attentively. At the end she said, “A rather sad story, don’t you think? A lonely little boy, probably missing his father, dreaming up a life where things were different. It’s what children do, isn’t it? It’s the same with those imaginary friends they create.”

  Jamie nodded. “I had an imaginary friend when I was a boy.”

  Isabel looked at him inquisitively. “Oh? What was he called?”

  “He was called Lolly. I don’t know why I chose the name, but that was what it was. Lolly Macgregor.”

  Isabel reached for the bottle of wine. She allowed herself two glasses, and if she poured another one now, it would have to last through the meal. Jamie shook his head. He would wait.

  “Tell me about Lolly Macgregor.”

  “Apparently I made him up when I was four or five,” said Jamie. “He stayed for three years, and then I gather I said that he went off to Australia and we never heard from him again. I don’t remember that bit, but my mother said I simply announced his departure and that was it.”

  Isabel had read that children’s imaginary friends could come to a sudden—and sticky—end.

  “Lolly Macgregor had a wonderful torch,” Jamie went on. “Its batteries never needed charging. He also had X-ray specs that could see through people’s clothes. Lolly could tell what colour their underpants were. This gave him something over them: if Lolly could see your underpants, then you were at an inherent disadvantage.”

  “He was a good person to have on your side,” mused Isabel.

  “Oh yes, Lolly was a great ally.”

  “Which is why children create them,” said Isabel. “It must be something to do with that. We create friends for ourselves, I suppose, because otherwise the world is just too frightening. We create friends and myths.”

  “Beliefs?”

  “We need them.”

  She thought of the saints of Mediterranean Chr
istianity. There were so many of them, and in a sense they performed much the same role as Lolly Macgregor. It was easy to mock, of course, but she was convinced that a sense of the sacred helped us to value the world. It was Roger Scruton’s argument in The Soul of the World, and she found it persuasive.

  “What are you going to do?” asked Jamie.

  “Find the place he’s talking about.”

  For a few moments he said nothing. Then, shaking his head, he said, “You’re going to find somewhere that doesn’t exist? Really?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “A house by the sea? A black-and-white dog? That’s not much to go on, if you ask me.”

  She pointed out that he was forgetting the lighthouse.

  “But how many lighthouses are there in Scotland?”

  She did not know. “I’ve never thought much about lighthouses. But I know somebody who can tell me.”

  Jamie looked doubtful. He considered this for a few moments. “You say that he mentioned being able to see islands? Big ones and a small one too? I suppose that narrows it down a bit.”

  “He talked about islands, with hills behind them on another island.”

  “That could fit an awful lot of places,” said Jamie. “Jura has hills on it. It’s an island.”

  “But which Scottish island has most hills? If you think of a hilly island, which one do you think of?”

  Jamie shrugged. “Mull has hills. There’s Ben Mhor. I suppose if you looked at Iona from the open sea you would see Ben Mhor sticking up behind it.”

  “You could do. But somewhere else comes up in my mind. Skye. Think of the Cuillins.”

  Jamie looked thoughtful. “Yes, possibly. Skye is admittedly mountainous…”

  “So it could be somewhere up there.”

  He looked at her incredulously. “You aren’t seriously going to try to find this place, are you?” He paused. “You may as well go off and look for Celesteville. You may as well go and search out Babar.”

  She laughed. “That would be fun. I’ll add it to my bucket list.”

  —

  AFTER THEIR DINNER, they took a tray of coffee into the room they now called Jamie’s practice room. His bassoon lay assembled on a table, but he went to the piano instead and lifted the keyboard lid. Isabel sat and watched him.