Tessa Hadley presents everything as fine at the front while it comes apart comprehensively at the back. The dozen short stories that comprise After the Funeral, her absorbing and thoroughly readable fourth collection, manage with a quiet dexterity the emotional situations that promote this kind of undoing.
Lynette, central character of Dido’s Lament, bumps into – or is bumped into by – Toby, her ex of many years. The collision, and what they make of it, will maintain a certain ambivalence. Who actually bumped into whom? Which of them, if either, has recovered from the damage they did one another in the past? Elsewhere it’s a different story, although as a story Old Friends occupies the same carefully curated kind of space: Christopher and Sally are made for one another – “she fitted into the shape of his own serious nature like a nut in its nutshell”. But Sally is still married to celebrity BBC war correspondent Frank, so she decides they’ll have to wait. Christopher isn’t sure what they are waiting for exactly, while the “whole exaggerated scale of Frank’s personal operation” continues to draw in everyone else “like a baggage train dragged after some showy emperor”.
