The Novel Habits of Happiness (8 page)

Isabel opened her mouth to say something, but realised that she did not know what to say.

“Yes,” said Edward. “So I thought I should warn you. It wouldn't do, I think, to go into a room and discover that it was full of one's enemies.”

Isabel struggled with herself. They were not
real
enemies; she liked neither of them, but that did not mean that they were people she would avoid at all cost. “I'll be able to cope,” she said. “I appreciate the warning, but I don't mind meeting them again.”

Edward still looked concerned. “Are you sure?”

She stood up. “Yes, perfectly sure. Let's take our coffee into the common room.”

“If you wish…”

“I think we should.”
We
should; but it was not a matter in which she should involve Edward—the presence of Dove and Lettuce were not an issue for him. “Or should I say
I
should. I mean…” She stumbled on the words; this was getting complicated. “That's to say, I can't exactly avoid them, and why should I, after all?”

Edward spoke sympathetically. “Well then,” he said. “Let's go.”

As they left the room, she asked him, in a lowered voice, why Dove and Lettuce were there. “Are they on visiting fellowships?” She assumed that this would be the case, as visiting fellowships were the core of the Institute's work; they were its
raison d'être.

Edward shrugged. “I have no idea. Perhaps they are. Or perhaps they know somebody here and have just dropped in. It's a sociable place.” He thought for a moment. “I didn't see their names on this term's programme. So I think we can assume that this is just a casual visit.”

Isabel felt relieved. “I know I shouldn't be uncharitable, but I couldn't bear the thought of their being here…here in Edinburgh for any length of time. I know that's childish. I know. But that's the way I feel.”

They had reached the end of the corridor and their conversation had to end. From the open door of the common room, they heard voices. Somebody said something and there was laughter. Elsewhere in the building a telephone rang.

She took a deep breath. She had no reason to be afraid of either Dove or Lettuce, and she would not allow them to intimidate her. But in her heart she found herself back at school, at the age of fourteen, when there had been a bully a few years her senior who had made her dread going into the refectory at lunchtime because this girl would take a seat near a prospective victim and stare at her. It was done quite subtly; on most occasions nothing was said, the bully relying on the power of the contemptuous glance, the look of amused appraisal.
Look at her hair,
might be the implicit message picked up by others and sniggered over; or
her skin
! There was nothing on which one could put one's finger, but the behaviour was unambiguous. Others laughed, grateful, perhaps, that they were not the target; a few girls tried to resist it, but the bully seemed to have the psychological advantage and triumphed. And then she was knocked off her bicycle by a speeding motorist and was obliged to spend four months in a wheelchair. Suddenly her spell was broken, and she became an object of pity. Somebody wrote on the wall of the toilets:
Serves her right.
No name was given, but they all knew who was being referred to. Isabel thought for a moment that what had happened somehow affirmed that there was some justice somewhere—some force that restored the balance. But then she decided that this was not so; we want there to be such a thing, she told herself, but there isn't. That was one of the earliest instances of the inner philosophical debate that became the background music to her life. She went on to think: But perhaps we
need
to believe in justice; perhaps we
need
to think that people will be served right for what they do, just as we need to believe in free will—even in the face of powerful arguments against it.

Do we ever escape from the fears of childhood, from the little things that worry us or frighten us, from the superstitions and concerns that things will suddenly go wrong and we shall be in trouble? For many, that is what childhood amounts to:
a hive whose honey is fear and worry.
The familiarity of the reference puzzled her as she composed herself for her entry into the common room; our thoughts are not always our own but are framed in the words of others.

She entered the room first, with Edward following her, and for a moment the conversation stopped. She saw the room as one might see a painting, with the models posed in their appointed places, immobile under the painter's gaze. Dove was standing near the window, looking contemplative, a cup and saucer in his hands; Professor Lettuce, seated on a chair near the fireplace, was about to take a bite out of a biscuit, his hand poised before his mouth, but arrested in movement, like a child caught dipping into the biscuit barrel; a young woman in jeans and a loose red top, her hair piled up on her head in an old-fashioned hairstyle that looked like Athena's helmet, was perched on the edge of a couch, while a middle-aged man, whom Isabel had seen on a previous visit, sat next to her, his hands raised as if to emphasise a point he was making.

The conversation faltered. The man on the couch had been saying something but his words trailed off: “…unless anybody could show otherwise, which, of course…”

Dove looked round sharply; Professor Lettuce lowered the biscuit.

Isabel seized the advantage that her sudden entrance gave her. She was no longer trembling. This was
her
city; they were in Edinburgh, where
she
lived.

“Well, my goodness,” she said. “Professor Lettuce and…and Christopher. What a pleasant surprise.” She tried to sound sincere, but she felt that the irony behind the word
pleasant
had surfaced. Hypocrisy required practice, she thought, and I am short of that. She thought of Charlie: he had been exposed to the Pinocchio story at nursery—a young woman from Italy, working for a few months as an assistant, had told the children about it and he had in turn quizzed Jamie about long noses and lies, all the while clutching his own nose to reassure himself that it had not grown. Had he told lies—already? Very small children did not understand the difference between truth and lies, and so when they said things that were untrue, these were not real lies; a lie required intent to deceive, and Charlie surely lacked that.

The man on the couch stood up. “It's Miss Dalhousie, isn't it?”

Isabel looked at him; she remembered now who he was. Edward had explained that there was an acting director, as the last director of the Institute had left to take up a chair in South Australia. The post was now temporarily held by a man who was about to retire from another department of the University. Isabel had met him, and struggled to remember his name.

“George Herrithew,” he said, sensing her uncertainty. “We met at that seminar…the one on…”

Now she was able to fill in the gap in memory. “On Schopenhauer.”

“Of course, of course.” He paused, and gestured towards Robert Lettuce. “You know Professor Lettuce, it seems. And Christopher Dove too.”

Isabel moved towards a vacant chair and sat down. She noticed that Lettuce had shot Dove a glance, an exchange so brief, a message so telegraphed, that it could easily have been missed. Dove had looked away, as if wanting to conceal, or even deny, whatever complicity the glance implied.

“We've met on a number of occasions,” said Isabel. “Here and in London.” She paused. Lettuce was smiling in a sickly, slightly pained manner, as if he were an Edwardian clergyman being obliged to spend time in the company of somebody vaguely beneath him.

“What brings you to Edinburgh?” she asked.

Again Lettuce looked at Dove, and then lowered his gaze. He did not look at Isabel as he answered. “A purely social visit,” he said airily. “We have old friends up here.”

Isabel swallowed. She hated the expression
up here
that people from the South of England sometimes used when talking about Scotland.
Up
had to be up from somewhere—presumably what they regarded as the centre. From her point of view that was
down,
but she did not say
down here
when she was in London.

She tried not to stare at Lettuce's nose. He had a fleshy face and yet the nose succeeded in establishing its salience, rising distinct above the surrounding features, as a mound of rocks will rise above the moraine of a valley. They were not here for a social visit—that was a lie, and his ample nose might rise even further.

“I've said something amusing?”

Lettuce was staring at her, and she realised that her reverie had lasted longer than it should have done and she was smiling.

“No,” she said. “I was thinking of something else.”

Lettuce pursed his lips. “Dare I ask what?”

“Who nose,” she said. She could not resist it. Yes, it was childish to make secret puns, but the irredeemable pomposity of Professor Robert Lettuce seemed to call for it.

Now Dove spoke. “And the
Review
?” he asked. “Is it still going strong?”

She turned to face him. Christopher Dove was a tall man who dressed with style and acted with an easy urbanity. He always spoke with a slight sneer in his voice—or so it seemed to Isabel—and he did so now. He was pretending, thought Isabel, that he did not know whether the
Review
was still being published, the implication being that he did not deign to notice it. And yet Isabel remembered that he had a current subscription because she had updated the subscription list only a couple of weeks earlier and had seen his name on it.

She struggled to control herself, and failed. “But you're a subscriber, Christopher,” she said. “Is your copy not arriving regularly? I shall start enquiries—the copies are sent off directly from the printer—they offer a service that does all that for the journals they print. I'll check with them tomorrow.”

Dove appeared flustered. “My secretary,” he muttered. “I expect that my secretary deals with it and then sends it over to the department.”

Lettuce shot Dove another glance—a different one this time. Isabel interpreted it as saying:
Secretary? You don't have a secretary.
It was a further lie. Two lies in four minutes, and therefore thirty lies an hour, or seven hundred and twenty lies a day—a cascade of lies, or was the collective name for lies a mountain? It was a mountain. In this case, then, it was a Ben Nevis of lies, Ben Nevis being the name of Scotland's highest mountain.

Lettuce cleared his throat. “I must say I enjoyed your special issue on humanitarian intervention,” he said. “That strikes me as being a very difficult issue for all of us.” He took a sip of his coffee. “When do we intervene to stop some dreadful injustice occurring in some foreign country? I find myself very torn on that issue.”

Isabel shrugged. “When we can get away with it,” she said, and then qualified her answer, “That is, if your question was purely descriptive rather than normative. If you're asking when we
should
intervene, that's another matter altogether.”

Lettuce looked slightly disapproving. “That's what I meant. I'm sorry if I didn't make my meaning clear enough.”

“Then I think it's a balancing act,” said Isabel. “You balance the good you can do in terms of lives saved against the harm you do by destabilising the international order. We can't have people intervening left, right and centre in the affairs of other sovereign states.”

“That's rather interesting,” said George Herrithew. “I'm a classicist, as you may know, and if you look at the roots of just war theory in ancient philosophy you see that they're rather gung-ho when it comes to justifying war. Aristotle expresses the view that you can wage war to subjugate people whom you think should be governed by you.”

Dove laughed at this—a sneering laugh, thought Isabel. “Not far off the views of some of our own recent leaders,” he said. “They may not say that people should be governed by them, but they do say that they should be governed by their system.”

“What about slavery?” asked Edward.

Lettuce looked up at him. “Would you wage war to free slaves?”

Edward explained politely that this was precisely what the United States—or a large part of the United States—had done. “We had a civil war over it,” he said.

“A long time ago,” said Lettuce.

“Not so long,” said Edward.

Isabel saw Lettuce's eyes narrow very slightly. “Of course we fought our own war against that sort of thing,” he said. “We started in 1939 and fought on until 1945.” He paused. “For much of that time we were unaided.”

Isabel bristled. Gratitude should not be expressed with a snide qualification. You did not comment on the timing of help, whatever you thought. “And how grateful we were,” she said. “For everything.” She directed her gaze at Lettuce. “The Marshall Plan, for instance.”

A mischievous smile flickered about Lettuce's mouth. “Of course, I was talking about the Soviet Union,” he said airily. “Our Russian friends go on about their Great Patriotic War, as they call it, but they omit to mention the non-aggression pact with the late Adolf Hitler, and their somewhat tardy arrival at the party.”

Lettuce reached for another biscuit. “Oh well,” he said. “Nobody's perfect. For my part, I can't resist shortbread. One of the things that you Scots invented. The greatest, perhaps.”

“Along with television, economics and so on,” said Isabel.

Lettuce seemed to pay no attention. He had selected his piece of shortbread and was eyeing it enthusiastically. Isabel was conscious of Edward's looking at his watch. “Yes,” she said. “I must dash too.”

Lettuce gave her an unctuous smile. “So nice to see you, Miss Dalhousie, even if so briefly.”

“Yes,” she said. “And I hope you enjoy the rest of your visit.”