After the Funeral and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley

Author:Tessa Hadley [Hadley, Tessa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

Men

At about seven o’clock a crowd came in. They were booked for an overnight, and dinner in the Jazz Bar—the men were loud and middle-aged, they had money and stood at ease in the foyer in their business suits, as if they owned the place. Strong, confident accents from across the Pennines, Leeds or Sheffield. The women varied: some of them were obviously first wives, hanging on from another less prosperous era, solid and plain and mouthy, mothers of grown children, packed pugnaciously into expensive tight dresses and lethal heels, defying the showy hotel. Other men had shed their first wives and acquired a newer model, younger and slimmer, promising a dream of sex; these new girls were either full of themselves, or diffidently shy. The ringleader among the men was a clever talker, short, with a paunch and thick nut-brown hair, bald patch like a monk’s; his ugliness was attractive, with his blue eyes shifting quickly from face to face, entertaining his companions, making sure they were all on board with his jokes, his know-how. He charmed them all, touching everyone with his quick hands, bringing them inside his magic circle, even the dumpiest of the old wives. And his girl stood out, she was different: very tall and serene, and pale—not like the others with their Lanzarote tans. She wore a long tasteful pastel dress, not split up to her thigh or cut to show off her breasts—though you noticed the shape of her breasts, loose under the loose fabric. Her hair was old-gold colour, silky, a good cut, feathered onto her white shoulders. She smiled around her as if she wasn’t afraid of anything, and her smile didn’t change when the bald-patch man trailed fingers down her back, between the shoulder blades; she was still free. He was talking away to the others at the same time, telling some old story about his great-grandfather who’d fought and won against a rival in this city once, at Moran’s Boxing Booth, famous in those days.

Michelle Brennan came through from the staff area into the space behind the reception desk, bumping the swing door open with her behind, preoccupied, holding her bookings chart in both hands and frowning down at it. There was some minor glitch with this block booking which she was worrying over. Then she thought that she was aware of her sister’s presence instantly, vividly, even before she looked up, like an animal picking up a scent, a smear of something rank; yet she hadn’t seen her for fifteen years, not since Jan was seventeen. And as soon as she’d seized an image of her, in one swooping, rapacious glance—the serenity and the thinness and the beauty and the dress and the man—she looked away again, back to her paper, and pretended she hadn’t seen. No one else would have noticed anything. There wasn’t any resemblance between the two sisters. Michelle wasn’t beautiful, she looked like their mother, small and dark with a little pasty face as soft as putty.

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