Without Reservations (15 page)

When I arrived at the café on Friday, Victoria was already there, queued up. With her was a tall, attractive woman whose face, tanned and mapped with fine wrinkles, suggested a life spent outdoors. Victoria spotted me and waved me into the line next to her.

“So nice to see you again,” she said, holding out her hand. She then introduced me to the woman next to her. “I’d like you to meet Sarah Davies. Sarah and I went to boarding school together. Met
there when we were eleven and have been friends ever since. Which means we’ve been friends for about a hundred years.”

Sarah and I laughed as we shook hands.

“Sarah’s in town for a few months doing a piece on Mrs. Some-body-or-other’s gardens,” Victoria continued. “She’s left her husband behind in Kent. Where, I suspect, he is busy with his roses and his dogs.”

Sarah laughed again. She didn’t seem to mind at all Victoria’s running commentary on her life. “But, Victoria,” she said, “the two of us being here without our husbands will make it just like the old days.”

Victoria was about to answer when the hostess beckoned us to a table. We sat down and after ordering salad and iced tea, Sarah asked about my stay in London. “Victoria said you wrote for a newspaper but were taking several months off. It sounds quite exciting.” She turned to Victoria. “Do you remember our plans to travel around the world when we turned eighteen?”

Victoria nodded. “Yes. But it never happened, did it? As I recall, you fell quite madly in love with Stephen and had to have him. And that was the end of it.”

A skeptical look crossed Sarah’s face. “Funny that, because I remember it the other way round.
You
fell in love with a stuffy old professor and had to have him. And
that
was the end of it.”

The two women exchanged private glances, then burst out laughing.

I liked the easy rapport between Victoria and Sarah. At home I had friends like this, women with whom I could exchange in bold shorthand strokes whole parts of our shared history. It was what I missed most on this trip: my women friends. I could always count on them to boost me up or take me down a peg when I needed it.

Sarah began asking questions about my trip. Where I was going. Where I had been. How I chose my flat in London. She seemed genuinely interested. Then Victoria joined in, asking me what had prompted me to do what I was doing.

“I needed an adventure while I still had the legs for it,” I said, only half-joking.

“Yes, well, they say the legs go last,” Victoria replied.

“And what do your children think about all this?” Sarah asked.

“They’re all for it.” I laughed. “Actually, I think they were pretty impressed that I, their
mother
, would do such a risky, spontaneous thing.”

“Quite the thrill, isn’t it, having your children give
you
a pat on the back instead of the other way round?” Sarah said, lifting her iced tea in a small salute.

I asked Sarah how she came to write about gardening.

“My family was quite keen on gardening. And from very early on I had my own corner to plant. It grew into a passion.” She said she’d kept a gardening diary since she was eight or nine and, after marrying, began sending in columns to various garden publications. “I do quite a bit of freelance now. It’s a wonderful way to snoop around strangers’ houses.”

“Yes, but it has its dangers,” Victoria said. “Remember, Sarah, how we got locked in that potting shed down in Sussex?” She turned to me. “Alas, we had to break a window to get out.”

In my mind I suddenly saw the two of them as Nancy Drew characters: smart, fearless young women, traveling about England in a snappy blue roadster, trying to solve The Secret at Larkspur Lane. Naturally I said nothing of this, saying instead, “It must be exciting to explore such wonderful gardens.” I mentioned that every time I visited England I promised myself a trip to the famous gardens created by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson at
Sissinghurst Castle in Kent. “I’ve never managed to get there. But I’m determined to do it on this trip.”

“Oh, you absolutely must,” Sarah said. “The White Garden alone is worth the trip. Although the whole place is pretty much a paradise as far as I’m concerned. How do you plan on getting there?”

“Well, I don’t …”

Before I could finish, Victoria interrupted. “I’ve a lovely idea. Why don’t we arrange an outing? Sarah here can beguile us with her arcane knowledge of plants, and I’ll bore you with all the gossip about Vita and Harold.” She turned to her friend. “What do you say we ring up Angela? She’s a great one for impromptu affairs. And besides, she’s got that big old car. The one that looks like a cab.”

“A Bentley, I think,” Sarah said.

Victoria explained that Angela was also an old friend, although not from boarding-school days. “We met her when we were all young marrieds, before Sarah and I moved away from the city,” Victoria said, launching into a chronology of their friendship that I couldn’t quite follow. But I gathered that Angela was considered the “sophisticate” of the group. Widowed twice—the second time after only two years of marriage to an Italian actor—her only son married and living in Wales, Angela remained single, devoting much of her time to fund-raising for the arts, particularly theater and dance. When not doing this, they said, she traveled.

“Particularly to Scotland to fish salmon,” Victoria said. “Although I can’t think why anybody would want to do that, can you?”

Angela sounded quite fascinating and, frankly, I was dying to meet her. However, throughout Victoria’s soliloquy, Sarah remained noticeably silent. Was this a polite way of indicating she had no interest in the Sissinghurst trip? Clearly Victoria was a person who liked to bring people together, to mix and match them. But
Sarah, perhaps, had not counted on a lunch date with a stranger turning into a moveable feast. I noticed Sarah looking at her watch. Not a good sign, I thought; she’s figuring out how to leave gracefully, without having to turn down Victoria’s plan.

Then Sarah looked up and said, “I don’t think Angela would be home right now. But I could ring her tonight. It sounds like something she might fancy doing.”

When we parted outside the café an hour or so later, Sarah and Victoria took my phone number with the understanding that one of them would call me about the trip.

I decided to walk over to Chelsea Green, the “village square” that had been recommended to me as a great place to market. Only two blocks from my flat, Chelsea Green did indeed prove to be both charming and useful.

There, clustered together around a small square, were vegetable markets, delicatessens, gourmet food and wine shops, florists and dressmakers, restaurants and carry-out shops. At The Pie Man, which offered everything from homemade carrot-and-orange soup to Thai beef salad, I selected my dinner: roasted redleaf salad with pancetta and tarragon, and a chicken breast cooked in lemon and ginger sauce with broccoli florets. A few doors down I stopped at the greengrocer and bought fresh fruit and a bunch of flowers—clear yellow irises mixed with spikes of pale green foliage.

I didn’t mind eating alone in London, whether in a restaurant or in my cozy flat. In Paris it had bothered me, but by now I’d grown less sensitive to dining solo. In fact, I rather liked it. If I ate out, it gave me a chance to observe the scene around me; if I ate in, it gave
me a chance to brush up on my cooking skills. Once I’d been an accomplished cook, but long working hours and living alone had eroded both the desire and the ability to turn out a proper meal.

Lately, though, I’d seen flashes in my small London kitchen of the woman who used to enjoy cooking so much that she’d taken classes in everything from bread-making to classic French cuisine. I remembered how much this woman had liked
suprême de volaille farcies, duxelles
—or, in plain English, chicken breasts stuffed with mushrooms minced and sautéed in butter. I recalled liking it, too. To my surprise, I knew the recipe by heart and one night decided to give it a try. After serving myself dinner on the balcony of my flat, I decided the chicken was even better than I remembered.

As I walked back from Chelsea Green with my groceries, I noticed a little girl wearing a flower-sprigged blue-and-white dress furiously pedaling her three-wheel bike along the sidewalk of a quiet neighborhood street. Pausing to watch her, I saw a pattern emerge: every few minutes, after a burst of high-energy pedaling, the girl would lift both hands from the handlebars, put her arms out to either side, and allow the bike to steer itself. As she did this, she made whooping noises of unleashed exhilaration.

Aha! I thought, a fearless woman in the making. But then the bike suddenly swerved into a large pot of red geraniums and the girl tumbled off. Immediately, however, she picked herself up, righted the bike, and somewhat more cautiously pedaled on.

Life’s like that, I thought, as I turned the corner to my building. Freedom has its dangers as well as its joys. And the sooner we learn to get up after a fall, the better off we’ll be.

That night I went to a play at the nearby Royal Court Theatre on Sloane Square. It was a long-winded, lecturing piece written by an American. I left at the intermission, a luxury I would never allow myself if I weren’t alone. On the way home I celebrated my newfound independence, theatrically speaking, by having a beer in a nearby pub.
Here’s to you, old girl
, I toasted myself, lifting the heavy glass to my lips,
and to the Queen Mum.
I wasn’t sure why I threw in that last bit until, on the walk home, I remembered how much my grandmother had adored her.

I had barely closed the door to my flat when the phone rang. It was Victoria, calling about our trip to Sissinghurst. We were on for the following Wednesday, she said. And Angela was joining us. They would pick me up at ten, in front of my building.

At precisely ten o’clock on the following Wednesday I spotted a large maroon sedan making its way through the Sloane Avenue traffic. Where Sloane and Cadogan intersected a waving arm appeared through the car’s back window. It was followed by Victoria’s face. The car pulled up in front of me; a door opened and Victoria said, “Been waiting long?” She laughed and moved over, making room for me in the back seat.