Tessa Hadley sticks close to home in her fourth collection of short stories. Treading similar thematic ground to her earlier work, these melancholic and nostalgic stories explore transgressions between siblings, parents and spouses and burrow into life’s disappointments.
The loss – or impending loss – of a parent is a central concern. The title story opens with the death of Charlotte and Lulu’s father Philip; in The Other One, Heloise meets a woman who might have a connection to her father’s death when she was 12. Sometimes the loss isn’t death, it’s simply neglect. In Funny Little Snake, Robyn can’t rely on either parent. Many of the characters in After the Funeral are searching for a sense of self in the face of death or abandonment.
Sometimes our sense of self is found in secret: Hadley’s characters are often aware of the restrictive roles they are forced to inhabit within their families, so they maintain an inner life, a private life, away from the prying eyes of others. This is explicitly explored in the final story, Coda, when Diane moves in with her 92-year-old mother, Margot, during the pandemic lockdown, then hides in the spare bedroom to spy on a woman next door. “Since I was a child I’d had an instinct … to keep my inner life out of my mother’s sight.”
This urge for a life away from a parent is something many characters in the collection are searching for, and Hadley examines the effects of that devastating but essential break between parents and their children, especially the fraught bond between mothers and daughters. This break is elegantly explored in Cecilia Awakened, when teenaged Cecilia wakes one morning during a family holiday in Italy and considers her parents with an altered point of view.
Some of these stories delve into the idea of what happens when, during this break, daughters move into the same sexual space as their mothers. Are they replacements? Or competition? What of the men who find themselves caught between the two? In After the Funeral, when Marlene is widowed after Philip dies, she explores her new freedom. But when an offer of marriage is withdrawn, it’s clear that lines have been crossed with one of her daughters. And in My Mother’s Wedding, Janey is drawn to her mother’s much younger fiancé, Patrick. Diane in Coda celebrates the lack of men when she lives again with Margot: it was more “restful” this way, without the “performance and competition”.
Hadley pinpoints how a particular misery can arise when family members slip away from us, or when they fail to give us what we want and need. In one story, two sisters circle each other in a hotel that had significance in their childhood, and the elder sister, Michelle, realises that whatever she was looking for, “her sister had taken it away with her”. The characters are forced to say goodbye to their childhoods and their loved ones before they might be ready.
Another story explores the sibling bond and the grief when one is terminally ill, and in a third, three sisters return to their childhood home after their mother is hospitalised. Exquisite in its restraint, this story explores how the three sisters wait “for their mother to die, and for the end of their past”.
All the stories are ultimately about endings. Funerals, divorces, awakenings, codas. With her formal, tight sentences, Hadley considers endings in all their shades and what beginnings might follow. Mistakes are made, and, as one character says, “you just have to be strong enough to learn to live with them”.
Whole lives are summoned in a paragraph or two, with carefully chosen and evocative details – one character is described as “angular, with apologetic small breasts” – so it’s easy to fall into the spell she conjures. An utterly charming collection.
After the Funeral, by Tessa Hadley (Jonathan Cape, $40)
