A Special Relationship

by Douglas Kennedy

  ‘Yes, but the editor does need to know my decision by the end of the week.’

  And he left it at that.

  Besides doing a lot of serious thinking, I also made several key phone calls – the first of which was to Thomas Richardson, the editor-in-chief of the Post, and someone with whom I had always had a cordial, if distant relationship. As an old-school Yankee, he also appreciated directness. So when he returned my call, I was completely direct with him, explaining that I was marrying a journalist from the Chronicle and was planning to move to England. I also said that the Post was my home, and I certainly wanted to stay with the paper, but the fact that I was also pregnant meant that I would eventually need a twelve-week period of maternity leave, commencing about seven months from now.

  ‘You’re pregnant?’ he said, sounding genuinely surprised.

  ‘It looks that way.’

  ‘But that’s wonderful news, Sally. And I can completely understand why you want to have the baby in London …’

  ‘The thing is, we won’t be moving there for three months.’

  ‘Well, I’m certain we can work something out at our London bureau. One of our correspondents has been talking about coming back to Boston, so your timing couldn’t be better.’

  There was a part of me that was alarmed about the fact that my boss had so eased my professional passage to London. Now I had no reason not to follow Tony. But when I informed him that my transfer to the London bureau of the Post seemed certain, I also said that I was terrified of this huge change in circumstances. Once again, his reply (though predictably flippant) was also reassuring – telling me that it wasn’t as if I was going behind the veil. Nor would we be moving to Ulan Bator. And I would have a job. And if we found that we couldn’t stand being behind desks in offices … well, who’s to say that we were indentured to London for the rest of our lives?

  ‘Anyway, we’re not the sort of people to become each other’s jailers, now are we?’ he said.

  ‘Not a chance of that,’ I said.

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ he said, with a laugh. ‘So, I don’t suppose it will be the end of the world if we get married in the next few weeks, now will it?’

  ‘Since when did you get so damn romantic?’ I asked.

  ‘Since I had a conversation with one of our consular chaps a few days ago.’

  What this ‘chap’ told Tony was that my passage into Britain – both professionally and personally – would be far more rapidly expedited if we were husband and wife. Whereas I would be facing months of immigration bureaucracy if I chose to remain single. Once again, I was astounded by the rate at which my life was being turned around. Destiny is like that, isn’t it? You travel along, thinking that the trajectory of your life will follow a certain course (especially when you’re starting to crowd middle-age). But then, you meet someone, you allow it to progress, you find yourself tiptoeing across that dangerous terrain called ‘love’. Before you know it, you’re on a long-distance phone call to your only surviving family member, telling her that not only are you pregnant, but you’re also about to …

  ‘Get married?’ Sandy said, sounding genuinely shocked.

  ‘It’s the practical thing to do,’ I said.

  ‘You mean, like getting pregnant for the first time at thirty-seven?’

  ‘Believe me, that was completely accidental.’

  ‘Oh, I believe you. Because you’re about the last person I’d expect to get intentionally knocked up. How’s Tony taking it?’

  ‘Very well. Better than me, in fact. I mean, he even used the dreaded words “settling down” and in a positive manner as well.’

  ‘Maybe he understands something you still don’t get …’

  ‘You mean, the fact that we all have to settle down someday?’ I said, sounding just ever so slightly sarcastic. Though Sandy had always supported my peripatetic career, she did frequently make noises about the fact that I was heading for a lonely old age, and that if I did dodge the child thing, I would come to regret it in later fife. There was something about my free-wheelingness that unsettled her. Don’t get me wrong – she didn’t play the envy card. But part of the reason she was so delighted with my news was because – once I became a mother – we would occupy similar terrain. And I would finally be brought down to earth.

  ‘Now, hang on – I didn’t tell you to get pregnant, did I?’ Sandy asked.

  ‘No – but you’ve only spent the last ten years asking me when it would happen.’

  ‘And now it has. And I’m thrilled for you. And I can’t wait to meet Tony.’

  ‘Come to Cairo for the wedding next week.’

  ‘Next week?’ she said, sounding shocked. ‘Why so fast?’

  I explained about wanting to sidestep working and residency permits before we moved to London in just under three months’ time.

  ‘God, this is all a little whirlwind.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  I knew that Sandy wouldn’t be able to make it over for the wedding. Not only did she not have the money or the time, but to her, anything beyond the borders of the United States was Injun Country. Which is why, even if she did have the wherewithal to get to Egypt, I’m certain she would have found a way of avoiding the journey. As she openly admitted to me on several occasions: ‘I’m not like you – I have no interest in out there! That was one of the many things I so loved about my sister – she was completely no-crap about herself. ‘I’m limited,’ she once told me; a comment which I found unnecessarily self-lacerating – especially as she was a very smart, very literate woman who managed to keep her life together after her husband walked out on her three years ago.

  Within a month of his seismic departure, Sandy had found a job teaching history at a small private school in Medford – and was somehow managing to meet the mortgage and feed the kids at the same time. Which (as I told her) showed far more moxie than ducking in and out of assorted Middle Eastern hell holes. But now I was going to learn all about life on the domestic front – and even on a crackly phone line from Egypt, Sandy quickly sensed my fear.

  ‘You’re going to do just fine,’ she told me. ‘Better than fine. Great. Anyway, it’s not like you’re giving up your job, or being sent to Lawrence (perhaps the ugliest town in Massachusetts). And hey, it’s London, right? And after all those war zones you’ve covered, motherhood won’t seem much different.’

  I did laugh. And I also wondered: is she telling the truth?

  But the next few weeks didn’t allow me much opportunity for extended ruminations about my soon-to-be-changed circumstances. Especially as the Middle East was up to its usual manic tricks. There was a cabinet crisis in Israel, an assassination attempt on a senior Egyptian government minister, and a ferry boat which overturned on the Nile in Northern Sudan, killing all 150 passengers aboard. The fact that I was suffering from an extended bout of morning sickness while covering these assorted stories only seemed to accentuate the banality of my condition compared to such major human calamity. So too did the large number of baby books that I had expressed to me by amazon.com, and which I devoured with the obsessive relish of somebody who had just been told she was about to embark on a complicated voyage and was desperately searching for the right guide to tell her how to get through it. So I’d return home after writing about a local cholera scare in the Nile Delta and start reading up on colic and night feeds and cradle cap, and a range of other new words and terminologies from the child care lexicon.

  ‘You know what I’ll miss most about the Middle East?’ I told Tony on the night before our wedding. ‘The fact that it’s so damn extreme, so completely deranged.’

  ‘Whereas London is going to be nothing but day-to-day stuff?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘But you are worrying about that!

  ‘A little bit, yes. Aren’t you?’

  ‘It will be a change.’

  ‘Especially as you’ll have additional baggage in tow.’

  ‘You’re not referring to
yourself, by any chance?’ he asked.

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Well, I’m happy about the additional baggage.’

  I kissed him. ‘Well I’m happy that you’re happy …’

  ‘It will be an adjustment, but we’ll be fine. And, believe me, London has its own peculiar madness.’

  I remembered that comment six weeks later when we flew north to Heathrow. Courtesy of the Chronicle, they were repatriating their new Foreign Editor and his new wife in Club Class. Courtesy of the Chronicle, we were also being put up for six weeks in a company flat near the paper’s offices in Wapping while we house-hunted. Courtesy of the Chronicle, all our belongings had been shipped last week from Cairo and would be kept in storage until we found a permanent place to five. And courtesy of the Chronicle, a large black Mercedes car collected us from the airport and began the slow crawl through evening rush-hour traffic towards central London.

  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. Figu
re 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 …’