The Novel Habits of Happiness

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Fiona thought for a moment. Then she smiled. “Yes,” she said. “It was in the Scotsman. In the magazine section. Very recently, as a matter of fact. There was an article on living near the Argyll coast, and they had a photograph—two photographs, in fact—of our house. I kept it.”

  Isabel felt a sudden rush of relief. This was the answer. There was always a rational explanation to these things. The hovering UFO was simply an unusually dense cloud; the yeti was a moving shadow on the snow; the near-death experience was simply the dreaming of the oxygen-starved brain; she wished she could conclude otherwise, but she could not: there were no inexplicable phenomena; there was nothing that could not be measured or understood scientifically.

  “Photos of what? This room?”

  Fiona rose to her feet. “I’ll show you,” she said. “It’s in the cupboard.”

  She left the room, and Neil gave a nervous laugh. “Funny, isn’t it? Not reincarnation at all.”

  “I must admit I’m relieved,” said Isabel. “I like a simple, realistic explanation. I like science and rationality to be vindicated.”

  They sat in silence until Fiona returned; Neil, she had noticed, was not one to speak when he had nothing to say.

  Fiona handed Isabel a protective plastic envelope containing a folded magazine. Isabel took the magazine out and examined the cover: The Remote Life, it proclaimed, Five cottages on the edge. She turned the pages to the article itself. There were the two photographs that Fiona had mentioned: one was of the view from the bedroom window, the other was of the living room. The fireplace was shown: Snug, in spite of the gales, ran the caption. And at the beginning of the article was the name of the journalist who had written it: George Campbell.

  It took Isabel a moment or two to make the connection, but when she did she gave an involuntary cry of discovery. “Campbell,” she said. “The journalist’s name was Campbell.”

  Fiona shrugged. “He came to speak to us. He came with his photographer. They were from Glasgow, I think—or somewhere near there. Airdrie, Motherwell—I get them all mixed up.”

  “Campbell!” repeated Isabel, and this time the others saw what she was driving at.

  “I see,” said Neil quietly.

  Isabel knew that Harry was a good reader, certainly confident enough to read the sentence under one of the photographs: From the window the view is of the Ardnamurchan Lighthouse in the distance and beyond that the islands of Muck, Eigg and Rum. “He must have seen this lying around somewhere,” she went on. “Heaven knows where, but he would have seen this and filed it away somewhere in his memory. Later it must have come out as an impression of something he had himself done. That happens, I’ve been told.” It happened to her: she remembered lines of Auden at odd moments, unprompted; she was unaware that the memories were there, but they had been laid down, to surface uninvited when something triggered them. And sometimes—not very often, but occasionally—she would think that the line was hers, and that she had said it, had been the author of an aphorism or an insight.

  Neil asked whether it was likely that a six-year-old would read the papers, but she felt that it was quite possible that he had just picked up that page somewhere and had somehow taken it in. “That’s not too fanciful,” she said. “It could easily happen. Children drink things in—especially boys. They love facts and figures. They read all sorts of things: the backs of cornflake packets, instruction leaflets, the most unlikely books.” She remembered something. “When I was seven I actually read some Bertrand Russell. I picked him up and struggled through ten pages or so. I was very proud of myself.”

  “But you’re a philosopher, aren’t you?” said Neil, smiling. Yet he accepted her point, even though he had been half hoping for a different outcome; as had Fiona, who seemed disappointed.

  “It’s a pity,” she said. “I rather like the idea of coming back. It’s quite a story, isn’t it? That wee boy—it would have been nice to have thought that he had been here before.”

  “Well, it looks as if we’ve found a plausible explanation,” said Isabel. “I’m sorry that it hasn’t proved more…more interesting.”

  “The world is prosaic,” said Neil. He realised that Fiona had not understood him, and he blushed. “It’s very ordinary.”

  “Even when it appears not to be,” said Isabel. People thought that evil would be exceptional, but it was…what? Banal, pronounced Hannah Arendt, and she had seen it close-up in the trial of Adolf Eichmann. And she thought, too, of the torturer’s horse in Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” scratching itself against a tree while suffering takes place elsewhere. Neil was right: the world was a disappointingly ordinary place.

  She noticed that Neil was staring out of the window, searching the sky. “There’s a pair of Goldies up there,” he said. “Do you mind if I go outside and take a look at them?”

  Fiona explained to Isabel. “Golden eagles,” she said. “We have a breeding pair not far away. Neil is very active in the ornithological club we have here. Not me. I’m afraid birds don’t interest me at all.”

  “They lead their lives,” said Isabel.

  Fiona said nothing.

  “We’ve imposed on you long enough,” Isabel ventured. “Perhaps we should…”

  “You haven’t imposed,” said Fiona. “I’ve enjoyed meeting you.”

  There was something in her voice that made the remark more than a mere pleasantry. Loneliness, thought Isabel.

  Fiona noticed a movement outside the window. “There’s your husband,” she said, pointing. “And your wee boy.”

  Isabel stood up to look. Charlie, pursued by Jamie across a strip of grass, was shrieking with delight.

  “He calls it rugby,” said Isabel. “Jamie chases him in circles but never catches him. He’s understood that much about the rules of rugby.”

  “I don’t like my boys playing rugby,” said Fiona. “There was a boy up in Fort William who was pretty badly injured from a tackle. He walked again, but for a time they thought he’d end up in a wheelchair.”

  Isabel winced. “There are so many dangers. You give a hostage to fortune when you have children, don’t you?”

  Fiona nodded. “Yes. Yes, you do.” She paused, still watching the scene outside on the grass. “He’s beautiful.”

  “Thank you. I suppose as his mother…”

  “I meant your man.”

  Isabel was momentarily taken aback. “Oh, Jamie. Well…”

  “You’re very lucky.”

  “To be married to him?”

  Fiona smiled. “Yes. If it were me, I’d never be able to keep my hands off him.”

  Isabel struggled. It was an extraordinary thing to say to somebody you had just met. You did not signal sexual interest in another person’s partner—even if you felt it.

  She searched for a response. “You have a husband.”

  Fiona smiled. “Aye, I have my own man. And he’s a good man, right enough. I’m happy enough with all that.”

  All that meant sex, Isabel assumed. She waited. She did not want to lead the conversation any further down that road, but there was a certain fascination for her to hear what this woman thought.

  “We met each other when we were fourteen,” Fiona said. “Willy and I were at school together in Strontian. We started going out—if you could call it that—at sixteen. We were married at seventeen. That was just over twenty years ago.”

  “Oh.”

  “He’s the only man I’ve ever been with,” Fiona continued.

  Isabel looked down at the floor. The carpet was cheap and badly worn in places. She looked up; she had to offer some exchange of intimacy. “I was married before,” she said. “I married an Irishman. It didn’t last.”

  Fiona seemed interested. “He went off with somebody else?”

  “More or less. It was that, and other things.”

  “They do. They go. Irishmen, Scotsmen, Englishmen—you name it. They go.”

  Isabel felt that she had to defend men. “Not all of them.”r />
  “No, not all of them. My man hasn’t. I thought at one time he might be because he was coming back really late from work over in Fort William. Then he went off to a job in Aberdeen, and I thought that this was just an excuse, but then, you know what?”

  “What?”

  “I discovered he had been working overtime. Saving up for a new car for me. Aye, that’s what he’d been doing and I’d been thinking the other thing.”

  Isabel smiled. “Sometimes we need to be reminded of trust,” she said. “We all suspect, I suppose.”

  “Yes, we do,” agreed Fiona.

  “Maybe because it’s dread,” Isabel continued. “We hear of how it’s happened to other people and we worry it’s going to happen to us.”

  Fiona looked out of the window again. Her eyes followed Jamie. “You must worry with him,” she said. “If you have a gorgeous man like that, you must worry that there are women looking at him all the time, undressing him with their eyes.”

  Just as you’re doing right now, thought Isabel. She looked at her watch. “We told the hotel we’d be back for lunch,” she said. “And we have to drop Neil off at his place.”

  “Of course.”

  “Would you mind if I took a photograph of the house against its backdrop? The sea and the islands—the lighthouse?”

  “Go ahead,” said Fiona. And then she said, “Look, he’s picking the wee boy up. I love that. I love it when you see a strong man holding a child. It’s so lovely. It makes me…”

  “My camera,” said Isabel busily. “I must get it from the car.”

  —

  IN THE CAR on the way back Neil said, “That boy.”

  “What boy? Harry?” asked Isabel.

  “No, their son, Matthew. The young man we met briefly.”

  “Yes. What about him?”

  “You saw his hair?”

  From behind the wheel Jamie interjected, “I did. Viking.”

  “Exactly,” exclaimed Neil. “Exactly the type. What makes it interesting is that the parents—Fiona and Willy—are local. If your grandparents came from here—as theirs did—then the odds are that they’ve been here, generation after generation, for heaven knows how long. They could easily have been here since the ninth century, when the Vikings arrived.”

  “On the basis of hair colour?”

  Neil defended himself. “Not just that. You get to recognise the type. They’re tall. They have that hair. There’s just something about them, and you think Viking.”

  He sensed that she was sceptical. “I don’t convince you, I see.”

  “Who was here before them?” asked Jamie. “Who did the Vikings have to rape and murder?”

  “Picts,” said Neil. “This was Pictish territory, although it was very much on the border with the Dál Riata, a bit further south. That was made up of bits of Ireland and southern Scotland.”

  Isabel had not thought about the Picts for a long time. What was the name of that teacher who went on about them? She remembered: Miss MacReadie. She pictured her in the classroom telling the class of fourteen-year-old girls, “We know very little about the Picts, girls, very little.” It had sounded as if she were issuing a warning: Don’t go out with a Pictish boy, girls: we know very little about them!

  “Weren’t the Picts a bit mysterious?” She almost said, “We know very little about them.”

  “We know a bit more about them these days,” said Neil.

  Ah! Miss MacReadie, I’m happy to tell you something. You may have retired to St. Andrews or Melrose or somewhere like that; you may even be dead, but I have something I must tell you: we now know more about the Picts!

  Neil continued, “They’ve discovered some very important sites. There was a big Pictish monastery up in Moray. Before this, we thought the centre of Pictland was in Perthshire—not any more. It was further north, and then they swept down, pushing out various other people. Angles, Britons in Strathclyde, and so on.”

  “Then the Vikings came?” asked Jamie.

  “Yes.”

  Isabel made an observation. “Human history seems to me to be one long story of people sweeping down—or up, I suppose—replacing other people in the process. A struggle for somewhere to live. A struggle for resources.”

  “Yes,” said Neil. “Even today. It’s exactly the same thing, although we don’t always see it that way. Look at the Middle East: arguments over land, and who has it. Think of the Kurds. Look at every territorial dispute you care to mention. Northern Ireland, for instance.”

  “Religion in that case,” Jamie ventured.

  “Not just. Religion was the badge of identity, but it wasn’t really about whether you went to Mass or to a tub-thumping Protestant chapel. It was a result of the movement of people. The Protestant planters—many of them Scots—replaced the native Irish, remember? Movement of people again.”

  Isabel mentioned Russia and the Ukraine.

  “Movement of peoples,” said Neil. “Cultural conflict, Lebensraum and so on: all intertwined.”

  “So what do we do—if we want peace?” asked Jamie. “Build fences? Berlin walls?”

  Neil shook his head. “People build borders and issue passports, but do they seriously think that can control human tides? They can’t—they just can’t.”

  “It’s down to numbers?” asked Jamie.

  “Yes,” said Neil. “Pressure of numbers.”

  “But people don’t like to talk about it?” Jamie pressed.

  Isabel knew why. “Because we recognise the humanity of the others—the ones who want to come in. Nobody likes to be hard-hearted. Nobody likes to defend what they’ve got against all-comers. We want to live in peace with others; we don’t fancy being constantly on guard, pushing people away.”

  “So you think we’re going the way of the Picts?” asked Jamie.

  Neil smiled. “Perhaps.”

  Isabel looked back towards the sea, now behind them. It was a rough coast, a coast of high cliffs and pounding waves; nature defended it. But it was, when all was said and done, one of the coasts of a country that was a lifeboat, and that lifeboat was under siege by people who wanted to be taken on board. She thought of the southern shores of Italy and the boats that came from the south, crammed with the desperate of North Africa striving to get into Europe. The vessels capsized under their human cargo; there were people in the water, their dream coming to a watery end. How could one turn one’s face against all of that? What sort of person would one have to be to sail past?

  They were approaching Neil’s house.

  “Thank you for sorting this out for us,” she said. “You must have wondered what on earth it was all about.”

  “I understood why you wanted to do it. Of course I did.”

  Isabel smiled. “And it was all a wild-goose chase.”

  “You could call it that.”

  They arrived at Neil’s gate. “It was worth doing,” said Jamie. “I suppose it showed us something about how there’s an explanation for everything—even the things that look most odd.”

  Neil agreed. Then he added, “But what if we hadn’t found that Scotsman article? Would we have ended up believing in reincarnation of some sort?”

  “Not on the basis of one case,” said Isabel.

  “And yet the existence of one black swan disproves the proposition that all swans are white.”

  “It does,” said Isabel. “Provided you know for sure that the swan is black.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Jamie. “The swan might have been covered in soot. It might have been sitting on somebody’s chimney. Or…”

  “But there are black swans,” said Neil. “They’re native to Western Australia. But there are a tiny number of escaped ornamental black swans in Britain. Under fifty, probably. They’re very lonely.”

  Charlie had been silent on the journey, engrossed in some private game with his stuffed toy fox. But now he looked up. “Swans are white,” he said.

  —

  THAT NIGHT, Jamie said to Isabel, “I don
’t know what it is, but that place gave me the creeps. And that woman…I didn’t like the way she looked at me.”

  Isabel hesitated, but then said, “I’m not at all surprised.”

  “Why? Why aren’t you surprised?”

  Isabel shrugged. She was disinclined to repeat her conversation with Fiona. “The way she spoke. It’s difficult to put one’s finger on it. She assumed inappropriate intimacy, I think. You shouldn’t talk to people you don’t really know about sex.”

  Jamie’s eyes widened. “Is that what she did?”

  “More or less.”

  “Creepy,” said Jamie.

  “Yes, a bit.”

  “And sad,” Jamie added. “There she is, cooped up in that remote place with that lighthouse and the sea and…that son who looks as if he’s about to jump into a Viking longboat and go off for a bit of pillaging.”

  “Poor woman.”

  “But at least we sorted out the business about Harry.” He paused, and looked enquiringly at Isabel. “We have sorted that out, I take it?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “Sorted out.”

  “You’re definitely going to let go of it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Definitely.”

  THEY RETURNED to Edinburgh the following day. The hot weather, brought about by a zone of high pressure that had settled over Scotland, gave way to cooler air from the south-west. Isobars tightened and the sky, clear for days on end, was now laced with fast-moving cirrus cloud. Falling ice crystals, thought Isabel, looking up at the delicate, dizzyingly high wisps of cloud; the first shy announcements of a change in the weather.

  Jamie had gone with Charlie to the Zoo again, and Grace had taken the day off to visit an elderly aunt in Stirling, leaving Isabel alone in the house. There was work to be done, of course, but Isabel felt disinclined to do it. The short trip to Ardnamurchan, though involving only two nights away, had unsettled her. Living in a city, one might forget the hinterland, and this had reminded her of a Scotland she wanted to pay more attention to. In particular, she wanted Charlie to be brought up to know the country he lived in, a country that was so much more than its cities. Returning from the quiet of Ardnamurchan, the city seemed restless; there were too many people making too many journeys by car. Ardnamurchan had seemed empty; Edinburgh, with the opening of the Festival not far off, seemed far too full.