One of the reasons I’m fond of Tessa Hadley’s fiction is that the writer appeals to my nesting instinct. Hadley can outline a domestic situation in a few deft lines, like Matisse can take a few simple strokes of black ink on white paper and show you a beautiful woman.
In “because the night” Hadley lays out a rich domicile with no wasted motion and then places two outlier characters at its borders. Kristen and the Pune orbit the warm domestic center like two lost stars barely holding on to their decaying orbits. Kristen, the daughter who doesn’t fit in and the teenaged Pune, short for “puny” although he really isn’t, just gangly in scale.
The story’s first line won me halfway over: “Their parents had fantastic parties; they were famous for it.” That’s abstract, but then we get the downstairs bath filled with ice and bottles of Veuve du Vernay, which is described in ad copy that I found online as “the ultimate party wine.” The extravagance of wine bottles in the bathtub makes me want to be there. It doesn’t matter that I don’t drink.
Kristen’s father is an import-export managing director. He expense accounts his house parties by inviting staff from his company. But the company people aren’t big party goers and don’t stay. Then the night is given over to real friends.
His wife Peggy dresses vintage. Tessa has an over-the-top brilliant line about how the scratchy sort of rustling sound that Peggy’s retro outfit makes sounds to her daughter like her mother’s scratchy voice. Kristen discouragingly struggles to live up to Mom’s level of coolness. The odd arrangement that Kristen has made for her party hair in a lame attempt to look cool just makes her look weird. She lacks Peggy’s flair.
No wonder Kristen wants to duck the party for a back garden greenhouse as soon as she can She has childishly hidden some cake and liquor in the greenhouse for a private snack. Meanwhile her brother Tom is in the thick of the social whirl. busying himself serving drinks, being a dynamic assistant host. The contrast between brother and sister at the party makes Kristin appear more awkward.
“The Pune only loved the house when Peggy was in it.” That line should raise the reader’s eyebrows. The Pune is like a stray cat who happens to befriend one member of the family, the only one he feels safe with. Late at the party, when everyone is very low key on cushions, the Pune lays his head in Peggy’s lap while she strokes his hair. Tessa writes he’s like a needy pet.
Here’s an amazing description of the Pune that’s placed so steadily before the reader that it’s as if Tessa Hadley has leveled a shotgun at your midsection and seems coolly about to fire. Tessa has Kristen notice the Pune’s lean belly between the gap between his stretch of grubby shirt and sagging loon trousers. Writer’s words.
“His lean belly was whorled with surprisingly vigorous black hair (there’s more) “heading in a bristling line down into the fraying waistband of his underpants”. “Kristen was always having to notice”…….this?
Earlier in the evening Hadley has Kristen in her mother’s bedroom, looking away from her mother in her underwear….what Hadley very remarkably calls Peggy’s “complicated adult voluptuousness”. It’s a great mother and daughter scene in which Tessa Hadley confronts the awkward promise of the daughter with the Lucien Freud-like solidity of her mother.
It’s one of the pleasures of reading Tessa Hadley that you can’t know where this great writer is going to take you including, I must say, into Pune’s underpants. You walk “through” her characters, as if you were walking through the rooms in a house, progressing from the more formal rooms to the more intimate where secrets are kept. “because the night” is in Tessa Hadley’s new Married Love collection.
