The Novel Habits of Happiness

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Well?” he asked. “What sort of mood are you in?”

  She considered his question. She was not sure of her mood. She felt a bit sad, perhaps—a touch melancholic. Why? She thought that it was something to do with the pointlessness of what she was proposing to do. She was involving herself in the affairs of that small, rather vulnerable family, when there was no obvious outcome to her involvement. In one way of looking at it, she had been asked to help in the destruction of a myth, in the discrediting of a small sliver of happiness dreamed up by a disappointed little boy as a memory of something better than what he had now. It was a task of iconoclasm, and she took no pleasure in it.

  Jamie picked up her mood. “I’m not going to sing about crossing the Minch to Skye,” he said. “I refuse.”

  “I wasn’t going to ask you,” she muttered.

  “How about this?” he said.

  She closed her eyes as he began “The Wild Mountain Thyme.”

  “I shall build my love a bower,

  By that clear crystal fountain,

  And on it I shall place

  All the flowers of the mountain…”

  She opened her eyes, and joined in the next verse:

  “If my true love, he should leave me,

  I should surely find another…”

  Would I? she thought. She was reminded of something she had read in the newspaper that morning. One thousand women had been questioned as to what their plans were, should their existing relationship with their husband or boyfriend fail. Half said that they kept somebody in mind to whom they felt they would turn, this usually being an old friend, perhaps a former lover, who had always been fond of them. Isabel had been surprised by this, but even more surprised by the disclosure that one in five of these women who had this Plan B believed that the man in question would drop everything to come to them. Isabel thought of Cat. If the researchers had asked Cat, they would have discovered that there were some women who had not only one man in reserve, but three or four. Whereas if they asked me, she thought, they would have discovered a complete lack of planning because I would never need it. But even as she thought this, she reminded herself that she might be wrong. None of us was immortal; but this was a morbid line of thought, and not one she cared to pursue.

  Jamie looked up from the piano. “You’re not in the mood, are you?”

  She shook her head. “I feel like crying.”

  “There’s a song about that. An Irish song.” He played a few chords and sang the refrain:

  “Let’s not have a sniffle, let’s have a jolly good cry

  And always remember, the longer you live, the sooner you jolly well die.”

  She smiled, in spite of herself, in spite of the way she felt. She felt that she could cry buckets, for no particular reason, but in spite of that she smiled.

  “There,” said Jamie.

  She held him in her gaze. My entirely beautiful one, she thought. My lover. She savoured the words in her mind. My lover.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Isabel found herself alone in the house. Jamie had taken Charlie to nursery, and Grace had gone off with a shopping list to the supermarket. Grace’s shopping trips were important for her, and although Isabel bought most of the household groceries herself, she left some things for her housekeeper to buy. In fact there was not really enough work for Grace to do, but Isabel kept her on because she had worked for her father and she felt a moral obligation to continue the arrangement. She felt slightly embarrassed about having a housekeeper, even though Jamie had done his best to persuade her that such feelings were misplaced.

  “If you didn’t employ Grace, then what would happen to her?” he asked. “She’d just have to look for a similar job with somebody else.”

  “Maybe…”

  “No, not maybe—definitely. And you could be pretty sure that whoever gave her a job wouldn’t treat her as well as you do. I’m pretty sure of that.”

  Isabel knew that this was probably true, but it did not help relieve her of a nagging sense of guilt. She was undeniably well-off—and that made her feel uncomfortable. Again, Jamie had tried to assuage these doubts. “You don’t use your money selfishly—quite the opposite, in fact. So what’s there to worry about?”

  “The thought of what other people have to put up with,” said Isabel.

  “You can’t change that single-handed,” Jamie pointed out. “And as far as I can work out, you give most of your income away. You’ve got to eat, you know. You’ve got to have a roof over your head.”

  He was right. Isabel eschewed the trappings of wealth: her car was now over twenty years old; her clothes, although well made, tended to be inexpensive (she had no time for designer labels); and even the New Zealand white wine served in the kitchen was from the cheaper end of the New World shelf at Cat’s delicatessen. But money disappeared effortlessly, of course, as it always does. The Review had become a drain on her finances, having dipped from making a small profit to running at a loss after a number of academic libraries, their budgets squeezed, had cancelled subscriptions. Now each issue cost her at least five thousand pounds in subsidy, a sum never mentioned to anybody (except Jamie and those members of the editorial board who had bothered to enquire). Printing became no cheaper, although Isabel had been offered—and turned down—the prospect of inferior paper that would have cut the costs appreciably. The less costly paper, however, smelled strange and suffered from what the printer referred to as “show through.” “I don’t think we need to read both sides of the paper at the same time,” said Isabel drily.

  Then there were the causes. Scottish Opera relied on Isabel for an emerging artist scholarship, and the Conservatoire in Glasgow received similar largesse. There were other causes—the Museum, the National Galleries, the University—the list had grown with every year. She did this discreetly: she was one of the donors described as anonymous benefactors at the end of many programmes, and only Jamie knew exactly how much went out each month to the various charities. That was why he said, with some astonishment at her discomfort, “Don’t even think about what you’ve got. You do ten, twenty times more than you need to. Stop brooding over your good fortune. Just stop.”

  Grace, in a sense, was one of the causes. She cleaned the house, but that could have been done in the space of one morning a week, rather than five. She helped with Charlie, but that, again, was something that Isabel and Jamie could easily have managed. So the shopping expeditions, which took place once or twice a week, were an important element in making her housekeeper’s job seem more important than it really was. And of course there was the call in at La Barantine on the way back; Grace liked to have a leisurely coffee in the small French bakery in Bruntsfield on the way home. They spoke French to their customers, and although her French was ancient—and weak—it was sufficient to see her through the ordering of a coffee, a madeleine cake, and a short conversation about the weather.

  That morning, while Grace sat in La Barantine and, like Proust, contemplated her madeleine cake, Isabel sat in her study and looked at the ceiling. She was not sitting idly—her mind was rehearsing the arguments of a paper she had just read for publication in the Review. There was something wrong with the paper, but she was not quite sure what it was. For some reason it made her hesitate, but she could not work out why that was. Was it that the author came across as arrogant? Was he showing off? Some philosophers, after all, wrote papers because they wanted to demonstrate to others their own intelligence. This, she felt, was particularly the case with those whose footnotes were in German. That, in her view, was a discourtesy to those readers who did not know German; there was enough said about everything in English to make it possible to have all footnotes in that language, at least for the Review’s international readership. She looked again at the paper; it was littered with German footnotes. Nein, she muttered, and noted probably reject on the top right-hand corner of the paper’s title page; hesitated, and then struck out the probably and substituted definitely, but added, with regret. That latte
r phrase was unnecessary; the author would not see her comment, but it made her feel better.

  It was then that the telephone call came from Edward Mendelson. He and Cheryl were taking a walk down to the canal and could they call in?

  “Only if you’re not busy,” said Edward. “We don’t want to interrupt the flow of thought.”

  Isabel welcomed the interruption, and assured him that a visit would be welcome. “I love distraction,” she said. “I look forward to it every time I sit down at my desk. I think we all do—secretly, that is.”

  They did not arrive until about fifteen minutes later, by which time Isabel had written a polite letter to the author of the rejected article. Her position had softened, and reject had been changed, in her mind at least, to ask for revisions. Her letter spelled out what needed to be done. “Our readers,” she said, “are, for the most part monoglot or virtually monoglot, although I should qualify that by saying that our English-speaking readers rarely have much of a command of another language. The British ones may have a working knowledge of French, but not necessarily of German. Our American readers may have Spanish, but again will not have German. Only the Germans, I’m afraid to say, can be relied upon to have German, but then they tend almost without exception to have rather good English and so, for academic purposes, they don’t need their German.” This, strictly speaking, was not true: an important discussion might be conducted in German and in no other language, and German might therefore be needed if one were to participate. But her point, in other respects, stood, and she continued, “All of this brings me to your extensive footnotes, or note a piè di pagina, as the Italians call them…” She struck out the Italian reference; she had been unable to resist it, but there was a difference between things that one could not resist thinking and things that one could restrain oneself from saying. It was petty, and she did not need to make a joke at the expense of this poor man with his German footnotes. He’s burdened enough as it is, she thought; all those heavy footnotes in German dragging him down…

  Edward and Cheryl stood at the door. They were dressed casually for a walk, with windcheaters tied around their waists, ready for use should the weather turn, and hiking boots.

  “You don’t have to invite us in,” said Edward. “If you’re working, we really don’t want to disturb you.”

  She reassured them. “I’ve just finished a tricky letter. Tea is called for.”

  They sat in the garden, as the day was a fine one. A bed of lavender had come into full blossom and scented the air with what Jamie called a “purple smell”; preoccupied bees, attracted by this, hovered busily. The sky, high and empty, was crossed by two dissipating vapour trails, one heading east, to Scandinavia, and one west to Canada; these had now become two long, thin clouds, stretched out, attenuated by high winds, forming a great St. Andrew’s cross against the blue behind them.

  Isabel served tea in willow-pattern mugs, each showing the same timeless scene of the fleeing lovers, the bridge they crossed, and the doves they eventually became. They talked about the canal that the Mendelsons’ walk would follow; this was no more than five minutes’ walk away, and was a favourite spot with Charlie for its ducks and its line of houseboats. These were well lived-in and comfortable looking; a good setting, Isabel had observed, for a long narrow life.

  Then the conversation turned to the Institute. Both Edward and Cheryl were enjoying their time there, and each had delivered a paper at a lunchtime seminar.

  “And Professor Lettuce?” asked Isabel. “Any sightings?”

  Edward smiled. “He’s there for a few days more, I understand.”

  Isabel absorbed this. When she had asked Lettuce what brought him to Edinburgh, he had replied that it was a purely social visit. And then he had said, “We have old friends who live here.” She had entertained her suspicions, even then, that they had another purpose in coming to Edinburgh.

  Lettuce had said “we,” which she assumed meant him and Christopher Dove—the oleaginous Dove, as she called him. But why would Lettuce and Dove come together all the way from London to see friends in Edinburgh? Why would they leave their wives behind? Both of them were married—there was Mrs. Lettuce, who was an assistant curator of something or other at the British Museum; Isabel had seen a picture of her in the newsletter of a society of which they both happened to be members. The article revealed her real name, Clementine, although Isabel had heard Lettuce refer to her as Dolly. Then there was Dove’s wife, whom Isabel knew nothing about, apart from the fact that she existed and that she was called Sarah. Both were to be pitied…but no, pity was condescending; both, Isabel thought, were to be sympathised with. Clementine Lettuce could not be blamed for her husband’s misdeeds; she might, for all one knew, be quite unaware of them. And that name of hers, thought Isabel: a clementine was a small sort of orange, and that meant that her first name was a fruit and her second a vegetable.

  No, Isabel reproached herself—a childish thing to think, and she returned to the unanswered question: Why would Lettuce and Dove leave Clementine and Sarah behind in London while they travelled to Edinburgh to see these mysterious friends?

  The answer, she decided, was that the friends did not exist. It was not that they were, like Jamie’s Lolly Macgregor, imaginary friends; these friends were a pure creation, dreamed up in a spontaneous lie to cover the real reason for the presence of Lettuce and Dove in Edinburgh.

  Isabel stared up into the sky. “Why?” she said. “Why do you think he’s here?”

  Edward glanced at Cheryl, as if he were seeking her permission to reveal something.

  “Go on,” she said. “Isabel might want to know.”

  Oh, I do, thought Isabel.

  Edward cleared his throat. “I was in the Institute the other evening,” he began. “I normally go back to the flat round about five, when most other people start going home. But on this occasion I was a bit later than usual.”

  “Edward was writing a review of a book of Hemingway’s letters,” Cheryl explained. “For the New York Review of Books.”

  Edward smiled. “I was engrossed,” he said. “It’s hard to be indifferent to Hemingway.”

  “Do you know that Hemingway wore a dress?” asked Cheryl. “Only as a small boy, but his mother wanted him to be a girl. She put him in a dress.”

  Isabel laughed. “Perhaps that explains the subsequent bull-fighting and big-game fishing.”

  “Perhaps,” said Edward, smiling. “Sometimes we feel we need to compensate. But anyway, I was caught up in this review and suddenly saw the time. It was after six and I was meant to be picking up fish from the fish shop in Marchmont. It would be too late, and I wasn’t sure what else we had in the flat.”

  “We could have eaten out,” said Cheryl. “And we had some ready-made pasta in the fridge.”

  Edward resumed his account. “I shall spare Isabel the culinary details. The point is that as I walked along the corridor, I heard somebody in the photocopy room. The door was ajar, and the voices were clear and quite loud. I imagine that they thought that nobody was around. I couldn’t help but hear what was said. They were making no attempt to keep their voices down.”

  “It was Professor Lettuce,” Cheryl supplied. “Robert Lettuce and Christopher Dove.”

  Isabel said nothing.

  “I wasn’t eavesdropping,” said Edward. “But I heard Lettuce say very clearly: I’ll do what I can to swing it your way. Of course, these appointments are made by a committee, but I should imagine that as new director they’ll want to keep in with me. It may take a while, you know.”

  Isabel’s eyes widened. “And then?”

  “And then Christopher Dove said—and I can’t remember his exact words, but this was the gist of it—he said, That’s perfectly all right. I need to give them a term’s notice down in London before I come up here. Then he said, I want a nice office, by the way. I don’t want one of those ridiculous little boxes in that new building. I want a bit of light. And Lettuce said, Be a good boy and you’ll
get what you want.”

  Edward stopped, and looked expectantly at Isabel. “I feel a bit embarrassed telling you this,” he said. “It’s just that the conversation was forced on me, so to speak, and I found it so odd.”

  Isabel listened with rapt attention. Until I get the job here…Now everything made sense. She had heard that the Institute was to appoint a new director; there had been a snippet about it in the bulletin that the University sent out to its alumni and donors. She had not thought much about that, but now it was obvious to her that Lettuce was in Edinburgh for negotiations over the job; he had probably already been interviewed, had been offered the post and was spending a few days meeting people in the University before finalising the arrangement.

  “I fear that Lettuce,” she began, but did not finish, as Edward anticipated what she was going to say.

  “…is going to be the new director.”

  Isabel nodded. “So it would seem. I can’t put any other construction on his remarks, can you?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Edward. “I’m afraid that Cheryl and I had reached the same conclusion.”

  “Not an attractive prospect,” said Cheryl. “Not that it really affects us—we’re just short-term visitors.”

  “And we don’t really know much about him,” said Edward, “although…”

  He did not finish, and Isabel looked at him enquiringly. “Yes?”

  “There was an incident,” said Edward. “But I really don’t know if I should talk about it.”

  “But you must,” said Isabel quickly.

  Edward glanced at Cheryl, who gave him an encouraging look. “I know you don’t like this sort of thing, but I really think Isabel needs to know.”

  “All right,” he said. “It’s just a little thing, but, well, I was rather appalled. It happened in the common room.”

  “Many appalling things happen in common rooms,” said Isabel drily. “And not just in novels—in real life too.”