The Novel Habits of Happiness (4 page)

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.

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

“You saw the meerkats?” Isabel asked. “Were they lovely, darling?”

“Lots of meerkats,” said Charlie.

“So I see. And any other animals?”

“They were sleeping,” said Charlie. “Even the lions.”

“Oh well,” said Isabel. “We can get by without lions, I think.” She did not like lions, those always rather restless, discontented creatures, even when filmed in the wild. They were, of course, high-ranking felines, and, much as she liked cats, she had always felt they were intrinsically psychopathic in their approach to life. They were capable of affection, but only intermittently and always on their terms. No cat, she thought, would make a sacrifice for its owner, whereas dogs did—readily and without question—and meant it too.

Stories of friendship between people and lions were dubious, in Isabel's view. Elsa, the famous lioness of
Born Free,
put on a good act of being on the side of the Adamsons but would have eaten them if she had been
really
hungry. And had that happened, the story of
Born Free
might have been somewhat different. The publishers would have had to publish an incomplete manuscript, explaining in the introduction that the book would have been a bit longer had the authors not been consumed by the subject of their story, but asking, nonetheless, for the reader's understanding.

The lions in Edinburgh Zoo were certainly well fed and well looked-after—a pensionable position, with lots of raw meat, that any lion in the wild might gladly accept. Yet there were some places that large animals simply should not be. She recalled a story told her by a friend who had been obliged to attend a conference in Las Vegas and who had stayed in one of the large hotels there. This hotel had, as many of them did, a casino on its ground floor, and the hotel guests were compelled to walk through this casino in order to get to their rooms. “I was walking,” said her friend, “through this hell of tinkling, flashing gambling machines and was suddenly confronted with a large glass-walled cage—in which there was a lion. A live lion.”

Isabel had been speechless. She was only half American—through her sainted mother—but that was enough to make her blush with shame for the mere fact that Las Vegas existed. There was so much of which America could be proud: it had made New York and San Francisco, along with a hundred other cities with parks and art galleries and universities, but then it had gone and spawned Las Vegas, a place that carried vulgarity and venality to undreamed-of heights. And yet people loved it, and flocked there in their millions, to marvel at the entirely false, to be married in Elvis chapels, to lose money and to listen to flashy crooners singing about love. Perhaps this was a concomitant of freedom: if people were free, then some of them, at least, would be free of the constraints of good taste. Perhaps Las Vegas was just a great big cultural burp, of the sort that you are bound to get in a free society where people can burp if they wish. Perhaps lions in casinos were what you got if you said:
There are no limits—everything is possible.
She imagined, though, the casino lion escaping—delicious thought—and suddenly finding a way out of its durance vile, romping through the crowds of gamblers, scattering the croupiers, sending the pole dancers up their poles to escape, pouncing on the waitresses with their trays of complimentary drinks, drowning the sound of cascading money with its roars of anguish and anger.

“People were tapping on the glass,” her friend continued, “and the lion paced backwards and forwards. There were the bones of its dinner on the floor. It lived there, it seemed.” She paused, and looked at Isabel with melancholy eyes. “It lived there.”

This memory of human perversity made her frown, and Jamie noticed it. He was accustomed to Isabel's patterns of thought, and knew that there were unanticipated avenues always opening up. Down one of these she might suddenly wander, even if only for a few seconds, while she wrestled with some question that most of us rarely thought about, or never dreamed existed.
I am married to a philosopher,
he thought.
What else can I expect?

“Thinking?” he asked.

“Of meerkats,” answered Charlie.

Jamie ruffled the boy's hair. “Not you—Mummy.”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “Of lions…and what it is to be a lion.”

“I never think of lions,” said Jamie. “Or hardly ever.”

“I don't exactly make a habit of it,” said Isabel. And turning to Charlie, she reached down and picked him up. “Time for your bath, my darling. You may bring your meerkat, but don't drop him in the water.”

Jamie was now off duty as far as looking after Charlie was concerned. He went off to practise a piece for a concert the following week, and as she ran Charlie's bath she heard the rumble of the bassoon in the background. Violins sang, brass crowed, while bassoons, she felt, rumbled according to a Richter scale all of their own. Charlie was allowed to have something they called a Saturday Bath, in which the bathtub was filled almost to its brim. This allowed him to duck himself under the water in a game that he called Big Submarines. Isabel watched closely: Big Submarines was a physical game, and from time to time he had to be restrained from slopping almost the entire contents of the bath on to the floor. He was like a seal, she thought, or an otter perhaps, as otters were as playful as four-year-old boys, and as slippery. Big Submarines was a bad name for this game, as submarines, especially big ones, were stately, rather considered boats that slid up and down through the water without anything approaching exuberance.

“What are the rules of Big Submarines?” she once asked.

Charlie had looked at her with surprise. “No rules,” he said.

“Does the biggest submarine win?”

He looked slightly resentful. Adults should not interfere in games; they did not understand. “The good submarine wins,” he announced.

“Ah,” said Isabel. “That's good to hear.” A mental image came to her of a good submarine—painted white, perhaps, with a crew that eschewed swearing (at sea) and hard liquor (when ashore), engaged in heroic acts, never used, as most submarines were, to intimidate others. But there were no such submarines—not in the world we knew. There were only dark prowlers bristling with weapons. One nuclear submarine, armed with its Trident missiles, could destroy our planet as we knew it. One submarine, she thought; one. In such a world, what chance did a good submarine have?

On that particular evening, the game of submarines seemed to fizzle out rather quickly. Charlie was tired; she could see that.

“Time for your story,” she said. “Babar tonight.” And added, “Again.” Like any child, Charlie liked the same story time and time again.
The Adventures of Babar
had been a favourite for the past few weeks, and attempts to move on to something new had been stoutly resisted by Charlie himself.

Isabel dried him and put him into his pyjamas. She noticed that these pyjamas had pictures of ducks on them. There was another pair with anchors, and one with small, friendly rockets travelling through fields of stars and moons.
Adult pyjamas,
she thought,
say nothing.

“Babar!” demanded Charlie, and snuggled down in his bed, holding his mother's hand. Isabel felt an overwhelming tenderness. My little boy; this little creature I have created; the person I love more than anything or anybody in this world; who means absolutely everything to me; who provides my answers in the way in which no philosophy, however brilliant, can ever do; mine.

They began
Babar,
right from the beginning. Isabel had toyed with censoring the scene in which Babar's mother is shot by a cruel hunter—some parents skip that page—but she had decided not to shield Charlie from the truth, even if the truth was fictional. He had asked her why the hunter had shot Babar's mother, and she had replied that it was because he was cruel, and cruel people did unkind things since they did not think of the feelings of others. And that, she thought, was as far as one might get in any attempt to explain the cruelties of this world to a four-year-old. She wondered whether more sophisticated explanations could get much further: ultimately it was a matter of the absence of human sympathy. One might dig deeper: the aetiology of evil could be complex and tendentious. What made Hitler what he was? A sense of historical injustice? Personal failure? A malignant, psychopathic personality? The desire to harm those he believed had harmed him? Auden had reflected on this in his disowned poem, “September 1, 1939,” where he had alluded to the lesson that “all school children learn / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return…” And he was right, in that respect at least. Evil was repaid with evil—but only by those who were themselves evil; which brought one back to where one started.

“Go on,” said Charlie.

Babar wandered from the forest and found himself, by sleight of improbable geography, in a French city. Now the transformation comes; he meets the old lady who takes him to the department store to buy him clothes. He is introduced into European society and acquires its baggage. He returns to the Kingdom of the Elephants in a green car and with all the accoutrements of French civilisation. When the King's position becomes vacant after he has eaten a poisonous mushroom, Babar is appointed, and Celeste becomes his Queen. They rule Celesteville with integrity and a sound instinct for orderly planning: rows of neat houses are constructed for the elephants; savagery is repelled.

Charlie's eyes began to close; it was time to leave Celesteville. Isabel bent forward and kissed him on the brow. He lived in a world of friendly stuffed toys, of talking elephants, and meerkats too. How long would it last? When would this childhood bubble be penetrated by images of conflict, of bionic superheroes, of pyrotechnics and explosions that made the world of older children what it was? At six, at seven, when the purveyors of these things realised there was money to be made from children?
Don't grow up too quickly,
she whispered.

JAMIE FINISHED HIS PRACTICE
and came into the kitchen.

“Asleep?” he asked, nodding his head in the direction of Charlie's bedroom upstairs.

“Out for the count.”

“I'm not surprised,” said Jamie. “He ran everywhere in the Zoo. Ran. I had to chase after him constantly.”

“He's a boy,” said Isabel. “Haven't you noticed how boys seem to run everywhere? Girls don't. They walk or skip, but boys tear about.”

Jamie went to the fridge and extracted a half-full bottle of New Zealand white wine. He poured a glass for Isabel and then one for himself. They touched glasses; they always did that; Edinburgh crystal to Edinburgh crystal.

“I was…” He did not finish, as the doorbell sounded. He looked at Isabel enquiringly. “Expecting anybody?”

She shook her head. “No. The Lifeboats?” A neighbour collected for the lifeboats charity. It was a popular cause—even amongst the land-bound.

Isabel shrugged. “Could be.”

Jamie went to answer the door. After a minute or so Isabel heard voices in the hall and went to investigate.

It was her friend Sam. “I was passing by. I'm not going to stay because you'll be getting ready for dinner and I don't want to hold you back.”

Isabel assured her they had plenty of time. “Dinner isn't always planned in this house. Sometimes it just happens.”

Sam smiled. She had a husband who could not cook, whereas Isabel had Jamie, who cooked rather well—or so Sam had heard. The injustice of it, some said; to look like that
and
to be able to cook.

“Perhaps Jamie could teach Eric one of these days. Nothing too sophisticated, but to be able to make an omelette would be useful.”

Jamie laughed. “I'm sure that Eric would be a perfectly good cook. Or even
is
a perfectly good cook. Some husbands don't let on, you know; they can cook quite well, but it's not in their interests for anybody to know it.”