The Novel Habits of Happiness

by Alexander McCall Smith

Kirsten seemed to pay little attention to this explanation. She pulled herself together, and asked briskly, “So? What now? What do we do now?”

  “I’ve been given an address for these people,” explained Isabel. “They live just outside Edinburgh, or they did some years ago—the address may not be a current one. If it is, I intend to go to see them.”

  “Do you want me to come?”

  Isabel did not. “Not at this point, if you don’t mind. I don’t know what their reaction is likely to be. They might resent the intrusion. So I’ll do it.”

  Russell returned with the water, and it was then that Isabel realised what Kirsten had said.

  “You said something about Campbells. You said that half your family…”

  “Yes, half my family are Campbells. My mother was a Campbell, and my grandmother on my father’s side. They were all from Argyll—real Campbell territory.”

  Isabel shook her head in disbelief. “Well, that rather changes things.”

  “Why?”

  “Your little boy knows all this? He knows that there are Campbells on your side?”

  Kirsten shrugged. “Yes, he would know that, I suppose. He was quite close to my mother. She lived in Linlithgow and so she was able to see quite a bit of him. She babysat a lot when he was younger. In fact, she did that until about six months ago. She died.”

  “Six months ago?”

  “Yes, a little over. Maybe seven.”

  “And you say that Harry was close to her. Did he stay with her in Linlithgow?”

  “Often.”

  For a few moments, Isabel felt something akin to irritation. How could Kirsten have failed to make the connection? And yet, even as she felt this, she reminded herself that this was a woman who had been upset by something that had frightened her, and that she was by herself and had been unable to talk to anybody about it. She should not be cross; she should not be impatient.

  “I think I can see what’s happened,” Isabel said, keeping her voice even. “It’s obvious now.”

  Kirsten frowned. “Because of the Campbells on my mother’s side?”

  “Did she—your mother that is—have a photograph album? Did she talk to him about the family?”

  “Yes, I think she did. She certainly had photos—lots of them.”

  “Of Argyll?”

  “Yes. She had an old biscuit tin full of ancient black-and-white photos of her as a little girl.”

  “Where would that have been?”

  “They lived near Oban. Seil Island.”

  Isabel looked up at the ceiling. The situation had now become embarrassing.

  “I’m a bit surprised,” she began.

  “By what?”

  She hesitated. She could say that she was surprised by Kirsten’s failure to see something that was now so glaringly obvious. But she did not. “Can one see a lighthouse from Seil Island, I wonder?”

  Kirsten started to answer. She was not sure…She trailed off. “Oh, I see.”

  “Yes,” said Isabel, smiling. “I think this solves the whole thing, don’t you think? Harry’s grieving for his grandmother. He’s made up a life for himself as a way of handling that grief.”

  Kirsten started to smile. “I’ve been stupid. I should have thought…”

  Isabel reached across to put her hand on the other woman’s wrist. “You haven’t been stupid. It’s extremely easy to miss things under your nose. I do it all the time. Everybody does.”

  “You’re being very kind.”

  “I’m just relieved we know where all this comes from.”

  Russell returned to take their order. “Stilton soup?” he asked.

  “In the circumstances,” said Isabel, “yes.”

  “For two?” asked Russell.

  “Yes,” said Kirsten.

  SHE TOLD JAMIE that evening. He listened, bemused. He was not surprised, he said, that the real explanation should be so much more credible than that of a child seeing a photograph in a newspaper. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?” he said. “Completely obvious.”

  “After the event, maybe,” said Isabel. “Hindsight bias.”

  He looked at her enquiringly. “The wisdom of hindsight?”

  “Yes. When we know an outcome, we tend to say that it was foreseeable or highly likely to occur. We look at a course of events with the knowledge that we now have, but didn’t have then.”

  “So it’s as if we say we knew all along when…”

  “When we didn’t,” she supplied. “We now know that such and such a thing was likely to result and we think that we would have known that at the time when that result hadn’t yet occurred. But in practice, we wouldn’t have known it. We just wouldn’t.”

  “So in this case…”

  “In this case,” she said, “you’re effectively saying that you would have enquired about whether there were Campbells in the family or whether there was any relative who might have been talking to him about life in Argyll in the past—a relative who lived near a lighthouse, for example. It seems so obvious now, but it wasn’t then.”

  Jamie shrugged. “Well, all right. Leaving aside hindsight issues, it does seem pretty obvious, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, it does. And I must admit, I’m happy that we found a totally feasible explanation.”

  “So that’s it?”

  She hesitated for a few moments before she replied. “I suppose so. There is the additional factor of that Campbell family who stayed in the house one summer, but frankly I don’t think there’s any point in looking into that. The whole idea must have come from the grandmother. It must have.”

  Jamie thought so too. “The only point in putting those other Campbells in the picture,” he said, “would be if one were still to believe in the possibility of reincarnation.”

  “Which I don’t,” said Isabel. She interrogated herself: I don’t, do I? Of course I don’t. I believe in things that are proved; I believe in things that withstand laboratory examination, that can be reproduced under the eye of science; I believe in things that are here and now, are tangible, observable, measurable; Ockham’s razor should be wielded on the rest.

  Jamie shook his head emphatically. “And neither do I.” He paused. “So no further enquiries?”

  “None.”

  “Good.”

  But a few hours after this conversation, Isabel picked up the telephone in her study and dialled the number of her friend Charlie Maclean, who lived near Roslin. “It’s idle curiosity, Charlie, but I wonder if you could find out about some people who I think live near Roslin. They’re called Campbell and they live in a house called Wester Brae Farmhouse. Or I think they might.”

  Charlie was used to Isabel’s odd requests. “Find out what?” he asked.

  “Just about them in general: who they are, what they do, and so on. Any local gossip.”

  “There’s always plenty of that,” said Charlie. “Most of it false, malicious, and fundamentally unbelievable—except sometimes.” He laughed. “Sometimes it’s right on the nail…not that I pass it on, you understand.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Mind you, I’ve got a shocker of a story to tell you. Remind me some time.”

  “I shall.”

  They returned to her request. Charlie said that he knew somebody who lived in Roslin—in the village itself—and who knew everyone. He would ask her, he said, and let Isabel know as soon as possible.

  “You couldn’t get in touch right now, could you?”

  “I suppose so. Is this urgent?”

  She could not say that it was, but he picked up her eagerness to hear, and he agreed to get in touch with his friend immediately after Isabel got off the line.

  She rang off and went to sit in her study. She opened the book that she had been reading, The Habits of Happiness. She was planning to devote a future issue of the Review to the topic of happiness, and she would ask the author of this book to contribute. She liked his style—and his approach. Perhaps he would write a sequel, The Novel Habits
of Happiness, and come up with some new insights. Happiness was not as simple a proposition as it was sometimes believed to be: there were even those who believed that the pursuit of happiness was a bad thing, restricting the growth of knowledge and awareness, encouraging us to withdraw into an anodyne world of intellect-numbing benevolence. Proust had warned about this, she recalled, when he had said that happiness might be beneficial for the body but it was grief that developed the powers of the mind.

  She started to read, making the occasional note as she worked her way through the book. After twenty minutes or so, the telephone rang, bringing her back from the world of happiness and its implications.

  It was Charlie. “Success,” he announced. “My friend knows them quite well. You said Wester Brae Farmhouse, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel.

  “I know the house myself, as it happens,” Charlie continued. “I drive past it quite often. It’s set back a bit from the road. Nice place.”

  She waited for him to continue.

  “He’s something to do with an engineering firm,” Charlie went on. “And there were other bits and pieces of information—I’ve made a note here. Let me see.”

  She took a deep breath.

  “He’s called Alan,” Charlie said. “She’s Olivia. He was on the local council for a couple of years—a Liberal Democrat, apparently—and she was on the school board. They were very much involved in the Roslin Chapel restoration project, and still are involved down there in some capacity.”

  “Children?” asked Isabel.

  “Two,” said Charlie. “A boy and a girl. The boy is at the high school in Penicuik; the girl goes to a school somewhere in town. Apparently there was a third child, a boy, who died six or seven years ago. Apparently he had a completely unsuspected heart condition. It can happen, I’m told. Apparently she’s never really recovered—and that’s understandable enough. That sort of loss…”

  Isabel caught her breath. Yes. That must be the worst loss one could suffer, the very worst; six or seven years ago.

  “Isabel?” Charlie asked. “You still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “You went quiet.”

  She made an effort to concentrate. “I’m sorry. It was your telling me about the boy they lost—I thought about…”

  “The nightmare all parents dread,” said Charlie. “Yes, of course.” He became businesslike. “Do you want me to try to find out anything more? I could always ask.”

  She told him that this was enough, and they ended their conversation. She stood up and stared out into the garden. A movement outside had attracted her attention, and she stepped closer to the window. Brother Fox had emerged from the undergrowth of a rhododendron and was standing in the middle of a small square of lawn, the sun on his back, his fur seeming to glow red with the light. Isabel stood quite still, as she did not want him to see her; she did not want to disturb him in this private moment. But he, of course, had sensed her with that extra sense, that subtle radar, that animals have and that we can only imagine; he sensed her and looked round sharply, so that they were staring directly at one another through the glass of the windowpane.

  What would you do? she whispered.

  Brother Fox held her gaze.

  But you have no dilemmas, she said. None. You are pure instinct.

  Suddenly, he turned and padded off, his long tail flicking as he moved. Isabel saw a lower branch of the rhododendron sway as he brushed past it, and then become still again. She turned and looked at her bookshelves; the cumulated wisdom of moral philosophy was shelved there in front of her, in book after book, but none of these books contained anything on how naked and unsupported were the decisions of real life. It would be simplicity itself to pick up the phone and tell Kirsten that something new had turned up. But what exactly was it? Another possible explanation, another strange coincidence? And then it occurred to her that the woman who had lost her son might be interested to hear that there was a little boy who spoke as if he had been there, with them. Would that provide some comfort for her in the desolation from which she was thought never to have recovered?

  She made up her mind. Charlie was having his rest and Jamie was in charge. She would explain herself to Jamie later; if she told him now what she proposed to do he would raise objections and they might even have one of their very rare rows. She had to tell Kirsten about this because…She thought of a number of reasons why she should do this, but in the forefront of her mind was the simple precept: You should not keep the truth from people. It was a cornerstone of the anti-paternalist argument, a position on which a strict Kantian would go to the wall if needs be.

  She told Jamie that she was going to Morningside and would be back in an hour or so. That was strictly true—she was going to Morningside, where Kirsten had her flat, but she knew that Jamie would interpret things differently and would think that she was going to the supermarket. That was the way she put it when she went shopping—going to Morningside. The thought crossed her mind: I’m keeping the truth from him because I’m allowing him to misunderstand me. But it was too late, and sometimes, she told herself, there were conflicting duties that had to be weighed against each other. Hard choices. There was a book of that title on her bedside table by an author whom she admired; her own choices were so insignificant by comparison, but that did not make them any easier to make. All of us had hard choices, she thought; the greatest of us and the least of us, and we had to feel our way through them and accept that there would sometimes be regrets.

  She went to the garage and opened the door. Unlocking the green Swedish car, she got into the driving seat and put the key in the ignition. She turned it. There was silence. She turned the key again. A light flickered on the dashboard, a brief sign of electrical life, and then that went out.

  It was dark in the garage, as there were no windows and the only light came from the open door, which was itself quite shaded by an unruly clematis that had established itself against the wall and in the guttering. There was an odd smell, too; the smell of petrol from the leaky lawnmower that Jamie used to cut the lawn; the smell of mould from an old canvas tarpaulin that her father had refused to throw away and that had remained for years, half-unfolded, at the back of the garage. There was an earthy smell from a bag of compost that she had bought for use on the flowerbeds and that she had opened but not used very much.

  She leaned back in the driver’s seat. Jamie had suggested that she should sell the car and get a newer, more practical vehicle; he had even sent for a leaflet setting out the merits of a new hybrid petrol-electric car that promised great economy and a good conscience. She had declined, even if it had been difficult to argue against the case for a greener means of transport. She loved her Swedish car, and now they were no longer making them because the factory had proved uneconomic. Other cars were very different; they were not Swedish; they all looked identical, being born in the same wind tunnel; they lacked character, which the green Swedish car, had in great measure, even if it sometimes would not start. Somewhere in the works there was a short that drained the power from the battery when the car was not in use. Her mechanic had looked into it and had scratched his head. “Electrical issues are a dark art,” he had said enigmatically, and then had said, “I can get you a new car, you know, where this sort of thing just wouldn’t happen.”

  She was not sure how long she sat in the car, but she thought it was rather more than half an hour. Then she got out, opened the battery compartment and connected the terminals to the charger that was habitually left ready for use in the garage. Lights on the charger glowed red; power, and motion, would be restored, but not for some hours. And by now she had made a fresh decision.

  “That was quick,” said Jamie.

  “I didn’t go anywhere,” said Isabel.

  “Sometimes that’s best,” said Jamie, watching her. “Sometimes nowhere is the best place to go.”

  She looked at him fondly. He was lying on the sofa, in his stockinged feet, reading a ma
gazine. I don’t want you ever to be any different from how you are now, she thought. But you will be, won’t you?

  “Thinking of?” he asked, over the top of his magazine.

  “Unrepeatable thoughts,” she said.

  He smiled. “Shameless.”

  She thought: Do you know how beautiful you are?

  He said: “I think that you’re rather unsettled. Am I right?”

  She sat down on the arm of the sofa. He reached out and laid a hand on her knee—the gesture of a friend rather than a lover.

  “Yes,” she said. “I am. This whole thing with that little boy and his mother and…and…”

  He waited. But she needed encouragement before she would continue.

  “Cat?” he asked.

  “Yes, I worry about her. I know I shouldn’t, but I do.”

  He sighed. “Cat’s going to be fine. I saw her yesterday, you know. She said that she’s going to come to see you. She said she had an announcement to make.”

  Isabel had suspected that this might happen. “That’ll be about Mick.”

  He nodded. “Accept it. Cross fingers for a good outcome. I think she’s changed, by the way. I think she’s settling down at long last.”

  “At long, long last.” She paused. “I’m worried on his behalf. Perhaps I should have spoken to him.”

  “Don’t,” warned Jamie. “Don’t even think about it.” He dropped the magazine on the floor. “And what else is on your mind?”

  “Professor Lettuce,” said Isabel. “There’s a danger he’s going to get a job here in Edinburgh, and he’s planning something with Dove. And yet I feel rather sorry for Lettuce now.”

  “Not your problem,” said Jamie. “Can’t you see it, Isabel? The whole world is not your problem. We think that it is—I know that plenty of people feel they have to shoulder the burdens of the whole planet, but we can’t, can we?”

  He searched her eyes for understanding and agreement.

  “You do see it, don’t you?” he continued.

  She looked away. “Yes, I do. I see it.”

  “Lettuce’s appointment is not something you should do anything about. Even Christopher Dove is none of your business. You may have to accept them.”