The Novel Habits of Happiness

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “I’m afraid so,” agreed Edward. “One sees nature red in tooth and claw in common rooms. Ambition, intrigue, character assassination, perfidy of every dimension…It’s all there in a common room.”

  Isabel smiled at the memory of a conversation she had overheard in Cambridge when a mild college bursar, not present, of course, had been described by a professor of anthropology as being “every bit as ruthless as Joseph Stalin” when he had introduced a rule that members of the college staff were to be charged for coffee.

  Edward now told his story. “It was the day before yesterday,” he said. “I was in the common room reading the newspaper when Professor Lettuce came in. He gave me a nod, but didn’t strike up a conversation, as he seemed preoccupied with something. Anyway, he crossed the room to the table where the coffee is, and where, as you may know, there’s always a tin of biscuits for people to help themselves from.

  “Now I knew that there were four biscuits in the tin, because I had helped myself to one a few minutes earlier, when I poured myself a cup of coffee. Lettuce busied himself with his coffee, and I heard him unwrapping a biscuit. I didn’t pay much attention to what happened over the next few minutes, as I was immersed in an article in the paper. But after a short while somebody else came in. It was that young Dane—I think I told you about him—the one who’s working on Kierkegaard.”

  Isabel remembered.

  “And he went to the biscuit tin—the Dane, that is—and opened it. Then he said, ‘Oh dear, the biscuits are all finished; somebody must have eaten more than his fair share.’ And Lettuce, who was by then sitting down, looked up and said, ‘Oh yes. I found the tin empty a few minutes ago. Most inconsiderate.’ ”

  When Edward finished his story there was a silence. Isabel sat quite still as its significance sank in. It was a small act of dishonesty on Lettuce’s part, but somehow it seemed so major.

  “He lied to a colleague,” she said softly. “He greedily ate all the biscuits and then lied about it. How despicable.”

  “Not very good behaviour,” said Edward. “I’d like to think of something in mitigation, but I can’t. It was just not very good behaviour.”

  “There’s no excuse,” said Isabel firmly. “Biscuits are trivial, but lies are not.”

  She suddenly felt bleak. Lettuce would become the new director of the Institute and would then, it seemed, appoint Christopher Dove as his deputy—or something like that. It would be a take-over.

  “I’m glad you told me this,” she said. “Not that I can do anything about it.”

  Edward nodded. “It’s sad when you see the wrong person getting a job, isn’t it? And yet we can rarely do anything about it.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Isabel. “But then again…” She paused. “I suggest we talk about something else. Let me tell you about the canal. There are pike in it, you know, and I once saw a man catch one. He seemed quite frightened by it—I suppose he wanted a…a more innocent fish, and instead he got this great creature with its wide jaws and sharp teeth.”

  “Be careful of what you fish for,” said Edward.

  Isabel and Cheryl both laughed. “I love that expression,” said Isabel. “Be careful what you wish for. It has such an inhibiting effect. But let me tell you a bit more about the canal. You can walk all the way to Glasgow alongside it, you know. If one had the stamina—or the inclination.”

  “We’re only planning to walk a couple of miles,” said Cheryl. “And then we shall turn back.”

  Isabel acknowledged this information vaguely. Her thoughts had returned to Lettuce. How dare he come to Edinburgh? she thought. How dare he? How dare he eat all the biscuits. How dare he plan to appoint the odious Christopher Dove. He had to be stopped. He had to be stopped in his tracks before it was too late. But then she thought: It’s already too late, just as it was already too late, she told herself, to do anything about most things—about most of the world’s problems: global warming, rising oceans, microbial resistance to antibiotics…The thought made her put the Lettuce affair in proper perspective: it was a tiny problem in the context of the world’s tribulations, and yet, and yet…

  “MADELEINE CAKES,” said Peter Stevenson. “Isn’t that what they call these?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel, looking at the small shell-shaped French cake on the plate beside her coffee.

  They were sitting in La Barantine in Bruntsfield, at one of the two tables that gave a good view of passers-by on the pavement directly outside. It was at such an hour of the morning that the sunlight, slicing over the high roof-tops, cast a square of buttery light on their table. Before them were two steaming cups of milky coffee, their foamy surfaces decorated with a delicate fern-leaf pattern. Vuillard or Bonnard might have painted this scene, thought Isabel; the tables, their covers, the display case of delicacies—it was all a tiny island of colour and comfort that would not have been out of place in an intimiste painting: Man and Woman in a Café, Morning, perhaps, or Madame Dalhousie prend du café avec M. Stevenson. She liked the titles given to paintings; they could be so pithy and poetic, first lines of incomplete haiku.

  Isabel often bumped into Peter at the fish shop, or sometimes in the supermarket where they both shopped, and they would occasionally have a cup of coffee together when they had completed their tasks. On this occasion, though, she had phoned him and asked him to meet her.

  “I have to pick your brains,” she said. “Bring Susie too.”

  “She’s at her bookshop.”

  “Then just you.”

  “About?”

  “Lighthouses.”

  He had laughed. “I think you may be confusing me with the other Stevensons,” he said. “But, as it happens, I know a bit about lighthouses. Not a lot—a bit. You probably need to talk to the real experts.”

  “One doesn’t need to know too much about lighthouses,” said Isabel. “Although I assume there are those who know a great deal about them…” She wondered what they would be like—these lighthouse experts; not the life and soul of the party, she imagined; they would be people who liked the idea of isolation and getting away from their fellow men.

  And now, sitting with Peter in the café, she told him about Kirsten and Harry. Peter was a good listener, and waited until she had finished the story before he said anything.

  “So,” she said as she came to an end. “There you have it. Kirsten is anxious and the boy…well, he’s fairly matter-of-fact about it all. He doesn’t seem to think that it’s at all unusual. Children are like that, I suppose—they accept things we would find very strange.”

  Peter took a bite of his madeleine. “I love these cakes,” he said.

  Isabel slipped hers, untouched, from her plate to his, and he smiled at the gift.

  “I wondered about this lighthouse he talked about,” she said.

  Peter wiped a crumb from his lips. “Let’s get to that in a moment. What interests me is what you make of him—of Harry?”

  “In what sense?”

  “Well, is he…how might one put it? Does he seem balanced? No, that sounds odd. Does he strike you as being a normal little boy?”

  She answered without hesitation. “Yes—as far as I know. I didn’t have much time with him when they came round. But he seemed to be absolutely normal. He was very interested in Charlie’s collection of toy cars. He was very straightforward.”

  “And her? The mother?”

  Isabel shrugged. “Nothing unusual—apart from her obvious anxiety over all this. Certainly, she expressed herself well.”

  “Not a neurotic mother then?”

  “Not at all. Solid, I would have thought, but not one to look for anything exceptional in her child.”

  Peter stared out of the window. “And was he telling the truth, do you think?” He paused. “Or rather, do you think he himself believed what he was saying? That can be different from telling the truth.”

  “I know what you mean. Something said in good faith may be false; that doesn’t make it a lie. I don’t think Harry
was telling lies. No, I don’t think he was.”

  “Although that line gets a bit blurred in children, doesn’t it?”

  She nodded. “You’re right.”

  Peter was silent for a while. Then he said, “You don’t believe any of this reincarnation business, do you?”

  She was about to say “No, of course not,” but she stopped herself. There was some evidence, she thought, but it was impossible to say whether it had any weight. People came up with what they claimed was evidence for all sorts of unlikely things—for UFOs, for the Bermuda Triangle, for telepathy, even for the Loch Ness Monster. But close examination of this purported evidence tended to reveal its shaky foundations, particularly when it came to the Loch Ness Monster, which had somehow avoided affording an opportunity for anything but the grainiest and most ambiguous of photographs. No, there was never any satisfactory proof of any of these unusual phenomena, and yet the absence of proof was not grounds for denying the existence of something. We might believe that things did not exist because we had no evidence for their existence, but they still existed—in spite of our ignorance.

  Peter smiled. “You seem a bit unsure?”

  She attempted to explain herself. “I have no reason to believe in it,” she said. “But that’s not the same as saying I deny the possibility it’s true. I’ve done a bit of reading about it, you see, especially since I first heard of this boy. Most people who reject these things out of hand have never bothered to look at all closely. So what I’d say is this: reincarnation is a possibility. I don’t think it likely or probable, but it could exist, for all we know.”

  She knew that she sounded vague, but then doubt never was all that convincing. She looked at him almost apologetically, as one does when one says something that one does not expect to be believed.

  Peter said, “I’ve never seen any evidence.”

  She remembered something. “Funny…” It had only just occurred to her. “It’s a bit of a coincidence.”

  “What?”

  “Your name. Stevenson.”

  He looked at her blankly. “I don’t see what you’re driving at.” And then: “Oh, lighthouses? Of course.”

  “No, not that. Reincarnation. Past lives. One of the books I read—no, I think two of them—were by a Professor Stevenson. I’d forgotten that.”

  “Nothing to do with me.”

  “No, I wasn’t suggesting that. It’s just that one of the people who looked into this seriously was a Professor Stevenson. I forget what his first name was…No, it was Ian. Ian Stevenson. I found out a bit about him.”

  Peter was interested. “Well, I hope I have an open mind. Tell me.”

  “He was a psychiatrist—Canadian, I think, but he spent most of his working life in the States. He was a professor at the University of Virginia. As I recall, he became interested in reincarnation because he felt that certain psychiatric conditions could not be explained in conventional medical terms—or their origins couldn’t—and that issues might have been inherited from a previous existence.”

  Peter looked sceptical. “A bit of a surmise, I’d have thought.”

  “Possibly. But what he did then was to look very carefully at people’s claims to have lived before. He travelled all over the world interviewing all sorts of people. Some of them were children—I suppose, children like Harry—who were convinced that they had had a past life. He considered them through a psychiatrist’s eyes, so to speak. Took case histories and so on.”

  “And?”

  “And he ended up concluding that there was enough evidence to suggest reincarnation as the most likely explanation. To suggest it.”

  Peter then asked if to suggest something was different from proving it. “It sounds more tentative,” he said.

  “Yes. I suppose it implies that the jury’s still out.”

  He sat back in his chair. “And that’s your view too? Do you think that the jury’s still out?”

  She had no hesitation on that. “Of course. I think, too, it’s highly unlikely.” But did she? She felt uncertain, even as she spoke. “Well, no, what I think is this—I think…”

  He laughed. “You think you think…”

  “No, what I know I think…What I think is this: It’s highly unlikely that people have lived past lives. I suspect—and this is just what I believe is the likely explanation—that all these cases can be explained in terms of imagination. Or where imagination is not at play, they can be explained in some other way. They may be instances of sheer coincidence, for instance, or they may be based on memories based on information laid down in the mind and then forgotten.” She saw he was nodding, and she continued: “There are so many things we take in subconsciously and are unaware we ever saw. There is plenty of lumber like that in our minds.”

  Peter liked the word lumber. “The lumber of the mind,” he said. “Very nice.”

  “Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Our minds are full of lumber.”

  He dwelt on it. “It’s a great word: lumber. It’s what you find in lumber rooms. Things that are stored.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And useless things in general—things we’re lumbered with. Stuff in the attic that we’ll never use.”

  She took a sip of her coffee, which had become cold. That was the trouble with conversation in a café: it cooled the coffee. Peter noticed, and signalled to the young woman behind the counter to bring them fresh cups. “Back to your professor,” he said. “Perhaps I should look at one of his books.”

  “I can lend you one. I bought a copy of the book he wrote on unlearned language. I could pass it on. It’s extremely interesting, even if one ends up saying: well, maybe…or well, not really.”

  “Unlearned language?”

  “There’s a technical term for it,” she said. “Xenoglossy. It’s the ability to speak a language you’ve never learned. Some people appear to do so under hypnosis; they’re put into a trance and they start talking as another personality. It’s regression.”

  Peter gave her a sideways look. “Isabel,” he said. “Don’t get caught up in all that business—it’s an awful waste of time. You’ll end up like that housekeeper of yours. Does she still go off to those séances?”

  “She does. And I assure you I have no intention of getting involved in that sort of thing.” She sighed. “All I’m doing is trying to help this woman who, whatever one may think, is genuinely troubled. Now, I think it’s possible to do this without being so sceptical that one simply dismisses the entire phenomenon out of hand.”

  Peter appeared chastened. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re quite right. It’s just that I don’t usually find myself sitting down and talking about people who speak languages they’ve never learned. It just seems so odd.” He paused. Their fresh coffee had been brought to the table, along with another madeleine cake each. Isabel again gave him hers.

  “Four madeleines in one morning,” said Peter.

  “They’re very small.”

  “Perhaps I’ll start talking French.”

  She said, “But you’ve learned it. I wouldn’t be fooled.”

  He pointed to her coffee. “Don’t let it get cold this time. But tell me, anyway, what did he decide about these people and their unlearned language?”

  “He decided that it was inexplicable in conventional terms. There are two main cases he writes about in the book: a woman called Gretchen in the United States and a woman in India. Gretchen appeared when the wife of a Methodist minister was put into a hypnotic trance. She spoke German, although the minister’s wife had never had any exposure to German. He went into that aspect of it very carefully. She had been brought up in a place where there were just no German speakers. And she had very specific things to say about a place in Germany and about events that happened there—in German, although apparently her grammar was not particularly good.”

  Peter shivered. “Sorry,” he said. “I find this just a bit spooky.”

  She agreed. “Yes, it is. So let’s talk about lighthouses.”
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  “I wondered when they’d come up.”

  She explained to him about Harry’s description of a lighthouse. “I thought I’d ask you about it. I knew that you had an interest in the subject, although you aren’t a direct descendant of the lighthouse Stevensons, are you?” The lighthouse Stevensons were the family of Scottish engineers who over several generations had built most of the country’s lighthouses.

  “Not really,” he said. “There’s a distant connection, but it’s pretty tenuous. Still, I’ve read that book about them. I found it rather interesting. And I’ve visited quite a few of the lighthouses over in the west. I rather like them, actually. They’re in beautiful spots, of course.”

  She gave him the description, as given to her by Harry, and Peter thought for a moment. “It sounds like Ardnamurchan,” he said. “Have you been up there?”

  She had. She and Jamie had spent a few days in Argyll when she was pregnant with Charlie, and they had visited the Ardnamurchan peninsula. She remembered the lighthouse, which was a large one and in a dramatic position on the most westerly point of the Scottish mainland.

  “If you’re looking for a view of a big island behind a small island,” Peter said, “then that fits, don’t you think? If you look up the coast from Ardnamurchan Point, you see Skye in the distance. But there are the Small Isles in front of it—between you and Skye. Muck’s the smallest of them, but there’s Eigg and Rum just behind it. You probably don’t see Canna—well, you might; I suppose it depends on the angle. Anyway, that sounds a bit like it to me.”

  She asked him whether he could think of any other possibilities. “There might be, but this is the one that springs to mind.” He hesitated. “Unless, of course, you’re thinking of the lighthouse on the Cairns of Coll. That’s a Stevenson lighthouse, I think, but nowhere near as big as the one on Ardnamurchan Point. You’d see Skye and the Small Isles from there, but the Cairns of Coll are just a small group of islands and they haven’t been inhabited since some time back—the nineteenth century, maybe earlier. So they wouldn’t really fit the bill, would they?”