“I remember being told when I was a child that we change our skins seven times in a lifetime—I’m not sure how scientific that is, but long marriages are a bit like that,” Tessa Hadley says.
” is about a middle-aged couple in the nineteen-nineties, in which the man, Quent, a musician, clings to the self-centered rebellious loucheness of his youth, while the woman, Lorraine, works a conventional job and takes care of their three children.
And I don’t think Greg is so uninteresting, although obviously I do give him that Boy Scoutish overcautiousness which makes him turn down Lorraine’s offer of herself. So we don’t know, can’t know for sure, whether he was ever actually capable of giving her what she thirsted for. Perhaps he was always too prim, too careful of himself, to quite deserve her? But the story leaves that question wholly open, as it remains in Lorraine’s own wondering.
I think it’s not merely self-indulgent. There’s really something missing in the particular version of femininity she’s performing—capable, tolerant, responsible, brusque, self-sufficient, wry—in relation to Quent’s version of masculinity, which is freewheeling, audacious, narcissistic, heedless, experimental. Her sensibility is subtle enough for her to be dissatisfied with that limited presentation of herself.
I’d always known that Greg would write an inept letter, which would humiliate and scald Lorraine even further, and that it would arrive on the very day they were moving into their grand new house. But then—it was obvious, but I didn’t get it until halfway through writing—I saw exactly what it was that transformed the old wolf and defeated him. It was inevitable once I’d seen it! He had to find the letter and read it, and it would change his perception of Lorraine forever.
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