The Novel Habits of Happiness

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Yes, yes.”

  He took his hand off her knee and glanced at his watch. “I’m going to cook tonight.”

  “Again?”

  “Yes. I want you to do nothing. And to do nothing without worrying about doing nothing…”

  —

  THAT WAS A FRIDAY; over the weekend that followed, Isabel caught up with her work for the Review. The first of the papers for the anniversary issue had now arrived; she suspected that more than one of them had been retrieved from a drawer and dusted down for the purpose, but that was understandable, and she did not mind. Amongst them, though, was Professor Trembling’s paper, “The Ethical World of My Mother,” fifteen closely typed pages when printed out. Isabel sat down with this on Saturday afternoon while Jamie played cricket—or a version of it—with Charlie in the garden, substituting a tennis ball for the hard red missile that the real game used.

  She began to read. Geoffrey Trembling’s mother, he explained, had been brought up in the Midwest, but had moved to California when her father had died, her own mother having died when she was still quite young. She had found a job at the naval base in San Diego, as a civilian secretary, and had married a petty officer she met there. That was Geoffrey’s father. He drank, and when he was posted to Florida, Geoffrey and his mother stayed in San Diego. She had given up her job at the naval base and now found work as a clerk in a government seismology office. She was determined that her son should go to college, and she had taken in part-time typing work to help finance this. She transcribed medical reports from dictated tapes, often typing late into the night. “She never complained about work,” he wrote. “She just did it. People like her did that.”

  Isabel read on, and as she did so, she found herself drawn into the rather ordinary world of this secretary and her son. The father defaulted on alimony payments, was dismissed from the service and disappeared. The Navy did its best to help find him, but failed. His wife became ill and had to have a hysterectomy. For years they suffered from an abusive, intimidating neighbour. A cousin won a competition that gave her two tickets to Paris. She gave the tickets to them, and so Geoffrey had his first trip abroad at the age of sixteen. He won a scholarship to Berkeley. His mother wept with pride, he said, when they received the letter.

  Her ethical world was laid out for the reader. It was founded, her son said, on intuition. She knew what was right because she felt it. He asked her about this, and she explained that she thought her intuition had something to do with pain. She intuitively understood whether an act would cause pain to another. If it did, then she avoided it. He had asked her why one should avoid causing pain in others, and she said that was because of love. We loved them and did not want to cause them pain. She asked what could be simpler than that? “You have your books and your theories, Geoffrey,” she had said to him, “but I don’t need those because my nose tells me when there’s something wrong.”

  And then he wrote, “Obviously the professional philosopher will find much of this pretty low-level stuff. The avoidance of pain in others hardly comes from any profound insight; nor will the expression of love for others seem in any way radical. But what interests me in all this is the good that lies behind my mother’s attitude. She is an ordinary woman, not a person of great education or sophistication. Her life has never amounted to much—it has been a matter of work, of struggling to make something of a hopeless marriage; it has been a matter of helping at church functions, lending a hand with looking after various people who could not look after themselves; it has been one of doting on me, her only child, and taking pride in anything that I did; it has been one of trying to run a house and meet payments on the car and wiping away the tears of others when they encountered disappointments and sadness and loss. And all the time she has done this without question, she has done it because there was something within her, deep within her that amounted, I think, to a notion of the good. It was like a source of warmth within her, something indescribable, something that has shone on her very ordinary, unexceptional life, but has made it a good one. It is the power of good, glimpsed through the agency of intuition; it is there, and she sees it because she has opened herself to goodness, as one opens a door to allow a friend to come in. That is what it is. That is what I have seen in my mother, and it has given my life more sense of direction, more meaning and ultimately more joy than anything else I have ever seen. I am not ashamed to say that; I am not ashamed.”

  Isabel finished reading. She laid the paper down on her desk. She would publish every word of it. She would change nothing. She remembered how she had shown his letter to Jamie, and of their amusement and their talk of mother’s boys; Professor Trembling had said he was not ashamed, but I am, she thought; I am.

  —

  NOW SHE MOVED ON to the special issue on happiness. She had written to a number of people to solicit contributions and they had, for the most part, responded positively. One, though, had declined on the grounds that he was committed to a book he was writing and could not find the time to write an article “even for you, my dear Isabel” and had then followed this with an emoticon of a happy face. Another had said that he had been flattered to have been asked, but that he was, quite frankly, too depressed to write about happiness. “What’s the point?” he had asked.

  On the Thursday of that week Kirsten phoned to ask Isabel to meet her. Isabel suggested La Barantine in Bruntsfield, and was waiting there for Kirsten when she saw the other woman crossing the road. She waved, and Kirsten waved back. There was a cheerfulness in her demeanour as she entered the café.

  “You look happy,” said Isabel.

  Kirsten smiled. “Do I? Well, that must be because I am.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yes, I’m happy. You could say I’m very happy. Jimmy’s back.”

  “Your husband?”

  “Yes, he’s leaving the Army. He’s going into partnership with another Army piper. They’re going to do weddings, dinners, that sort of thing—any time anybody needs a piper.”

  “He’ll do well,” said Isabel.

  “He thinks so.”

  “And he’s pleased to be back with you?”

  “He’s relieved. And so am I.”

  The young woman from behind the counter came to take their order, and then went off into the kitchen at the back.

  “And Harry? He’s pleased to have his dad back?”

  Kirsten beamed. “You bet! Pleased as punch.”

  “Well, that’s good. I know it sounds trite, but a boy needs a father. If at all possible, of course.”

  Kirsten nodded. “Of course. But the wonderful thing is this: he’s stopped. That business about the house and the Campbells and so on—stopped completely. I asked him about it, and he simply said, ‘I’ve forgotten now.’ And that’s it. Everything has improved—his school work, his state of mind.”

  “He’s happy?”

  “As a…as a…” Kirsten looked at Isabel for help.

  “You can pick your expression,” said Isabel, smiling. “As a dog with a bone, or two bones perhaps. As happy as a sandboy is another one.”

  “What’s a sandboy?”

  “They were boys who sold sand in Victorian times,” said Isabel. “They were thought to be happy. Either that or it’s an insect that hopped around on the sand. These things can be vague.”

  Their coffee arrived.

  “May I ask you one thing?” said Kirsten. “Do you really think it all came from what my mother had told him? From her photographs?”

  Isabel lifted her cup to her lips and took a sip of coffee. This gave her time—time to remember Dr. Fordewell in his cardigan and his injunction about never hiding the truth. But then she thought: I don’t know what the truth is, at least not in this particular set of circumstances.

  She chose her words carefully. “If I had found out something else,” she said slowly, “would you want me to tell you? I mean, would you want me to tell you now that everything seems to have worked out so well?”

  Kir
sten gazed at her intently. She began to say something, but stopped. Then she began again. “I don’t think so…”

  “Are you sure?”

  Kirsten became more decisive. “Yes, I’m sure. I don’t see what the point would be, do you?”

  “I don’t see any point at all,” agreed Isabel.

  For a few moments nothing more was said, and then Kirsten broke the silence. “I’m very grateful to you, you know. You’ve helped me so much.”

  “It’s kind of you to say that. But I don’t think I really did very much. The problem seems to have sorted itself out—which is what often happens, I think.”

  “Maybe. But you were kind to me. You were.”

  Isabel lowered her eyes. “Thank you for saying that.” And she thought: Hard choices are sometimes less hard than we think.

  —

  ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, she saw Edward Mendelson walking across the Meadows. She had Charlie with her, asleep in his pushchair, his stuffed fox clasped to his chest. She and Edward spoke in hushed tones so as not to waken him.

  “I have news for you,” said Edward. “Professor Lettuce has been announced as the next director of the Institute.”

  Edward imparted this information in the tone of one unveiling a piece of bad news: a major dip in company profits, the outbreak of a distant war, the failure of a promising line of scientific research.

  Isabel received this with equanimity. “I thought it likely,” she said. “I met his wife, you see. She spoke to me about it.”

  Edward looked surprised. “You’re not too alarmed?”

  “No. I imagine he’ll be very pleased. And he has his good points, I think.”

  “Well, I’m much relieved that you seem to be reasonably sanguine about it. And there’s news on the Christopher Dove front.”

  This was the signal for Isabel to look more worried.

  “He was turned down, apparently,” said Edward. “I heard from one of the other people in the Institute. Dove had applied for a post in the University—a teaching post, unlike Lettuce’s new position. And he failed to get it. They’ve appointed somebody from Cambridge.” He gave the name, and Isabel realised that it was that of a regular contributor to the Review.

  “I’m pleased to hear that,” she said. “I was worried about Dove.”

  “So, there’s no need to worry,” said Edward.

  Isabel laughed. “Apart from all the usual reasons,” she said.

  “Well, we know all about those,” said Edward. “And, generally speaking, we keep them in perspective.”

  “If we can.”

  Charlie began to stir. A breeze had arisen and was beginning to move the tops of the trees that lined the lateral walk across the grass.

  A line came to Isabel. “The winds must come from somewhere when they blow…”

  Edward gave a smile of recognition and supplied the next line: “There must be reasons why the leaves decay…”

  Isabel looked at him. “I find that poem utterly haunting,” she said. “And it has two of the most beautiful lines that Auden wrote.”

  “Let me guess,” said Edward. “I imagine that this is what you have in mind: If we should weep when clowns put on their show…”

  She finished for him: “If we should stumble when musicians play…” She looked up at the tops of the trees, still moving, the leaves little black dots waving against the sky. “I think I know what he meant about weeping when the clowns came on. We know that we should laugh, just as we know that we should be able to dance when the musicians play. But we can’t, because we’re weak and the world is beyond our control. Things will happen whatever human attempts we may make to alter the course of events.”

  Edward nodded. “You can look at it that way,” he said.

  —

  SHE COOKED FOR JAMIE that evening. She had a new book, published by a chef who had just been awarded his first Michelin star. She chose one of the simpler recipes, but even that, it seemed, required two hours of preparation time. Once Charlie had been put to bed, Jamie came down to help her. She gave him carrots to chop.

  “There was a boy at school with me who had the tip of his finger missing,” he said. “He told us that he had lost it when he was chopping carrots. He thought his finger was a carrot.”

  Isabel winced.

  “But he had a vivid imagination,” Jamie continued. “We didn’t believe him.”

  “Still, he had lost a bit of his finger,” Isabel pointed out. “He must have cut it off somewhere.”

  “He became a dentist,” said Jamie.

  Isabel, grating cheese, raised an eyebrow. “His patients must have seen the missing joint. They might have thought that somebody had bitten it off in the middle of some dental procedure.”

  “That must happen,” said Jamie. “It must be an occupational hazard.”

  The sauce was taking shape, and Isabel, half an eye on the recipe book and half on a simmering saucepan, needed to concentrate.

  When the meal was eventually served, Jamie pronounced it well worth the hours of preparation. He did the washing-up while Isabel checked on Charlie, and then they went into the music room. He played the piano while she sat and listened. He sang the song she asked him to sing. Then he closed the lid of the piano and stretched.

  “Fatigue,” he said.

  They went upstairs.

  Isabel had something to tell him, and she thought that now was the moment. She would need confirmation, and she would go to the doctor’s surgery the following morning; she had already arranged the appointment.

  She waited for him; he often took a shower at night, just before going to bed. She heard the shower, and when she closed her eyes she thought how like the sound of tropical rain it seemed—a good, long, soaking downpour.

  He spoke as he towelled himself dry. “Let’s try this evening to increase our little family.”

  She watched him. She would tell him, but not just now; she would wait, and tell him later, just before they went to sleep, although she knew that the news would keep them both in wakefulness. But it would be good news on which to close one’s eyes.

  “Isabel,” he said from the other side of the room. “Yes?”

  She nodded, and she waited while he came to her, caught in the gentle light of the late summer evening when Edinburgh never really got dark; caught in that light he came to her, like an angel.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, the Isabel Dalhousie series, the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, the 44 Scotland Street series, and the Corduroy Mansions series. He is professor emeritus of medical law at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and has served with many national and international organizations concerned with bioethics. He was born in what is now known as Zimbabwe and taught law at the University of Botswana. He lives in Scotland.