A Special Relationship (6 page)

As the car inched along the motorway, I reached over and took Tony’s hand – noticing, as I still did, the shiny platinum wedding bands adorning our respective left hands, remembering the hilarious civil ceremony at which we were spliced in the Cairo Registry Office – a true madhouse without a roof, and where the official who joined us as husband-and-wife looked like an Egyptian version of Groucho Marx. Now here we were – only a few short months after that crazy twenty-four hours in Somalia – rolling down the M4 towards …

Wapping.

That was something of a surprise, Wapping. The cab had negotiated its way off the motorway, and headed south, through red-brick residential areas. These eventually gave way to a jumble of architectural styles: Victorian meets Edwardian meets Warsaw Public Housing meets Breezeblock Mercantile Brutalism. It was late afternoon in early winter. Light was thin. But despite the paucity of natural illumination, my first view of London as a married woman showed me that it was an extended exercise in scenic disorientation; a Chinese menu cityscape, in which there was little visual coherence, and where affluence and deprivation were adjacent neighbours. Of course, I had noticed this hodgepodge aspect of the city on my visit here with Tony. But, like any tourist, I tended to focus on that which was pleasing … and like any tourist, I also avoided all of South London. More to the point, I had just been passing through here for a few days – and as I wasn’t on assignment, my journalist’s antennae had been turned off. But now –
now
– this city was about to become my home. So I had my nose pressed against the glass of the Mercedes, staring out at the wet pavements, the overflowing litter bins, the clusters of fast-food shops, the occasional elegant crescent of houses, the large patch of green parkland (Clapham Common, Tony informed me), the slummy tangle of mean streets (Stockwell and Vauxhall), yielding to office blocks, then a spectacular view of the Houses of Parliament, then more office blocks, then more faceless redbrick, then the surprise appearance of Tower Bridge, then a tunnel, and then … Wapping.

New bland apartment developments, the occasional old warehouse, a couple of office towers, and a vast squat industrial complex, hidden behind high brick walls and razor wire.

‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘The local prison?’

Tony laughed.

‘It’s where I work.’

Around a quarter-mile beyond this compound, the driver pulled up in front of a modern building, about eight stories tall. We took the elevator up to the fourth floor. The corridor was papered in an anaemic cream paper, with neutral tan carpet on the floor. We came to a wood veneered door. The driver fished out two keys and handed one to each of us.

‘You do the honours,’ Tony said.

I opened the door, and stepped into a small boxy one-bedroom apartment. It was furnished in a generic Holiday Inn style, and looked out onto a back alleyway.

‘Well,’ I said, taking it all in, ‘this will make us find a house fast.’

It was my old college friend Margaret Campbell who expedited the house hunting process. When I called her up prior to my departure from Cairo and explained that, not only was I about to become a full-time London resident, but I was also just married and pregnant to boot, she asked, ‘Anything else?’

‘Thankfully,
no.’

‘Well, it will be wonderful to have you here – and, believe me, you will end up liking this town.’

‘By which you mean …?’

‘It’s just something of an adjustment, that’s all. But hey, come over for lunch as soon as you arrive, and I’ll show you the ropes. And I hope you have a lot of cash. Because this place makes Zurich seem cheap and cheerful.’

Certainly, Margaret wasn’t exactly living in disadvantaged circumstances – she and her family resided in a three-storey town house in South Kensington. I phoned her the morning after we arrived in London – and, true to her word, she invited me over that afternoon. She’d become a little more matronly since I’d last seen her – the sort of woman who now sported a Hermes scarf and wore twin-sets. She’d given up a serious executive position with Citibank to play the post-feminist stay-at-home mother, and had ended up in London after her lawyer husband had been transferred here for a two-year stint. But despite this nod to corporate-wife style, she was still the sharp-tongued good friend I had known during my college years.

‘I sense this is just a little out of our league,’ I said, looking around her place.

‘Hey, if the firm wasn’t footing the sixty grand rent…’

‘Sixty thousand
pounds?
’ I said, genuinely shocked.

‘Well, it is South Ken. But hell, in this town, a modest studio in a modest area is going to set you back a thousand pounds a month in rent … which is crazy. But that’s the price of admission here. Which is why you guys really should think about buying somewhere.’

With her two kids off at school all day – and with my job at the
Post
not starting for another month – Margaret decided to take me house hunting. Naturally, Tony was pleased to let me handle this task. He was surprisingly positive about the idea of actually buying a foothold here; especially as all his colleagues at the
Chronicle
kept telling him that he who hesitates in the London property game is lost. But as I quickly discovered, even the most unassuming terraced house at the end of a tube line was exorbitant. Tony still had his £100,000 share from the sale of his parent’s place in Amersham. I had the equivalent of another £20,000 courtesy of assorted small savings that I had built up over the past ten years. And Margaret – immediately assuming the role of property advisor – started working the phones and decided that an area called Putney was our destiny. As we drove south in her BMW, she pitched it to me.

‘Great housing stock, all the family amenities you need, it’s right on the river, and the District Line goes straight to Tower Bridge … which makes it perfect for Tony’s office. Now there are parts of Putney where you need over one-point-five to get a foot in the door …’

‘One-point-five
million?’
I asked.

‘Not an unusual price in this town.’

‘Sure, in Kensington or Chelsea. But
Putney?
It’s nearly the ‘burbs, isn’t it?’

‘Inner
’burbs. But hey, it’s only six or seven miles from Hyde Park … which is considered no distance at all in this damn sprawl. Anyway, one-point-five is the asking price for a big house in West Putney. Where I’m taking you, it’s just south of the Lower Richmond Road. Cute little streets, which go right down to the Thames. And the house may be a little small – just two bedrooms – but there’s the possibility of a loft extension …’

‘Since when did you become a realtor?’ I asked with a laugh.

‘Ever since I moved to this town. I tell you, the Brits might be all taciturn and distant when you first meet them – but get them talking about property, and they suddenly can’t stop chatting. Especially when it comes to London house prices – which is the major ongoing metropolitan obsession.’

‘Did it take you a while to fit in here?’

‘The worst thing about London is that nobody really fits in. And the best thing about London is that nobody really fits in. Figure that one out, and you’ll have a reasonably okay time here. Just as it also takes a while to work out the fact that – even if, like me, you actually like living here – it’s best to give off just the slightest whiff of Anglophobia.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because the Brits are suspicious of anyone who seems to like them.’

Intriguingly, however, Margaret didn’t play the Anglophobic card with the rather obsequious estate agent who showed us around the house on Sefton Street in Putney. Every time he tried to gloss over a defect – like the paisley-patterned carpets and the cramped bathroom and the woodchip wallpaper which evidently hid a multitude of plastering sins – she’d break into one of her ‘You’ve got to be kidding?’ routines, deliberately acting the loud American in an attempt to unsettle him. She succeeded.

‘You’re really asking four-hundred-and-forty-thousand for
this?
’

The estate agent – in his spread collared pink shirt and his black suit and Liberty tie – smiled weakly.

‘Well, Putney has always been very desirable.’

‘Yeah – but,
gosh,
it’s only two bedrooms. And look at the state of this place.’

‘I do admit that the decor is a little tired.’

‘Tired? Try archaic. I mean, someone died here, right?’

The estate agent went all diffident again.

‘It is being sold by the grandson of the former occupants.’

‘What did I tell you?’ Margaret said, turning to me. ‘This place hasn’t been touched since the sixties. And I bet it’s been on the market …’

The estate agent avoided her gaze.

‘Come on, ‘fess up,’ Margaret said.

‘A
few
weeks. And I do know the vendor would take an offer.’

‘I bet they would,’ Margaret said, then turned to me and whispered, ‘What do you think?’

‘Too much work for the price,’ I whispered. Then I asked the agent, ‘You don’t have anything like this which might just be a little more renovated?’

‘Not at the moment. But I will keep your number on file.’

I must have heard that same sentence dozens of times over the next ten days. The house hunting game was terra incognita for me. But Margaret turned out to be a canny guide. Every morning, after she got her kids off to school, she drove us around assorted neighbourhoods. She had a nose for the areas that were up-and-coming, and those worth dodging. We must have seen close to twenty properties in that first week – and continued to be the bane of every real estate agent that we encountered. ‘The Ugly Americans,’ we called ourselves … always polite, but asking far too many questions, speaking directly about the flaws we saw, constantly challenging the asking price, and (in the case of Margaret) knowing far more about the complex jigsaw of London property than was expected from Yanks. With pressure on me to find something before I started work, there was a certain ‘beat the clock’ aspect to this search. And so I applied the usual journalistic skills to this task – by which I mean I gained the most comprehensive (yet entirely superficial) knowledge of this subject in the shortest amount of time possible. When Margaret was back home with her kids in the afternoon, I’d jump the underground to check out an area. I researched proximity to hospitals, schools, parks, and all those other ‘Mommy Concerns’ (as Margaret sardonically called them) which now had to be taken into account.

‘This is not my idea of a good time,’ I told Sandy during a phone call a few days into the house hunt. ‘Especially as the city’s so damn big. I mean, there’s no such thing as a simple trip across town. Everything’s an expedition here – and I forgot to pack my pith helmet.’

‘That would make you stand out in the crowd.’

‘Hardly. This is the melting pot to end all melting pots – which means that no one stands out here. Unlike Boston …’

‘Oh, listen to the big city girl. I bet Boston’s friendlier.’

‘Of course. Because it’s small. Whereas London doesn’t need to be friendly …’

‘Because it’s so damn big?’

‘Yeah – and also because it’s London.’

That was the most intriguing thing about London – its aloofness. Perhaps it had something to do with the reticent temperament of the natives. Perhaps it was the fact that the city was so vast, so heterogeneous, so contradictory. Whatever the reason, during my first few weeks in London, I found myself thinking: this town’s like one of those massive Victorian novels, in which high life and low life endlessly intermingle, and where the narrative always sprawls to such an extent that you never really get to grips with the plot.

‘That about gets it right,’ Margaret said when I articulated this theory to her a few days later. ‘Nobody’s really important here. Because London dwarfs even the biggest egos. Cuts everyone right down to size. Especially since all Brits despise self-importance.’

That was another curious contradiction to London life – the way you could mistake English diffidence for arrogance. Every time I opened a newspaper – and read a lurid account of some local minor celebrity enmeshed in some cocaine-and-jail-bait scandal – it was very clear to me that this was a society that stamped down very hard on anyone who committed the sin of bumptiousness. At the same time, however, so many of the estate agents I dealt with deported themselves with a pomposity that belied their generally middle-class origins … especially when you questioned the absurd prices they were demanding for inferior properties.

‘That’s what the market is asking, madam’ was the usual disdainful response – a certain haughty emphasis placed on the word
madam,
to make you feel his condescending respect.

‘
Condescending respect,’
Margaret said, repeating my phrase out loud as we drove south from her house. ‘I like it – even though it is a complete oxymoron. Then again, until I lived in London, I’d never been able to discern two contrasting emotions lurking behind one seemingly innocent sentence. The English have a real talent when it comes to saying one thing and meaning the—’