The Novel Habits of Happiness

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Isabel said that she thought it all pointed to Ardnamurchan.

  “Well,” he said, “at least that narrows it down. Are you going to try to find this house? Is that what you’re planning?”

  “I haven’t planned very much. But I suppose that’s what Kirsten—the mother—would like me to do.”

  “Even if it’s a wild-goose chase?”

  “Even if it’s that. I think I’ll try.”

  Peter sipped at his coffee. “I could help you, I think.”

  “You mean you’d go up to Ardnamurchan?”

  He shook his head. “No, I can’t get away at present, I’m afraid—much as I’d like to take Susie up there for a couple of days. No, what I meant is that I know somebody there who knows everything there is to know about the history of the place and who’s who. He’s one of those people who’s steeped in local knowledge. He could be helpful.”

  “He would be,” agreed Isabel. “Could you get in touch with him?”

  “I’ll phone him,” said Peter. “He’s called Neil Starling. It’s a rather nice name, isn’t it? All those bird names are rather appealing, I think. He and I were at university together. He took over his father’s accountancy business in Edinburgh and then he inherited a house up there from an uncle. He gave up the business in Edinburgh, and he and his wife upped sticks for Ardnamurchan. She hadn’t been particularly well, and I think it just suited them. He loved it, and became fascinated with the history of the place. He learned Gaelic as well and started a Gaelic choir with some local people. I think they were quite good.”

  She thanked him. Peter never let her down when she sought information—about virtually anything.

  He pointed at her coffee. “You haven’t drunk a drop of it. It’s going to be cold.”

  She picked up her cup. “No, it’s fine.”

  She looked at the last-remaining madeleine cake. “Can you take back gifts?” she asked.

  “Is that a general moral question you’re asking me?”

  She smiled. “No, it’s specifically to do with the second madeleine cake I gave you. I’d like to eat it, you see. I’ve changed my mind.”

  He moved the cake back to her plate. “Of course. That will mean I’ve only had three. I shall feel less guilty.”

  She picked up the tiny cake and tasted it. “Very nice.” And at that moment she saw somebody she knew walking past the window of the café. Peter followed her gaze.

  “That’s John Scott Moncrieff, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel.

  She looked at the half-consumed madeleine cake. “A pure coincidence,” she muttered.

  Peter looked puzzled. “I don’t get it,” he said. “What’s pure coincidence?”

  “John’s some connection—a great-nephew or something like that—of C. K. Scott Moncrieff who was…”

  “Proust’s translator.”

  “Exactly. His version of À la recherche has never been equalled.” Isabel gestured towards her plate and what remained of the cake. “And who ate madeleines? The young Marcel. Remember how he dipped his madeleine into tea and felt all those feelings and memories wash over him. All evoked by the taste of the madeleine. It was the most famous Proustian moment of all.”

  “Of course.”

  “And here I am eating a madeleine and Proust’s translator’s great-nephew or whatever he is walks right past.”

  Peter took a final sip of his coffee. “It proves nothing,” he said. “And I mean that semi-seriously.”

  Isabel laughed. “Oh well,” she said. “One shouldn’t let a Proustian moment stand between one and the rest of a madeleine.”

  She put the rest of the cake into her mouth and closed her eyes. She saw a lighthouse, high on a promontory, and the sea beyond, with a fishing boat. The boat was moving slowly, describing a white line of wake over which gulls dipped and mewed. Beyond the fishing boat she saw an island, and an island behind that, a distant mountainous coast of attenuated blue, washed so faint as to merge with the sky.

  OVER THE FOLLOWING two days Isabel busied herself with preparing the next issue of the Review for the printer. She had taken to doing the page layout herself, using a computer programme she had bought at vast expense and that effortlessly—or so it seemed to the user—sized text, chopped it up into page-length segments and produced what looked like a professionally laid-out page at the end. The effortlessness, she knew, was illusory; behind each simple keyboard stroke was a vast hinterland of human effort. Somewhere, in some distant office, anonymous computer programmers had passed large parts of their lives glued to screens, writing the code that did the work, churning out forests of numbers to produce the tidy miracle at the end. Now their work enabled her to cut and paste, to line up notes neatly at the end of each article, and to vary fonts and the type size of whole screeds with all the ease of a god deciding the fate of hapless mortals.

  Halfway through the afternoon of the second day of editing, she had the entire issue more or less ready for the printer. His staff would run a more professional eye over Isabel’s efforts, and with a few tweaks the whole thing would be ready for printing. With the issue printed, for a few days Isabel would avoid her study altogether before the whole business would begin again. “My daily grind,” Isabel remarked, but knew, of course, that her lot was infinitely easier than that of most. A true daily grind involved a journey to an office or a factory, often on crowded transport, and the performance of tasks that were boring or repetitive: watching machinery, moving pieces of paper from one place to another, carrying and stacking, cleaning up. She thought of the people who manned those booths at tolls or at car park exits. What of the air they breathed, laced with traffic fumes? What of the sheer monotony of taking the money and handing back the change, hour after hour, through the day? There were jobs that were even worse than that, right down to the most demeaning ways of scratching a living. There were people who picked over heaps of rotting detritus—she had been struck by a picture she had seen of a family scavenging for tins and bottles in a South American shanty town; that was their life, their only life. And in the background of the photograph were the gleaming towers of the city centre, a world of affluence and plenty.

  No, the real working world was very different from hers. Of course, somebody had to do what she did: if there were to be reviews of applied ethics, then it would obviously fall to somebody to edit them, and perhaps that person should not feel too guilty about her good fortune. Similarly, there were people who earned their living tasting wine, or inventing new chocolates, or designing cathedrals. Isabel thought of people she knew who had daily grinds like that: her friend Will Lyons wrote about wine for the Wall Street Journal and was obliged to visit wine estates in Bordeaux as part of his job. And another friend, Charlie Maclean, drank whisky professionally in order to write tasting notes for Scotch whisky distillers. Neither complained about the calling in which they found themselves. Neither would be tempted to go on strike, she thought. And of course there was Evelyn Waugh’s Captain Grimes in Decline and Fall, who had been offered the job of his dreams by a brewery: “We employ a certain number of travellers to go round to various inns and hotels to sample the beer and see that it has not been diluted…”

  With the Review safely tucked up in its electronic bed, Isabel rose from her desk and crossed the room to the window. It was just before three, and in ten minutes Charlie would be ready to be collected from his nursery school. She was not to do that, though, as this was a Friday, and Friday afternoon, by unspoken agreement, was Jamie’s afternoon with his young son. It was an afternoon of unabashed treats, beginning with a visit to the Italian ice-cream bar in Bruntsfield Place, where Charlie would be indulged in a three-flavour cone, most of which would end up on his face, his hands and his clothes. Jamie seemed indifferent to this liberal distribution of ice cream, and did not appear to mind when Charlie, a tactile child, transferred a fair proportion of the sticky mess from himself to his father. Then, smelling of peppermint or raspberry or whatever flavou
r had been chosen, they would go off to the park near the canal, or, more frequently, to the Zoo, where there were penguins and meerkats to be observed. By the time they returned, Charlie would be ready to drop, being almost too tired for his bath, but needing it, nonetheless, for the removal of the now almost-ingrained layer of ice cream. Even if he stayed awake for the bath, he rarely managed to keep his eyes open for the story, and on a Friday he was often half asleep before the first page of the book was finished.

  Isabel left her study. She stood for a moment in the hall, undecided as to how she would spend the rest of the afternoon; the prospect of free time for a busy person, for a mother in particular, can be intoxicating. There were exhibitions she wanted to see, and one of these, an exhibition of Dutch paintings at the National Gallery on the Mound, was due to close soon. On the other hand, Valvona and Crolla, the Italian delicatessen on the other side of Princes Street, beckoned seductively; art or the needs of the kitchen? Art, she thought; art, of course.

  She caught a bus to Princes Street, alighting just before the Mound. Looking down into the gardens below the street, she saw, through the thick summer foliage of the trees, the Glasgow train accelerating through the greenery. The train’s whistle sounded—a curious, rather plaintive sawing between two notes—and then it was gone; in the bandstand an accordion band played bravely on, although for the smallest of crowds. She smiled; an accordion band might seem out of place in this setting—a folksy, undemanding sound from a Scottish hinterland of village halls and remote Highland bars, but it was a reminder that for all the cosmopolitanism and grandeur of Edinburgh in the month before the International Festival, this was still Scotland. And that particular Scotland was a windswept country of fish suppers and whisky and unfulfilled dreams; a country in which folk music of the sort being played by the accordion band was still in the people’s blood, half forgotten, perhaps; overlaid by the bland, promiscuous culture of the age, but still there somewhere, an ancient artistic DNA that went back to the heartbeat of a very different Scotland. “Mhairi’s Wedding”: the familiar tune, played at countless dances, reached Isabel from the gardens below, and she stopped for a moment and listened before continuing her walk towards the Gallery.

  She did not want that Scotland to disappear, that Scotland of ceilidh bands and kilts; it was hers, shared with so many others, a small fragment, an offshoot of the feeling that bound people together, that meant that people were not strangers to one another. Every country needed that: the French needed their picnics by the river, their pâté, their games of boules on dusty squares; the Germans their brass bands and beer, their Lieder; the Americans their flag and its rituals, their proms and cheerleaders; little things, yes, and embarrassing too; sneered at; clichéd in their repetition and their superficiality, but part of an identity that saved us from feeling utterly lonely and detached, mere passengers on a circular rock spinning through space.

  She entered the Royal Scottish Academy on Princes Street. Above the entrance, a large banner proclaiming the exhibition rippled in the breeze: The Dutch Golden Age: Masterful Interiors. Below the inscription was a reproduction of a Vermeer: Mistress and Maid. Isabel had seen the painting in the Frick in New York, who had lent it for the show. She liked it rather more than she liked Scotland’s own Vermeer, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, a rather sombre picture, she thought, even if brighter in colour than many of the artist’s works. Mistress and Maid was far better because it had that strange quality that so many Vermeers had; that quality that put you there in the room with the subjects. What was it that David Hockney had suggested about Vermeer? She remembered it as she went into the exhibition: he had said that he had used a camera obscura device to paint his pictures. It had seemed such an unlikely theory, and yet Hockney’s explanation made it seem so feasible. It was all to do with angles and perspective, and when you came to look at a Vermeer, there was a definite photographic feel to the artist’s work.

  Or was it the light? Was that what made a Vermeer so arresting? There was an afternoon quality to it; a stillness, a warmth, that seemed to support the people and things in the painting, that gave them body. That was why you felt you could reach out and touch them; might intercept the note being passed between mistress and maid; might feel the nacreous earring sported by the girl.

  She walked into the first hall. A child playing in a courtyard, a small dog at her side, and through the courtyard door a view of a passageway and a lane beyond. The Dutch masters liked to give us a view from one room into another, said the exhibition guidebook. There are few interiors that do not reveal other interiors, or even the outside world. Yes, thought Isabel; that was everywhere in these paintings. That, and things—physical things, possessions, evidence of the habits of the household, evidence of wealth: elaborate dishes, food, the accoutrements of bourgeois life.

  The show was not crowded, and what few visitors it had attracted seemed to be drawn to the Vermeers—the Pearl Earring Effect, she thought. A group of Japanese students stood around one of these, listening attentively to a lecture from their guide. One of the students produced a camera and took a surreptitious photograph of a girl standing next to him; she dug him in the ribs, playfully, flattered, perhaps, to be of as much interest to him as Vermeer.

  On the other side of the room, Isabel stood before a painting by Pieter de Hooch: A Woman Drinking with Two Men. The men were seated, the woman stood beside them; a maid hovered in the background. To their side, a great window allowed copious light to fall upon the party; again the light…

  Suddenly she became aware that somebody else, a couple, had entered the room. Up until that moment it was just her, the Japanese students, and two elderly ladies making their way round the room with earphones and a recorded commentary. The earphones had required the removal of hearing aids, and this was causing difficulty, as they both tapped at the equipment in an attempt to improve audibility.

  She saw the new arrivals out of the corner of her eye and did not pay any attention—to begin with. But then she realised that one, at least, was familiar. The realisation came as a shock: it was Lettuce.

  She turned back to face the de Hooch. She did not want to meet Lettuce. That was a rare feeling for her; she would usually never avoid anybody, but Lettuce was somehow different. Was it just dislike, or was it something different—a wariness born of the knowledge that he did not like her and would be perfectly happy to harm her interests—such as they were? She was not sure.

  She sneaked another glance. Lettuce’s companion was probably Clementine, who must have accompanied him to Edinburgh after all. Poor woman…There is a particular sort of pity, Isabel thought, that we feel for those married to people whom we do not like. How awful to have to share a bed with Lettuce; not a vegetable bed, she thought, and, in spite of everything, smiled. There were so many otherwise nice men, of course, with whom it would be inconceivable to share a bed; in fact any man, Isabel decided, could be a bit of an effort—except one’s own man.

  And what if you discovered that your husband or your partner was, like Lettuce, scheming and ambitious, or something even worse? The alternatives in such a case were stark, she imagined: you stuck to your man and said, “Oh well, he may be scheming and ambitious, but he…” And then you recited his finer qualities. Or you denied it. People had it wrong; he was not like that at all.

  She suspected it was the second of these that was more common. So Clementine Lettuce was probably proud of Lettuce. She would be ignorant of the machinations that Isabel had witnessed, including Dove’s attempt—aided and abetted by Lettuce, Isabel thought—to get rid of her from the Review, a piece of perfidious plotting that had been so beautifully trumped by Isabel’s outright purchase of the company that published it. There were other matters to be chalked up against him, not least this new plot that he was apparently hatching to appoint Christopher Dove—who was considerably worse than he was—to a post in Edinburgh; again she would be unaware of all that, no doubt. So Clementine was probably innocent in the matter
of Lettuce intrigues, and Isabel told herself, I must try to like her; I must try to like her.

  Still seemingly engrossed in de Hooch, but looking, every now and then, at the Lettuces on the other side of the room, she saw that they were making some sort of arrangement. Lettuce looked at his watch, tapped its face in emphasis and pointed over his shoulder in the direction of Princes Street. His wife listened, then nodded, and reached into her handbag to get something to pass to him. A shopping list, thought Isabel. Lettuce is being sent off to do some shopping. Even philosophers shop, she said to herself; even people like Professor Robert Lettuce.

  Lettuce left, and Isabel moved away from the de Hooch to look at the painting beside it. This had the look of a Rembrandt, but was not; she did not recognise the name of the artist, but he had achieved something of Rembrandt’s effect in his picture of a young boy with his dog—a vague, rather smudged image but one that captured the loneliness of the boy and his relationship with his dog. The dog, a nondescript terrier, was at the boy’s feet, gazing up at his young master, but the boy was looking directly out of the picture, straight at the viewer. Behind him, on a table, stood an hourglass, a symbol, of course, of the passage of time. Childhood was fleeting; life was painfully brief. Art reminded us of that—in case we needed reminding.

  She found herself thinking of the boy. This had been a real boy, presumably the son of the family that had commissioned the painting. The boy was dressed in good clothes, which revealed the family’s wealth, and he was not undernourished. But he was dead, thought Isabel, and had been dead for centuries. What had life brought him? A career as a merchant—following his father, presumably? Happiness, illness? An end from some trivial infection that would today be cured in hours by a powerful antibiotic? People died of the merest scratch in those days, she reminded herself. His little terrier could have nipped him and that would have been that; no wonder people paid such attention to the hourglass.