Lamentations All Around

A WRITER'S WIT
I can only answer that I tried to tell the truth and, if not be objective, at least be fair; history is not served when reporters prize trepidation and propriety over the robust journalistic duty to tell the whole story.
Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On
Born August 8, 1951

New Yorker Fiction 2016

David Doran

August 8 and 15, 2016, Tessa Hadley, “Dido’s Lament”: On a snowy December day in London, Lynette, an adequate vocalist in her late thirties, is knocked down by a man in a huge, holiday hurry, and when she eventually catches up with him, to reprimand him, discovers that the brute is her ex-husband, Toby. ¶ Oh, sure, one thinks, but one must remember that fiction is always filled with coincidences, and Hadley makes this one sound reasonable:

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“It wasn’t really so extraordinary that she’d followed him all that way without recognizing him—she’d seen only his back, and the open, flapping coat had obscured his shape, a knitted hat had hidden his hair” (63).

Lynette’s ankle has been sprained in the mêlée, but when she sees that the culprit is Toby, she fails to mention it. Instead of going to a bar, they move to his home, where absent are his second wife and two children. He and Lynette visit over expensive white wine—long enough for her to learn that he is a successful TV or film producer—until she decides she must leave. ¶ Hadley is all about magnificent details: clothing textures and smells, rooms entered, weather endured, aromas the world forces upon one racing after a rude man, the life those two once shared before Lynette forced Toby to leave. Yes, she sees that he is prosperous and happy. However, she slips and is injured a second time after Toby closes his door, thus intensifying her pain, and, instead of summoning him with a scream, she limps to a local bar. For one scene near the end, the point of view shifts to Toby, who informs the reader that he’s already erased her phone number from the kitchen chalkboard and is so pleased with himself for having revealed to Lynette all that she could have had, though not the fact that he still loves her. Oh, and he suddenly sees her bag with a cheap leopard-skin print top inside that he then stashes in the back of his office closet. Because he has not Lynette’s number, he will never know that she now waits in a bar to receive a text (about her garment) that will never come. Hadley’s novel, The Past, came out in January.
Illustrated by David Doran.

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