A story built around a chance encounter, a tentative reconnection, and then, four-fifths of the way through, there’s a turn in the form of a switch in perspective. Lynette, annoyed at being barged into on crowded Oxford Street, follows the guilty party down into the tube, only to find, when she reaches him, intending to remonstrate with him, that it’s her ex, Toby:
She realized in that moment, to her surprise, that he’d been only a boy when they separated and then were divorced. They had seemed so ancient to themselves in those awful days, so darkened and wizened by experience and bitterness. It hadn’t quite occurred to her, in the time since they’d parted—and the parting had been all her doing, he had just suffered it intensely, with a white, fixed, wronged stare and outbreaks of baffled protest—that he might have had all this growing left to do.
Toby, it turns out, is now married again, with two daughters. Lynette tells him that she has a boyfriend, while reflecting that she would never normally use that word about “the man she saw sometimes”. They end up going back to Toby’s house for a drink – his wife and children are away – and Lynette can’t avoid being envious of his evident prosperity and comfort whilst reflecting, again, on why things didn’t work out between them. Then, when Lynette leaves, almost at the end of the story, we get Toby’s perspective, witness him taking a decisive action that, unbeknownst to Lynette, makes a mockery of her fragile hopes. Hadley makes switches, or turns, of this kind elsewhere, including in her novels. Sometimes, it takes the form not of a different character’s point of view but of a leap many years forward in time, denying us what we thought we were going to be shown next, keeping us on our toes. It could become a mannerism, but it forces the reader to reconsider what they’re reading for, challenging expectations without falling into gimmickry.
First published in The New Yorker, 2016, and available to subscribers to read online here. Collected in After the Funeral, Vintage, 2023
