This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Triesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Tessa Hadley read her story after the

funeral from the March 28th, 2022 issue of the magazine.

Hadley has published 11 books of fiction, including the story collection, bad dreams and

other stories, and the novel Free Love, which came out this year.

She is a winner of the 2016 Windham Campbell Literature Prize.

Now here's Tessa Hadley.

After The Funeral

After The Funeral, the two little girls aged 9 and 7 accompanied their grief-stricken mother

home.

Naturally, they were also grief-stricken, but then again, they hadn't known their father

very well and hadn't enormously liked him.

He was an airline pilot and they preferred it when he was away working.

Being alert little girls, they picked up intimations that he preferred it to.

This was in the 1970s when air travel was still considered glamorous.

Cape Lions had flown 747s across the Atlantic for B.O.A.C. until he died of a heart attack.

Luckily, not while in the air, but on the ground, prosaically eating breakfast in a New

York hotel room.

The airline had flown him home free of charge.

All the girls' concentration was on their mother, Marlene, who couldn't cope.

Throughout the Funeral service, she didn't even cry.

...