After the Funeral and Other Stories

by Tessa Hadley

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A masterful collection of stories that plumb the depths of everyday life to reveal the shifting tides and hidden undercurrents of ordinary relationships — Tessa Hadley is "one of the greatest stylists alive" (Ron Charles, Washington Post).

"Like Alice Munro, to whom she has more than once been compared, Hadley . . . sees us all: our travails, our fantasies and our small joys."—Claire Messud, New York Times best-selling author of The Burning Girl

“Hadley is pure magic and After the Funeral is a triumph.”—Lily King, New York Times best-selling author of Writers & Lovers and Euphoria

In each of these twelve stories, small events have huge consequences. Heloise’s father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her forties, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Two estranged sisters cross paths at a posh hotel and pretend not to recognize each other. Janie’s bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janie’s own age—everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of his best friend’s death, a man must reassess his affair with the friend’s wife. Cecilia, a teenager, wakes one morning in Florence on vacation with her parents and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes.

As psychologically astute as they are emotionally rich, these stories illuminate the enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom, power and desire, convention and subversion, reality and dreams. A vital addition to Tessa Hadley’s celebrated body of work, After the Funeral and Other Stories showcases what Colm Tóibín describes as "Tessa Hadley's extraordinary skill at making both surface life and deep interiors come fully alive."

Release date: July 11, 2023

Publisher: Knopf

Print pages: 240

Sample

After the Funeral

After the funeral, the two little girls, aged nine and seven, accompanied their grief-stricken mother home. Naturally they were grief-stricken also; but then again, they hadn’t known their father very well, and hadn’t enormously liked him. He was an airline pilot, and they’d preferred it when he was away working; being alert little girls, they’d picked up intimations that he preferred it too. This was in the nineteen-seventies, when air travel was still supposed to be glamorous. Philip Lyons had flown 747s across the Atlantic for BOAC, until he died of a heart attack—luckily not while he was in the air but on the ground, prosaically eating breakfast in a New York hotel room. The airline had flown him home free of charge.

All the girls’ concentration was on their mother, Marlene, who couldn’t cope. Throughout the funeral service she didn’t even cry; she was numb, huddled in her black Persian-lamb coat, petite and soft and pretty in dark glasses, with muzzy liquorice-brown hair and red Sugar Date lipstick. Her daughters suspected that she had a very unclear idea of what was going on. It was January, and a patchy sprinkling of snow lay over the stone-cold ground and the graves, in a bleak impersonal cemetery in the Thames Valley. Marlene had apparently never been to a funeral before; the girls hadn’t either, but they picked things up quickly. They had known already from television, for instance, that their mother ought to wear dark glasses to the graveside, and they’d hunted for sunglasses in the chest of drawers in her bedroom: which was suddenly their terrain now, liberated from the possibility of their father’s arriving home ever again. Lulu had bounced on the peach candlewick bedspread while Charlotte went through the drawers. During the various fascinating stages of the funeral ceremony, the girls were aware of their mother peering surreptitiously around, unable to break with her old habit of expecting Philip to arrive, to get her out of this. —Your father will be here soon, she used to warn them, vaguely and helplessly, when they were running riot, screaming and hurtling around the bungalow in some game or other.

The reception after the funeral was to be at their nanna’s place, Philip’s mother’s. Charlotte could read the desperate pleading in Marlene’s eyes, fixed on her now, from behind the dark lenses. —Oh no, I can’t, Marlene said to her older daughter quickly, furtively. —I can’t meet all those people.

So Charlotte took charge, arranging with the funeral director, who was willing to give them a lift home in his hearse, and then breaking the news to Nanna, who was affronted but couldn’t be surprised by any new revelation of Marlene’s inadequacy. Nanna was a tall, straight-backed widow whose white hair was cut sensibly short. She collected old delft and read all the new novels and taught piano: only not to Lulu, who had wriggled and slid down off the piano stool, wanting to press the pedals with her hands. Charlotte practised religiously but wasn’t musical, her nanna said. Of course Nanna was grieving too, for her youngest son. Her other sons were a doctor and a dentist, and although she used to talk deprecatingly about Philip’s flying, as if it were something rash, like running away to join a circus or a pop group, the girls understood now that this meant he’d been her favourite. Nanna had lost her baby boy and was inconsolable, like a tragic actress in a film. Charlotte and Lulu looked volumes at each other.

At home they fussed around Marlene, who submitted limply to their ministrations; they kissed her and took off admiringly, piece by piece, in reverse order, all the items they’d dressed her in for the day’s drama: sunglasses, black chiffon headscarf, royal blue gloves because she didn’t possess black, high-heeled black patent-leather slingbacks. The beloved Persian lamb they enveloped again tenderly in its clinging polythene. Then they sat her down on the sofa in front of the television and turned on the children’s programmes; Lulu, pressing up against her, stroked her left hand with its wedding ring, which shone with a sober new significance. Charlotte, feeling grown-up, boiled the kettle and made tea in the pot for them all, stirring two teaspoons of sugar into each mug, and a not extravagant dollop of whisky from the bottle, plus extra milk in Lulu’s. She got out the biscuit barrel from where it was supposed to be hidden in a high cupboard, by standing on a stool, as usual. Marlene couldn’t reach the high cupboard, either, without using the stool. They ate a lot of biscuits and Charlotte made toast under the grill, with its real flames.

Later, their uncle Richard, the dentist, turned up to make sure they were all right, bringing leftover food that Nanna had sent from the reception—sandwiches and coleslaw and Madeira cake, also two servings of jelly with mandarin oranges set in it, for the little girls. The sisters felt a hostility to this uncle which wasn’t rational, but based on their sessions in his terrible chair, equipped so exquisitely for torturing them. Now it was Richard’s turn to be made uncomfortable. Clearly he didn’t know where to look, in the face of his nieces and sister-in-law’s predicament, and what he assumed were the excesses of their emotion. His brother’s death was an embarrassment: brash and scene-stealing, he thought, like everything Philip had ever done. Not only that, but the black cocktail dress Marlene was wearing—it was the only black thing she’d got—was very low-cut; for the duration of the funeral, the girls had made sure she kept her cardigan buttoned over it. Richard was rather like Philip in appearance—tall and burly and sandy. As soon as Marlene saw him she lunged into his arms, breaking into hysterical weeping. Uneasily he extricated himself. —Now, come on, Marlene. You have to buck up, you know.

—But I’ve lost everything, she sobbed.

—Well, not everything. You’ve got your girls. You have to be brave for them.

—I can’t be brave without Philip! I can’t be!

—You have to look to the future.

—I don’t want the future. I want Philip back! I should have thrown myself into his grave today! I wish I was dead too!

Impressed, the sisters exchanged glances, and Richard saw it.

—Isn’t it time these girls were in bed? he said severely.

Then Lulu, too, burst loudly into tears, hiding her face against her mother’s half-bare breasts, arms squeezed around Marlene’s small waist so that she couldn’t unfasten them. Richard was out of his depth. Only Charlotte could calm them all down. When he’d gone she looked in the Radio Times and found that at 9:25 on BBC1 there was an episode of one of their favourites, Ironside. They watched it while eating the ham sandwiches and crisps, snuggled together, as always for the telly, under a wool blanket on the sofa. Charlotte only just remembered not to exclaim, Isn’t this cosy? Marlene used to put the blanket back in the spare room whenever their father was due home: but now there was no one, ever again, to stop them enjoying themselves. By the time Ironside was over Marlene was fast asleep, exhausted by sorrow, snoring lightly with her mouth open and her eyebrows, plucked to a thin line, raised quizzically. The girls crept into the kitchen; Lulu stood on tiptoe to see over the top of the kitchen counter, surveying what their uncle had brought them from the party.

—Nanna sent us jelly, Charlotte said. —In her special best glass dishes, for a treat.

Lulu was small like her mother, and her wide face was pink and creamy as an angel’s in a painting, dark eyes set far apart under thick lashes, the mass of her dark-brown corkscrew curls shivering with impatient energy. She took one of the jelly dishes carefully in her two hands, lifted it up over her head, and—before Charlotte had time to grasp what she intended—let it fall deliberately on the tiled floor, where it smashed in a satisfactory splat of red jelly and orange segments. Shards of glass went skidding across the floor and under the cupboards; they heard their mother stirring in the sitting room, but knew she hadn’t woken, because she would have called out to them. After a moment’s frozen outrage, Charlotte stepped over the mess to smack her sister hard across the face. Charlotte was tall for her age and very thin, with her pale hair cut short like a boy’s; her grey eyes were huge and their heavy lids, dropping over her expression like shutters, conveyed her burden of responsibility. As Lulu prepared to break out in wailing, Charlotte shook her urgently by the shoulders. —We have to clean this up, she said. —We’ll tell them it was an accident; they’re bound to forgive us, today of all days. But we can’t ever be naughty again, now that Daddy’s dead.

Lulu protested indignantly. —Why not?

—Because then Nanna will adopt us and we’ll have to live with her.

This was a sobering prospect even for Lulu.

---

—

Once the excitement of the funeral was over, the girls took in the solemnity of their loss. It was shocking, for instance, when Uncle Richard’s wife, Hilary, came round, with their other aunt Deirdre, to deal with Philip’s clothes. They were sorting out what his brothers could use and what had to go to the Salvation Army; this felt like a violation to Marlene and she couldn’t watch, only sat seeping tears in the living room, unable to shake off a dread that Philip would hold her accountable. He’d never been able to stand his brothers’ wives, and hated anyone poking around in his wardrobe. There was something unseemly and even gloating in how Hilary and Deirdre were holding up his suits now for judgement, sniffing the armpits of his shirts and even the crotch of his trousers. After a while the aunts forgot to use their subdued voices, and Marlene and the girls overheard Deirdre saying suggestively, Well, at least he wasn’t alone when he died,although that was the first they’d heard of it. They looked wide-eyed at one another, but didn’t dare ask.

Even though their father had so often been absent, a fixed idea of him had given the girls’ daily life its particular flavour, they realised now, and they paid anxious tribute to him in retrospect. He may not have wanted them under his feet all the time when he was home, but sometimes he’d tickled them and thrown them in the air, and also he’d brought them costume dolls for their collection, from all over the world. Some of their treats—supper in front of the TV, jumping from the kitchen roof onto a mattress they’d dragged outside, eating condensed milk from the tin—seemed less pleasurable now that they didn’t fear his disapproval. They were haunted, too, by imagining the actual scene of his death, whose details were kept hidden from them, like something behind a curtain in a horror film. At least he wasn’t alone.Whatever beast had felled their father, so fearless and bursting with his life, must have been potent in ways that were also shaming and disgusting. For a while Lulu had to sleep in Charlotte’s bed at night, because she could see Daddy’s picture when she closed her eyes.

—Don’t be silly, Charlotte said firmly, although she budged up towards the wall resignedly, and punched out the pillow which had been scrunched under her head, so that there was room on it for both of them. —He no longer exists.

—He exists inside my eyes.

By the time she awoke the next morning, Charlotte would be pressed, she knew, into the narrow margin of her own bed, while Lulu luxuriated unconsciously in possession of the rest of it, sprawled on her back with her pyjama top twisted under her armpits and her dark curls sweaty, breathing noisily, the fine red vee of her lip drawn up, showing the little baby teeth like seed pearls.

Once it became clear that Marlene had no idea about money, Philip’s brothers carried off from his desk all the papers that Marlene superstitiously wouldn’t even touch. It turned out that Philip hadn’t had much idea about money, either. The Lyonses convened a family conference; there was grim satisfaction in how their nanna broke the news to them. Philip hadn’t taken out any life insurance, and there was very little pension: they would have to move from the bungalow, which was the only home the girls could remember, because the rent was too expensive. Philip’s brothers would club together to keep the girls at their fee-paying school, but to cover the rest of their costs Marlene would need to go out to work. Deirdre had heard of a job that might suit her, as a receptionist for a doctor who’d gone to medical school with Dennis. Marlene protested to her daughters afterwards, in an uncharacteristic gush of resentment against their grandmother—mostly she submitted meekly to her authority. They were all three looking around with different eyes, already, at the bungalow which had been the shape of their family life so far, and seemed shabbier and sadder in the light of parting. —I used to have it over her, Marlene broke out. —Because she was a widow and I had a husband living. Now she thinks she knows everything.

Her girls consoled her, Nanna wasn’t half so pretty or so nice as she was.

Another revelation at around this time—which certainly Nanna didn’t know about—was the appearance on the scene, at least briefly, of Marlene’s own relatives. Or two of them, anyway, purporting to be her sister and a male cousin, although the girls weren’t convinced—and, as they never appeared or were mentioned again, a doubt persisted. Charlotte and Lulu hadn’t wondered much about the absence of any family on their mother’s side: she wasn’t like anyone else, she was one of a kind. Now that absence was filled out with a vengeance by this improbable pair, ...