The Novel Habits of Happiness Read online

  Isabel had reached Bruntsfield Place, and she could now see the delicatessen on the other side of the road. The front of the shop was plate glass, and she could make out a movement within, a patch of white. This would be Eddie, who liked to wear white shirts, the cuffs of which were kept clean by two metal armbands of the sort that nobody wore any more but that did a very practical job. She had never seen him in anything but that white shirt and the thin blue tie that he also liked to wear. He had explained to her once, with some pride, that the tie was washable, which had surprised her. She did not imagine that such things as washable ties existed, but they must do, and Eddie appeared to have one. If the armbands were old-fashioned, as was the washable tie, seeming to belong, as it did, to the nineteen-sixties—that era of breathless, newly discovered convenience—then the rest of Eddie’s clothing had the same ring to it: baggy trousers made either of corduroy or of a curious blue twill fabric and striped loose-fitting socks. These were of rough wool and, Isabel decided, home-produced in some remote Scottish town where people still made such things. It struck her as curious that this young man should dress so much at odds with the style of his contemporaries—a style that rarely got beyond jeans and tee-shirts and shapeless, indeterminate jackets.

  “He’s a young fogey,” Cat had said to Isabel, with a shrug. “He just is.”

  Isabel had been intrigued by this, and wondered why anybody, and in particular a young man in his early twenties, should cultivate an antiquated aesthetic. Why should anybody do that—unless of course the present, or the recent past, was for some reason distasteful, or painful? And she remembered that for Eddie perhaps it had been.

  —

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON could be busy, and on this occasion it was. When Isabel arrived at the delicatessen, there were several people awaiting service at the counter, while Sharon, the young woman who helped out a couple of days a week, tried to deal tactfully with an elderly man who was asking her to read out the list of contents printed on various packets.

  “If I had my reading glasses with me, I wouldn’t have to ask you,” he explained. “But the print on these things nowadays…unless it’s me, of course; the print may be the same size and it may be me. One has to be aware of the passage of time.”

  “Yes,” said Sharon. “But what are you concerned about? Have you got an allergy?”

  “Maybe,” said the man.

  “What to?”

  “Well, it may be nuts, but I’m not sure. Some things disagree with me. I think it might be nuts, but I’ve never had one of those frightful attacks that people with a real nut allergy can get. That can be awful, you know. They carry those pen things that can give them a shot of whatever it is that deals with the nuts, although there was somebody—did you hear about it?—somebody in Morningside Road only a few weeks ago who ate a nut and dropped dead, right there in the street. One nut. It was in the Evening News.”

  “Yes. Well, this is pasta. There are no nuts in it. Pasta doesn’t have nuts.”

  The man laughed. “Oh, I know that. But sometimes the things that go with pasta…”

  “This is just pasta. Simple pasta. There’s nothing in it but pasta, which is wheat, isn’t it?”

  “And gluten,” said the man. “There are some people who can’t take gluten. I’m not sure whether it disagrees with me—I’m not sure how one would tell. Do you know? Is there a test these days?”

  Sharon caught Isabel’s eye.

  “I’m sorry,” said Isabel, coming to Sharon’s aid. “I’m sorry, but we’re very busy. Pasta is absolutely fine, and this young lady is really going to have to look after other customers.”

  She drew Sharon away and smiled blandly at the man’s look of wounded annoyance. That’s just the way it is, she thought. There is just not enough time to listen to everybody. There never is.

  “He did that last week,” whispered Sharon. “He goes on and on. It takes him ages to choose.”

  “Oh well,” said Isabel. “Perhaps he’s suffering from information overload. There are all those notices on food packages—so much saturated fat, so many calories, so much salt and so on. It’s rather a lot to read before you eat.” She remembered that she had heard of an Indian restaurant somewhere that required customers to sign a consent form before they served them their hottest curry. I am aware of the heat of this curry and voluntarily assume the risk of eating it…That was a sales gimmick, of course, but we were an unduly risk-averse society, she thought, and we were in danger of becoming obsessed with protecting people from the world and its dangers. Nuts, hot curries, sharp surfaces, death…In the unlikely event of the aircraft landing on water…No, it could happen; aircraft did land on water, and if they did, they broke up, as if hitting concrete, unless you were terribly lucky and were in the hands of somebody like that amazing captain who landed his plane on the Hudson River with such skill that everybody simply walked off the floating plane as if they were disembarking at an airport.

  Eddie spoke to Sharon. “You should go,” he said. “Just go. If you hang about, you’ll get somebody else and then you’ll never get away.”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “I’m here. Just go.”

  She took her place behind the counter and began to serve the next customer. It was two o’clock, and she would be working more or less without a break until six, when she and Eddie would shut up shop. She thought of Paris and saw, for a moment, Cat sitting in a pavement café. There was a man beside her, and Isabel tried to imagine what he would look like, but he was somehow fuzzy, and lacked outline. But he was definitely there, and he was looking at Cat, who was saying something to him, and smiling.

  —

  SHORTLY BEFORE FOUR there was a lull in business. It often happened that way on a Saturday afternoon: they would be worked off their feet from lunchtime until mid-afternoon, when people seemed to pause and take breath; then, twenty minutes later, they would remember the things they had to buy for the rest of the weekend. Then they would come in for milk and baguettes, for smoked salmon for their Sunday breakfast and for the garlic needed for the dish they were planning to cook that evening.

  “Sit down,” said Eddie. “I’ll make you a coffee.”

  She accepted his offer and perched on one of the two stools behind the counter. It was a relief to take the weight off her legs and to relieve the sore calf muscle that she had somehow pulled when she went to the Craiglockhart gym earlier that week. Jamie had warned her—“You should tackle these things gradually. Go straight into it and you pull a muscle. Guaranteed.” She had not told him when she felt the first twinge, but had confessed a bit later, and he had said, “I’m not going to say I told you so. But I did, didn’t I?”

  Eddie handed her a paper cup of coffee. He had made it as she liked it—strong and with a dash of cold milk—and he smiled at her as he passed it over. “Where’s Charlie?” he asked.

  “He’s at the Zoo with Jamie. Charlie likes the meerkats. He spends hours staring at them.”

  “They’re very popular,” said Eddie. “People identify with them, I think.”

  Isabel nodded absently. Perhaps they did. Other, less engaging animals would have nobody to identify with them: anteaters, warthogs, or those small creatures with sticky fur and worried-looking expressions—nobody identified with them.

  She looked at Eddie appreciatively. “Lovely coffee…”

  “I wonder what she’s doing,” said Eddie.

  She realised that he meant Cat. “Drinking coffee perhaps. In a café.”

  “With somebody playing the accordion in the background?”

  Isabel smiled. “That’s the cliché. Have you seen those films where they set the scene like that? France is always accordion music or the Eiffel Tower. London is Big Ben or Trafalgar Square—perhaps a bowler hat or two bobbing along, although bowlers have completely disappeared.” She paused. Cinema audiences had to know where they were; perhaps it was not unreasonable to play accordion music in the background to remind people that this was Paris. “Perhaps
they need to do it.”

  “She’s lucky,” said Eddie.

  Of course she is, thought Isabel. She’s lucky because she’s got a reliable, uncomplaining assistant like you, and a relative who will come and help out for nothing, and a father who bought her the delicatessen in the first place; she’s lucky because she doesn’t have to worry about her weight, and she’s got good skin, and she has that nice flat round the corner and…The enumeration of those things that made Cat lucky simply seemed to increase the discomfort in Isabel’s calf muscle, and she stopped.

  “He’s lucky too,” added Eddie.

  She looked at him. There was wistfulness in his voice rather than resentment. “He?”

  “Her new boyfriend,” said Eddie. “The one she’s taken with her. She’s paid for the tickets because I heard her making the booking on the phone. She paid for both of them on her credit card.”

  “Oh…”

  He continued before she could say anything else. “I wish somebody would take me to Paris. I’ve never been.”

  “Never?”

  He shook his head, and she made her decision. “I’ll stand you, Eddie. Later this year, when things are less busy. September’s a good time for Paris. I’ll buy you a ticket.”

  “And come with me?”

  She had not envisaged that. “No…Well, that’s nice of you, but I have Jamie and Charlie to look after, as you know, so I’ll just buy you the ticket—you and a friend, if you like. And I’ll pay for a hotel for a couple of days. You could go on Friday and come back on Sunday evening.”

  “You wouldn’t…would you? Really?”

  She saw that he was beaming with pleasure. It was so easy; money made it so easy. But then, there was Cat to think about and this new boyfriend of hers, and she felt a curious, rather sick sensation in her stomach, the sort of feeling one gets when an entirely familiar but nonetheless dreaded task comes round.

  “Have you met him?” she asked, looking down into her coffee cup as she spoke.

  Eddie was thinking of Paris, and he replied absently, “Yes.”

  She put the cup down. She had to face it. “And?”

  “He’s all right.”

  “Just all right?”

  “No. Actually rather cool.”

  She waited for more, but Eddie was silent. Men, Isabel had always felt, had limited curiosity about other men. Other men were all right, or not all right. “Who is he, Eddie? What’s his name?”

  “He’s called Mick.”

  She would have to prise it out of him. “And?”

  “And what?”

  She made a gesture with her hands—a gesture reflecting both frustration and encouragement.

  “She’s known him for some time,” said Eddie, as if only now realising that more information was required. “He fixes dishwashers. I suppose he calls himself a dishwasher engineer.”

  For a few moments Isabel said nothing. Then she asked, “Is he the man who fixes her dishwasher?”

  Eddie nodded. “That’s how she met him.”

  Isabel looked out of the window. “And now she’s taken him to Paris.”

  “That’s right,” said Eddie. He broke into a broad smile. “I bet he didn’t think that he’d go to somebody’s flat to fix her dishwasher and then end up going to Paris with her! Some dishwasher engineers have all the luck.”

  “I doubt if he anticipated that,” said Isabel.

  She lowered herself off her stool. Two customers had entered the store. One of them she recognised as a particularly difficult woman who insisted on squeezing and sniffing her purchases before she paid for them. She had even once suggested that she should be allowed to open a jar of pimento-stuffed olives to try a sample before she made up her mind. Isabel had glared at her and shaken her head. Later she had regretted her firmness—justified though it undoubtedly had been—when she found out that the woman had been abandoned by her husband of thirty years, suffered from alopecia (she wore a wig) and had been the victim of a commercial fraud that had almost resulted in her losing her house. Isabel had resolved that she would show no irritation and would in future help this woman in whatever tests she wished to conduct before committing herself.

  She returned to work and was busy without interruption until Eddie finally announced that it was almost six and they should close the door.

  “Six o’clock is seven in Paris,” he said. “I wonder what Cat’s doing right now?”

  “Getting ready to go out to dinner,” said Isabel, and then thought morosely of Cat with her dishwasher engineer. She had not met him and had no idea what he was like. There was nothing wrong with being a dishwasher engineer—indeed there was nothing wrong with any honest job, and so…She stopped to think. There were some jobs that, although perfectly legal, were of a nature that made one wary. Being a bouncer in a bar or a nightclub was quite above board, but surely suggested a pugnacious temperament: bouncers tended to have broken noses and to look threatening; they were certainly not the type with whom one could envisage having much of a discussion about anything. And then there were those financial traders in the City of London, vocal young men who were skilled at mental arithmetic and remembering figures, whose main concern was to be a few seconds ahead of rivals in tapping in their trades on their keyboards. They were hardly the sort of person one would want to spend much time with, although presumably they all had mothers and girlfriends and had their moments of tenderness. Or possibly not…

  She decided that she would like Mick; she had to. Disliking somebody about whom one knew nothing—other than that he could fix dishwashers—was, quite simply, wrong. Isabel had a distaste for snobbery—an insidious evil, she called it—and she would not fall into the trap of thinking that she would have nothing in common with him; she had no grounds for thinking that except, perhaps, experience, which we must sometimes discount in favour of principle. We know that there are people who let others down, who treat them shabbily, and yet we must not lapse into cynicism and believe this of everyone. Cat chose badly. She chose men on physical grounds, and that was the worst possible basis for a relationship—Isabel was sure of that. And yet, and yet…She pictured Jamie. What if he did not look like he did, but was quite differently built? If Jamie were round and myopic and with a moustache in which food particles became easily trapped, would she love him as she did? Would she have given him a second glance? Moral perfectionism suggested one answer—look behind the physical, it urged us—while honesty suggested quite another. What was that line of poetry she had learned somewhere? It came back to her: it was Yeats. Only God, he said to Anne Gregory, could love you for yourself alone and not for your yellow hair. Isabel sighed: sometimes it was difficult being a moral philosopher, particularly in matters of the heart, but also in a whole lot of other respects.

  She looked at Eddie and was about to say to him: “Do you think God prefers blondes?” But did not, of course; Eddie would have looked at her blankly and would later say to Cat, “Isabel is getting really peculiar these days, you know. She asked me whether God preferred blondes.” And Cat would probably say, “She’s always been peculiar.”

  But that exchange would not take place, and Eddie simply made an innocuous observation about Cat in Paris. “She’ll be having a good time,” he said.

  Isabel pulled herself together. “Yes, and I’m glad,” she said.

  Eddie looked at her sideways. “I thought you were cross with her.”

  “I was,” said Isabel, summoning up every ounce of good will she could muster. “But I no longer am.” She almost convinced herself.

  Eddie shrugged. “Cat’s just Cat,” he said. “She’s not going to change.” He paused; he had remembered something. “Oh, by the way, you know that woman? The one married to that journalist you hear on the radio? You know her?”

  It was Isabel’s friend Sam. “Yes. Sam?”

  Eddie nodded. “She came in here the other day. She said that she wanted to talk to you about somebody she’s met. She just mentioned it.”

 
Isabel took off her apron and hung it on the back of the door that led into Cat’s office.

  “She said that it was something rather unusual,” said Eddie. “But she didn’t tell me what it was.”

  Isabel wondered what it was. People were always talking to her about unusual things, she thought: I am a recipient of unusual confidences.

  “I’ll phone her,” said Isabel.

  Eddie reached for his bundle of keys. “Cat will be having a really good meal in Paris, I should think,” he said. “You know what the French are like.”

  “I do,” said Isabel. Charity, she thought; charity requires us to enjoy the prospect of others having good things to eat—an attitude that was the very opposite of Mahlneid, meal envy in invented German, which described the covetous feeling we have when we see others in a restaurant enjoying dishes that look much better than our own. If the word Mahlneid did not exist, then there could surely be another German compound noun for regret over one’s own choice in that, and other contexts; the German language could come up with long words for anything. Now she thought of what Eddie had said about Sam. Something unusual. She would phone her friend when she got back to the house and find out just how odd was this thing awaiting her. Was there a German word for the feeling of anticipation experienced in waiting to hear something that a friend was about to tell you, but that you currently had no idea about? Her German was shaky, and as little used as her French, but some of the vocabulary remained—enough to think: Eindrucksempfindlichkeitkapazität or, on second thought, Verständigungsvorfreude, which had the merit, at least, of being in the dictionary.

  CHARLIE RETURNED from the Zoo with a meerkat badge, a meerkat soft toy and a book about the foraging habits of meerkats in the Kalahari.