A Special Relationship

by Douglas Kennedy

‘Very senior, very respected, with rooms in Harley Street – and he does his NHS work out of the Mattingly … which I think you’ll like, as it’s one of the newest hospitals in London.’

  When I mentioned this last comment to Margaret, she laughed.

  ‘That’s her way of telling you she doesn’t want to horrify you and your need for newness by sending you to one of the grimmer Victorian hospitals around town.’

  ‘Why did she think I had a need for newness?’

  ‘Because you’re a Yank. And we’re supposed to like everything new and shiny. Or, at least, that’s what everyone over here thinks. But hey, when it comes to hospitals, give me new and shiny any day.’

  ‘I’m not exactly thrilled either about being “assigned” an obstetrician. Do you think this guy Hughes is some second-rater?’

  ‘Well, your GP told you he has rooms on Harley Street…’

  ‘Makes him sound like a slum-lord, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Tell me about it. I mean, the first time I heard my doctor’s office over here referred to as a surgery …’

  ‘You thought that’s where they operate as well?’

  ‘What can I say? I’m a new, shiny American. But listen, Harley Street is the place for all the big-deal specialists in town. And all those guys do NHS work as well – so you’ve probably landed yourself a top ob-gyn. Anyway, you’re better off having the kid on the NHS. The doctors are the same, and the care’s probably better … especially if anything goes wrong. Just don’t eat the food.’

  Certainly, there was nothing new or shiny about Mr Desmond Hughes. When I met him a week later at an office in the Mattingly Hospital, I was immediately struck by his reediness, his beak-like nose, his crisp, practical demeanour, and the fact that, like all British consultants, he was never referred to as Dr (as I later learned, in this country all surgeons were traditionally called Mr—because, back in less medically advanced times, they weren’t considered proper doctors; rather, high-end butchers). Hughes was also a testament to the excellence of British tailoring, as he was dressed in an exquisitely cut chalk-stripe suit, a light-blue shirt with impressive French cuffs, and a black polka-dot tie. Our first consultation was a brisk one. He ordered a scan, he requested blood, he felt around my stomach, he told me that everything seemed ‘to be going according to plan’.

  I was a little surprised that he didn’t ask me any specific questions about my physical state (beside a general: ‘Everything seem all right?’). So when we reached the end of this brief consultation, I raised this point. Politely, of course.

  ‘Don’t you want to know about my morning sickness?’ I asked.

  ‘Are you suffering from it?’

  ‘Not any more …’

  He looked at me quizzically.

  ‘Then morning sickness isn’t an issue now?’

  ‘But should I be worried that I occasionally feel nauseous?’

  ‘By “occasionally” you mean …?’

  ‘Two or three times a week.’

  ‘But you’re never physically sick?’

  ‘No … just a hint of nausea.’

  ‘Well then, I’d take that to mean that, periodically, you feel nauseous.’

  ‘Nothing more than that?’

  He patted me on the hand. ‘It’s hardly sinister. Your body’s going through a bit of a change right now. Anything else troubling you?’

  I shook my head, feeling gently (but, oh-so-firmly) chastized.

  ‘Very good then,’ he said, shutting my file and standing up. ‘See you again in a few weeks. And … uhm … you’re working, yes?’

  ‘That’s right. I’m a journalist.’

  ‘That’s nice. But you do look a little peaky – so don’t overdo it, eh?’

  Later that evening, when I related this entire conversation to Tony, he laughed.

  ‘Now you’ve just discovered two general truths about Harley Street specialists: they hate all questions, and they always patronize you.’

  Still, Hughes rightly observed one thing: I was tired. This wasn’t merely due to the pregnancy, but also to the manifold pressures of trying to find the house, arrange all the building work, and simultaneously feel my way into London. The first four weeks evaporated in a preoccupied blur. Then, my initial month in London was over … and I had to start work again.

  The Boston Post’s office was nothing more than a room in the Reuters building on Fleet Street. My fellow correspondent was a twenty-six-year-old guy named Andrew DeJarnette Hamilton. He signed his copy A.D. Hamilton, and was the sort of ageing preppie who somehow managed to lace every conversation with the fact that he’d been to Harvard, and also let it be known that he considered our newspaper to be a mere staging post for his triumphant ascendancy to the New York Times or the Washington Post. Worse yet, he was one of those determined Anglophiles who’d allowed their vowels to become a little too languid, and who had started to dress in pink Jermyn Street shirts. And he was also the sort of East Coast snot who made the same sort of disdainful noises about my grubby home town of Worcester as that fat little twerp Wilson had done about Tony’s suburban place of birth. But given that A.D. Hamilton and I were stuck with each other in a small office, I simply decided to work very hard at ignoring him. At least, we did agree that I would handle most of the socio-political stuff, whereas he would corner the market on culture, lifestyle and any celebrity profiles he could sell to the editor back in Boston. This enabled me to be out of the office on a regular basis – and to start the long, laborious task of making contacts at Westminster, while also attempting to fathom Britain’s byzantine social structure. There was also the little problem of language – and the way the wrong choice of words could lead to misconstrued meanings. Because, as Tony was fond of noting, every conversation or social interaction in Britain was underscored by the complexities of class.

  I even wrote a short, moderately humorous piece for the paper, entitled ‘When A Napkin is Definitely Not A Serviette’ – in which I explained the loadedness of language on this island. A.D. Hamilton went ballistic when he read the article, accusing me of usurping his territory.

  ‘I’m the cultural chap in our bureau,’ he said.

  ‘True – but as my piece was about the nuances of class, it was a political piece. And as I am the political chapette in this bureau …’

  ‘You should check with me in the future before writing something like that.’

  ‘You’re not the Bureau Chief, pal.’

  ‘But I am the senior correspondent here.’

  ‘Oh, please. I have far more seniority on the paper than you do.’

  ‘And I have been at this bureau for two years, which means that I have higher rank in London.’

  ‘Sorry but I don’t answer to little boys.’

  After this exchange, A.D. Hamilton and I went out of our way to avoid each other. This wasn’t as difficult as I imagined, because Tony and I had to vacate the company apartment in Wapping and move into Sefton Street. I decided to start filing most of my stories from home, using my advanced pregnancy as an excuse for working from Putney. Not that chez nous was the most ideal place to write, as the interior of the house was under construction. The carpets had been pulled up and the floors partially sanded, but they still needed sealing and staining. The living room was being replastered. All the new cabinets and appliances had been installed in the kitchen, but the floor below was chilly concrete. The living room was a catastrophe. Ditto the attic – the conversion of which would now be delayed, as the contractor had been called back to Belfast to deal with his dying mother. At least the decorators had made the nursery their first priority, finishing it during our second week of residency. And thanks to Margaret and Sandy, I had found out which crib and carry-cot to buy, not to mention all the other baby paraphernalia. So the stripped pine crib (or ‘cot’ as they called it here) toned in well with the pink starry wallpaper – and there was a changing mat and a playpen already in position, ready for use. But no such attention had been lavished on the guest r
oom, which was piled high with boxes. Similarly our own en suite bathroom lacked a few necessities like wall and floor tiles. And though our bedroom had been painted, we were still waiting for the wardrobes to be fitted, which meant that the room was cluttered with assorted clothes rails.

  In other words, the house was a testament to builders’ delays and general domestic chaos – and possibly one of the reasons why I wasn’t seeing much of Tony right now. Mind you, he was fantastically busy – he never seemed to get his pages to bed before eight most evenings – and, in this early phase of his new job, he was also having to stay out late schmoozing with his staff, or work the phones, talking with his assorted correspondents around the planet. But though I accepted his preoccupation with his job, it still bothered me that he dodged any responsibility when it came to dealing with the builders and decorators.

  ‘But you Americans are so much better at threatening people,’ he said.

  I didn’t find this comment wildly amusing. But I decided to ignore it, instead saying, ‘We should get together with some of your friends.’

  ‘You’re not suggesting having them over, are you?’Tony asked, looking at our half-finished jumble of a kitchen.

  ‘You know, darling – I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid.’

  ‘I’m not suggesting you are,’ he said lightly.

  ‘And I certainly wasn’t proposing that we bring them into this disaster area. But it would be nice to see some of the people we met when we came up from Cairo.’

  Tony shrugged.

  ‘Sure, if you want to.’

  ‘Your enthusiasm is spectacular.’

  ‘Listen, if you feel like ringing them up, then by all means ring them up.’

  ‘But wouldn’t it be best if the invitation came from you?’

  ‘The invitation to what?

  ‘To go out and do something. I mean, we live in this amazing cultural capital, right? Best theatre in the world. Best classical music. Great art. And we’ve both been so bound up in work and this damn house that we haven’t had a chance to see any of it …’

  ‘You really want to go to the theatre?’ he asked, phrasing the question in such a way that it sounded like I had just suggested joining some whacked-out religious cult.

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Not my thing, actually.’

  ‘But might it be Kate and Roger’s thing?’ I asked, mentioning the couple who had had us over for dinner that first time we were together in London.

  ‘I suppose you could ask them,’ he said, a little undercurrent of exasperation entering his voice; an undercurrent which had started to make a regular appearance whenever I said something that … well, I suppose, exasperated him.

  But I still called Kate Medford the next day. I got her voice mail, and left a pleasant message, saying how Tony and I were settled in London, how I had become a huge fan of her programme on Radio 4, and how we’d both love to see them. It took about four days for her to get back to me. But when she did, she was most friendly – in a rushed sort of way.

  ‘How lovely to hear from you,’ she said, the crackly line hinting that she was talking to me on her cell phone. ‘Heard you’d made the move here with Tony.’

  ‘And maybe you also heard that we’ve a baby due in just over three months.’

  ‘Yes, the bush telegraph certainly picked up that piece of news. Congratulations – I’m so pleased for you both.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And I suppose Tony will eventually adjust to life in Wapping.’

  This stopped me short. ‘You’ve been speaking to Tony?’

  ‘We had lunch last week. Didn’t he mention it?’

  ‘My brain’s so elsewhere these days,’ I lied, ‘what with the job and pregnancy and trying to get the house …’

  ‘Ah yes, the house. Putney, I hear.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Tony Hobbs in Putney. Who would have believed it.’

  ‘Roger well?’ I asked, changing the subject.

  ‘Desperately busy, as always. And you? Settling in?’

  ‘Getting there. But listen … our house is still in no fit state for livestock, let alone friends …’

  She laughed. I continued.

  ‘Maybe we could all meet up one night, go to the theatre, perhaps …’

  ‘The theatre?’ she said, rolling that one around on her tongue. ‘I can’t remember the last time we did that …’

  ‘It was just a suggestion,’ I said, hating the embarrassed tone creeping into my voice.

  ‘And a lovely one too. It’s just we’re both so busy right now. But it would be lovely to see you. Perhaps we could do Sunday lunch sometime soon.’

  ‘That would be great.’

  ‘Well, let me have a chat with Roger and get back to you. Must fly now. So glad you’re settling in. Bye.’

  And our conversation was terminated.

  When Tony finally got home that night – well after ten o’clock – I said, ‘I didn’t know you had lunch with Kate Medford last week.’

  He poured himself a vodka and said, ‘Yes. I had lunch with Kate last week.’

  ‘But why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Am I supposed to tell you these things?’ he asked mildly.

  ‘It’s just … you knew I was planning to call her to ask about the four of us going out …’

  ‘So?’

  ‘But when I mentioned it a few days ago, you acted like you hadn’t heard from her since we’d moved to London.’

  ‘Did I?’ he said, the tone still temperate. After the merest of pauses, he smiled and asked, ‘So what did Kate say to your idea of an evening at the theatre?’

  ‘She suggested Sunday lunch,’ I said, my voice even, my smile fixed.

  ‘Did she? How nice,’ he said.

  A few days later, I did go to the theatre … with Margaret. We saw a very well acted, very well directed, and very long revival of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm at the National. It was an evening performance – and had come at the end of a day that started with the arrival of plasterers at eight am, and finished with me filing two stories and just making it across the river right before the curtain went up. The production had received very flattering reviews – which is why I chose it. But about twenty minutes in, I realized I had let myself and Margaret in for an extended three-hour sojourn through some serious Scandinavian gloom. At the intermission, Margaret turned to me and said, ‘Well, this really is a toe-tapper.’

  Then, halfway through the second act, I fell fast asleep – only waking with a jolt when the applause came for the curtain call.

  ‘What happened at the end?’ I asked Margaret as we left the theatre.

  ‘The husband and wife jumped off a bridge and killed themselves.’

  ‘Really?’ I said, genuinely aghast. ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, you know – winter in Norway, nothing better to do …’

  ‘Thank God I didn’t bring Tony. He would have filed for divorce on the spot.’

  ‘Not a big Ibsen fan, your husband?’

  ‘Doesn’t want anything at all to do with culture. Which is, in my experience, a typical journalist philistine thing. I mean, I suggested going to a play with a couple of friends of his …’

  Then I recounted my conversation with Tony and my subsequent call from Kate Medford.

  ‘I promise you, she won’t get back to you for at least four months,’ Margaret said when I finished telling her the story. ‘Then, out of the blue, you’ll get this call. She’ll sound all friendly, talk about how “frightfully busy” she’s been, and how she’d just love to see you and Tony and the baby, and might you be free for Sunday lunch six weeks from now? And you’ll think to yourself: is this how it works here?… and is she only doing this because she feels obliged to do this? And the answer to both questions will be a big resounding yes. Because even your good friends here are, to a certain degree, standoffish. Not because they don’t want to be around you … but because they think they shouldn’t be disturbing
you, and also because you probably don’t really want to hear too much from them. And no matter how much you try to convince them otherwise, that edge of reticence will be there. Because that’s how it is here. The English need a year or two to acclimatize to your presence before they decide to be friends. When they are friends, they are friends but they will still keep their distance. Everyone in this country is taught to do that from a very early age.’

  ‘None of my neighbours have bothered to introduce themselves.’

  ‘They never do.’

  ‘And people are so abrupt with each other in shops.’

  Margaret grinned a big grin.

  ‘Oh, you’ve noticed that, have you?’

  Indeed, I had – particularly in the form of the guy who ran my local newsagent. His name was Mr Noor – and he was always having a bad day. In the weeks that I’d been buying the morning papers at his shop, I’d never known him to ever favour me (or any other customer) with a smile. I had tried many times to force a grin out of him, or to at least engage him in a basic, yet civil conversation. But he had steadfastly refused to budge from his position of ongoing misanthropy. And the journalist in me always wondered what was the root cause of his unpleasantness. A brutal childhood in Lahore? A father who beat him senseless for the slightest infraction? Or maybe it was the sense of dislocation that came with being yanked out of Pakistan and dropped into the chilly dankness of London in the mid-seventies – whereupon he discovered he was a Paki, a Wog, a permanent outsider in a society that despised his presence.

  Of course, when I once articulated a version of this scenario to Karim – the guy who ran the corner shop next to Mr Noor’s newsagency – I was greeted with serious laughter.

  ‘Bloke’s never been to Pakistan in his life,’ Karim told me. ‘And don’t think it’s something you’ve done that’s made him treat you the way he does. He does it with everybody. And it’s nothing to do with nothing. He’s a miserable git, that’s all.’

  Unlike Mr Noor, Karim always seemed to be having a good day. Even on the bleakest of mornings – when it had been raining non-stop for a week, and the temperature was just above freezing, and everyone was wondering if the sun would ever emerge again – Karim somehow managed to maintain a pleasant public face. Maybe this was something to do with the fact that he and his older brother, Faisal, were already successful businessmen, with two other shops in this corner of South London, and plenty of plans afoot for further expansion. And I wondered whether his innate optimism and affability were rooted in the fact that, though a native Brit, he had aspirations – and a curiously American sense of confidence.