The Novel Habits of Happiness

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The suggestion seemed to appal Clementine. “Oh, I hope not.” She stopped to reflect. “Of course, I shouldn’t be selfish about that. Robert is not very good with friends—he doesn’t keep up any friendships. I rather think that Christopher is his only real friend, you know.”

  Isabel gazed up at the ceiling. How bleak to have Christopher Dove as your only friend. Lettuce, she thought, is not what I thought he was. I have been unkind. I have been wrong. He may be insufferably pompous, but within him there’s the damaged, frightened little boy trapped in an institution of bullies and oppression, wanting only the love of his mother, who was far away, in some place where Shell people went, a voice on the telephone in occasional, snatched conversations—that same frightened, uncertain little boy who was there within so many men. She thought of a politician she knew who had a reputation for bombast and bullying. That little boy was within him. Or the greedy tycoon who had tried to put a rival out of business through sheer canon power; that same boy’s voice could be heard there too. No, it’s Dove who’s the one to watch; he’s the Svengali, he’s the Rasputin.

  FROM THE GREEN SWEDISH CAR they looked out over a loch to their left, a long, narrow stretch of water overshadowed by the hills that rose sharply on either side. Jamie was at the wheel; they shared the driving, hour and hour about, neither of them liking to drive for long periods. In the back, strapped into his detachable car seat, Charlie had dozed off, still clasping his toy stuffed fox.

  “This Seagull guy,” said Jamie. “Who exactly is he again?”

  “Starling,” corrected Isabel. “He’s called Neil Starling, and he’s a friend of Peter Stevenson’s. Peter was in touch with him.”

  Jamie guided the car carefully round a tight bend. The road was following the edge of the loch closely, and the sharply rising hillside on the other side left little room for manoeuvre. “Yes, you told me that,” he said. “But what about him? What do you know about him?”

  Isabel explained that she knew very little beyond what Peter had told her. When she had contacted him, after Peter’s phone call, he had sounded warm and friendly, and had said that he would be delighted to see her. “I’m going nowhere,” he assured her. “Any day will suit me.”

  They had made the arrangement, and Isabel had telephoned the small hotel he said would be a convenient place for them to stay. They were equally welcoming. Charlie would be no problem: “We have high chairs, and our carpets, I assure you, can put up with anything,” said the woman who took the booking. “Three-year-olds hold no dread for us.”

  Jamie slowed down for another awkward bend. “Do you really think we’ll find anything out?” he asked. “I mean, honestly?”

  She looked out over the passing loch. “No, I don’t think we will. But if we can tell Kirsten that we’ve tried, then I’ll feel much better.”

  He took his eyes off the road for a few seconds. He glanced at her in fondness. “I’m glad that you’re the way you are. I don’t think I’d like to be married to a selfish person.”

  She blushed. She did not think of herself as at all exceptional. “I’m every bit as selfish as the next person,” she muttered.

  “No, you’re much more altruistic than…than anybody I know.”

  “Thank you, but that’s not really true.”

  “No, it is. You’re just…really kind, I suppose.” He thought for a moment. “Anyway, you know how I’ve said in the past that you should be much more careful about getting involved in other people’s problems?”

  She did not need to be reminded; he had begun to say it in the early stages of their relationship—when they were still just friends—and he had continued. “I’ve heard you say that.”

  “Well, I’ve changed my mind a bit. I still think you shouldn’t jump in too quickly, but now I think that if that’s what you do, well, it’s what you do.”

  She reached out and touched him gently on the forearm. She wanted to kiss him, to thank him for this little speech, but the winding road discouraged it. “I’ll give you a kiss later on,” she said.

  He smiled. “A lingering one?”

  “As lingering as you wish.”

  There was a noise from the back seat. And then a small voice: “Hills.”

  Isabel turned round to look at Charlie. “Yes, hills, my darling. Hills. The Highlands.”

  Jamie looked up at the driving mirror to see Charlie.

  “Daddy driving,” said Charlie.

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “Daddy is driving now. Mummy will drive a bit later on.”

  There was silence. Then the small voice said, “No. Daddy drive.”

  Isabel made a face. “Oh dear. Where’s that come from?”

  Jamie grinned. “Nothing to do with me,” he said. And then, over his shoulder to Charlie: “Mummy drives very well, Charlie. Mummies are good drivers.”

  “No,” insisted Charlie. “Daddy drive.”

  Isabel caught Jamie’s eye. “It starts very young,” she whispered. “Do you think he’s picked this up from somebody at nursery?”

  “Possibly. I think it’s probably best not to make too big a thing of it or he’ll use it. Best to ignore.”

  Isabel agreed. “Look at the sheep,” she exclaimed in an attempt to distract. “So happy in their fields.”

  “We’ll eat them later,” said Charlie, without malice. “For dinner.”

  It was, thought Isabel, an entirely understandable observation on the world. People did eat sheep—they could not hide such things from him—and with the honesty of childhood he remarked on the fact; whereas we, she thought, don’t care to mention it too directly. The blind eye develops as one gets older, she said to herself.

  “We eat vegetables too, Charlie,” said Jamie.

  “Poor vegetables,” said Charlie.

  “They don’t mind,” said Jamie.

  “Mr. Potato doesn’t want to be eaten,” protested Charlie.

  Isabel suppressed a laugh. Charlie had a book about Mr. Potato, a grumpy, potatoesque figure who had constant problems with the other vegetables around him; and yet was, in his own earthy way, something of a hero. Of course Mr. Potato would mind being boiled or mashed; of course he would.

  “Nobody will eat Mr. Potato, darling,” she reassured him. “He’s quite safe.”

  —

  THE ROAD THEY FOLLOWED climbed up into the first large hills of the Highlands proper. Once through the pass at Glen Ogle, it crossed a wide sweep of country to Rannoch, a high, desolate moor dotted with small lochs, like silver patches, breaking up a landscape of heather and peat bog. Now the hills became mountains—high and brooding, bare of trees, scarred with lines of tumbling scree and white waterfall. Jamie pointed out Buchaille Etive Mhor, a sentinel mountain that guarded the mouth of Glen Etive. “I climbed that,” he said. “I went up with my father’s cousin, one winter. She was a member of the Scottish Ladies’ Mountaineering Club. I didn’t realise how dangerous it was until I came down again and looked up to see where we had been. Then I knew.”

  And if you had fallen…Isabel looked up at the forbidding face of the mountain. A veil of mist concealed the summit, even on this otherwise clear day; the distant brow of rock, almost sheer, glistened from the water that drained off the mountain in rivulets. Now she thought of it differently; it was not simply Buchaille Etive Mhor, it was the mountain that Jamie had climbed with his father’s cousin. Everywhere that Jamie went was, in her mind, touched by his presence, as is often the case with lovers. The places our lovers have been to are no longer ordinary—the association, she felt, conferred on them a particular status, as a benediction does upon a holy place. We are fond of places because we are fond of people.

  The road descended, dropping down towards the coast at Ballachulish. Charlie had been becoming restless, but the sight of boats bobbing on their moorings improved his mood. And then, when they took the small car ferry that crossed Loch Linnhe, his excitement seemed to know no bounds, and he gave sporadic, heartfelt squeals of delight.

  Their ho
tel was a good hour’s drive further along the Ardnamurchan peninsula, at the edge of a small village of whitewashed stone cottages. These cottages were dotted about, seemingly at random, without circumscribing gardens and fences. Sheep grazed at random, free to roam—on the verges of the single-track road, on the lower slopes of the hill behind the village, around the back doors of the houses.

  “Before the land grab,” remarked Isabel.

  Jamie was concentrating on finding the hotel. “What?”

  “The land grab. This was what life was like before the land was taken away from people. There were no fences. There were no walls. Just freedom.”

  He thought he saw the hotel. “Over there. That must be it.”

  She glanced at the larger building at the far end of the village. It would have been the Manse, she thought—the house once occupied by the Church of Scotland minister—and it had now become a hotel. “Yes, that must be it. Everything has been taken away—over the years.”

  “I’m not with you.”

  “Everything,” she said. “The Gaelic culture suppressed. The language. The songs. The way of life.”

  “But things change everywhere. The Industrial Revolution…You can’t uninvent technology.”

  That was not her point. “The problem was that people got in the way. You couldn’t have a society of small farmers who lived according to a culture of sharing. That didn’t fit.”

  “Well…”

  She continued, “So the people had to go, didn’t they? Off to Canada and America.” She pointed ahead. “I think that’s the turning up there.”

  “Where they were a bit better off, weren’t they? Not that I’m justifying the clearances, but how many people in Canada, for instance, can look back with relief that their people made it over there? Or made it to America?”

  He slowed down; a red post office van was approaching them on the road ahead; sheep were scattering.

  It was not a conversation that was going to get anywhere. Jamie was concentrating on the driving, and she was dwelling on the past.

  He turned the car into a short driveway lined with flowering gorse bushes. The scent of the gorse was powerful, and combined with something else—an iodine smell of seaweed. “I love this,” he said. “I love this sort of place.”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s come and live here,” he said. “Let’s leave Edinburgh and live somewhere like this. We’d be away from everything. No traffic. No noise. Nothing. Just these hills and the sea over there and the sheep all about us.”

  Isabel laughed. “What would we do?”

  They had reached the hotel and Jamie turned off the engine. There was quiet. In spite of his earlier excitement Charlie had dropped off to sleep again, lulled by the movement and the warm air.

  “Does one have to do anything? What do the people who live here do? We could do that.” He paused, and she wondered whether he was serious. “I could give music lessons. And you could run the Review from here. The internet has liberated everyone from having to be in a particular place. Cyberspace is a big country. You can do just about anything anywhere.”

  “Have they got the right cables out here?”

  He pointed to a wooden telephone post and the wires leading to the side of the building. “That’s all you need,” he said.

  She smiled at him “We could think about it.”

  “I know I’m being unrealistic.”

  She said that she thought he was being romantic.

  “That’s much the same thing,” he replied.

  —

  THEY HAD ARRIVED at three in the afternoon, the journey from Edinburgh having taken them almost five hours. Neil Starling had told them that he would be at home some time after four. “Just turn up at my place,” he said. “We’re very casual over here. If we’re not in, just make yourselves comfortable in the kitchen. We don’t lock our doors.”

  The owner of the hotel gave them directions. She knew Neil, she said—everybody did. And she confirmed what Peter had said: “He knows an awful lot, that man—an awful lot about…well, everything, I suppose.”

  A line of poetry came to Isabel. That one small head could carry all he knew…It was Oliver Goldsmith’s village schoolmaster. Another line came back to her: Amazed the gazing rustics rang’d around…That was what amazed them—the fact that one head could contain so much. But heads did. There was Professor Hawking, whose head, she imagined, contained the sum total of what we knew about physics; and Mozart, whose brain contained that extraordinary, seemingly limitless body of music.

  “What were you thinking about?” Jamie asked, as they went out into the hotel car park. “Back there, when she was talking about Neil Starling?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I can always tell. You get this odd expression, as if you’re there, but not quite there.”

  She shrugged. “I was thinking of a poem by Oliver Goldsmith.”

  Jamie shook his head in disbelief. “How can you think about that when somebody’s talking to you about something completely different?”

  “I just do,” said Isabel. “Don’t you?”

  “No, I usually think about what they’re saying to me.”

  They put Charlie back in his car seat. “I don’t want to go home,” he said.

  “We’re not going home,” explained Isabel. “We’re going to see a man. And then, when we’ve seen the man, we can go and look at the sea. Would you like that?”

  He would, he said, but would like it now.

  She planted a kiss on his cheek. “Soon, my darling. Soon.”

  “Will we see whales?” he asked.

  Isabel did not want to raise his hopes too high. “Maybe.”

  She thought of what Jamie had said. She knew that she had a tendency to allow her mind to wander, but surely that was what made the world interesting: one thought led to another, one memory triggered another. How dull it would be, she thought, not to be reminded of the inter-connectedness of everything; how dull for the present not to evoke the past; for here not to imply there.

  Neil Starling’s house was a couple of miles away, separated from its nearest neighbour by a small clump of neglected Scots pines. It looked as if it had been a farmhouse, as there was a cluster of outbuildings behind it, one of which looked like a line of animal stalls. In front of the house, on a stretch of what might once have been a lawn, a boat sat on a trailer, its name painted in red on the bow: The Gordon. There was an attempt at a flower garden, but this had an untended look to it; it was a working house and yard.

  Neil appeared at the door as they arrived. He was a tall man, somewhere in his fifties, thought Isabel, dark-haired and with a rather prominent aquiline nose. He looked fit, with the complexion of one who lived much of his life out of doors.

  He greeted them warmly, and they followed him inside, where they met his wife, Andrea. Isabel noticed that she, like Neil, was tall, and there was a similar aquiline nose. We marry people who look like us, she thought. She glanced at Jamie. Was he her?

  Over tea in the kitchen, while Andrea and Jamie entertained Charlie with a jigsaw puzzle, Isabel told Neil about Harry. Peter had given him a rough idea of what their visit was about, but now he sat rapt while she filled in the details.

  When she had finished speaking, Neil sat back in his chair. “What an extraordinary story,” he said.

  “Yes, it is. Of course, this little boy is probably imagining everything, but he’s being so specific. That’s what makes me feel unwilling to dismiss it out of hand.”

  He agreed. “I think we need to be open-minded.”

  “Yes.”

  He frowned. “Let me get this straight: You want me to identify a likely house?”

  “If you can. Or at least I’d like you to say that there isn’t one here, if that, as I suspect, is what you feel.”

  He rose from his chair and crossed to the window. He stared at the pine trees, and then turned round. “The lighthouse is the key, I suppose. The boy claims that the hous
e was nearby? He said that, did he?”

  “Yes. He said that they lived close to the lighthouse.”

  “And could see islands? A big island behind a small one?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And a burn? He said that the burn was close to the house?”

  “Just behind it, I think.”

  He turned to face the window again. From the floor behind them, Charlie gave a cry of triumph. He had found a piece of jigsaw puzzle that fitted exactly. Isabel waited.

  “There are a few houses,” Neil said suddenly. “One in particular, I think. Yes, there is one that could match that description. But…” He broke off, frowning.

  She wondered what the qualification would be.

  “There are other lighthouses. There are other islands.”

  She told him that she knew that. “But we have to start somewhere.”

  “True enough, I suppose.”

  He sat down at the table again. “You said that the name of the people was Campbell?”

  “Yes. I know, of course, that it’s a common name round here.”

  “It is. There are lots of Campbells and any number of Camerons.” He paused. “The house that came to mind, by the way, has been in the same hands for a long time. It belongs to a family called McAndrew. Hugh McAndrew was a fisherman—he owned a couple of trawlers up in Mallaig and did rather well from them. He’s in his eighties now, and I think he lives somewhere up near Shieldaig. The house has been lived in for quite some time by his son, Willy. He’s a welder, and works over in Fort William during the week. His wife lives there with the children—they’re high-school age, I think; there’s a high school over at Strontian—they’re there, I think. One of them is very good at something or other—you see his photograph in the Oban Times. Running, I seem to remember. Or rugby. Something.”

  He stopped, and made a gesture of helplessness with his hands. “Not much use, I’m afraid.”

  “Any other houses?”

  He thought for a moment. “Not down there. The lighthouse is quite isolated, you see. That’s why I thought of that place. Otherwise it would be pretty much needle-in-a-haystack stuff.”