When I scrolled to Tessa Hadley's 'The Other One' published in The New Yorker, April 6, 2020, I wasn't sure whether to continue. The opening paragraph of the story doesn't sound like what I'm normally keen on. It's good writing. The story is fairly interesting although it really isn't anything thought-provoking unless you choose to go into the emotions of the characters. It's a short story, but they're well fleshed out, and you'll remember them. I'm devouring books and journals at a phenomenal rate. I might as well read as much as I can.
Set in 2016 Bristol, thirty years later after her father, Clifford's car crash, and in her mid-forties, protagonist Heloise didn't remember many details of the aftermath of Clifford's death. She couldn't even remember if she had accompanied her mother Angie to France to view her father's dead body and had forgotten the name of the hospital he was sent to. She is in therapy still, trying to come grips with her father's death, and more so, the abandonment of his wife and family, and also coming to terms with her own failed marriage, divorce, and trying to raise two young daughters Solly and Jemima. She runs a small business of finding locations for photo shoots for various events.
When Heloise was twelve, in 1986, her father was killed in a car crash. But it was a bit more complicated than that. He was supposed to be away in Germany at a sociology conference, only the accident happened in France, and there were two young women in the car with him. One of them was his lover, it turned out in the days and weeks after the crash, and the other one was his lover’s friend. He’d never even registered at the conference. Didn’t it seem strange, Heloise’s mother asked long afterward, in her creaky, surprised, lightly ironic voice, as if it only touched her curiosity, that the two lovebirds had taken a friend along with them for their tryst in Paris? The lover was also killed; her friend was seriously injured. Heloise’s mother, Angie, had found out some of these things when she rushed to be at her husband’s bedside in a hospital in France: he lived on for a few days after the accident, though he never recovered consciousness.
This brings us to Delia, the only survivor in the car crash. Heloise knows the survivor's name was Angie. But Angie said that Delia wasn't the father's lover—she was the lover's friend. Heloise met a Delia at a dinner party hosted by mutual friend Antony, and thought it could be that Delia. Heloise was rather taken by the much older and elegant Delia. who was a Suzuki method violin teacher, and had only words of admiration for her.
Delia and Antony were lovers, and by chance one morning, she found Heloise's father's book on the coffee table. Heloise had loaned it to Antony, and Delia then realized the strange connection between her and the younger woman. At a surprise visit to Antony's that was meant to be a playdate for the children, Delia took the initiative to speak with Heloise. Heloise learnt that the woman who died in that car crash in France, was Barbie. And a young Delia back then, an aspiring violinist incredibly focused on her music, was The Other One. The story ended here. We know that she told Angie about Delia. But readers can't quite discern if she fully hated Delia.
That definitely knocked Heloise a few steps back in the therapy progress. She's going to have to struggle to come to terms with even more emotions, especially when she seems to be enamored with Delia still. She would be struggling to put some sort of blame on the older woman for the current events of her life. The ending indicated that she felt like she should hate Delia, but she still admires her more, and couldn't quite bring herself to do it.
Angie sat listening stiffly, cautiously, as if there were something bruising and dangerous in this news for her, even after all this time. “So what’s she like, then, the lover-girl?”
Heloise said that she was hardly a girl. She wanted to say that Delia was cold and shallow and selfish, but she couldn’t. “She’s pretty tough. She’s made a life for herself. I like her—she’s a survivor.”
“What does she look like? Is she scarred? I hope so.”
She wasn’t scarred, Heloise said, as far as she could see.
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