Scenes from domestic life: After the Funeral, by Tessa Hadley, reviewed

The cover image of Tessa Hadley’s fourth short story collection is Gerhard Richter’s ‘Betty’ (1988), a portrait of the artist’s daughter facing away from the viewer. It’s an apt choice for Hadley’s work, which turns on the fundamental unknowability of human beings.

The titular tale, about a widowed mother and her two daughters confronting reduced circumstances, is loosely inspired by Mavis Gallant’s story ‘1933’. Its climax, which pulls off the feat of being both shocking and inevitable, is a testament to Hadley’s skill as a storyteller. Some of the stories’ incidents are entirely internal: in ‘Cecilia Awakened’, a teenaged girl on a family holiday in Florence wakes up ‘inside the wrong skin’, suddenly aware of her parents’ shortcomings.

As ever in her oeuvre, Hadley masterfully uses the smallest details – of dress, food, décor – to convey class and character. In real life ‘we construct from those particulars the story of a life’, she has said, ‘necessarily incomplete, but full of rich suggestion’. Chekhovian shifts in points of view, such as between three adult sisters in ‘The Bunty Club’, offer narrative propulsion.

What is a mystery in real life – the inner world of others – is thrillingly revealed in Hadley’s fiction. ‘Dido’s Lament’ explores the awkward choreography between former spouses after a chance meeting. We’re in the woman’s thoughts, with the exception of a brief but revelatory peek into the man’s mind: ‘He had put together everything important, family and work and home, all so that Lynette could get to visit it some day and see that he’d managed to have a life without her.’

Hadley also harnesses fiction’s capacity to time travel. In ‘The Other One’, a dinner party encounter sheds light on a daughter’s misperceptions about the circumstances of her father’s death, with the story shifting to the present tense to recount the accident.