The dovetailing of the two stories, more nuanced, less forced than in Hadley’s earlier double-narrative The London Train, is alive with echoes and resonances. The two present-day sections sandwich a middle act, set in 1968, when young mother Jill quits her philandering husband in London and seeks refuge with her parents in the country, three children – Harriet, Roland and baby Alice – in tow. The past keeps knocking at the door of the present, first in glancing references and later in a concentrated flashback. Hadley monitors the stir of sibling loyalties and antipathies with hair-trigger sensitivity: “They knew one another well, all too well, and yet they were all continually surprised by the forgotten difficult twists and turns of one another’s personalities, so familiar as soon as they appeared.” Arguments flare up and feelings are outraged in a way that might, in another novel, be exhausting one of Hadley’s gifts is to describe people living on their nerves without getting on ours. Pilar, the latest wife, is one of two family outsiders, the other being Kasim, moody son of Alice’s ex-boyfriend, who takes an instant shine to Molly, Roland’s teenage daughter. They are later joined by their brother, Roland, a pop philosopher on his third marriage, in a new white suit. Alice, the middle one, is 46, flighty, forgetful and romantic Fran, a teacher, is practical and decisive and a mother of two young children, Ivy and Arthur Harriet, the eldest, is independent-minded and shy, a former revolutionary in retreat from the fray. Here she has created a Chekhovian trio of sisters who love and resent one another. Hadley specialises in bright, brittle, defensive women with unsatisfactory love lives and a knack for self‑sabotage, most notably Kate in The Master Bedroom and Stella in Clever Girl. It is the story of a family and a three-week summer holiday in the house they have inherited, beneath whose affable surface run deep currents of tension. These talents are on formidable display in her latest novel, The Past. To cap it all, she is dryly, deftly humorous. She is possessed of a psychological subtlety reminiscent of Henry James, and an ironic beadiness worthy of Jane Austen. She handles the passing of time with a magician’s finesse. She is a remarkable and sensuous noticer of the natural world. She writes brilliantly about families and their capacity for splintering. She is equipped with an armoury of techniques and skills that may yet secure her a position as the greatest of them. I n her patient, unobtrusive, almost self-effacing way, Tessa Hadley has become one of this country’s great contemporary novelists.
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