The Novel Habits of Happiness (23 page)

“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.”

“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.”

T
HEY 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.

She had been unsettled, too, by the trip to the McAndrews' house. She was not quite sure what she had expected to find there—nothing, really, and so it was not a question of having experienced an anti-climax. There had been a note of sadness to the whole affair, right from her first meeting with Kirsten, and the Ardnamurchan trip had seemed to crystallise that. She realised, of course, that she would have to visit Kirsten and tell her what she had found out, and she was unsure how the news would be received.

She had made an arrangement to meet Kirsten for lunch at Glass and Thompson's in Dundas Street, and she would tell her there. Before that, she decided that she would call in on Guy Peploe in the Scottish Gallery, a few doors down the hill. Guy was mounting a small Scots Colourist exhibition and had promised to show her some of the pictures before they were hung. After lunch, she would buy something for herself. She was not sure exactly what it would be, but the prospect improved her mood, lifting the slight sadness she had been feeling. Of course she knew that retail therapy was about as useful as a sugar rush, and about as long-lasting; but the anticipation, at least, had some effect.

She decided to walk into town, rather than to catch a bus. The cooler temperature seemed perfect; it was not so low as to chill, but low enough to make it pleasant to stroll down the Mound and through the crowds thronging Princes Street. In normal circumstances, Princes Street in the high summer induced a feeling of being trapped, but it did not do that now, and even as she was almost barged into by a group of self-engrossed teenage girls on a shopping trip, she could not bother to feel irritated. None of us as a teenager, she thought, really believes in the existence of others—not really; at that age we were as close to perfect solipsism as we ever came.

Guy Peploe, who ran the Scottish Gallery, met her at the door. She was slightly early, but Guy had finished what he was doing and was ready to show her the paintings, stacked against the wall in the lower gallery, ready for hanging in the main gallery above.

“You mentioned you'd been over in Argyll,” he said as they went downstairs. “Business or pleasure?”

She found it difficult to answer in those terms: it had not been business in a sense that anybody would normally recognise, and yet it had not been for pleasure. Perhaps I should say I was interfering, she thought.

He noticed her smile. “Did I say something amusing?”

She shook her head. “I was thinking. Some of the things I do are clearly business—things to do with the
Review.
But then there are other things I do that are rather difficult to classify. You could call them
interferences.
That's what made me smile.”

Guy laughed. “I don't think you interfere. I get the impression that you help people. That's not the same thing, surely.”

“Well, I think I'll use the term
interference.
I was over there on an interference.”

“And?”

“I found what I was looking for.”

She did not want to think about it just yet. Lunchtime was not much more than an hour away, and she would have to speak to Kirsten then. She hoped the other woman would be relieved to hear that a rational explanation had been found, but she was not sure of that. What would Kirsten do? She could try to explain to her son that his memory had played a trick on him; she might even show him the
Scotsman
article. But that would probably make no difference—a child's imagination, and the convictions it spawned, would surely be beyond the reach of rational deflation. And as Jamie had pointed out, there was something ineffably sad about this whole affair; an unhappy little boy would be made no happier by anything that his mother chose to tell him.

Guy led the way down to the lower gallery. “Here we are,” he said. “Fifteen Colourist paintings. Seven borrowed; eight for sale—some of them real gems.”

“Peploes?” she asked. Guy was the grandson of the great painter and had recently written a book on his work.

“Three,” said Guy. “But they're all on loan.” He paused. “A lovely Fergusson—if your walls are feeling bare.” He reached down to extract a painting from the stack. “This is a later post-war Fergusson, and as you will see…”

“Fecundity,” said Isabel.

“Precisely.”

“And a certain erotic element,” she added.

Guy inclined his head. “Both of those. But isn't it rather lovely?”

Isabel stared at the picture of the woman painted against a lush background of greenery. The curves of the woman's body were suggestive, as were the twisted forms of the plants. “I couldn't live with that,” she said. “It's magnificent, but you almost feel that the painting's going to insinuate its way out of its frame.”

Guy laughed. “That's a good way of putting it.”

Fecundity. She thought:
Will I have another child?
She had tried not to think about it, but the Fergusson painting had touched something within her.
Am I that woman?

“And this,” said Guy. “What do you think of this.”

She recognised the style. “Cadell?”

“Yes. But clearly not one of his women in hats.”

She leaned forward to examine the painting more closely. It was a picture of a male bather sitting on a rock; the face, though, was indistinct.

“That's probably a picture of Charles Oliver,” said Guy. “Bunty Cadell had a friend whom he had met during the First World War. He took him on as a companion and man-servant. He used to give elaborate dinner parties when he was living in Ainslie Place, and Charles would act as butler. But he would also act as his sales agent and would sell pictures for him.”

“Close friends?”

“I assume so,” said Guy. “But the people at the dinner parties would have understood.”

Another painting caught her eye. “And that?”

“Hunter. But not one of his best. That painting has been looking for a home for rather too long, I think. We show it for the owner, who wants to sell it, but the problem is that Hunter ruined it. He never knew where to stop. It's important for an artist to know when a painting is finished. I'm not sure that Hunter always got that right.”

“Whereas James Cowie stopped rather early,” said Isabel. “Some of his paintings were deliberately unfinished. He just stopped in a corner, and rather faded away. I have one like that.”

They spent half an hour looking at the other paintings. Then Guy said, “Is something troubling you? You seem a bit distracted.”

Isabel sighed. “Yes. Frankly, Guy, everything's troubling me. I've got myself mixed up in a rather sad little matter and I don't feel comfortable about it. And then…”

He waited.

“And then Cat has got herself in tow with another man, and that always worries me. He lives near here, by the way.”

“Oh yes?”

“In Drummond Place. He's called Mick. I've met him and…”

Guy stopped. “Tall? Dark hair? A bit like your Jamie?”

Isabel gave an exclamation of surprise. “Exactly. Jamie's double, in fact.” She paused. “You know him?”

“Yes, of course,” said Guy. “He's very interested in art.”

“He recognised my Thomson.”

“Well, there you are. He's extremely nice.”

She said nothing for a moment, and Guy continued, “Is it serious?”

“I think so. But, then, you can never tell with Cat. In general, she has awful taste in men and has had the most appalling boyfriends. She always gets rid of them; she can't seem to stick to one man. Now there's this one. I also thought he was nice, by the way.”

“Well, he is. So where's the problem?”

“Because he's too nice for her,” said Isabel. “And I wonder whether I should tactfully make sure he knows what he's getting into.” She frowned. “No, did I really say that?” As she spoke, she thought too about Lettuce. Lettuce was about to get a job in Edinburgh. She may have reassessed her attitude to him, but she was still deeply suspicious of Christopher Dove. Should she warn somebody in the University about the possible manipulation of Lettuce by Dove? But if she did that, and Lettuce's appointment did not go ahead, then she would be causing grave disappointment to Clementine Lettuce, for whom she harboured no ill feeling.

There was a note of concern now in Guy's voice. “Listen,” he said. “I don't think you should. You don't have to go round warning others about the people they're getting involved with.”

“Don't you?”

He seemed certain of his answer. “No. It's not your business. People have to make their own mistakes.”

“So we're not our brother's keeper?”

“Sometimes, but not in a case like this.”

She gazed at the Fergusson picture of the woman. “Does art make us feel better? Is that its role, do you think?”

“One of them,” said Guy. “It can give us answers. It can promote happiness.”

“Happiness? Is that what we want?”

Guy looked surprised. “I thought that's what you philosophers believed in. Aren't you meant to help us know how to be happy?”

“I don't know,” said Isabel. “Perhaps that's what philosophy is meant to do. To show us that we don't really know.” She looked at her watch. “Sorry, I have to go. And I'm sorry, too, that I burdened you with my doubts. Your paintings, by the way, have made me feel a bit better.”

“Then they've worked,” said Guy.

“But I still don't know what to do about Cat,” said Isabel.

“Then do nothing.”

She smiled weakly. “Maybe.”

“Not maybe,” said Guy, more firmly this time. “Definitely. Keep out of it.”

“Best left alone,” muttered Isabel.

“Precisely,” said Guy.

She realised that his advice was sound; doing nothing was the right thing to do. She began to thank him. “You're right, you know, I have a tendency to…”

She was interrupted by the ringing of her mobile phone. She glanced at it. She could ignore the call—another instance of doing nothing—but something prompted her to answer.

“Isabel Dalhousie?” The voice seemed familiar, but she was not sure why. “Neil Starling. Is this a good time?”

Guy signalled that he would leave her to take the call in peace, and he left the room. She moved over to the window.

“As good as any. Thank you, by the way, for all your help the other day. I've written you a note.”

“Well, that's what I'm phoning you about,” Neil said. “A development.”

She caught her breath. “Yes?”

“Fiona McAndrew phoned me. She said that her husband had reminded her of something. She was apologetic for not having remembered it. A Campbell family did stay in that house, apparently.”