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Within minutes the waitress reappeared to ask if I’d ordered hot tea or iced tea. “Iced, please,” I said, looking up from my map and, in the process, locking eyes with my “single” lunch-mate.

She smiled. “You’re on holiday?” she asked, nodding in the direction of my map. Her voice, in just three words, conveyed a confident, lively attitude. Her accent was resonant with British history.

“Yes, I am.”

“So am I.” She hesitated. “In a manner of speaking.” She told me she had come down from Scotland, her home for the last twenty years, to visit her daughter. “She’s thirty. Just received her degree in economics. But now she’s decided to go into publishing.” She laughed. “But then that’s the way nowadays, isn’t it? Young people spend most of their lives gathering up degrees in one field only to end up doing something entirely different.” Her son had done the same thing, she said: “Started mathematics, then went into veterinary medicine.” He was twenty-eight and now lived in Australia.

I told her about my sons, adding that the one in Japan, who was now a translator, had just decided to go to law school. “It seems to me we didn’t have so many choices at that age, especially as women,” I said, launching into a bit of a lecture about women and choices and the kind of work that was hospitable to us then.

She nodded, seeming to agree. “It’s the same with marriage and motherhood. It was simply what was supposed to happen in a woman’s life. Quite likely though, it was that way for men, too. Something expected of them.”

“Do you think you’d make a different choice today?”

The woman smiled. “No. But that’s beside the point, isn’t it?”

I laughed. I liked her directness, the way she said what she meant. I also liked the look of her, her expressive face and mischievous eyes.

Her name was Victoria and she was in town alone, staying for the month at a nearby residential hotel. She explained that her husband was away on business and she preferred a hotel to staying in her daughter’s small apartment. “We like each other better with some distance between us,” she said, smiling.

Victoria was an interesting woman with interesting opinions and we stayed, talking about our lives and politics and the differences between British and American newspapers, until the café was almost empty. After paying the bill we walked outside together, where we stood talking about what was going on in the London theater. Finally, we said our good-byes. Then, just before she turned to leave, Victoria asked if I’d like to join her for lunch later that week. “I’m meeting an old friend. I think you’d like her. She’s a writer, too. Does pieces on gardening for magazines, mostly.”

“That sounds like fun,” I said. We agreed to meet back at the café on Friday, and, finally, I headed for the supermarket.

It was a short walk from the supermarket back to my flat. Still, the two bags filled with bottled water, All-Bran cereal, skim milk, tea bags, coffee, yogurt, packaged biscuits, and paper goods seemed quite heavy. It had been a long time since I’d walked home from a supermarket carrying all my groceries. It reminded me of the daily treks I made as a child to the neighborhood store, Mother’s handwritten list tucked away in a purse along with a two-dollar bill.

I was eager to settle into my flat. Although I’d spent only one night there, I liked everything about it—the tree-lined neighborhood, the gracefully proportioned white limestone building, the pleasantly decorated living room and bedroom, and, most of all, the tiny balcony overlooking Cadogan Street and Sloane Avenue.

I’d found this gem of a place quite by chance, while reading the classified ads in The New York Review of Books. A call was put in to the telephone number listed, a quite reasonable rent was quoted, photos were sent. And although I’d learned the hard way that photos of real estate often bear little resemblance to the actual property—I’d once taken an apartment in Paris owned by a Harvard professor who sent me glorious pictures and glowing