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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—’
    She didn’t get to finish that sentence, as a white transit van pulled out of nowhere and nearly sideswiped us. The van screeched to a halt. The driver – a guy in his twenties with close-cropped hair and bad teeth – came storming out towards us. He radiated aggression.
    ‘The fuck you think you was doing?’ he said.
    Margaret didn’t seem the least bit flustered by his belligerency, let alone his bad grammar.
    ‘Don’t you talk that way to me,’ she said, her voice cool and completely collected.
    ‘Talk how I want to talk, cunt.’
    ‘Asshole,’ she shot back, and pulled the car back out into traffic, leaving the guy standing on the road, gesticulating angrily at her.
    ‘Charming,’ I said.
    ‘That was an example of a lowly species known as White Van Man,’ she said.