While Tessa Hadley’s The Party began its life as a New Yorker short story, it seems that it wouldn’t, for her, go away. At some point she found herself moved to continue the narrative, and so it became the first of the three chapters of what is now a novella. In my mind, these chapters resemble the mirrors you might find sitting on top of an old-fashioned dressing table, each one providing a different angle, sometimes lovely and sometimes unexpectedly ugly, for the person (the reader) who happens to be gazing into them. The book begins with a party, after all: noses must be powdered, and lips carefully blotted. Only later does anyone notice that the hair on the back of a head has unaccountably become matted, that smudged mascara has darkened pale cheeks.
The dishevelment in this story comes courtesy of two men: the sinisterly named Sinden and his friend Paul. At a party in an old boozer in the Bristol docks some time after the war (the Malayan emergency is under way, so we’re talking 1948 or later), these two are loitering rather hungrily when Evelyn, who’s reading French at university, arrives to meet her older and more sophisticated sister, Moira, a fashion student. As the night wears on, neither girl is taken with either of these blokes particularly, but a certain boredom and competitiveness induces them first to drink with them and then to run away from them. Better to get the bus home, they think, than to accept Sinden’s self-proclaimed attempt at “abduction”, however jocular.
