The Novel Habits of Happiness by Alexander McCall Smith Page A

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