Evelyn had the surprising thought that bodies were sometimes wiser than the people inside them. She’d have liked to impress somebody with this idea, but couldn’t explain it.
On a winter Saturday night in post-war Bristol, sisters Moira and Evelyn, on the cusp of adulthood, go to an art students’ party in a dockside pub; there they meet two men, Paul and Sinden, whose air of worldliness and sophistication both intrigues and repels them. Sinden calls a few days later to invite them over to the grand suburban mansion Paul shares with his brother and sister, and Moira accepts despite Evelyn’s misgivings.
As the night unfolds in this unfamiliar, glamorous new setting, the sisters learn things about themselves and each other that shock them, and release them into a new phase of their lives.
The Party by Tessa Hadley was published on 31 October by Jonathan Cape. As part of this #RandomThingsTours Blog Tour I am delighted to share an extract from the book with you today.
Extract from The Party by Tessa Hadley
The party was in full swing. Evelyn could hear the sexy blare of the trad jazz almost as soon as she got off the bus at St Mary Redcliffe and began walking over to the Steam Packet, the pub which Vincent – who was a friend of Evelyn’s older sister Moira – had commandeered for that evening. He’d decided they all needed a party to cheer them up, because the winter had been so bitter, and because now in February the incessant rain had turned the snow to slush. It was raining again this evening; the bus’s wiper had beat its numb rhythm all the way into town, the pavements were dark with wet, the gutters ran with water. Frozen filthy formless lumps, the remainders of the snow, persisted at the street corners and in the deep recesses between the buildings, loomed sinisterly in the gaping bombsites. Crossing the road, Evelyn had to put up her umbrella – actually her mother’s worn old green umbrella with the broken rib and the duck’s head handle, which she’d borrowed without asking on her way out, because she’d lost her own somewhere. Probably she’d get in trouble for this tomorrow, but she didn’t care, she was too full of agitated happiness. Anything could happen between now and tomorrow. Evelyn couldn’t believe her luck, that she was going to an actual party – and not just any dull ordinary party but this wild one with her sister’s friends, in a half- derelict old pub with a terrible reputation, hanging over the black water in the city docks. If her parents had known where the party was they’d never have let her out, but she’d lied to them so fluently and easily, saying that Moira had promised to look after her, and that they were meeting in the Victoria Rooms. She was proud of herself. Who knew that you could be a Sunday school teacher one minute, asking the children to crayon in pictures of Jesus holding up a lantern, with a lost lamb tucked under his other arm, and then lie to your parents with such perfectly calibrated inno- cent sweetness?
The rain didn’t matter, Evelyn was impervious to it. Picking her way between the streams of water rip- pling on the roads, not wanting to spoil her fashionable unsuitable black ballet flats, she enjoyed the contrast between this desolate outer universe and the heat of her life burning up inside. When she’d had to change buses at the Centre, she’d gone into a cubicle in the Ladies public toilets to take off her wellington boots, and also the decent wool dress she’d put on over her actual party clothes, so that her parents couldn’t see what she was wearing: skin-tight black slacks zipped up along the inside of her calves, black polo-neck jumper, wide red leather belt with a black buckle. Evelyn was very thin, with a long neck – a swan neck, she thought – and flat stomach, jutting hip bones; she hoped that she looked spectacular, hair scraped back from her face like a dancer’s and breasts thrust up in a new brassiere. She longed for and feared the moment when she would shed her thick winter coat and reveal herself. To tell the truth she feared everything: part of her wanted to get straight back on the 28 bus and go home. Peering at her reflection in the square of tin which served as a mirror above the sink in the Ladies toilet, she had clipped huge false pearls on her ears – those were her mother’s too – and painted her mouth stickily with red lipstick. The boots and the dress were bundled now into a shopping bag which she’d have to jettison somewhere, along with her coat and the umbrella, for collection later.
She won the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2016, The Past won the Hawthornden Prize for 2016, and Bad Dreams won the 2018 Edge Hill Short Story Prize.
Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker.
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