by Tessa Hadley
–That it’ll be hard for me. Having you at such close quarters, and not taking advantage.
She laid her cheek against the expensive softness of his coat.
The four of them gathered together on the anniversary of Albert’s death, at the bottom of the slump between Christmas and New Year: Lynne and Ben, Tom and Ros. Ros was in the last trimester of her pregnancy, which sat high on her tiny frame like a football. Ben had moved up into the house; Tom and Ros had taken over the cottage. There must have been some delicious gossip. Ros had mostly been away, working on a new project for a director in the US, then promoting Affinities; now she had scheduled herself a break for a few months. She was working on a screenplay, hoping to direct a feature of her own.
Ros wanted to go for a walk, but Tom was too lazy, sprawled smoking beside the fire with his socks almost in the ashes, reading through all the sections of the paper. Although he was supposed to have moved down to the cottage, he still spent most of every day in the big house. Lynne came in her striped apron from the kitchen, where she was stuffing a joint of pork for later. Ben was sending e-mails in the office. Ros stood impatiently in her bright blue coat, its buttons strained across her bump. Her hair had grown. She was dyeing it orange again; she had it wrapped in a vermilion knitted scarf.
–You’re such a slob. You ought to be disgusted with yourself.
–Aren’t I a slob? Tom commiserated complacently, waggling his toes.
Untying her apron, Lynne volunteered. – I’ll go with you. I’d like a walk.
Ros had to appear to be grateful: but it was probably the last thing she wanted. The two women were so unlike, bound together in such convoluted circumstances; Lynne guessed that Ros found this unbearable sometimes, though their mutual politeness had never faltered. Lynne had never said a word to accuse Ros. Beside Ros, she felt herself bleached of colour, old and ordinary; yet she found herself making these clumsy efforts to get closer to the younger woman. They drove to the Iron Age fort a few miles down the road—an unkempt oval mound rearing austerely out of the farmed landscape. It was a few degrees colder up there than at the house; every leaf and blade of grass was outlined in frost crystals, and frozen mud crackled under their walking boots, though the sun was on their backs.
Ros waddled in her top-heavy roll along the path around the fort’s perimeter, hands in her pockets, telling bright, funny stories about her experiences in the US. Although she was laughing, there was something dogged and bitter in how she threw herself along faster than she needed to, shoulders hunched defensively. They avoided the subject of Elective Affinities, which opened in a few weeks. Where the path narrowed and they had to walk in single file, Ros stopped short suddenly in pain, crouching over. She reassured Lynne breathlessly that these were only Braxton-Hicks contractions. She was having them most days. Her doctor said they were nothing to worry about; he didn’t know why they were so painful.
–What a mess, this whole thing.
Lynne embraced her, awkwardly through the thickness of their winter wrappings, trying to rub where it hurt: Ros grabbed her hand and pushed it into the right place, under the blue coat. The rubbing seemed to help. It was the first time Lynne had touched this pregnancy; these days everyone wanted to put their hands on someone’s bump, for luck, or marvelling. In other periods, it had been a thing to keep hidden. Something seemed to convulse in the hard hot mound under her hand.
–I didn’t think I’d ever have a grandchild, Lynne said. – So I’m happy.
Ros looked wanly. – I’m glad someone’s happy. I suppose I’ll get used to it. But you do know Tom and I aren’t a real couple? He doesn’t really want to sleep with girls. This is only temporary. It was a kind of accident.
Lynne said of course she knew. It didn’t matter.
Walking on, Ros spilled over with her fears, deferring to Lynne as an expert. They were still in single file; Lynne, coming behind, had to strain to catch everything she said. She had never heard Ros sound like this before: unsure of herself, and even querulous. She said she was dreading that she would be a bad mother; Lynne reassured her she would muddle along like everyone did. Wasn’t it irresponsible to conceive a child outside a stable relationship? Lynne told her about Tom’s father, who used to hit her and then blame her for provoking him. The last sloes were withered on the blackthorn bushes. Usually Lynne came to the fort to pick them in the autumn. She and Albert had picked sloes here in the October before he died; they had meant to drink the sloe gin on her birthday in February, but when that time came she naturally hadn’t given it a thought. It must be waiting still, in its Kilner jar on the shelf in the boiler room. When she got home, she would look to see if it wasn’t spoiled.
–Isn’t it strange? Ros said in a tearful, excitable voice. – How we’re all four still held together here? As if we can’t escape from the pattern Albert made out of our lives, connecting us, even now he’s gone.
Lynne said blandly that she didn’t think about it like that.
She didn’t care if people imagined she was only with Ben for convenience; she liked to shield their relationship from prying eyes. When she took him his coffee in the office, she pulled the door shut behind her so that they could be alone together for five minutes; then she might only sit holding his hand. As a lover, he was decorous and shy. They were only beginning to get to know each other.
Lynne cried off from attending the premiere of Elective Affinities, though Ben tried to persuade her to go. There were wonderful reviews. Weeks afterward, when she was staying with her sister in Faversham, she went to see the film by herself one afternoon, telling her sister she was going shopping, paying for a ticket and slipping into the back of a cinema, where there were only five or six other people, most of them solitaries like her. She could hardly connect what she saw now to her experience of the film at the private screening. Every scene then had seemed charged with terrible revelation; she must have been slightly mad at that point in her mourning. Because the film was really only a comedy, a love story, or a grown-up succession of love stories, tracing the intricate shifts of affection and desire around a set of close friends. Lynne didn’t weep once as she watched; she was very calm, although she also felt herself laid open to the film, the scenes washing through and through her, with their beautiful imagery: winter trees, light and dark reflections on water, Deborah’s character’s green dress flitting past the windows of a house, her aunt’s lover watching surreptitiously from inside.
Lynne gave herself up to the dream Albert had brought into being, hardly conscious this time of his controlling presence. When it was finished, she caught a bus back to where her sister lived, outside the town. It was the end of a wet afternoon, the waterproofs of shoppers were slick with wet, they were tired, laden with carrier bags. Lynne felt the power of the film pooled inside her, glimmering and grey, something to live by. Meanwhile she gave herself over to the ordinary dirty traffic, the labouring stop-start of her bus journey, the smells of wet wool and hair and trainers, and the motley collection of passengers, mostly not talking to one another, only into their mobiles.
Acknowledgments
Married Love,” “Friendly Fire,” “A Mouthful of Cut Glass,” “The Trojan Prince,” “The Godchildren,” and “She’s the One” were originally published in The New Yorker; “In the Country” was originally published in Granta; “Because the Night” and “In the Cave” in The Guardian; “Post Production” in Ploughshares; “Pretending” in The Asham Award Short-Story Collection; “Journey Home” in the New Statesman.
Many thanks, for wisdom, advice, and stories, to Deborah Treisman, Dan Franklin, Jennifer Barth, Caroline Dawnay, Joy Harris, Tom Nichols, Shelagh Weeks, Simon Relph, and always Eric.
P. S.
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About the author
Meet Tessa Hadley
About the book
Writing Married Love
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An Excerpt from The London Train
About the author
Meet Tessa Hadley
I WAS BORN IN BRISTOL, ENGLAND, in 1956. My father was a schoolteacher (he’s also very musical and still plays the jazz trumpet); my mother gave up her dressmaking business (gratefully, she says) and stayed at home to look after me and my younger brother. For next to nothing they bought one of the old Georgian houses nobody wanted in those days—five stories tall, with a leaky roof and an unsafe, wrought-iron balcony on the front, also an assortment of sitting tenants. I was shy, bookish, skinny, freckled, hopeless at games. I promoted myself to adult books in the local library at quite an early age and read lots of them without understanding much of what was going on—it all seeps into the sum of one’s knowledge somewhere. I was happy at junior school, miserable at secondary school, which was all girls and very driven academically. I wanted to be left alone, and I didn’t want to belong to anybody’s tribe. In an act of courage that surprises me retrospectively (I was still shy), I left that pushy school and went to the ordinary state one where my brother was, and I was much happier. There, to start with, were boys, who were different and wittier and fascinating.
I studied English at Cambridge (oh dear, another tribe), which had its good moments but didn’t convince me that academic ways of reading literature were close enough to the real experience of reading (or writing—I was guessing then). So I wasn’t tempted to try to prolong my life in academia: probably I took some of its luxuries of thought and time too much for granted, assuming they’d always be there for me. Then, after a brief, doomed, idealistic, ineffective flurry as a schoolteacher, I had babies and stayed at home. Even walking up and down at night with a crying baby on my shoulder, I thought: “this is better than facing the classroom tomorrow.” I liked the sort of semisolitude you get, bringing up children. I read lots—always imagining there were other people elsewhere who’d read so much more (there were, of course), which is a great spur. And I did write. Shamefacedly, badly, tainted with failure and falsity: with moments of power and joy and long hours of despair, wondering why it mattered so much, and why I couldn’t be decently happy without it. I wrote at least three, maybe four (I’ve forgotten) bad novels in these years. Solitude is good, but I think I was too solitary. I needed to rub up against the audience I was writing for; I didn’t have any living sense of them.
My husband was a schoolteacher, and then he trained teachers (now in his retirement he’s unleashed his passion for theatre and directs and acts for a good group here in Cardiff, Wales, where we’ve lived for thirty years). We have three sons: two are political and love history like their father; the youngest likes poetry and writes songs. I also have three stepsons and six stepgrandchildren, and all the lovely young women that come attached to all those boys. It’s impossible to write without mawkishness, or efforts of expression equivalent to the hard work of literature itself, about how much one feels about these marvels of relationship, these precious surprises of personality and talent and charm.
In my late thirties, I went back to university—about time, I think, because I was so ready (belatedly) for making myself a life in the outside world. I’m sure my daughters-in-law can’t imagine a retreat so complete and dull-seeming as those years of shopping and cooking and cleaning and waiting in the school playground. They’re right, probably. Though there’s something to be said for all that slow invisible work the mind does when it isn’t buoyed along by anything outside. And there are lessons you learn, too, knowing you’re weak and unimportant and socially invisible—these lessons ought to keep you sane and clean and without illusions. Anyway, I went back to university and began to teach and write and loved the teaching hugely (I still do), and I wrote my book about Henry James. Then I worked my way round gradually to writing a few stories I wasn’t ashamed of. When you do finally make your way into the writing personality that is your real one, it’s such a relief (however small that personality might be, however partial). It’s like wandering round for years and years in a writing wilderness and then letting yourself in at last to your own house with your own key.
I could write short stories before I managed a novel. So I had the idea of writing a novel by writing a series of short stories about the same characters and in chronological order, then putting them end to end. It isn’t really cheating. It solves two problems. First, if each “chapter” is structured as tightly as if it were a free-standing short story, then you won’t risk the slack passages the novel is prone to due to its sheer length. Second, it helps solve the problem of needing to find an overarching grand theme of discovery or revelation to pull your novel together. The writer is tempted into finding an “explanation” for a life, some hidden clue or secret that will release its truth. Of course, the good novels don’t do this. But it’s a temptation.
I published a story-novel, Accidents in the Home, in 2002. And then I wrote Everything Will Be All Right, which was woven partly of stories connected to my own family—but only partly, and loosely. I published The Master Bedroom in 2007—my least episodic novel up to that point (it even has a secret!). And all this time I was also writing short stories, and published a collection of these, Sunstroke, also in 2007. Writing makes me very happy. Or perhaps I could put it more negatively: All those years I couldn’t do it, and I had no reason to think I would ever be able to do it; writing was a painful, awful absence in my life. I can’t quite explain this rationally. I love paintings, but it’s never hurt me that I can’t paint for toffee. Which bit of myself, and when, elected to need to write, in order to be me—and through what mental process? I used to feel (this is disturbing) that life itself wasn’t quite real unless I could write about it in fiction. Now that I am writing, and being read (most important), that mild insanity has dropped out of sight. I have a fear, of course, of its returning if ever writing failed.
About the book
Writing Married Love
FOR ME SHORT STORIES represent a wonderful kind of writing freedom. In a novel, each element as you introduce it will have to have its fulfillment later and be woven into the created whole fabric of the book. In a short story, you can afford to be irresponsible. The short form is so good at catching life on the wing, flashes from the intensity and mystery of people’s inner lives, their strange motivations, their yearnings. It’s difficult to define a short story as opposed to a novella or a novel—no one can sum up the difference satisfactorily, and no one needs to—but I think you have to feel that you can hold a story in one hand, however it sprawls. It’s a single thing; it’s a single room, if you like, in the house of fiction. Whereas a novel is a whole house, and the writer (and reader) can move around inside its different spaces. Partly this is a consequence of the novel’s working through a much longer reading time. By the end of a novel, you are supposed to have forgotten some of its middle and its beginning—that’s not a reader’s weakness, it’s intrinsic to the novel form. When you get to the end of a short story, the beginning is still sounding in the air somewhere nearby.
Endings carry much more weight in short stories than in novels, I think—it’s just a matter of proportion. If you had to wait until the end of a novel to find out what to make of it, the novel would fail. But you can hold a short story in suspension as you read, waiting to see: Where will this go? Where must it stop? What does it mean, that it stops there? We don’t like stories any longer that have a neat twist in the tail, although they’re still delicious to read (Kipling’s “Plain Tales from the Hills,” for example, is exquisitely poised). Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield taught us to feel that irresolution is more truthful: a moment comes that seems to clinch something or change something, but it’s not obvious what or how. The story moves to a new place at its ending—it has to, but it’s more likely to be an unexpected step sideways (Oh! So that’s possible!) than into a grand gesture of revelation or exposure.
The flow of the story finding its way to its end should feel as unpredictable as a sequence of events in life itself (Colm Tóibín is so right when he says that the flow is more like music than argument). The e
nd isn’t contained in a story’s beginning; it should surpass it. One of my favourite stories is Alice Munro’s “Carried Away.” (Munro’s stories, by the way, aren’t really much like single rooms—perhaps they are more like rambling apartments in some wonderful mansion block.) After taking us chronologically through most of a woman’s whole life, the last paragraph of “Carried Away” returns us suddenly (perhaps she’s dreaming, perhaps she’s dying) to a moment before any of her story has happened, when she’s at the beginning of things and everything is still possible, everything exists in potential. There’s a beautiful excitement in the writing, the description of horses at dusk heading out of town in the snow. All the events of the story could be about to happen over again—or different accidents could befall the characters, their lives could turn out quite differently. Because Munro is a great writer, that twist doesn’t feel tricky. Instead, it feels like a movement of deep imaginative reach into the mystery of contingency, the mystery of what befalls us and what doesn’t. And it’s also a hymn to the enigma of the present moment, whose content is always so much more than merely a preparation for the next step.
I don’t think there’s any unifying theme in this collection of mine. Most of the stories are set in the UK, and at some time along the continuum of my life, between the 1950s and now (one story is set in the past, in 1920). The stories come from all over the place. The title story came from a fragment of gossip, a married couple I knew very vaguely long ago, where the husband was much older than his wife—old enough to be her grandfather. But that was only the germ; the rest of it is out of my head. “The Trojan Prince” partly uses a true story about a shipwreck, which my grandfather told. Like the boy in my story, he was an apprentice on board a ship that went aground off Vancouver Island in a storm. And I wrote “Post Production” after watching a good production of Hamlet on television: two brothers, one all-powerful, the powerful one dies, his widow turns to the other brother, her son is jealous. It seemed like promising material.