On a rather mild early spring morning in 1995, a taxi pulled up to one of the low flat-faced old buildings that make up most of the block of Dean Street just north of Shaftesbury Avenue in London. The driver was perturbed. From the moment he had pulled out of the terminal at Heathrow Airport, he had tried to convince his passenger that no woman would want to be dropped off, suitcase in hand, at the address she had given at 8 a.m. on a Sunday. As he unloaded her luggage from what she called his trunk and he called his boot, he squinted with unconcealed hostility at the front of the house and the small sign that identified it as the Groucho Club, so named because the writers and journalists and other non-clubby types who’d founded it liked the idea, expressed in the words of Groucho Marx, of never belonging to a place that would have them as a member.
There was no one on the street, and no one immediately visible behind the desk in the club, for that matter. The neighborhood was a nighttime neighborhood, a neighborhood of long dinners out and shutting down the pubs and streets crowded at midnight, so that sometimes you had to step off the curb to go on your way. And it had the sad and tired and slightly disreputable look that all such neighborhoods have on a Sunday morning, that look of the morning after the night before, the look of a full ashtray or a wineglass with dregs and a ring of blood red around the bottom, the look that a dress removed in haste after a party has on the floor of your bedroom in the bright sunlight. It had the look of a place in which everyone slept on Sundays until at least noon.
“Soho,” the driver had said, and there was the sound of a curled lip in his broad British tones. He might as well have said “Sodom.”
“A mistake’s been made,” he added before he slammed shut the hatch to his trunk, or boot, and drove off on the lookout for more sensible passengers.
But there was no mistake. An attendant who appeared to be slightly hungover, or at least very tired, produced a room key from behind the desk of the club. The small lobby outside the bar smelled strongly of cigarette smoke, and there was no lift. No lift, she thought to herself, and her heart thumped, not at the notion of hauling heavy suitcases up narrow stairs, which turned out to be a pain by the second landing, but because she had managed to use the word lift without thinking twice about it. Lift. Loo. Treacle. Trifle. As she thump-thumped up the stairs, like Christopher Robin dragging Pooh by the leg, only much more arduously, she silently practiced her English. Trainers. Waistcoats. Salad rolls.
The room was extremely small, exactly the sort of snug and vaguely uncomfortable place in which people who do not write imagine writers writing. If she had tried to write there, it would have had to be on the bed, which took up most of the available space. There was a bathroom shoehorned into one corner of the room—or was it more properly called a loo? Or just the bath, in the fashion of the Mitford sisters?—with a toilet in which, she could not help feeling every time she looked at it, shamefaced at being so obviously American, there was far too little water. The electrical sockets looked highly unfamiliar, and again there was that thump from within. She had purchased an adapter! She could convert the current!
She went to the window and looked out on a vast array of chimney pots and a sky the color of ash that came down so low that it seemed to have been responsible for the way in which so many of the chimney pots were leaning. She unpacked quickly and went downstairs, peeking into the door of the bar. No one was serving breakfast. There was garbage nestled around the curb outside. She walked for three blocks, found a newsstand, bought the Sunday Times, the Independent on Sunday, the Observer, and the News of the World, and somehow managed to stumble upon the timbered Tudor front of Liberty of London, the estimable department store. The scarf slung around her shoulders had come from Liberty by way of an intermediary shop on Madison Avenue.
The cafés she passed by seemed to promise coffee later. A few had people inside, filling pastry cases and setting out cups in the half-gloom of a business on the verge of opening. She lost track of where she was going and wound up on a street filled with peep shows and shops that sold sex toys and ridiculous lingerie, slashed panties, leopard print corsets. She doubled back on herself and was clearly in Chinatown, like every Chinatown on Earth, phony street pagodas and gilt-and-scarlet lanterns and restaurant names that sounded as if they’d been ineptly translated. Somehow she wound up on Shaftesbury again, and suddenly, around one corner, she was face-to-face with a tiny dollhouse of a place in the Tudor style at the center of a deserted square. She thought it looked like a place where Henry VIII would have kept his hunting dogs. A block on and she found herself on Charing Cross Road, then in an enormous cobblestoned piazza. A small café was open on the corner, and she sat at a table and spread out her newspapers.
“I’m lost,” she said to the young woman who wiped the table down.
“I wouldn’t think so,” she drawled, pointing out the window. “That’s Covent Garden.”
“Covent Garden,” she thought to herself. “I’m in Covent Garden.” And she felt full and foolish, both at the same time.