A Unique Tessa Hadley Ending

Almost every short story I can recall has an ending that focuses on what happened to the central characters, usually a single protagonist but occasionally two or three linked in facing a common dramatic question.  Tessa Hadley, one of the most significant current British story writers, frequently offers a unique approach to this story form. For years, as I’ve read new stories in issues of The New Yorker, I’ve admired the originality of her endings and their ability to shift reader perspectives.

One example is “After the Funeral,” the title story of a 2023 collection. The story until its final paragraph addresses what happens to a woman, Marlene, and her two daughters, Charlotte and Lulu, over a number of years after their husband and father, Philip, an airline pilot, dies of a heart attack in a New York hotel room. At the start of the story, the girls only nine and seven, all of the attention is given to their mother: “All the girls’ concentration was on their mother, Marlene, who couldn’t cope.” Marlene, a former airline hostess, possesses only physical attractiveness but limited intelligence. Her daughters realize that. And it turns out that her husband was with another woman when he died.

Not only that. Marlene is looked down upon by her in-laws and must take a job to survive economically. She finds one in the office of Dr. Cherry: “He was tall and jovial and stooped like an awkward boy, with black-rimmed glasses and shirt collars greasy from his hair; Marlene thought that his wife didn’t look after his shirts properly. Because he was so educated and passionate about medicine, he sometimes offended his patients, particularly the old ladies, by dismissing their illnesses too cheerfully; it was Marlene’s role to soothe and charm them, and she was a great success at it. She carried over her reassuring manner from when she’d been an air hostess, before she married.”

Dr. Cherry soon visits the family on evenings, as does Philip’s dentist brother, James, occasionally, just for Marlene. Charlotte informs Lulu what both men are there for. But “Then, when Charlotte was in the sixth form, there was a kerfuffle at the surgery and Marlene lost her job.” She ends up working checkout in a supermarket, to the disdain of her mother-in-law.

Meanwhile, after a long period of absence, Dr. Cherry, having left his wife and three children, shows up, involved with Marlene, but Charlotte, plain and bright, having chosen to stay home and work to manage the family rather than attending university, begins spending time with the doctor, to “visit his nearby lonely bedsit and negotiate the next step with him.”

In a climactic scene, Dr. Cherry is out for a walk with Marlene, Charlotte, Lulu, and Lulu’s boyfriend. Hadley captures the unpleasantness of the situation through a description of the path: “The path ran alongside a row of seedy municipal pines whose red bark hung down in strings; lolly sticks and sweet papers and caches of dog dirt, with smeared tissue paper, were tucked in among the tree roots; the light was thwarted and desolate. The doctor stopped suddenly dead.—Oh God, this is bloody, he said, not looking at anyone. Then he swerved on his heel and strode off …” Charlotte, possibly pregnant, tells her mother she hates her life.

That’s when the story shifts its ground from concentrating on Marlene and her daughters, with Dr. Cherry as a secondary charter, to a full focus on the doctor that reveals the man he really is and that offers an external perspective on the three woman the story has been about:

The doctor meanwhile, as mother and daughter stood facing certain realities in the park, was on the road for home: his rightful home, with his wife and children. Hardly caring what reception awaited him there, he felt strong enough for anything. He’d awoken out of a fever dream. As if all the years of his education, and all his hard graft in medical school, could have been meant to end in that ghastly bedsit, or in a stuffy flat in Purley! Batting aside a bothersome slide show of images—Charlotte’s goose-fleshed, greenish-white limbs, abandoned like something drowned, against pink nylon sheets that had crackled with static—he shifted in his seat and glanced uneasily in the rear-view mirror. There had been an excruciating scene with his landlady. Dr. Cherry had made a few wrong diagnoses in his career: missing the spinal tumour, for example, that had caused one patient’s back pain. And he’d sent away with reassurances a child who turned out to have meningitis; that child hadn’t died, but hadn’t made a complete recovery either. Everybody makes mistakes, the doctor consoled himself, turning on the windscreen wipers. You just have to be strong enough to learn to live with them. The rain was really lashing now. It was coming down in torrents.

These are all pitiful people. A typical story structure would have concluded with a view of the women’s situation that reveals the essence of their sad and empty lives. The switch to the doctor magnifies this by adding to the misery. This man, whom the women hoped would save them, has made them just one more of his wrong diagnoses, one he dismisses like all the others in his personal and professional life. The story had taken the women seriously. He brushes them off. The torrential rain captures the bleakness of all their lives, a bleakness made much more disturbing by this unique ending.