“After the Funeral”
by Tessa Hadley
from the March 28, 2022 issue of The New Yorker
Ozick a few weeks ago. Keegan and Groff before that. The New Yorker is hitting a lot of my sweet spots lately! And it continues this week, with a new story from one of my favorite short story authors. Tessa Hadley is a regular contributor to the magazine, and I hope it doesn’t stop any time soon.
“After the Funeral” introduces itself quite nicely in the first paragraph. And it does so while intriguing me to continue:
After the funeral, the two little girls, aged nine and seven, accompanied their grief-stricken mother home. Naturally, they were also grief-stricken, 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 considered glamorous. Philip Lyons had flown 747s across the Atlantic for B.O.A.C., until he died of a heart attack—luckily not while 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.
I love Hadley’s explorations of the lives of girls and women, and this promises to continue in that area.
Please comment below with your thoughts on the story.
I’ve enjoyed reading all Tessa Hadley’s full-length novels, as well as any short stories I’ve come across. She is a supremely comforting, intelligent writer. Her deceptively simple prose chuggs along at a steady pace, completely eschewing any temptation to shock by challenging convention or by employing the second person narrative voice. She is the voice of the English middle class, a perhaps unfashionable outmoded perspective in these post-colonial times.
This story is no exception. Comfortably we slip into the lives of the bereaved mother and daughters, whose other relatives, while maybe a little annoying, safely rescue the family from utter destitution. Private school fees continue to be paid. A nice safe job in the surgery of an intelligent and cultured doctor is found, and the two girls grow up quite safe from predators and addiction.
For a longish time one wonders where the story is going, what can be the denouement?
Comfortably, we slip into a resolution. The doctor is safe, the mother and younger daughter are safe. The elder, more vulnerable than we perhaps guessed, seems as though she will pull through.
Story-telling as comfort-reading,
I’ve been thinking of this story since it was published. It does seem quiet and comfortable, as mentioned above. The family of three are saved, at least in terms of material necessities. Predators and addiction, mentioned above, would be expected maybe in contemporary America but not of the Britain of this time. And, in the past, families did help each other, even through the snobbery, if only to keep face. What lingers in this story is that no one is saving the eldest daughter, and she is beginning to make choices that she will regret for the rest of her life. The extent of her damage is hinted at and even shown. It isn’t looking good for her, to say the least. That notion has stayed with me.
You are right, actually. It’s so subtle. And that’s a very English thing.
My hope for Charlotte is that somehow she is the figure who might become a writer and detail this story once she’s gotten some distance. I was also impressed by the pace and in general am always a fan of Hadley’s work. I did find the dead father’s family a bit less sympathetic than the above comments, but they aren’t malicious ultimately. The ambiguity around the mother and daughter’s relations with the doctor is nicely handled. We’re clear about what we need to know but much is left unspoken.
Brilliant story and an insightful interview with the author accompanying it. The role reversal at the end was a masterful touch, reminding us that they are still mother and child, despite the past.