“The moment when a story comes together feels like striking into a gush of life that exists outside your invention,” Tessa Hadley says, in a conversation about her short story “After the Funeral.”
” involves a widowed mother, Marlene, and her two young daughters, living in a town in South London in the seventies. Marlene is seen as a problem by her late husband’s relatives, who disapprove of her life style. How did this scenario come to you? Was it inspired by people you’ve known?I really don’t know where it came from. I remember two beautifully dressed girls from my own childhood, daughters of someone my mother knew, and I actually think the older one was called Charlotte.
I had that loving, tight little triangle—the mother and her two daughters—and its female heat, for a while before I quite knew what to do with them. I suppose I knew I had to introduce a man, to disrupt the sealed-in energy of the triangle. I kept thinking at first that Charlotte would have a plan and Lulu would spoil it. But somewhere I knew that was wrong. It was too obvious—it didn’t penetrate down to the true flaw in their sealed system. It had to be Charlotte who spoiled the plan.
The story also turns around the idea of shame: Marlene has none, doesn’t understand why she should. Charlotte is enveloped in the shame of having a mother and sister who don’t aspire to respectability. Why do you think she’s so sensitized to this and the others aren’t? Does she have more in common with Nanna than she thinks?
Love, of course. She’s just a girl, a human being. Her plans are an illusion that melts to nothing at the first hint of a possibility of romance and sex. Who ever eschewed a love relationship because they knew it wouldn’t “lead anywhere good”? She adores the doctor. She has no experience of life, or men. She longs for an acknowledgment from him.