Bookclub: Tessa Hadley - Married Love

Editor's note: This programme is available to listen to online and to download.

We’ve had some strange interruptions in Bookclub over the years. We had the creaky floor in Dr Johnson’s house that wouldn’t stop squeaking, the demonstration outside Broadcasting House that was so loud that the chanting came through the windows, and a reader’s alarm that went off to remind her to feed the chickens. I had never expected, however, to have to abandon a recording because of the intervention of an automatic milking machine.

We were at Charleston, the Bloomsbury group’s lair near Lewes in East Sussex, set up to record with the novelist and short-story writer Tessa Hadley, as part of the Small Wonder Short Story Festival that’s held there for a weekend each September (the Charleston literary festival takes place over ten days each May). We were in the lovely stone barn which has been carefully converted to accommodate a good-sized audience, and things were going swimmingly. We’d reached the end of the second of the three short stories we were talking about from Tessa’s collection Married Love, when the whole place began to hum and a loud thumping noise announced that the milking apparatus had kicked into life in the building next door.

There was a Marie Celeste quality to the cowshed in question; there no farmer in evidence, not even a farmer’s boy. Most of the cows were still chomping happily at the grass in their field beyond. But there was no way to turn the machine off. And after a series of fruitless phone calls it became obvious that we were stuck with the noise, which made it impossible to carry on.

Fortunately we had two of our most experienced studio managers with us, and Bob and Giles managed to set up what was in effect a new studio in a tent at the bottom of the Charleston garden, on the other side of the house. Within the hour, our readers - and the accompanying audience who wanted to watch - had decamped to our new location, through Vanessa Bell’s garden, alive with butterflies and bees. It made our afternoon. When we resumed the recording, the audience was even happier than before. We hope that, in the end, the cows were, too.

The three stories we discussed caught the spirit of the collection. They all concern transitions in life - into marriage (a girl in her twenties and a man in his seventies, with all the complications that entails for her family), through adolescence and the shock of a near-death experience (a teenager in a shipwreck),and of growing up (three godchildren of the same woman meeting in adulthood). In the course of our discussion Tessa spoke about the handling of complicated relationships in a short story (most in the collection take no more than 20 pages) and the disciplines involved in telling a satisfactory tale in relatively few words.

Discipline, but also freedom. She once spoke about the ‘irresponsible’ short story, because it’s possible to hint at all kinds of background and to introduce characters briefly without the need to tie up all the loose ends, as in a novel where the reader expects, quite rightly, a world that’s complete. In a short story it’s possible to dodge that, giving the effect - as we put it in the recording - of a musical chord that isn’t resolved.

It was an invigorating conversation, from a writer who can move easily from the novel to the short story and back again, and who can capture character, as in these three stories, in a few spectacular brushstrokes.

The stories we discussed were Married Love, The Trojan Prince and The Godchildren, and it seemed to me afterwards that we’d caught something of Tessa’s character as a writer - her acute sense of place (especially in houses), her economy of style, and her confidence in describing ambiguous and complicated relationships. These are great talents. We haven’t done a short story collection on the programme since William Trevor (After Rain) some years ago. Dymphna and I were thinking afterwards that it shouldn’t be so long before we turn to one again.

On the other hand, the William Trevor recording was in Dr Johnson’s house, it of the squeaky floor. Maybe there’s a jinx in the short story.

For now I hope you enjoy Tessa Hadley on Bookclub, this Sunday at 4pm.

Happy reading

Jim