Sixties casualties
Free Love Tessa Hadley Jonathan Cape £16.99
Free Love opens with a 40-year-old woman, Phyllis Fischer, sitting at her dressing table by an open window. She’s relishing the sounds and smells of a wealthy London suburb on a late summer evening:
‘The steady relieving splash of a hose in a herbaceous border, confiding clack of shears, distant thwack of balls from the tennis club, broken sharp cries of children playing, fragrance of cut grass and roasting meat, jiggling of ice in the first weekend gin and tonics…’
While she titivates the butter- and garlic-laden dinner (it is 1967 and, being ‘an adventurous cook’, she has read Elizabeth David), her nine-year-old son hurtles out of the garden, pretending to shoot her at the kitchen door.
She staggers and groans in pantomime response before luxuriantly sinking her face into his hair and thinking, ‘This happiness can’t last.’
An Eden about to be despoiled, and anyway only dubiously Edenic, is Tessa Hadley territory. The Fischers’ dinner guest, 25-year-old Nicholas, with his ‘loosely spontaneous’ movements, outrages the conventions Phyllis lives by, making her Arts and Crafts home seem stultifyingly bourgeois. Currents of antagonism, mortification, vanity and lust charge the dinner-party talk.
Phyllis and Nicholas go out into the dark to rescue a child’s sandal from a garden pool. Stirring its muddy depths, he ‘seemed to breathe in the vegetable, tropical, hothouse flowering of Brazil’, feeling that, ‘under the placid surface of suburbia, something was unhinged’.
But he has, after all, been reading Lévi-strauss’s Tristes Tropiques. Hadley skilfully conveys how would-be wildness is inevitably clogged with self-conscious construction. It is pique at Nicholas’s apparent recoil from her touch, and anxiety about ageing, that breed Phyllis’s attraction to him. While they kiss, a version of her life story is ‘spooling through her mind’.
Phyllis leaves her husband, teenage daughter and young son. Her ‘free love’ is costly, though quite how much is unclear. While portraying her deserted family’s bleakness, Hadley seems to suspend judgement on how harmed any of them is. She subtly plays with the novel of adultery.
The counterpart to Phyllis is the older woman, Jean, for whom ‘hyperbole usually came closest to what one really felt’, who should have left her marriage 25 years ago. Phyllis has far less reason to leave hers, and less capacity for feeling.
She ‘knew that her betrayal of her husband and children was wrong, but in the same impersonal dulled way that she knew from school about the Treaty of Vienna’. She is reminiscent of the protagonist of Hadley’s first novel, Accidents in the Home.
She realises that, unlike a 19thcentury heroine, she has no repression to break free of, no fear of punishment and guilt. The ‘things that should have shamed her... had lost their voices’.
Finely calibrated reflections on emotion, however, slice away readers’ feelings too. The heady promise of the first chapter is never fulfilled.
Hadley is best at the bourgeois and the turbulence underlying it than at turbulence itself. That the old world is ‘crumbling’ and ‘turned on its head’ is a constant refrain.
Its objective correlative is the demolition of the coming Westway in London’s W10: bedspread-curtained houses and exotically provisioned shops ‘abutting into nothingness’; the A-Z rendered obsolete.
Phyllis pursues liberation and ‘a new continent of experience’ among the ethnically mixed youth in the bedsits of an art-nouveau erstwhile hotel.
But Ladbroke Grove is less vivid than the lush, suburban gardens, and the counterculture characters are thinly drawn. Their shifting, borderless relationships and smoky ad hoc parties are somehow seen through perspex. We never smell the marijuana or feel the ‘intoxicating freedom’ Hadley describes.
Her visiting daughter says that Phyllis now has ‘ideas’. Certainly she realises that ‘everything [is] much more terrible than she had allowed herself to see’.
She contentedly dishes up meals to random, unspecified guests, or makes love ‘under the wide sky’ with a man for whom she is just one in a succession of women. The nearest anyone gets to revolution are second-hand reports of the ’68 Paris riots.
Maybe that is what Hadley intends to portray – sixties rebels playing at outrage and subversion; the lopsidedness of ‘liberation’ that exploits women. But does she really mean it to be this lacklustre?