The Party by Tessa Hadley review – a daringly old-fashioned novella

The domestic details of postwar life are closely observed in this tale of two sisters over one weekend in Bristol

Tessa Hadley’s novella has an alluring opening line: “The party was in full swing.” Evelyn is following her glamorous older sister Moira to an ostentatiously unglamorous gathering in a docklands pub in postwar Bristol, where there’s “sawdust on the& stone-flagged floor” and smoke-stained plaster walls “crowded with advertising for brands of beer and rum and tobacco which hadn’t existed for decades”. Hadley, usually a writer of& bourgeois households, strong on gardens and antique furniture, has a& good time with dereliction, adding memorably to the literature of urination when the sisters can’t find a& loo. Evelyn has just started a BA in French and is working with sweet self-consciousness on her transformation into adulthood, hyper-aware of her clothes and manners and vocabulary in the way of a young adult changing class. Moira, studying fashion design at art school, seems – at least to Evelyn – more confident, more experienced, less interested in changing status.

Evelyn meets people she knows at the party, her sister’s colourful friends and a smart and kind fellow student, Donald, whose niceness makes him unattractive to her but not to the reader. She asks him to buy her a drink to alleviate her disappointment with the evening: “I’m not talking to anybody,” she says to him, “or at least not anybody I actually like.” When he obliges, she abandons him: “she submerged herself effectively in the flamboyant, quarrelsome, ecstatic, flirting mass, drifting between different groups as if she were always on her way somewhere else”. Poor Donald. This is not a world in which a& woman can buy her own drink.