The Novel Habits of Happiness (7 page)

“It's so different from the presses I trained on,” the printer said above the clatter of the machinery.

“You used type?”

“Not the actual type you're thinking about—not the metal stuff.” For a moment he looked wistful; printing was no longer the craft it once had been. “No, but we did have flexible plates that we put on drums. There was a physical side to it that's almost gone now.” His voice lowered, and she barely heard what he had to say next. “Like the customers too.”

She looked at him.

“Sorry,” he said. “Not all of them. But so many are having all of this done abroad now. China. We're going to lose all of our skills soon, I fear. We won't be able to print because we won't have any trained printers.”

“Outsourcing?”

He nodded. “That's what they call it. But it has very bad effects: people are losing the ability to make the things they've always made.”

This reminded her of something. She had read recently that there were virtually no engravers under forty in the country—they simply did not exist. And stone carvers? And watchmakers? And people who could actually repair a car engine rather than just replace the parts?

She sought to reassure him. “I'm not proposing to take my business anywhere else.” She touched him lightly on the forearm—an oddly intimate gesture in the noisy workplace.

His expression showed his relief. “I like printing your
Review.
”

“Oh…Do you read it?” The question slipped out without her thinking about it.

He looked down at the ground. “Yes, of course. Well…perhaps not all of it, I'm afraid. I don't actually read…”

She was embarrassed.
I have put this nice man in a position where he felt he had to claim to read something that he doesn't read.
She reminded herself of what a friend had said about the potential tactlessness of asking others if they had read something: people do not like to confess that they have never read
War and Peace.
“Do films count?” an anxious friend had once asked her. “Can I say I've read something if I've seen the film?”

She glanced at the printer. “It's not everybody's cup of tea,” she said quickly.

This gave him his opportunity. “On which subject,” he said, “we have tea waiting for us up in the office.”

Now she glanced at the piles of books and papers on her desk.
There are no chains,
she thought,
except those we create for ourselves.
That, of course, was not entirely true: there were plenty of chains, real or imaginary, that people created for others—or that
desks
created, she thought…

I
SABEL HAD LOOSE LINKS
with the Enlightenment Institute. There was a separate department of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh—she had worked there years earlier, and still attended their Friday-afternoon seminars when she could—but recently she had found herself having rather more to do with the small institute tucked away on the edge of the Meadows, the green wedge of park that separated the university area from the acres of stone-built Victorian tenements to the south. Its name, of course, was a nod in the direction of the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century—the period when Edinburgh had been the intellectual centre of Europe.

She had first become involved with the Institute when she had got to know an Australian philosopher, a visiting fellow whom she had helped in a personal search. The following year Isabel herself had been asked to read a paper at the Institute and had written for this occasion a piece on justice between the generations: “Do the young
really
have to support the old?” They did, she had argued, although not because the old were old, but because they were people. That had gone down well, even if it had led to a spectacular exchange of divergent views—accompanied by accusations of ageism directed, oddly enough, against one of the older participants by one of the younger ones.

Her connection with the Institute had been strengthened when she heard that Edward and Cheryl Mendelson were to spend the summer there, each working on books that they hoped to finish. They came from New York, where Edward was a professor at Columbia, and from where, as W. H. Auden's literary executor, he ran the poet's affairs. Edward had a book of essays to complete, and Cheryl was putting the finishing touches to a study of the history of marriage. It was Isabel's interest in Auden that had first put her in touch with Edward: she had written to him with a query about one of his books, and he had responded helpfully. The correspondence had deepened and become quite regular; she very much appreciated his willingness to explain the more obscure poems in the poet's canon.

“What on earth does he mean here?” she asked about these poems. “Am I missing the point?”

She sometimes was.

“He can be somewhat opaque at times,” sighed Edward. “But that's part of the charm, I think, and there's always a meaning there. It just might be that the references, shall we say, are not always immediately obvious.”

“He knew so much, didn't he? Theology, science, opera—they're all there in the poems.”

Edward nodded. “Yes,” he said simply. “All of that—and much more.”

Edward greeted her as she went up the stairs to the coffee room. “Cheryl's going to be coming in a bit later,” he said. “She'll be sorry if she misses you. I hope that you can stay until she comes back.” He hesitated. “Or perhaps I shouldn't ask you. I know how busy you are.”

“Absolutely everybody's busy,” said Isabel, thinking of the one truly idle friend she had, who always complained of having far too much to do. “But I'm happy to linger. I'm in denial about the state of my desk.”

“Like so many of us,” said Edward.

She knew that he was being polite; he should have said
you
rather than
us.
“Not you,” she said. “I can imagine your desk, and it'll be a paragon of…” She struggled to find the right word. How did one describe the state of being uncluttered? “Unclutteredness.” She rather liked the idea of a category of people singled out for their tidy desks, unlike those whose desks were piled high with papers.
Desk guilt,
she thought; it could be a useful new term to join all the other available forms of guilt and self-reproach.
Desk guilt, gym guilt, chocolate guilt…
It was another case for compound nouns, she thought, although the effort of translating it all into German would be enough to give rise in itself to guilt, or perhaps to
compound noun anxiety,
which would sound so much more credible in German, where the word
Angst
could be tacked on to just about everything. She paused at that. Angst was different from guilt, and the distinction should be maintained: one could feel angst about something that one knew one should not feel guilty about; angst had nothing to do—or not necessarily so—with any personal failure.

On the landing at the top of the stairs, Edward glanced in the direction of the coffee room. “I need to talk to you,” he said, his voice lowered.

“Over coffee?”

Edward shook his head. “In private. I can go and fetch you a cup of coffee, if you like, but we need to talk in my room.”

Isabel was concerned. “Is everything all right?”

He assured her it was. “No, nothing's going wrong as far as we're concerned. Our work is going very well, and we're enjoying ourselves. It's more a question of…” He broke off before continuing, “Look, I'll join you in my room in a moment—I'll get the coffee. Just wait for me there.”

She knew where his room was—a small study at the end of the sort of meandering corridor that was typical of so many Edinburgh buildings. Cheryl's room was next door, and Isabel had visited them both in their respective offices shortly after they arrived. The door was ajar, and she entered the room and sat down on the armchair near the window. The room overlooked a small, three-sided courtyard; facing east, it was still benefiting from the morning sun. This had a buttery quality to it; it played upon her arms as she waited and she felt its heat, rather like the warm breath of some invisible creature. She looked up at the ceiling, with its elaborate cornice. This followed the Greek key design that had been so popular during Edinburgh's eighteenth-century enthusiasm for all things Greek—when the city's ambition had been to re-create the Parthenon on the Calton Hill and when people began to refer to Edinburgh as the Athens of the North. She smiled at the thought. Money had run out after the construction of nothing more than a set of imposing pillars topped by lintels; these remained, a reminder of the perils of civic vanity. In Isabel's view, though, they were just right for the city; a completed Parthenon would have been too much—in bad taste, perhaps, whereas a manifestly uncompleted Parthenon was just right. Failure often had a certain style that success simply did not have.

Edward appeared, bearing two cups of coffee. He handed one to her, and then he crossed the room to take his seat behind the desk. The coffee was piping hot, with small wisps of steam still rising from its surface. Isabel raised the cup to her lips, but put it down without taking a sip. Edward looked apologetic.

“Sorry, it's too hot,” he said. “Give it a moment.”

Isabel smiled. “Coffee's getting hotter and hotter, it seems. Global warming, perhaps.”

They laughed.

“You have to be careful,” said Edward. “In some coffee places you now see warning notices:
Our coffee is served at…
and then they give the temperature. I suppose they're worried about being sued.”

“Everybody's worried about that,” said Isabel. “I was in a shop the other day—just a small place—and there was a large sign on the wall that simply said:
The management is not responsible.
That was all.”

“A general disclaimer,” said Edward.

“Of course one can understand it,” said Isabel. “We're so obsessed with protecting people from themselves—and protecting ourselves from others while we're about it.” She thought of another example; there were so many once one began to think about it. This time it was Charlie's nursery; they had taken the children to the museum and had sent a letter to the parents telling them that a full risk-assessment survey had been carried out, and that this had included psychological risk. She told Edward about this. “You can just see them—visiting the museum with their clipboards, ticking off each risk one by one. Were there any obviously unsafe electrical installations? Were the stairs the sort of stairs down which children might fall? Were there things that the children might see in the museum that were disturbing and might lead to nightmares?”

Edward laughed as Isabel continued. “Of course, Scottish history is full of disturbing things. Look at Mary, Queen of Scots—her secretary murdered before her eyes, her husband blown up, or strangled, or whatever it was. Any visitor to a Scottish museum may well come away quite traumatised.”

She stopped herself. Edward had said that there was something he needed to talk to her about—and she had led the conversation into the sixteenth century. It was so easily done, she thought…

She tried her coffee again.
The management is not responsible for the coffee.
“You said there was something?”

Edward nodded. “I wanted to have a word with you before we went into the common room. There are a couple of visitors this morning. I thought I should let you know.”

“But there always are visitors here, aren't there?”

“Yes, but these are…Well, I recall a conversation we had a couple of years ago when I was last here. You know how you can forget vast swathes of experience and then you remember something that somebody said to you on a particular occasion; you remember it in great detail; you remember every word.”

Yes, Isabel thought. She remembered conversations she had had in which nothing notable had been said, but of which every word had been laid down in memory. There had been a conversation with a friend when she was seventeen. They had been for a walk together on Cramond beach, and the friend had suddenly said that there were some beaches that were sand and some that were made of crushed shells, and that sometimes it was hard to tell which was which. And then the friend had suddenly changed the subject and said that seaweed was very good for you and that was why the Japanese, who ate a lot of seaweed, she claimed, lived such long lives. “They go on and on,” she said. It was an odd, inconsequential conversation, but she remembered it word for word.

“Yes,” she said to Edward. “Sometimes that happens.”

“It was a discussion about having enemies,” said Edward. “I can't remember how we arrived at that topic, but we did. And then you said to me, ‘Some people seem to have an awful lot of enemies. They go through life gathering them in the same way as other people acquire friends.' And then you said to me that you didn't think you had any enemies—at least not ones you knew about—and then you corrected yourself and said that you did: you had two enemies, although you felt reluctant to call them that because you thought it was wrong to keep a state of enmity alive.”

Isabel made a careless gesture. “I said all that?”

“Yes, you did—and more.”

She looked amused. “There's a certain embarrassment in being reminded of what you said. Politicians face it all the time, don't they? They have their words quoted back to them and then they have to work out how what they said can be reinterpreted in an entirely different way.”

“I hope I don't embarrass you,” said Edward. “But I do remember it all rather well, for some odd reason. I then asked you who your enemies were, and you told me. You said, ‘There's a Professor Christopher Dove down in London.' ”

Isabel groaned. “Oh dear.”

“And then,” Edward continued, “you said that there was an
éminence grise
behind this Christopher Dove, and he was called Robert Lettuce.”

Isabel made a gesture of defeat. “Yes, I probably said all that. I feel a bit awkward about it, and they're not
real
enemies in the sense that I don't think much about them, and I doubt if they sit there plotting my downfall, but…but I'm wary of them, I suppose. Dove is a slippery piece of work and Lettuce is a great pompous whale. I suppose if I were to continue the marine metaphor, Dove is a shark and Lettuce is a whale, or perhaps a sea lettuce—there is such a thing, you know—it's a sort of seaweed.” She trailed off. “Why…”

“They're in the common room,” said Edward quietly. “They're here.”