The Novel Habits of Happiness (5 page)

Isabel offered Sam a glass of wine, and she accepted. “But just a small one,” said Sam. “I don't want to
roll
home.”

The three of them sat down at the kitchen table. Sam, who was in her mid-forties, had been a friend of Isabel's for some years, having been introduced to her by a mutual friend. She was an attractive woman who liked to wear ethnic clothing, on this occasion an embroidered Indian blouse and an elaborate brass necklace, also Indian.

“Eddie said you were in the delicatessen the other day,” Isabel remarked. “He said you were hoping to see me.”

Sam took a sip of her wine. “Yes, I did—or rather, do. I do want to see you.”

Isabel smiled. “Well, here I am.”

Sam put down her glass, fingering the stem as she did so. “You know that you have a reputation for helping people.”

Isabel blushed. “I don't do any more than most people do.”

Sam held up a hand. “But you do. I know that you're modest about it.”

There was an awkward silence. Isabel looked at Jamie, who met her gaze briefly, and then looked down at the floor. She knew that he was concerned about her readiness to help people in all sorts of difficulties. “You can't do everything,” he had said to her. “You can't take on the troubles of the whole world.” She knew that he was right, but it had always been hard for her to turn down a direct appeal, especially from somebody she knew. Certainly, if Sam were in some sort of difficulty, Isabel would find it almost impossible to say no to her.

“Are you in trouble?” Isabel asked.

Sam laughed. “No, not me. My life is too uneventful for trouble—or for real trouble. No, not me, but…”

“Somebody you know?”

Sam nodded. “Not trouble as such, but…well, troubled. There's a difference.”

Isabel agreed. “Of course.”

“There's a woman downstairs in my building, in the ground-floor flat,” Sam continued. “She moved in about six months ago. Her husband's a pipe major in the Army. They no longer live together, and I've only met him briefly, when he's been round to pick up their son. But I've got to know her reasonably well.”

Isabel was busy avoiding Jamie's eye. He looked at her, glanced away and then looked at her again.

“Her name is Kirsten. The boy's called Harry,” Sam continued. “He's six. A rather serious-looking little boy. I see her taking him off to South Morningside School every morning if I look out of my window at the right time. The two of them walk off, hand in hand.” She paused. “Your wee Charlie hasn't started yet, has he?”

“At nursery. Two days a week.”

Sam nodded. “Mine are growing up so fast. Fiona's fourteen now, you know, and Nicholas is twelve, and is shooting up like a bean-pole.”

Isabel thought of Charlie, upstairs with his new stuffed meerkat on his pillow. He had been a baby just a few months ago, it seemed, and she had thought it would never end.
I
thought that love would last for ever. I was wrong;
that line of Auden's that contained a truth about everything, not just love. And we had to act as if things were not going to end, because if we did not, then we would do so little in life. People still planted oak trees and created gardens, which they might not do with quite the same enthusiasm, or would not do at all, if they stopped to think of the brevity of life.

“I feel rather sorry for her. I know that being a single parent is pretty common these days, but it can't be much easier than it's ever been. In other words, it's tough.”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “I can just imagine. It's twice as tough. I don't know if I'd be able to cope.”

Sam thought that Isabel would manage very well. “You might surprise yourself, you know.” She paused. “She dropped in the other morning after she had taken him to school. She works part-time, three days a week, I think, as some sort of receptionist—while he's at school.”

Isabel nodded. “And?”

“And she told me the most extraordinary story. Well, I don't know if everybody would find it extraordinary, but I did. Apparently the boy is convinced that he's had another life. He's adamant about it, and talks about it every day, she said. He says that he had another mother—another family—he's matter-of-fact about it, but she's understandably worried.”

Isabel said that she could imagine it would be unsettling for any parent. “But it's not all that unusual, is it? I've heard of things like that, haven't you?”

“Vaguely,” said Sam. “I think I read about something of the sort. But somehow this seems rather different.”

“Why?”

“Because he's very specific. He's come up with a name for the family, as well as a very detailed description of the place he lived. And he's been consistent.”

Isabel looked out of the window. She wondered how she would feel if Charlie were suddenly to claim to have been somebody else? She would treat it, she imagined, as a figment of childish imagination: very young children simply did not grasp the difference between truth and falsehood. Charlie had announced a few days earlier that he had seen a squirrel wearing pyjamas. He had sounded so convincing, and had appeared hurt that he had not been believed. “He was,” he protested. “He was.”

Sam continued: “She's spoken to various people about it. She took it up with her doctor, and he said that he could arrange an appointment with the child psychiatry services at the Sick Kids' Hospital. That happened, she said, and they saw him. But at the end of it they explained to her that he seemed an entirely normal young boy. They reminded her that children could create elaborate stories and then forget about them. They said it was harmless.”

“And it probably is,” said Isabel.

“I thought that too,” said Sam. “But she's really concerned about it. She feels that there's nobody she can discuss it with. Harry's father is very dismissive of the whole thing, as is his teacher.”

“She has you to talk to,” said Isabel. “That must help.”

“Perhaps, but I think she wants to speak to somebody other than a neighbour. And then she said something that made me think of you.”

Isabel was silent, but she already knew that she would have to help.

Sam was looking at her intently. “She said that she wanted to put her mind at rest, and the way to do this would be to investigate the story. She says that Harry has half convinced her that what he says is true, and that if she could just look into it and establish that there's no truth in what he says, then she'll feel much easier about it.”

Isabel inclined her head. “I can understand that, but frankly…” She was about to say that she was not sure how much help she would be able to give, but Sam interrupted her.

“He's given her a lot of information, you know. The description of the house he says he lived in is very specific.”

“That may be, but how on earth could one do anything with that? If he says it was a house with a path leading to a red front door and so on, how could one possibly do anything with that? How many houses in Scotland match that description? If it's in Scotland, that is—presumably it could be anywhere.”

Sam shrugged. “He's more specific than that. He describes the view from the front. He says that it looks out on islands. He describes those.”

“There are plenty of islands in the west of Scotland,” said Isabel.

“Yes. But he talks about a lighthouse, and she says he's drawn it. She has a picture of the lighthouse.”

Isabel looked thoughtful. She was imagining herself in the shoes of this woman, with nobody to turn to. She had Jamie; she had her editorship of the
Review;
she had Grace to help her in the house; she had her network of friends and contacts. She recalled what her mother had said to her:
Remember what you have and what other people don't have.
What mothers said often seemed embarrassingly trite, but as we grew older we saw the truth in it, sometimes to our chagrin.

“Of course I'll talk to her,” she said.

Sam smiled. “I knew that would be your answer,” she said. Then she frowned. “Do you believe in reincarnation, Isabel?”

Isabel shook her head. “No. As a general rule I don't believe in things for which there is no satisfactory evidence. And what about you? Do you think it's anything more than wishful thinking?”

Sam was more hesitant. “Not really. But then half of humanity believes in it, you know. Belief in reincarnation is…well, it's fairly mainstream.”

“That may be,” said Isabel. “But then half of humanity is prepared to believe the most extraordinary things.” There were so many examples of this—and not just the obvious ones. The
Scotsman
had recently reported a survey that showed that an astonishing number of people believed they would win the lottery—and made that belief part of their retirement planning. They actually believed it, even when the odds against that happening were explained to them. Then there were those who were convinced they had been abducted by aliens, or who thought that unproven remedies would protect them from all sorts of illness, or who believed in the Loch Ness Monster. They held these beliefs in spite of a complete lack of evidence; vitamin supplements had never been shown to do half the things claimed for them, and if there were some unknown creature in Loch Ness, some secretive survivor of an earlier age, then surely bodies or skeletons of these peculiar animals would have washed up, or somebody would have photographed one. There were photographs, of course, but they were always conveniently blurred, or taken in half-light, and could just as easily be of otters or a jumping salmon, or of something equally prosaic and explicable; it had been pointed out that a duck could, in certain lights, look like a monster. One might as well believe in Santa Claus…

Isabel stopped herself. A well-known campaigner against religion had recently suggested that we should stop telling our children fairy stories because these encouraged irrational habits of thought. She did not want to end up in that camp, because the imagination was a delicate plant that could be so easily destroyed, and childhood's stories were the mulch that it needed to thrive. Without imagination we find it more difficult to be good, because imagination enables us to understand the pain of others: destroy imagination and you destroyed empathy.

Charlie believed in Santa Claus, and she would not have it otherwise. And he believed in the Tooth Fairy too, and in kelpies, those skittish Scottish horses that lived in the sea. He would find out the truth about all these things soon enough, but for the time being she was content for him to believe in things that did not exist but that we wished were there.

“They may be right, of course. For all we know, that is.” There was a gentle note of reproach in Sam's voice, and Isabel picked this up.

“Yes, they may be.”
For all we know—
it was the essential, if unspoken, qualification to everything we said about anything.

“Not that I think it is,” said Sam.

“No, I don't either. And anyway, can you think of anything more depressing than the thought that we come back time and time again? What an awful thought—to have to do it all over again—as somebody else, of all things.”

“But things might be better,” said Sam. “You may have a better deal, so to speak, next time round.”

“Or a worse one.” Isabel had always thought that reincarnation provided rather convenient solutions to the problem of evil in moral philosophy. If evil were to be punished, then the moral balance would seem much less out of kilter. The bully would become the bullied; the proud would become the humbled; the exploiters would be the exploited. There was a certain attraction in it, but the problem with attractive solutions was that they were often just wishful thinking.
There are no ships that will come to save us,
she thought.

She thought of Harry, that small boy, living with his mother in their flat in Morningside. She pictured the boy thinking of his father, the pipe major in the Army, and she saw the father, too, in his swathes of tartan, twirling his silver-topped baton while behind him marched the band, pipes skirling, crowds applauding and yapping dogs running alongside the parade. He would admire his father because to a small boy a pipe major would be something grand and wonderful, and he would wish, no doubt, for his father to be returned to him.
Another life.
Invent another life to make this one more bearable. A life with a father.
What could she possibly do for this little boy and his mother, other than to bring back the father, which of course was beyond her?

“You'll at least see her?” enquired Sam anxiously. “You aren't having second thoughts, are you?”

“No,” said Isabel. “I'm not having second thoughts.” And she realised that she did have second thoughts—frequently—but they were usually about matters other than decisions to get involved in the complicated problems of others. She knew herself well enough to realise that she always kept those commitments, no matter what.

She looked at Sam. “I'll do what I can.”

“Which is all anybody should ever ask of anyone else,” said Sam.

Oh no, thought Isabel; people often ask more than that—much more.

S
UNDAY WAS A DAY
of doing nothing very much, but Monday saw Isabel back at her desk.
The
Review of Applied Ethics,
which she edited—and now owned—was coming up to its twentieth anniversary and Isabel had planned a special issue to mark the occasion. Most issues of the
Review
dealt with a particular theme—the last issue had been “The Just War” and before that there had been “The Rights of Transgendered Young People.” That issue had included a controversial and fiery paper by a feminist philosopher who argued that males who became female should never be accepted in women-only groups. “Having enjoyed the privileges of male-dominated hierarchies, reassigned men cannot enjoy the same moral claims as those who have suffered from those very structures,” the contributor had written, provoking a flood of angry correspondence that had taken Isabel several days to deal with.

The anniversary issue, though, was to follow a different pattern, and was to be an open forum for a number of specially invited philosophers to write on whatever happened to interest them at the time. “A pot-pourri,” Isabel had called it in the letter she had sent to the prospective contributors. “Say what you like about whatever you like.” It was a dangerous invitation for any editor to issue, but she had chosen her contributors carefully, writing to those whose work she particularly admired, and it had worked, or almost worked. She had approached her friend Julian Bagnini, who had done more, she felt, to bring philosophy to a wider audience than most, and he had agreed to write on an issue in personal identity. She wrote to Bill Childress in Virginia, who said that he would write on rationing resources in medicine. “A problem that sadly refuses to go away, no matter how much we spend on health,” he wrote in his reply. “The scale of the problem simply changes. In circumstances of dire need, there may be a decision to be made about who gets aspirin; in circumstances of plenty, the argument may be about transplants or the latest miracle drug.” The issue was beginning to look good, and Isabel had boasted to Jamie about the all-star cast. “Everybody's going to be in it,” she said. “I'll make it
this
thick.” She held up a hand to demonstrate the dimensions of the issue, but Jamie simply smiled and said, “The ethics of using lots of trees—is anybody going to write about that?”

She had retorted, “Spoil-sport,” but his comment had given her pause to think. She had resisted suggestions that the
Review
should become entirely electronic, but was that position defensible? Surely we can use
some
trees, and surely applied ethics was a suitable use for them. And what would be the bad uses for trees? She made a mental list: junk mail, glossy fashion magazines, newspapers she disagreed with, those paper lanterns that you lit tiny fires under and watched as they floated up into the sky? The last of these, she thought, were just litter, and when they landed in fields and were eaten by cows, they gave the cows indigestion, even killed them. No, that was definitely a bad use of paper.

Almost everybody she approached had now accepted the invitation to write an article for the anniversary issue, and that Monday Isabel received the last reply—in an email from a professor at a university in California. He said that he would be delighted to write for the issue and that the subject he had chosen was his mother. Isabel read his message with growing incredulity.

“Your invitation came at a very auspicious time,” wrote the professor. “I have been thinking a great deal about my mother in recent months, and I am shortly coming up to a sabbatical. I have planned to spend it in a house I have up at Napa, north of San Francisco. I like the climate there, which is a bit fresher than our climate down here in southern California. You don't know my mother, of course, but I'm sure you and she would hit it off. She's seen so much in her seventy-eight years—her autobiography would fill several volumes, I think—and she's very wise. I know everybody thinks their mother's wise—or just about everybody—but in my case there are grounds for saying this, and how! What I'd like to do in my paper is to try to capture her particular way of looking at the world and analyse how she gets to where she's at. It's intuition, of course—she has plenty of that—but there's something else there, something I propose to call
maternal certainty.
I'd like to capture the essence of that because I think it adds something to what we know of how people make a moral judgement. And as for a title, I was thinking of calling it ‘The Ethical World of My Mother,' but would obviously be guided by you on that.”

Isabel stared at the screen, carefully re-reading the message in case she had misunderstood it. Was it intended as a joke? She decided it was not; sincerity was one of the most transparent qualities in any prose and one could always tell if something was written in jest. No, Professor Geoffrey Trembling really did want to write “The Ethical World of My Mother”; he meant every word of it.

She got up from her desk. Jamie had taken Charlie to nursery school and would be back within a few minutes. Isabel waited for him in the kitchen, the printed email in her hand.

“Read this,” she said when he returned.

He took the sheet of paper. “Is it for me?”

“No, it's for me. But I want you to read it.”

As he read the email, Jamie broke into a smile. “This is great stuff,” he muttered. “This is classic.”

“I'm assuming he's serious,” said Isabel.

Jamie agreed. “Oh yeah, I think this is what he wants to write.” He paused. “I think this guy loves his mother.”

Isabel took back the piece of paper, glanced at it and then put it down on the kitchen table. “I don't know what to do. I asked him because I'm familiar with his work. He wrote a very well-received book on moral psychology. I reviewed it for those Chicago people, for
Ethics.
I like it.”

“And now he comes up with this?” Jamie shrugged. “I don't want to be unkind, but I think he might just be an
echt
mother's boy.”

Isabel felt slightly defensive of Professor Trembling. “You don't know that, do you? He
admires
his mother, which doesn't necessarily make him a mother's boy. Lots of boys admire their mothers, with good reason, but aren't…” She struggled with the criteria for being a mother's boy. Was it a case of simply spending too much time with your mother; did that make you a mother's boy? Or was it something subtler than that? She tried to think of mother's boys she had known, which was not many, although the memory of one came to her now, her second cousin, Billy, who lived in Glasgow with his mother. She had always dominated him, and he seemed to accept the situation, even to enjoy it. He went to university in Glasgow so that he could live at home, and after graduation he had gone into his mother's wedding catering business and worked as her assistant. They went on holidays together, on bridge cruises in the Mediterranean, on which the passengers played bridge all day, and for most evenings too. He had brought home a girlfriend once, and it was generally believed in the family that his mother had seen her off. Certainly that was the view that Cat had taken. “That woman,” she had spat out, “she's wrecking Billy's life. It's awful.”

Isabel had been inclined to agree, although she expressed herself less forcefully than Cat did. She could understand the mother's feelings too. She had been widowed when Billy was six and her son was all she had. Of course she would dread the thought of losing him.

“You have to let go,” she muttered.

“What?” asked Jamie.

“I was thinking of mother's boys. The mothers need to let go.”

“Yes,” said Jamie. “They do. And so do the sons.”

Isabel thought about this. It was possible that at least some sons wanted to be mother's boys, and their mothers were doing no more than respond to the sons' needs. “Maybe it's hard for both to let go,” she ventured. “Can you imagine what it's going to be like letting go of Charlie?”

“We'll do it—when the time comes.”

Isabel looked out of the window. “Perhaps the process starts earlier than you think. Perhaps it begins when they're more or less Charlie's age. We start letting go when we allow them to take their first unaided steps. And then the next stage is to let them go off to nursery school and listen to other adults, not just us, telling them about the world and about what to do. That's letting go, isn't it?”

Jamie thought for a moment. His heart had given a lurch when they had taken Charlie for his first day at nursery school. They had glanced back through the classroom window and seen him immediately absorbed in some task set him by the teacher. They had expected tears, and clinging perhaps, but there had been none of that.
He's launched,
Jamie had thought. And there would be so many more milestones in the future, each of which involved a form of letting go: the first sleepover at a friend's house, the first unaccompanied trip into town, and then, suddenly, he would go off to do whatever he was going to do with his life and he would no longer be there. That was the day that every parent dreaded.

Jamie looked at Isabel. “Will you find it hard to let go?”

It took her a while to answer. “I hope not. I'll put a brave face on it—or I'll try to.”

He was not sure why he said what he said next; the words came out, as important words can sometimes do, unplanned, not thought-through. “We could have another one. Shall we?”

They had never discussed it, which sometimes happens with issues that lie at the heart of marriage. Isabel had been so thrilled with Charlie, so grateful, that she had not thought about another child, or, if she had thought about it, had suppressed the thought rather quickly.

“You could, couldn't you?”

“Yes,” she said. “It's late, but not too late.”

“Is that what you want?” he asked.

Her answer was as spontaneous as his. “No, I mean yes. No, yes is what I meant to say. Yes, Jamie. Yes.” She looked at him. “If you would, of course.”

“I don't think I've got anything better to do.”

She laughed. “Oh…”

He explained himself. “I mean: I can't think of anything better to do. Or rather, I can't think of anything I'd like more.”

They were both silent. Isabel felt herself trembling inside; she was aware that something momentous had just happened in her life, but was unsure how she felt about it. She decided that what she felt was elation, but
elation
was too prosaic a word to describe what had happened to her. She felt that the world had suddenly changed and that the colours about her, the colour of the kitchen walls, the colour of the sky glimpsed through the window, had somehow changed, as music will change key to express a different mood.

She struggled to bring herself back to reality. She did not want to talk about what they had just agreed; the decision was too recent, too fresh, and she did not want to disturb it in case either of them underwent a change of mind. “But what about Professor Trembling?”

“Tell him no,” said Jamie. “Tell him that nobody will be interested in his mother. Tell him to get a life.”

She looked at him reproachfully.

He immediately regretted what he had said. “Sorry,” he said. “That's unkind. It slipped out.”

“Yes,” she said. She hated the expression
get a life,
which was cruel and dismissive. It was arrogant. She also disliked people saying of others that they should get out a bit more. That had the same tone of condescension to it; the same suggestion that what
I
do is far better than what
you
do. “And anyway, what exactly does
get a life
mean? He has his life. Are you suggesting that everything about his life is worthless?”

Jamie was contrite. “I didn't mean that. I wouldn't say that to anybody.” He blushed; he remembered that he had muttered those words only three days earlier, when a particularly fussy conductor in Glasgow had laboured a point, keeping the orchestra for fifteen minutes longer than necessary. The cor anglais player had young children to get back to; several brass players had agreed to go to the pub; a cellist had to visit a sick relative in hospital; and Jamie had his train to catch back to Edinburgh.
Get a life,
Jamie had muttered, and the conductor had overheard, as he looked up sharply in the direction of the woodwind section and the muffled giggles that Jamie's remark had caused.