Read Online The Novel Habits of Happiness by Alexander McCall Smith - Free Book Online

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.
    “I’m not holding you up for no reason at all,” the conductor had said drily. “If you had played this passage correctly the first time, it would not have been necessary for us to re-examine it.”
    One of the clarinettists had half turned towards Jamie. “Proves your point,” she whispered.
    “There is no need for wider discussion,” said the conductor, his reedy voice now slightly raised.
    Isabel gazed at Jamie. Of course he did not mean to be disparaging; he was gentle in all his dealings with people, as effortlessly strong men so often are. She had rarely, if ever, heard him raise his voice to anybody, and he was incapable, she felt, of any sort of insensitivity.
    She was thinking. “Why don’t we see what it’s like?”
    Jamie shook his head. “It’ll be awful. It’ll be extremely embarrassing. He’s lost the plot.”
    “Do you think so?”
    “Yes, I do. What reasonable, down-to-earth person would offer to write something like that?”
    Isabel picked up the email. “I don’t think we should dismiss him. I think I’ll tell him that the offer was not an unconditional one; that obtaining our approval of the subject was implicit.”
    “Oh well,” said Jamie. “You’re the editor, not me.” He, at least, was thinking of their new baby. “What will we call him? Or her, of course. I think I’d like a girl this time. Would you like that too?”
    A shadow passed over her face. “We can’t count on anything. It may not happen.”
    “I’ll try my best.”
    “And I will too.”
    He grinned. “When should we start?” And immediately he answered his own question. “Now?”
    She dropped the piece of paper, which fluttered down to the floor and lay there, upside down. She could afford to be generous to Professor Trembling. We all had our own ways of going through life; we all loved in our own particular way, and an account of the life of one person, a mother, might contain insights into the moral life—which, after all, was what the
Review
was meant to be about. Academic journals did not have to be