Tessa Hadley: Married Love and Other Stories

Lottie announces at the breakfast table that she is getting married. The youngest daughter of a large and close-knit family, Lottie is nineteen but looks five years younger. Her fiancé is Edgar Lennox, a composer of religious music and lecturer at Lottie’s university, forty-five years her senior. We follow as Lottie’s life unfolds; her marriage to Edgar, the tiny flat they share, the children that follow. It is a story of romantic dreams and daily reality, family loyalties tested but holding, and the comedy and solace to be found in small moments. Evoking a world that expands beyond the pages, it marks the beginning of what is an astonishing new collection.

On full display in these stories are the qualities Tessa Hadley has been praised for often before: her unflinching examination of family relationships; her humour, warmth and psychological acuity; her powerful and precise prose. In this collection there are domestic dramas, generational sagas, wrenching love affairs and epiphanies — captured and distilled to remarkable effect.

Married Love is a collection to treasure, a masterful new work from one of the most accomplished storytellers of today.

Tessa Hadley is the author of four highly praised novels, Accidents in the Home , which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right, The Master Bedroom and The London Train , and one previous collection of stories, Sunstroke . She lives in Cardiff and teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker, Granta and other magazines.

LOTTIE ANNOUNCED THAT she was getting married.

This was at the breakfast table at her parents’ house one weekend. The kitchen in that house was upstairs, its windows overlooking the garden below. It was a tall, thin, old house, comfortably untidy, worn to fit the shape of the family. The summer morning was rainy, so all the lights were on, the atmosphere close and dreamy, perfumed with toast and coffee.

— Whatever for? Lottie’s mother Hattie said, and carried on reading her book. She was an English teacher, but she read crime novels at weekends: this one was about a detective in Venice.

Lottie was nineteen, but she looked more like thirteen or fourteen. She was just over five feet tall, with a tight little figure and a barrel chest; she insisted on wearing the same glasses with thick black frames that she had chosen years earlier, and her hair, the colour of washed-out straw, was pulled into pigtails.

Everyone happened to be at home that weekend, even Lottie’s older brother Rufus and her sister Em, who had both moved away.

— Have you got a boyfriend at last? Em asked.

Lottie was always pale, with milky translucent skin behind a ghostly arc of freckles across her snub nose, but she seemed to be even whiter than usual that morning, blue veins standing out at her temples; she clenched her hands on either side of the place mat in front of her. They were improbable hands for a violinist: pink and plump, with short blunt fingers and bitten cuticles.

— You’re not taking me seriously! she cried.

A squall of rain urged against the steamed-up window-panes, the kettle boiled, toast sprang from the toaster for no one in particular. Vaguely, they all looked at her, thinking their own thoughts. Lottie emanated intensity; her personality was like a demon trapped inside a space too small. Even as a baby she had been preternaturally perceptive and judgmental. Her talent for the violin, when it was discovered, had seemed an explanation for her surplus strength, or a solution to it; she had begun on an instrument so tiny that it looked like a Christmas-tree decoration. Now she was living with her parents while she studied for her music degree at the university.

— Why ever would you want to get married? Hattie said reasonably. — Dad and I have never felt the need.

— I’m not like you, Lottie said.

This was one of her battle cries.

— Of course, you’re not like anybody, sweetheart. You’re just yourself.

— For a start, I happen to have religious beliefs. I believe that marriage is a holy sacrament.

— No, you don’t, Rufus said. — You’ve never said anything about them before.

— So when, exactly, are you getting married? Em asked sceptically. — And who to?

— How could I possibly know yet when? That’s exactly what I want to talk to you about. I want to sort out a date. I want you all to be there. I want it to be a proper wedding. With a dress and everything. And bridesmaids, probably.

— So you have got a boyfriend! Em said.

Em was gracefully loose-jointed, with her mother’s hooded, poetic eyes; she worked in the toxicology department of the city hospital.

— My husband, he’s going to be.

Hattie put down her book and her coffee mug in concern. — Poppet, you’re so young. There’s no hurry about the marrying part. Of course, you can have a proper wedding one day if that’s what you want, but there’s no need to rush into anything.

Sullen white dents appeared in Lottie’s cheeks where her jaw was set. — You forget that I have a whole life of my own now, as an adult, outside of this house, about which you know nothing, absolutely nothing. You don’t warn Emily not to rush into anything.

— To be fair, Em said, — I’m not the one who just said I was getting married.

— Have we met him? Hattie asked. — Is he on your course?

— Is it the one with the stammer in your string quartet? asked Noah, Lottie’s younger brother, who was still at school. — Tristan?

— How could you think I’d want to marry Tristan?

— Personally, I’d warn against anyone in a string quartet, Rufus said.

— Shut up, Rufus. It isn’t anything to do with Tristan.

— So what’s his name, then? Noah persisted.

Duncan, the children’s father, arrived from his morning ritual with the Guardian in the bathroom upstairs. He was shorter than Hattie, stocky, densely and neatly made, with a wrinkled, ugly, interesting head; she was vague and languid, elegant, beginning to be faded. He taught special-needs kids at a local comprehensive, though not the same one where Hattie taught. — What is whose name?

Alarm took flight in Hattie. — Lottie, darling, you’re not pregnant, are you?

— I just don’t believe this family, Lottie wailed. — There’s something horrible about the way your minds work.

— Because if you’re pregnant we can deal with that. It doesn’t mean that you have to get married.

— Is she pregnant? Duncan asked.

— Of course I’m not.

— She says she’s going to get married.

— Whatever for?

— Also that she has religious beliefs, all of a sudden.

This seemed to bother Rufus more than the marrying. He was an ironic pragmatist; he worked as a research analyst for the Cabinet Office.

— The reason, Lottie said, — is that I’ve met someone quite different from anyone I’ve ever known before, different from any of you. He’s a great man. He’s touched my life, and transformed it. I’m lucky he even noticed I exist.

She had a gift of vehemence, the occasional lightning flash of vision so strong that it revealed to others, for a moment, the world as it was from her perspective.

— And who is he? Em asked her, almost shyly.

— I’m not going to tell you now, Lottie said. — Not after this. Not yet.