The boxes loom, bordered by miniature walled gardens that promise intimacy but fail to deliver it. Walls around the plants lie low enough to show shrubbery off but not low enough for a child to climb, or for the child’s father to sit and fill his pipe or consult his street map. The garden walls stand like boudoir biscuits around a cake, narrower than brick or stone, so narrow that even if they were lower you could not balance your croissant on them, nor a picnic cup. Around the greenery, which is shiny and alienating, run banisters, platforms, and outdoor passageways that purport to be for people to walk through but that are instead full of bitter wind licking round corners like tongues of the tiny northern lizards that hide in cracks in the cement.

“Always wanting picnics,” Sophie scoffs. “Is this the Cotswolds? Are we Bill and Dot cavorting around the Lake District?”

I suspect she has no idea what the Cotswolds are like. I suppose Bill and Dot must be relatives of hers whom I have not met.

“A hamper, please,” she singsongs, “a checkered cloth, a steak-and-kidney pie and eight hard-boiled eggs—poor little Tool-of-the-Empire wants his cucumber sandwich!”

“But look, why do things here possess a façade, even the vegetables? Nothing seems content to be itself.”

“What are you on about now?”

“Even a parsnip has no fragrance under the skin.”

“Are parsnips the fat grimy white roots? Didn’t you eat them in the Gaspé?”

“I can barely locate a parsnip. But if I were fortunate enough to find one, it should be full of perfume. That’s the point of a parsnip.”

“What about carrots?”

“You can’t inhale them here. There’s no sharp intake of perfumed bitterness. No anointing. How is it that North America manages to strip a thing’s essence? All that remains is counterfeit external structure. A convincing, robust specimen, but only on the outside.”

“Huffington Post says people are asking supermarkets to keep the spindly carrots and tarnished produce in bins for snobs like you.”

“I wouldn’t mind a spindly carrot. But more than that I yearn to see a crumbling wall, or a wall that at least has a chance to crumble in a few years, a wall not full of…what did you tell me it was? Styrofoam. Everything is so ostentatious yet unreal: the buildings, the parsnips, the athletic people running along the Saint Lawrence in their clothing that seems to have been made out of rubber pressed paper-thin then overlaid with silver lightning-bolts in case we mistake them for sensitive walkers trying to notice snails along the path, or caterpillars…”

“You’d like runners to wear handspun outfits?”

“I’d like to look at a thing that remains itself all the way through and isn’t made of chemical compounds that have been solidified and macerated then solidified again to resemble building stones or fabric of any kind.”