A late fling: Free Love, by Tessa Hadley, reviewed

Tessa Hadley is the queen of the portentous evening, the pregnant light and the carefully composed life unwittingly waiting to be unravelled. Free Love, like its predecessor Late in the Day, begins on one such evening. The year is 1967 and Phyllis, a suburban housewife, is applying her make-up. She and her husband, a ‘respected Arabist’, are expecting the son of a family friend for dinner.

Nicholas arrives, and broods angrily over his resentment of the staid old guard his hosts represent while plotting half-heartedly to seduce Phyllis as vengeance. Hadley is wonderfully wry at undermining the novel’s own urge towards solemnity:

He wondered, if he pulled at that ribbon on Phyllis’s dress, what would come undone? When she stood up to fetch a bowl of salad from the sideboard, he saw that the ribbon was purely decorative, the dress undid in fact at the back with a zip.

When Phyllis wilfully initiates an affair, she thinks:

If he won’t have me then I’ll die. Although she also knew that she wouldn’t really die, she’d go home and put macaroni cheese in the oven. And that would be worse.

Nicholas is self-absorbed and enigmatic, living in chaos in London and musing appreciatively as their relationship develops. ‘She supported his work. While he was at his desk she slept, or kept quiet, or turned over the pages in a book — though without taking anything much in, he thought.’ Phyllis has something of Mad Men’s Betty Draper’s perpetual childishness:

She knew that her betrayal of her husband and children was wrong, but in the same impersonal dulled way that she knew from school about the Treaty of Versailles or the abolition of the Corn Laws.

She recalls, too, Ann Patchett’s Beverley in Commonwealth, another housewife who walks out on her life at the tipping point of the 1960s.