The Novel Habits of Happiness

by Alexander McCall Smith

  For a few moments she was immersed in the world of the Dutch boy and forgot about Clementine Lettuce. But then she became aware that the other woman had wandered across to her side of the room and was standing by an adjacent painting. Isabel turned her head just as Clementine did so, and they found themselves looking directly at one another.

  It was one of those sudden moments of contact with a stranger when we find ourselves looking into the eyes of someone we do not know but feel that we must acknowledge. Isabel felt this. I have to, she thought.

  She smiled at Clementine. “Mrs. Lettuce?”

  Clementine gave a start. “Oh…” She recovered quickly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t…No, I’m so sorry, I just can’t place you.”

  “I’m Isabel Dalhousie. I know your husband slightly. I saw you with him a few minutes ago. He didn’t see me, I think.”

  The anxiety left Clementine’s face. “Of course! Robert has mentioned you. I knew that you lived in Edinburgh.”

  “Well, yes, I do. In fact, I saw your husband a few days ago, in the Institute.”

  Clementine nodded. “I believe he mentioned that.”

  “With Professor Dove,” continued Isabel.

  “Christopher. Yes. He’s here too. We’re staying in the same hotel. Christopher’s over in Fife today. He knows somebody at St. Andrews. Robert was going to go with him, but he decided to stay in Edinburgh.”

  As Clementine spoke, Isabel found herself warming to her. She had an open expression and a soft, rather gentle face. She’s innocent, Isabel decided. She may be married to Lettuce, but she’s innocent of his crimes. Now, on impulse, she said something that she had not intended to say.

  “I hear that you’re moving to Edinburgh. Will that be soon?”

  Clementine hesitated, but only briefly. It was as if she was weighing up whether to make a disclosure. “It’s not widely known yet,” she said. “But yes, we are.”

  Isabel wanted to smile at the words it’s not widely known. People were odd about confidentiality; irrelevant, unimportant matters were deemed, for some reason, to be state secrets. What did it matter if people knew that the Lettuces were coming to Edinburgh? Perhaps if he had not yet given his notice in London, it might be something to be kept confidential, but otherwise, surely not.

  She was aware that she had led Clementine into this admission, and she felt a pang of guilt. But the next moment she thought: But I had heard that. What I said was quite true.

  “Have you found somewhere to live?” she asked.

  “We’re looking. We saw somewhere rather nice yesterday and we’re getting further particulars from the agents.”

  Isabel felt a momentary sense of doom. There was a house on the market round the corner from her own—a matter of a few hundred yards away. What if the Lettuces had seen that and would end up being her neighbours in Merchiston? What if she had to run the risk of encountering Lettuce every time she walked along Merchiston Crescent to Cat’s delicatessen? And—excruciating thought—what if Lettuce were to come into the delicatessen and she had to serve him?

  “Whereabouts?” Isabel asked. The anxiety she felt made her voice crack.

  “In the West End,” said Clementine. “Near that Cathedral—the Church of England one. Drumsheugh Place. Maybe you could tell me something about the area.”

  Isabel winced. She could not help it. “Episcopalian,” she said. “The Episcopal Church of Scotland is a member of the Anglican communion, but is not the Church of England.” She put more emphasis into the not than she had intended, and it had its effect.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry. Of course. I have to remind myself that people are sensitive up here.”

  Up here. Isabel bit her tongue. It was unhelpful to blame people for their ethnocentrism. Everybody believed that they were the centre of the universe and at times forgot that there were other cultures. It was a familiar complaint in Scotland, where the English assumption that the United Kingdom was the same thing as England particularly rankled. But it was not ill-meant, Isabel reminded herself, and it was pointless working oneself up into a state of nationalistic frenzy over such things.

  The Japanese students had moved away from the painting they had been studying and had dispersed in small groups around the room. Two young women, not much older than eighteen or nineteen, were now peering past Isabel at the painting of the boy.

  “Would you care for a cup of coffee?” Isabel asked Clementine. “Or tea, of course. There’s a rather nice tearoom on the level below. It looks out over the gardens.” She paused. “You asked me if I could tell you about the area—that bit of the West End.”

  Clementine accepted, and they made their way towards the stairs that led to the tearoom. There they found another group of students, Italian this time, but not so many as to make them wait long for their tea.

  “This part of town can get a bit crowded in the summer,” Isabel remarked. “But when you live here, you tend to avoid the places that get too busy.”

  “Oh, it’s the same with us in London. We’d never dream of going somewhere like Oxford Street. Robert would expire, I think.”

  In her mind’s eye, Isabel saw Lettuce lying on the Oxford Street pavement, gasping like a stranded fish, while crowds of indifferent shoppers made their way about him, careful to avoid treading on him but not doing anything to help. The Expiry of Professor Lettuce. It could so easily be the title of a painting.

  She immediately censured herself. One should not think such things; and yet, of course, one did. Unwelcome thoughts was the term psychiatrists gave to such imaginings; most people, if they were honest, thought these things, at least occasionally, but not everybody sought to control them. That, Isabel felt, was one of the great moral challenges: how to think charitably when it was sometimes so entertaining to do otherwise. Sexual fantasies fell into this category: Isabel had read that many people—particularly men—entertained sexual fantasies every day of their lives, and on average slightly over once an hour. She had wondered about this. Did men really think about sex that often? She had asked Jamie, whose eyes had widened at the question before he gave the Delphic answer, “It all depends, I suppose, on whether they have anything to think about.”

  Isabel took a deep breath. “But do you?” she asked.

  Jamie stared at her and then winked. “What do you think?” he said.

  She said nothing. She had crossed a barrier, and must retreat. But she looked at him and thought: Every hour?

  There were other fantasies, of course, and if she were to confess to being a fantasist, then these were more her province; she had a tendency to picture things like the last moments of Lettuce in Oxford Street, or Cat’s former boyfriend, Toby, who had irritated her so much, being caught up in an avalanche on the ski slopes and ending up with his legs sticking up out of the snow, legs encased in those crushed-strawberry corduroy trousers he invariably wore. Only his legs would show above the snow, but these would be enough, of course, to guide the rescuers. They would dig him out and dust him off—he would be miraculously unhurt—chastened, yes, but not hurt; and they would scold him: You really shouldn’t show off so much, you know; keep on piste…And suddenly Toby became Christopher Dove, and it was the arrogant Dove who was pursued by the roaring avalanche, only to be saved at the last moment by Isabel herself, swooping down from a higher snowfield, guiding him down to safety. And Dove would say, “I don’t know how to thank you…” She would say, “Don’t think twice about it—you’d do the same for me”—which of course he would not; there were times when one said You would do the same for me in the full knowledge that the person to whom you said it would not; that was the reason for saying it.

  She tried to control these thoughts because she recognised their pettiness and knew they were all about revenge. Revenge was wrong in principle; that at least needed no further discussion: a dish eaten hot or cold, it was always wrong. Imagining humiliation for others was not something of which one could be proud; it was what inadequate people did to build themselves
up, and she would not allow herself to become inadequate. Mind you, she thought, some of these fantasies are funny, and she was only human. She was a philosopher, and she was well aware of the stern requirements of duties to self, but she was also human, and being human involved a certain amount of weakness, and silliness too; not too much of either, of course, but some. It had once occurred to her that perhaps somebody could market a notebook with My Failings printed on the front cover. You could give it to your friends for their birthdays, and encourage them to use it. “You won’t need many pages of this, my dear, but still…”

  —

  IN THE GALLERY TEAROOM Isabel and Clementine found a table by the window.

  “That really is a most peculiar edifice,” said Clementine, as she settled in to her chair.

  Isabel followed her gaze to the Scott Monument. “Yes,” she said. “A lot of people think of it as a sort of Gothic spacecraft, poised to blast off. And yet I’m rather fond of it, in an odd sort of way.”

  Clementine inclined her head. “This is a very unusual city,” she said.

  “Oh, in what sense?”

  “It’s hard to put one’s finger on it. People talk to one another, I suppose. That makes it a bit different from some places.”

  “You should go to Glasgow,” said Isabel. “If you want people to talk to you. They do that a lot. All the time, in fact.”

  Clementine smiled. “No, I’m serious. I don’t think that you would have talked to me, had we been in London. You would have been too busy. You would have been too reticent.”

  Isabel poured their tea. Proper china. Proper cups. “I believe you work in the British Museum,” she said. “Are you going to be giving that up? Now that you’re moving to Edinburgh?”

  “The Museum? Yes, I’m an assistant keeper there. I’m one of the people who works on the cuneiform collection. We have the largest collection of cuneiform tablets in the world, you know. Clay tablets. About one hundred and thirty thousand of them.”

  Isabel showed her surprise. Somehow she had not imagined that this is what Clementine Lettuce would do. “You mean, you read cuneiform? You decipher it?”

  Clementine Lettuce smiled weakly. “Yes, people are sometimes taken aback a bit. They don’t expect people to be able to read these things.”

  “There can’t be many of you who do.”

  There were, Clementine said, not more than a few hundred people in the world who could make any sense of the scripts. There was, she thought, one person in Edinburgh who could. There were none in Glasgow.

  Suddenly Clementine reached into the pocket of her jacket and took out a small notebook. From this she tore a page, and wrote on it, in ink, a collection of odd, angular strokes. She handed this to Isabel. “Your name,” she said. “Isabel Dalhousie in the Hittite language. I’ve done it phonetically, of course.”

  Isabel examined the inscription. “So that’s me.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry it looks so spiky, but none of us, I assure you, looks glamorous in Hittite.”

  Isabel tucked the piece of paper into a pocket. She would show it to Jamie: My Hittite self—see?

  “So Edinburgh will mean you’re going to give up the job?”

  Clementine put her notebook away. “Yes.”

  “With regret?”

  “Of course.” She paused. “I’ve spent years of my life on cuneiform. Years. But…” She shrugged.

  Isabel waited for her to continue; she sensed that something important was coming.

  “The truth of the matter is that this move is important for Robert. If it were just me, then I’d stay in London—I’d stay in my job in the Museum. But it isn’t just me.”

  Isabel was silent. She liked Clementine Lettuce. She liked the way she looked; she liked the way she spoke. She felt this way although she had been predisposed to dislike her intensely; that was strange—and unexpected.

  “You see,” Clementine went on, “the last few years have been very tough for Robert. And for me, I suppose, but particularly for him. He needs a fresh start, and that really means getting away from our house in London. Getting away from so many associations there.”

  “I thought he was happy in London,” said Isabel. “I thought he enjoyed the Society of Philosophy. Isn’t he on the Council? And his chair there; I thought he’d enjoy that.”

  “Oh, professionally everything has been fine for him. It’s not that, though—it’s what happened to us. We lost our daughter you see, our only child—our daughter, Antonia.”

  Isabel looked down at the table. “I’m so sorry…”

  “Thank you.”

  “Please don’t feel that you have to…”

  Clementine held up a hand. “No, it’s important to be able to talk about it. I often say that to Robert. It causes him immense pain—I can see it in his face—but I always encourage him to talk about her.”

  Isabel spoke quietly. “What age was…was Antonia?”

  “She was eighteen.”

  Isabel said nothing.

  “She went off to look at a university—it was Durham, actually. She wanted to apply for a place there, and they had an open day. She went with some school friends, and there was a road accident. Somebody was driving a bit too fast. It doesn’t matter who that was. I don’t bear them any ill feeling because they couldn’t have known what would happen. Robert found that harder, but he came round to my view eventually.”

  “I see.”

  “But his heart was broken.” She paused. “Have you ever known anybody with a broken heart?”

  Isabel was not prepared for the question. Had she? She was not sure.

  “It’s the saddest thing there is. Something goes out inside them. It just goes out.”

  “I’m sorry to hear this.”

  “Thank you. But that’s why Robert needed to apply for this job. Edinburgh or Oxford are the two places he says he would be prepared to move to. There’s nothing coming up in Oxford, and anyway, I think that there are people there who don’t like him, so he won’t stand a chance. So it’s going to be Edinburgh, I hope.”

  The words were not intended as a reproach, but that was what they were—in Isabel’s mind at least. There are people there who don’t like him. And in Edinburgh? There were people there who did not like him either. She imagined the anti-Lettuce faction in Oxford—a group of fussy, argumentative dons, united at least in this one thing: their dislike of Lettuce; meeting in secret to discuss the latest doings of their bête noire. Adolf Sax, the inventor of the saxophone, similarly had a society of his enemies—he attracted fervid jealousy from people who wished they had invented the saxophone; this society had formal meetings in Paris, in, quite appropriately, la rue des Serpents. She smiled at the thought.

  But the smile quickly faded. She had been without charity, and she now saw Lettuce in a different light. He was a sorrowing father, to whom the most awful thing conceivable had happened. And here was this woman giving up her career for his sake. She obviously loved him. He loved her. They had both loved their daughter. And Lettuce was presumably doing the best he could in an imperfect world. He was vain and he was pompous. But he was human, and his heart had been broken.

  “I’m so very sorry,” said Isabel, and reached out to put her hand on Clementine’s arm. She saw the first sign of tears in the other woman’s eyes. They were quickly wiped away.

  “It’s very kind of you,” said Clementine. “It’s very kind of you to talk to me. I don’t know a soul in Edinburgh.”

  “I’m sure you’ll make friends here quickly,” said Isabel, and she added, without thinking, “I’ll help you meet people.”

  “You’re very kind.”

  “And Robert too.”

  Clementine frowned. “Robert’s not always easy,” she said. “Sometimes it’s more difficult for him. He had a very unhappy childhood, you know. His father was with Shell, you see, and so his parents lived abroad much of the time. Robert went to one of those dreadful boarding schools. It was down on the South Coast. I think some
very unpleasant things happened there.” She looked hard at Isabel. “So many lives were distorted by such cruelty. I know so many men who had to put up with that, so many…”

  Isabel closed her eyes momentarily. Those schools, and the attitudes that allowed them, were a largely spent force now, but their shadow was a long one. Now she asked the first thing that came into her head. “And Christopher Dove? What does he think of the move?”

  Clementine did not answer immediately. She glanced out of the window and seemed to be studying something. Isabel looked out too. The gardens were busy; a woman with a group of children—six or seven—walked past, and Isabel thought: They can’t all be hers—not these days. Then Clementine turned her head. “At times it’s difficult to read Christopher. Do you know him well?”

  At first, Isabel was unsure how to answer. She knew Dove’s faults well enough, she believed, but she could not say that she knew him well. “Professionally. We’ve had some dealings. I edit a journal, you know, and he…”

  “Oh, I know you do,” interjected Clementine. “Robert’s spoken about that. He says you’re very good at it.”

  Isabel tried to hide her surprise. “That’s good of him. I do my best. It’s a bit of a burden at times.”

  Clementine returned to Christopher. “Robert’s close to Christopher, but sometimes, well, frankly, I don’t quite get what he sees in him. Friendships between men can be rather opaque, I find. Men are not particularly given to thinking about their friendships. They just take them for granted. So-and-so is my friend—that’s all there is to it. That sort of thing.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Isabel.

  “Still,” mused Clementine, “I think that it will be good to have Robert here in Edinburgh and Christopher down in London. I think it will be good for Robert to get out of Christopher’s orbit, so to speak. Sometimes I think that Christopher manipulates Robert—or tries to.”

  Isabel caught her breath. “So Christopher wouldn’t think of coming here too?” She paused, watching the effect of her words. “If something suitable came up, of course.”