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- [00:01]
Debra Treisman
This is a message from sponsor Intuit. TurboTax Texas was getting frustrated by your forms. Now Taxis is uploading your forms with a Snap and a TurboTax expert will do your taxes for you. One who's backed by the latest tech which cross checks millions of data points for absolute accuracy. All of which makes it easy for you to get the most money back guaranteed. Get an Expert now on TurboTax.com only available with TurboTax Live full service. See guarantee details@TurbotaX.com guarantees this is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker Magazine. I'm Debra Treisman, fiction Editor at the New Yorker. Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss. This month we're going to hear An Abduction by Tessa Hadley, which appeared in the New Yorker in July of 2012.
- [00:56]
Aishagal Savage
It didn't occur to Jane that the car would stop for her. She watched it hungrily, sifting the silky dust between her toes. Daniel, the driver Jane saw at once, was the best looking of the three. In fact, he was crushingly beautiful.
- [01:10]
Debra Treisman
The story was chosen by Aishigal Savage, who's the author of three novels, including White on White and the Anthropologist. A nonfiction book, the Wilderness, was published earlier this year. Hi Aysugal.
- [01:23]
Aishagal Savage
Hello Deborah.
- [01:24]
Debra Treisman
So welcome to the podcast.
- [01:26]
Aishagal Savage
Thank you for having me.
- [01:28]
Debra Treisman
When we talked about this, the first two stories you really settled on were both by Tessa Hadley. So I'm interested to hear why that is. What makes her work really important to you?
- [01:39]
Aishagal Savage
Tessa Hadley is a writer. I read when I was trying out becoming a writer and I was trying out different voices, and she's a writer I still read. She's one of these writers, whenever she has a new story or a new book really fills me with joy. And I think it's so rare that a writer accompanies you in different phases of your career and of your life. And her stories really have shaped how I think about stories very strongly.
- [02:13]
Debra Treisman
In what way? What is it that she does that you also feel is pertinent for your work?
- [02:20]
Aishagal Savage
You know, I think I used to think that sort of a rule for writing a short story was that it had to be about the distance between an imagined reality and lived reality and, or, you know, the ways that characters thought about themselves and the ways that they were in the world. And I think actually this is something that's sort of central to Tessa Hadley's stories and it's something that interests me so much. The way that she does it, the distance and the Disconnect between interior lives and the exterior.
- [02:56]
Debra Treisman
Right. She's very, very good at taking you through the thought process as you're reading. What is it about an abduction that made you choose it?
- [03:05]
Aishagal Savage
It's so great. It's so. You know, I've taught this story in writing classes, and then I stopped teaching it just because it's so technically amazing, that I thought we were talking too much about the story's technicalities in these classes. And then, you know, it would lose part of its joy and just how generous it is with its images and its storytelling and character. So I stopped teaching it because I didn't want to lose that joy for myself. But there's also, you know, this distance I was talking about is so apparent in the abduction. Even the title. It's called An Abduction, but she's really not abducted. But in her mind, she sort of is. It's the drama of the situation and she maybe wishes she were abducted. In some ways, it's a great example of that. It's also just an amazing story and so surprising.
- [04:02]
Debra Treisman
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we should listen to the story now and then talk some more after the reading. So now here's Aishegul Savage reading An Abduction by Tessa Hadley.
- [04:18]
Aishagal Savage
An abduction. Jane Alsop was abducted when she was 15 and nobody noticed. This happened a long time ago in surrey in the 1960s, when parents were more careless. She was home from boarding school for the summer, and day after day the sun rose into a cloudless sky from which Jane couldn't unfix the word cerulean, which he'd learned in the art room. She wasn't clever or literary and was nervous of new words which seemed to stick to her. Cerulean was more of a blank baking glare than mere merry blue. It prized its way each morning like a chisel through the crack between Jane's flowered bedroom curtains and between the eyelids she squeezed tightly shut in an effort to stay inside her dreams. It wasn't acceptable in Jane's kind of family to complain about good weather, yet the strain of it told on them, parents and children. They were remorselessly cheerful, while secretly they longed for rain. Jane imagined herself curled up with a bag of licorice beside a streaming window pane, reading about the Challis School, but her mother said it was a crime to stay indoors while the sun shone and Jane couldn't read outside with the same absorption. There was always some strikingly perfect speckled insect falling onto your page, like a reminder. Of what? Of itself or a root nudging into your back or stinging ants inside your shorts. The morning of the abduction, Mrs. Allsop, dishevelled in a limp linen short dress, was wielding her secateurs up a ladder pruning the climbing roses. She was immensely capable, tall and big boned, with a pink pleasant face and dry yellow hair chopped sensibly short. Jane admired her mother greatly, especially when she transformed herself at night for a concert in London or a Rotary Club dinner with clip on pearl earrings and lipstick and scent, a frilled taupe satin stole. Jane coveted this doll and tried it on when her mother was at the shops making sultry faces at herself in the mirror. Although sultry was the last thing her mother was and everyone told Jane that she looked just like her. She certainly seemed to have her mother's figure, with not much bust, no waist to speak of, and a broad flat behind. Why don't you call up some of your old friends, Mrs. Allsop suggested from the ladder top. Invite them round to play ping pong. Jane responded with evasive enthusiasm. She didn't know her old friends anymore. That was what happened when you were sent away to boarding school. She said. She was heading inside to find her jokery set a rubber ball attached by a long elastic string to a wooden base. You could hit the ball back and forth with a paddle all by yourself for hours on end. It was part of the family code that sport and physical exercise were meaningful ways of passing leisure time. Without them you risked dissipation, letting value slip away. Only Jane's brother Robin was allowed a special dispensation because he was studying to get into Oxford. It was all right for him to have his head stuck in a book all day and to go around scowling, complaining that the sun gave him headaches when Jane strayed into Robin's room. Buzz off, shrimp. You're not permitted across my threshold. He was curled up on his side on the bed, his clasped hands between his drawn up knees, his glasses off and his book propped across his face, Pink Floyd playing subduedly on the stereo. It was obvious that he'd been smoking. Mrs. Allsop smoked with a casual elegance that startled Jane, but only on the silk stole evenings or if she had women friends around for tea. For Robin, blind on his bed with a headache and sex fantasies and short circuiting flashes of insane ambition, his sister mutely protesting she simply stood there till he got up and pushed her out and locked the door behind her, was a visitant from his insipid past when they'd been friends. Jane was listless, her mind a blank with vivid little jets of dissatisfaction firing off in it. Real children somewhere were wholesomely intent on untying boats or building dams or collecting butterflies to asphyxiate in jars, as she and Robin had done one summer. She should be like them, she reproached herself, or she should be more thoroughly embarked on her teenage self like some of the girls at school, painting on makeup then scrubbing it off, nurturing crushes on friends, brothers she'd only ever seen from a distance, cutting out pictures of pop stars from Jackie magazine. Jane knew that these girls were ahead of her in the fated trek toward adulthood, which she had half learned about in certain koi biology lessons. Yet there seemed also a backward step into triviality, away from the thing that the cerulean day, munificent broiling burning across her freckled shoulders, hanging so heavily on her hands, ought to become, if only she knew better how to use it. She carried the jokery set down through the patch of woodland toward the bottom of the garden. Her sister Frances, dark skinned and fey, not at all like their mother and not yet old enough for boarding school, had chums around to play with. They were supposed to be clearing the drive of rabbit droppings with spoons and plastic bags for money, but they were all four, hunkered in a semicircle under the pine trees where they had set out tea things for their dolls, a pinecone on each tiny plate, a rabbit dropping in each tiny cup. Jane heard Frances chanting in two alternating voices while the others watched, enthrall to her. Don't want it, don't want it, frances said in her whiny voice. Eat it up, her vicious voice replied. Take your nasty medicine. When Jane came near, the little girls melted into the undergrowth with hostile backward looks. She kicked their dolls over and hurled the pinecones as far as she could toward the flaunting patches of sky between the treetops. She had a strong throw, her father always said, better than Robin's, but she lacked conviction even in her malevolence. We hate her, she's so ugly. The witch children hummed, drifting between the bald pine trunks, keeping out of sight. Jane remembered, as she often did, how once at a friend's house she had overheard the doughty grandmother asking too loudly who the plain one was. The witches didn't even bother to follow her to spy on her, which would at least have been some kind of game. She set up her jokery on a scorched patch of grass beside where their chalky drive debouched onto the road. No cars passed the road was a dead end, leading only to more big houses like theirs, secretive behind their screens of trees, some atmospheric with a half timbering that Jane didn't yet know was a badge of inauthenticity, some with tennis courts from which the thwack of balls didn't often come. Kicking off her flip flops, she settled resignedly into her game. The pock and thud of the jokery ball on the baked ground soothed her, and she started to care about whether she could break her own record of consecutive hits. She had passed Robin's record long ago wrapped. She didn't notice her father steering the Rover down the drive on his way out to pick up the Saturday paper. To save petrol, he liked to roll down with the handbrake off, starting the engine only when he turned into the road. Jane scooped low to the ground under an awkward shot, getting it up with too much force just as the sleek black of the car eased into the edge of her vision. The ball on its elastic must have seemed smashed deliberately and vindictively against the car's side window, which luckily was not open. Assaulted amid his reverie, Mr. Allsup was outraged out of all proportion to the offence. Nothing was broken. He stopped the car and half stood up out of it to rant across its roof at Jane. Stupid girl. Didn't she have anything better to do? Then the car rolled on ominously firing to life when it felt the road, and Jane was left wounded, staring after it. The wings of her spirit, which had been beginning to soar, faltered and flung her to earth, because after all, she had been doing her best, nothing else, and also because her father was supposed to be her ally in the family, though they weren't at all alike. Mr. Allsop was small and dark like Francis, easily bored and clever with figures. He thought about Jane vaguely through a fog of fond concern, fearing that she had her mother's flat, bland surface without Mrs. Alsop's force of conviction or whatever it was that kept her impermeable, buoyant. Jane dropped her paddle in an uncharacteristic gesture of despair. Tears stung her eyes. She stood with her hands by her sides, palms outward in a kind of resigned openness. What next, then, if even her attempt at virtue had failed? And that was how they first saw her. They passed Mr. Allsup in the Rover. He was turning out of the unmade up road just as they turned into it. Mr. Allsop noticed them because he knew most of the cars that visited the road, and he didn't recognize or much like the look of this one, an expensive dark green sporty two seater convertible with with one long haired youth in a sloppy vest lolling in each seat and one smoking something that might have been more sinister than a cigarette squeezed into the little luggage space behind, craning forward as he was bound to between his friends, the driver who had one languid hand on the wheel, cornered carelessly in a puff of chalk dust, tires spitting loose stones. If they were my kids, Mr. Allsop thought, catch me allowing them anywhere near my car. It's not all bad that Robin's such a drip. Had the family ever realized that Jane had been abducted, her father would probably have remembered and suspected these visiting aliens. The boys were drunk and stoned and hadn't been to bed at all the night before, but then they hadn't got out of bed until 4 the previous afternoon. They were out looking for girls in Nigel's father's car. Nigel was the one squeezed into the luggage space. They'd finished their second year at Oxford and were staying at Nigel's house about a 20 minute drive from the Allsopps while his parents were away in France. After sagging at dawn, dozing in the angular Swedish armchairs in the lounge and filling Nigel's mother's fashionable ashtrays while listening to the Grateful Dead, all three had found a second wind swimming several thrashing lengths in Nigel's pool. The loveliness of the morning had then seemed their own fresh discovery, the light as limpid as the water, bird songs skimming the flat echoless air, the sun's touch intricate on their skin. They had decided that they needed to find girls to crown the day. That was a few hours ago. It had taken them a while to get started, and then there'd been a striking absence everywhere they'd driven of available girls. She'll do, one of them called out when they saw Jane loud enough for her to hear. It was Patti, not Irish at all, the bulky, clever looking one in the passenger seat with small eyes like chinks of bright glass, and greasy hair the color and texture of old rope pushed behind pink ears. He took the joint from Nigel and blinked at Jane through its smoke with a sort of appraising, impartial severity. Not lascivious. But where will we put these girls? Nigel asked facetiously after one glance at Jane. He didn't fancy sharing his small space and wasn't in fact much interested in girls. Patti explained that they'd have to collect them one at a time. Jane stood barefoot, hands still open in that gesture of self relinquishment. She wasn't plain in that moment, though she didn't know it. Something was revealed in her that was normally hidden, an auburn light in her face, her freckles startling as the camouflage of an animal blotting up against her lips and eyelids. There were ginger glints, too, in her hair, which she wore in two bunches fastened with different colored elastic bands. Her eyes, with their pale lashes because she was unhappy, communicated keenly. Her family called her pudgy, but she just looked soft, as if she were longing to nestle. Her jawline was pure, the pale lips rather full, cracked, parted. She seemed not fake or stuck up, and just then, in the dappled light, not a child either. None of this was wasted on the boys. It didn't occur to Jane that the car would stop for her. She watched it hungrily, sifting the silky dust between her toes. Daniel, the driver Jane saw at once, was the best looking of the three. In fact, he was crushingly beautiful, his features smudged and vivid at once as if sketched in black ink, and her heart fastened on him. When he had stopped the car, he asked her what her name was and she told him. Want to come for a ride? He said kindly. She hesitated only for a moment. Not in the back, she said, quite clear about it already. She didn't care for Nigel. Between us in the front, patti said, squeezing over, and so she climbed in, carrying her flip flops in her hand. On a whim she had decided against shorts. That morning she was wearing a washed out old dress in flowered cotton with a Peter Pan collar. On their way back to Nigel's house, Jane was an accomplice in an episode of shoplifting, which fortunately went undetected, or at least unreported. She had never stolen anything before. The possibility hadn't crossed her mind, but she was disoriented. As they drove along, Patti had pulled the elastic bands off her two bunches so that her hair blew crazily into all their faces, whipping across her vision. The strands of it were like a hallucination, distracting her from her larger bewilderment. At half sitting on Patti's knee, feeling Daniel ease his arm around her once on a straight stretch when he wasn't changing gears, Nigel's father had chosen a manual gearbox on the mgc. It's all right, Daniel had said. Don't worry about us. We're not all bad. I like her, patty commented. She doesn't talk too much. The oddest thing was that she wasn't worrying, although she knew she ought to be, especially when they made plans to keep the shopkeeper talking while she, Jane, slipped bottles of whatever alcohol she could get into their canvas haversack. He keeps it in a little side room, daniel said. You don't look as if you drink, so no one will suspect you. If they do, you can cry and say that we kidnapped you and made you do it. Jane didn't recognize the shop, though it was only a few miles from her home. Her mother had most of their groceries delivered, and anyway Mrs. Allsop would never have shopped in such a dimly lit cellar smelling place. Its windows hung with conflicting advertisements for cigarettes and tea, its shelves crowded promiscuously with faded tins, china souvenirs, regiments of sweet jars, a naked fat ham and orange breadcrumbs jostled for space on the counter with packets of parsley sauce and marked down broken biscuits. Repulsion at the ham's sickly flesh smell fueled Jane's impossible swift acts. She chose the cool bottles by feel in the dark little off license nook beyond a curtain of plastic strips because she could hardly see in there. Her eyes were dazzled from the light outside. Her heart thudded as violently as an engine stalling, but her hands were sure the boys paid for the sliced bread and tomatoes and tin of tuna they bought, thanking the shopkeeper loftily as they left. Jane sat in the car again between them, her trophies chinking on her knee. Isn't she good? Paddy said when they'd driven on and he'd excavated in the haversack, finding dusty Matthias Rose and Johnny Walker and several bottles of barley wine. She's a natural, daniel said. Now she belongs to us, patti said. We've got the dirt on her. Jane sought in the recesses of her consciousness the remorse that she knew ought to be lying in wait, that poor honest shopkeeper struggling to make a living. But it was as if all recesses had flattened out for the moment into a balmy infinite presence amid the sunshine and the gusts and swirls of wind. As the MGC swerved around Ben's, her consciousness was filled to the brim with her contact, astonishing because she was so virgin, in contacts with the boy's warm bodies lapping against her. She didn't even much mind Nigel's chin resting showily on her shoulder when he leaned over from his perch in the back. It had never occurred to her until now that the masculine, a suspect realm of deep voiced otherness, beard growth, fact, authority, and bathroom smells could be so intimately important in relation to herself. It seemed as improbable as two planets colliding now below the surface of the moment. She began to wait in secret, patiently, because her self discoveries were very new for Daniel's hand to jostle her thigh when he changed gears. She stole long gazes at him from behind the blinding strands of her hair, drinking in whatever it was in his looks that tugged at her so exquisitely. His head was poised on a slight frame in a way that reminded her of the poet's bust. She couldn't remember which poet on the piano at home which nobody played. His dark hair fell in floppy curls like the poet's sculpted ones, and his face had the same keen forward slanting lines. A fine dimple of skin puckering beside his mouth when he gave one of his rare quick smiles was a fatal last touch. Jane thought he was as handsome as a rock star or a film star, only more so because they flaunted crudely from their posters, whereas Daniel held something back. Nigel had a bottle opener on his keyring and they started on the barley wine after a discussion with Jane over whether she drank alcohol or not. I don't, she owned up candidly, but I might start. Daniel, solicitous, said that they mustn't give her too much, just a little sip at a time. They watched her face to see whether she liked the taste and laughed delightedly when it was obvious that she didn't, although she bravely insisted, I do, I do quite like it, as entertained as if they were feeding beer to a puppy. If Nigel's parents house had been anything like Jane's, she might have felt a pang of recollection when they arrived. But although it was secluded behind trees like hers and with the same defensive air of privilege, it was modern, all glass rectangles and slats of unpainted reddish wood. Somehow it explained Nigel, Jane thought, his angular unease and his gape, as if he were blinking in reflected light. Daniel braked on the gravel with a flourish and they got out of the car, straggling in through the front of the house and then out again at the back almost immediately, as if the bright indoors were an optical trick, not absorbent like the gloomy interiors Jane knew, which were dense with family history. A terrace at the back overlooked a garden landscaped in Japanese style with artful quartz boulders and ginkgo and Japanese maple trees. The boy seemed unsure for a moment what to do next. Jane knew from observing her mother that it was her role to fill awkward silences. What a shame I didn't bring my costume, she remarked. Conversationally looking at the pool, which Nigel was supposed to skim of its flotsam of twigs and leaves and dead insects every day, but hadn't what costume? Bo Peep, nigel said. This isn't a fancy dress party. He'd become waspish at the sight of the awful mess in the house. Torn between bravado and responsibility, he thought about his mother toying with the idea of washing dishes. He put it aside for later. My swimming costume, jane explained. Transplanted out of her familiar world, she seemed to find it easier to be dignified, as if she were moving inside a different skin, sleeker. Perhaps it was partly the barley wine she was able to penetrate, too, into the other's motives and relations. Grown up insight seemed to come not through gradual accretion but all at once. Daniel had power over the other two, she saw, just as he had power over her, though not through any conscious exertion of his will. They tracked his movements and his moods. If he was at ease, then they could be too. And yet he wasn't tyrannical, was only either pleasant or absent if he was abstracted. You felt the curse of your failure to interest him. Patti, who picked up a book to read as soon as he sat down on the terrace, didn't care as much as she and Nigel did, because he was cleverer. He was more detached, with reserves of irony. Now Daniel suggested coffee and sandwiches a as if this were a summer lunch party and not the tail end of an all nighter. The idea made everyone carefree. They discovered they were starving. Nigel hunted in the fridge for butter. If Jane had been older, she might have taken the opportunity to parade her femininity in the kitchen, but it didn't occur to her. Daniel and Nigel made tuna and salad cream sandwiches. She waited with an air of calm entitlement for hers to be brought to her while they ate. They catechised her on her opinions and were delighted to find that she believed in God and expected to vote Conservative when she was 21. Not just because my parents do, she insisted. I shall read the newspapers and make up my own mind. They were sitting on the terrace in Nigel's mother's striking wicker chairs. Jane's was a shallow cone set in a cast iron frame. Daniel was cross legged on the terrace beside her. She said that it was only fair for everyone to do a day's hard work and that people who criticized England all the time should try going to live somewhere else, and that she hated cruelty to animals. All the time she was talking, Daniel was doing something to her feet which dangled from the rim of the wicker cone, tickling them with a grass seed head, pulling the grass backward and forward between her toes where they were calloused from the thong on her flip flops. Jane was suffused with a sensation that was mingled ecstasy and shame. Shame because she hated her feet, prosaic flat slabs that took an extra wide fitting. Daniel's feet. He had been barefoot even when he was driving, and in the shop the shopkeeper had stared were brown and finely complex, high arched with wire taut tendons curling dark hairs tufting each toe. Do you think we're layabouts and social parasites? Patti asked her. I thought that perhaps you were students, she said shyly. I sort of know the type because my brother's trying for Oxford. Daniel said that he'd rather not talk about Oxford. His career there hangs in the balance between brilliance and disaster, Patti explained on his behalf. Daniel's senior tutor had warned that after certain brushes with the drug squad, he might not be allowed to sit his finals. And he doesn't know whether he cares. I think we should swim, daniel suggested. It's just too fucking hot. Jane blushed. His word was so forbidden that she hardly knew how she knew it. The girls never used it at school. It was an entrance, glowering with darkness into the cave of things unknown to her. But I haven't got a costume, she said. Bo Peeps lost her sheep, nigel mocked. Swim nude, daniel suggested. No one can see except us, and we like you. She looked around at them all to see if they were joking, then drew her breath in testingly, as you did on the brink of plunging into water. Inspired, and she had been sipping barley wine again with her sandwich just then. She was capable of anything. Tipping herself out of the cone chair, she took hold of the hem of her dress to pull it up over her head while the boys watched. It was as easy as playing with Robin in the old days, she thought, in the garden with the paddling pole. She was aware uninhibitedly of her young body beneath the dress in its knickers and bra. She would keep those on, perhaps, but at that very moment another girl appeared from inside the house, astonishing them all. She came through the sliding doors carrying a glass of fizzing drink, ceremoniously stirring the ice cubes and sucking at it through a plastic bendy straw. Slender and disdainful, with a long narrow nose and slightly squinting eyes, she was wrapped in a sarong. Her chestnut dark hair fell well below her waist in symmetrical waves, as if it had been tied in plaits and then undone. She can borrow my old swimsuit if she wants, the girl said with an air of unmasking male proceedings. Beneath her dignity. Nigel had leaped out of his chair, a suspended wicker basket which went swinging wildly. Fiona, when did you get here? How did you get in? What on earth are you drinking? Vodka, fiona said. And I got in while you were out because you actually failed to lock anything up behind you, you idiot. I mean, God, Nyge, what if I'd been a burglar or something? Then I was fast asleep until you lots started banging around down here and this pulls a disgusting swamp. Weren't you supposed to do something about it? Hi, Daniel and Patti. Hi. What's your name? My cossey's in a drawer in the chest in my bedroom if you want it. Fiona was Nigel's younger sister, aged 18 and returned by herself from the south of France on her way to drama school. She chose to sit with her drink under an orange umbrella at the far end of the terrace, as if she were semi detached from her brother and his friends. Jane, with her new intuitiveness, guessed that she sat there because it meant that she was in Daniel's sightlines the whole time she was yawning and stretching and pretending to sunbathe, showing off her legs through the slit in her sarong. Jane borrowed Fiona's swimming costume, which was tight on her, and powered up and down the short pool with her strong crawl face turning into the water, then out to breathe as she'd been taught all the accumulated rubbish, leathery wet leaves, sodden drowned butterflies and Daddy long legs, an empty cigarette pack bobbing against her breasts and lips and knees as she swam. No one joined her in the pool. Jane had hardly expected them to. She had accepted immediately the justice of her defeat right at the moment that she'd had all the boys eyes on her by the older, prettier, more more sophisticated girl. Still the word woe begone nudged at her from a poem she'd read at school. When she got out, she would ask Patti to drive her to a bus stop, then to lend her the money for her bus fare home. She would ask for his address so that she could repay him out of her pocket money because she could never tell her parents where she'd been. Heaving herself out at the side of the pool, she she stood streaming water, too shy to ask for a towel. The others were planning a visit to the pub in the nearest village. Jane had never been inside a pub in her life, but she thought there was bound to be a bus stop somewhere in the village. Come on, let's go, fiona said impatiently. There was only half an hour until afternoon closing time. We can't all get in the car, nigel said, worrying. We can if we hold on tight. It'll be a scream, Paddy. Come on. Obediently, Paddy stood up, stuffing his book into his back pocket. It was Hermann Hess's Steppenwolf. He went to look for shoes. Fiona was aware suddenly of Jane. Oh God, she's still got that costume on. Can't you just put your dress on over the top? Jane looked down mutely at herself, still dripping. Daniel hadn't moved from where he was spread eagled now in a deck chair. He had been watching Jane's steady stroke in the pool, how she submitted to the rhythm of it and forgot herself, forgot to wonder whether they were looking at her or not. He had felt, while he watched that he was seeing deeply into her raw sensibility, fatalistic, acutely responsive, open to anything. He was aware all the time, of course, of Fiona's maneuvering to make him notice her. There was a bit of past history between them which he was wary of reviving, not wanting her to get it into her head that she had any rights of possession over him anyway. Her blase, bossy voice was grating on him this afternoon. Her displays of sophistication seemed childish, and he was unmoved by the skinny brown stomach flashing at him so insistently from above the sarong. You go ahead, he said. Jane has to change. I'll wait and walk down with her. We'll catch up. Fiona couldn't hide the sour disappointment in her face, but she had staked too much, too noisily on her desperate need for the pub to back down. Now Jane looked anxiously from one to the other. I don't mind, she said. You don't have to wait for me. What are you up to, Daniel? Fiona laughed ungraciously. Daniel kept his eyes closed against the sun while the others quarreled. Getting ready, Jane went inside to change when he heard the car receding on the road. He followed her in, confused at first. In the interior patchwork of light and shadows after the glare outdoors, he stood listening at the bottom of the open tread staircase, his breath barely stirring the bright dust motes in their circling. The house was as perfectly quiet as if it were empty, yet he was aware of the girl standing somewhere upstairs, equally still, listening for him. The moment seemed eloquent. As he put his foot on the bottom step and started up, breaking into the peace. He found Jane In Fiona's room, where she'd left her dress. She was still in the wet costume, although she'd pulled down the blind out of modesty so that he saw her waiting in a pink half light. She'd been afraid suddenly to be naked in case he came looking for her. His mouth, when he kissed her, her first ever kiss, seemed scalding because her mouth was cold from the water and from fear. She was cold and clammy all over. When Daniel tried to peel off the sodden swimming costume, it knotted itself around her in a rubbery clinging rope and she had to help rolling it and dragging at it. They left it where it lay when she kicked it off, and its wetness soaked into Fiona's red rug. Fiona found the wet patch on her rug later and guessed immediately. She had intuitions too, the story behind it. She thought for one outraged moment that they'd actually done it on her bed. But her bed was intact, thank God for that at least. Daniel must have taken Jane into the spare room where he and Patti were staying. By now it was late afternoon and Jane was in a phone box in the village, ringing home. Nigel didn't want them using the phone at the house in case his parents complained about the bill. Daniel waited for her, not interested in her difficulties over what to say. He was smoking, leaning back against the phone box, head tilted to look up at the sky, which was still immaculately blue, just beginning to pale even while Jane spoke to her mother in the ordinary words that seemed to flow convincingly, as if from her old self, her new self pressed her free palm on the rectangle of thick glass against which, on the other side, Daniel in his blue shirt was also miraculously pressed, oblivious of her touch, and she knew now the long brown nakedness of his back under the shirt with its ripple of vertebrae forever afterward. The smell inside one of those old red phone boxes, dank and mushroomy and faintly uranous, could turn Jane's heart over in erotic excitement. Her mother's mild voice was in her ear, incurious. They had begun to wonder where she was. I told Daddy you'd probably gone off to play ping pong somewhere. I'm at Alison's, jane said. Allison Leffenu. You remember? From Junior Orchestra. French horn. Can I stay the night? It doesn't matter about toothbrush and pajamas. Her mom says I can borrow them. Mrs. Allsopp, blessedly vague, sent her love to Mrs. Leffanu. The Lefanoos live out at Headley, don't they? You didn't walk all that way. I was on my way down to the village and they drove past. I just got in, Jane was thinking. Will I ever see my home again? It seemed unlikely. Don't be a nuisance, her mother said. Eat whatever they put in front of you, even if it's cauliflower. Now they all sat talking on the terrace in an evening light as thick as syrup. Clouds of insects swarmed above the Japanese water features. Swallows slipped close along the earth. A blackbird sang. They were drinking Jane's shoplifted wine and her whiskey. Then the boys started messing around with a needle and little glass vials of methedrine, which Paddy fetched from his room. Don't look. It's not for nice girls, daniel said to Jane, and so obediently she closed her eyes. The boy's huddle over, this ceremony, so intimate, taken so seriously, frightened Fiona and made her even more furious than the wet patch on her rug. She went inside and crashed around the house, effecting a transformation, washing dishes, scrubbing the stove and the kitchen floor, throwing the windows wide open, emptying ashtrays. With a clang of the dustbin lid. She shook out the mats from the sitting room, cracking them like whips over the boys heads on the terrace. Gradually, as she worked, the resentment slipped out of her and her mood changed. She began to enjoy her own strength and to feel serenely indifferent to the others. If her brother's friends wanted to get doped up, why should she care? She started to think about drama school. Later she warmed up some tinned soup and brought out cheese and crackers for them all. By this time it was dark and the only light came from the lamps she turned on. Inside, Daniel was trying to explain the idea of the soul as it was understood in the Hindu Vedanta. His words were punctuated by the clonk of the bamboo shishi odousi in the garden, which filled up with water, then tipped and emptied, falling back against its rock. What he wanted to describe was how the soul's origins were in wholeness and light, but on its entry into the world it took on the filth of violence and corruption. The soul, trapped in the individual, forgot its home and despaired. But despair was only another illusion to be stripped away. He wanted to say that revolution was a kind of cleansing that conferred its own immortality in a perpetual present. Art had to be revolutionary or it would die in time. He believed as he spoke that he was brilliantly eloquent, but in truth he was rambling incoherently, Patti getting the gist of it quoted poetry in an ironic heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. Senor Keats, I do believe, nigel said. Oh, that's the poet, jane said. We have his bust at home on the piano, cross legged on a cushion at Daniel's feet. She was leaning lightly against him, as if she could ground the tension quivering in his right foot, which was balanced across his left knee. His intelligence seemed as ceaseless as an engine working. She felt exceptionally attuned to the boys, voices rising through earnestness to mockery and back again, although she hardly heard their words, only what ran underneath, a current of strain, a jostling of contest and display. She saw how Nigel tried to match the other two and failed, and how he suffered, yearning for Daniel's approval. Meanwhile her own new knowledge filled her up, not in the form of thoughts but as sensations overwhelming her. Experience in the strange bed that afternoon hadn't been joyous. There'd been some swooning, obliterating pleasure in the preliminaries, but then too much anxiety in the clumsy arrangements which she had known from her biology lessons would follow. Remembering it all now, though, she was sick with desire and longed for the time to come when Daniel would touch her again. When they did go to bed, however, Daniel was suddenly exhausted. Stoop backed, he crawled between the sheets in his underpants, turning away from Jane toward the window. Watch over me was the last thing he mumbled, and so she kept vigil faithfully for hours in the quiet of the night, presiding over the mystery of her changed life, adjusting her body against the peremptory curve of his turned back and legs in the narrow single bed. But at last she couldn't help it. She fell asleep herself, and when she awoke in the morning, Daniel was gone. After a while, when he didn't come back, she put on her underclothes and her dress and set off around the house in search of him. Downstairs she smelled Patti's sweat and saw the tousled mess of his hair poking from the top of his sleeping bag on the sofa in the lounge. Nigel was making a racket outside with the sliding door of the garage in search of the net for the swimming pool. Jane climbed upstairs again. Nigel's parents bedroom was at the front of the house, opening off the landing ahead of her. The door was ajar and Jane stepped soundlessly inside. It was a beautiful room like nothing she'd ever seen before, with a pale wood floor and plain white walls, creamy sheepskin rugs, fresh sunlight pouring through windows all along. Its length was reflected in the mirrored doors of the built in wardrobes, the curtains in some kind of rough white translucent linen, were cut too long for the windows, and the cloth fell in heaps on the floor. A huge bed seemed to be all white sheets and no blankets. Jane had never seen a duvet before. In the bed, with the duvet kicked to their feet, Daniel and Fiona lay naked and asleep, facing away from each other, their slim tanned legs tangled together. Jane, who had done the Greeks in history, thought that they looked like young warriors in a classical scene, fallen in the place where they had been wrestling. She withdrew from the room without waking them as quietly as she had come in. Nigel, rather the worse for wear in his pajama bottoms, was smoking and skimming the pool, dumping the rubbish in a soaking heap beside him. He watched. When Jane came to stand at the pool's brink, she stared in with dry, hot eyes. So now you know, he said, but she repudiated his offer of companionship in her unrequited love. Her experience was not like anyone else's. She asked only if he would drive her home, and he said he'd get the car out as soon as he'd finished with the pool. I'd like to go now, she said crisply, sounding like her mother, if you don't mind. On the way back they hardly spoke, except when Nigel asked for directions. As they drew near the house, Jane forgot in her absorption to notice the way they'd come so that she never afterward knew where she'd been. And she never saw Nigel's house again, or any of the boys. Fiona once, perhaps, at a party. He dropped her off at the bottom of the drive. It was still quite early in the morningonly 9:00. Jane stared around her as if she'd never seen the place before, as if it were more mysterious than anywhere she'd been. The scuffed dirt at the edge of the road, the old mossy gate posts, blackbirds flitting in the dead leaves at the bottom of the hedge, the hard lime yellow fruits in the hedge apple tree, her own footprints from the day before, intact in the dust, the jokery paddle left where she had dropped it. Her mother didn't seem surprised to see her so early. Did you have a nice time, dear? Jane said that she'd had fun, but that afternoon she suffered with pain in her stomach and bloating. What exactly did you eat at the Lefanoo's? And the next day her period came rather copiously and early, which ought to have been a relief but wasn't because it hadn't occurred to her until then, despite the biology lessons, that she could be pregnant. The weather changed too, so it was all right for her to curl up under her eider down, hugging a hot water bottle to her stomach, reading her chalet schoolbooks, and looking up from time to time at the rain running down the window. Her mother bought her tea with two sugars and aspirin. Jane never told anyone what had happened to her, not even years later, the boyfriend who became her husband and who might have wondered. And in a way she never assimilated the experience, though she didn't forget it either. As an adult, she took on board all the usual Tory disapproval toward drugs and juvenile delinquency and under sex, and never saw any implications for her own case. She was fearful for her own daughters, as normal mothers were, without connecting her fears to anything that had happened to her. Her early initiations stayed in a sealed compartment in her thoughts and seemed to have no effects, no consequences. Jane and her husband divorced in their mid-50s, and her friends advised her to have cancelling. The counselor was a nice, intelligent woman. Actually, she couldn't help feeling exasperated by Jane and her heavy, patient sorrows, her expensive clothes, her lack of imagination, the silk scarf thrown girlishly over one shoulder. Of course, she was much too professional to let this show. Jane confessed that she had always felt as if she were on the wrong side of a barrier cutting her off from the real life she was meant to be living. What's it like, then, real life on the other side? Haltingly, Jane described a summer day beside a swimming pool, a long sunlit room with white walls and a white bed. A breeze is blowing. Long white curtains are dragged sluggishly backward and forward on a pale wood floor. These women's fantasies, the counselor thought, have more to do with interior decor than with repressed desires. Then Jane got into her stride and the narrative became more interesting. A boy and a girl, she said, are naked, asleep in the bed. I'm curled on a rug on the floor beside them. The boy turns over and is sleep, flings out his arm and his hand dangles to the floor. I think he's seeking out the cool down there under the bed. I move carefully on my rug so as not to wake him. I move so that his hand is touching me. That's more like it, the counselor thought. That's something. As for Daniel, well, he trained as a lawyer after he'd finished his literature degree. He got out of the drink and the drugs not long after university. Paddy never did. He died. Daniel lives in Zurich now with a second wife whom he loves very much. And occasionally, when he's bored with his respectable Swiss friends and wants to shock them, he tells stories about his wild youth. He's an international human rights law. He's a force for good. He's a good husband and father too, more dedicated because of the wildness in his past. Of course, he's ambitious and likes power. He can just about remember Nigel in Nigel's parents house that summer, and Fiona. They were together off and on for a few months afterward. But he has no memory at all of Jane. Even if by some miracle he ever met her and she recognized him and told him the whole story, which she would never do, it wouldn't bring anything back. It isn't only that the drink and the drugs made him forget. He's had too much happiness in his life since. Too much experience. He's lost that fine tuning that could hold onto the smell of the ham and the offlicense, the wetness of the swimming costume, the girl's cold skin and her naivete, her extraordinary offer of herself without reserve. The curtain sweeping the floor in the morning light. It's all just gone.
- [49:50]
Debra Treisman
That was Aisha Gul Savaj reading An Abduction by Tessa Hadley. The story appeared in the New Yorker in July of 2012 and was included in Hadley's collection Bad Dreams and Other Stories, which was published by Harper Collins in 2017. So Aishugal, let's start with the first line of the story. Jane Alsop was abducted when she was 15 and nobody noticed. What does that line do? What does it tell us? I'm Nomi Frye. I'm Vincent Cunningham. I'm Alex Schwartz and we are Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. Guys, what do we do on the show every week? We look into the startling maw of our culture and try to figure something out. That's right. We take something that's going on in the culture now. Maybe it's a movie, maybe it's a book, maybe it's just kind of a trend that we see floating in the ether and we expand it across culture as kind of a pattern or a template. We talked about the midlife crisis starting with a new book by Miranda July. But then we kind of ended up talking about Dante's Inferno. You know, we talked about Kate Middleton, her so called disappearance and from that we moved into right wing conspiracy theories. Alex basically promised to explain to me why everybody likes the Beatles. You know, we've also noticed that advice is everywhere. Advice columns, advice giving. And we kind of Want to look at why? Join us on Critics at Large from the New Yorker. New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [51:22]
Aishagal Savage
Well, you wonder immediately, well, how was she abducted and how dramatic was it exactly? But then the no one noticed is it's a lot more about Jane and the fact that this great drama of her life wasn't remarked upon. And we immediately feel something about her. I think what the no one noticed.
- [51:44]
Debra Treisman
It also, I guess it sets up a certain fear that maybe keeps us waiting for this form of violence that we're expecting because of this word abduction.
- [51:55]
Aishagal Savage
Right. I mean, it's the engine for the story. Right. That it tells us this is what you're going to be reading. We think we're reading for the abduction and it sort of pretty soon becomes clear that she's not in. In too much danger. But then the no one noticing or this fact of Jane being unnoticeable, I think becomes the real focus, the real essence of the story.
- [52:20]
Debra Treisman
Yeah, we begin it with Jane in this kind of, I suppose she spends all of the story in this kind of in between world, but at the beginning, she's in between ages. You know, she's early adolescence. She's not a child anymore. She's not interested in, you know, playing with teacups with her little sister. She's not accepted as a youth. You know, Robin shoves her out of his room. She's also not like the other girls who are putting on makeup and having crushes. She's just in this very finite period of time where she's not one thing and not the other and she doesn't really have an identity.
- [53:01]
Aishagal Savage
Right, right. Well, this is sort of the surprise of the story for me, too, that she's in between phases and it is a coming of age story. And perhaps, you know, what happens to her on this afternoon and evening is when she sort of moves from one thing to another and crosses that threshold. And it's, you know, a story of transformation in some ways, but it also isn't. It doesn't play out in the ways that we expect it to. And there isn't such a great transformation, I guess, that happens.
- [53:35]
Debra Treisman
Well, there's this moment of transformation and all of these things happen, but then when she goes home, it disappears. Right. She goes right back into having her mother sort of tuck her in with a cup of tea and reading her chalet school books. So there's the center of a story that's a great transformative time and then it's undone.
- [53:59]
Aishagal Savage
Exactly. I mean, it's like the title. It's so dramatic. And then. Yet the drama dissipates very, very quickly. And Jane's great adventure, maybe the greatest adventure of her life, the moment she returns home. So much has changed for her, and yet she's the same. And then I think, you know, the greater surprise of the story is then we get to find out what this transformation meant for Jane's longer life, what it meant for her adulthood. And the first time I read it, I thought, okay, she was affected by this for the rest of her life, but not really. Right. She did grow up to become the type of person her parents would have expected her to become.
- [54:41]
Debra Treisman
Right. And that she expected herself to become. You know, she tells the Voice that she's assuming she'll grow up and vote conservatively like her parents do.
- [54:50]
Aishagal Savage
Right. And there is also, you think that it's going to be a story about Jane recognizing herself more clearly because there's that beautiful passage at the beginning when the boys see her. And we have to step out of Jane's point of view because she isn't able to see her in the way that the boys can see her, that she looks beautiful in that moment. And I think maybe she's going to gain that sort of insight about herself by the end of the story with what has happened to her. But I don't think she gains that insight either, that she can be beautiful, that she can be sort of mysterious and striking.
- [55:31]
Debra Treisman
Yeah. We start the story with sort of all of these dismissive slights that her family.
- [55:41]
Aishagal Savage
Right.
- [55:41]
Debra Treisman
Her family does to her. When we get that it's almost Freudian moment, when her father, who's ostensibly her ally in the family, yells at her and insults her, calls her stupid. Her sister's friends call her ugly. Her grandmother calls her plain. The whole family calls her pudgy. We get all of these insults and we see that that's to a great extent formed Jane's self image. So she's not gonna be able to see how she looks to the boys at all.
- [56:14]
Aishagal Savage
Right. There's something so tragic and so heartbreaking about the way she accepts these insults in such a good natured way. And she continues to as the story continues. And even at the end, she accepts. When Fiona arrives by the pool, she accepts that she's been defeated. And in the morning, she accepts that her heart has been broken, and that's it. And of course, then talking to the therapist in her 50s, she says she's waiting for this hand to touch her, but her role is, you know, like lying on the floor underneath them.
- [56:51]
Debra Treisman
Yeah. I mean, talk about Oedipal moments.
- [56:53]
Aishagal Savage
Yeah.
- [56:54]
Debra Treisman
They become the parents, in a sense. And she's the little child sort of curling up next to their bed, hoping they'll pet her. And it's all she asks for. You know, this is sort of her imaginary fantasy, in a sense, is simply to kind of maneuver her body in such a way that someone will touch it without trying to. Without meaning to.
- [57:21]
Aishagal Savage
Right. And then there are all of these moments, you know, regarding her body where she's so confident when she swims up and down the pool and she doesn't really care if anyone's watching her or she's not focused on being watched. And there's that moment where they say, well, why don't you just take off your clothes and swim? And she says, okay, I'll do it. And that sort of confidence I also find so surprising given how much she's internalized about what her family says about her.
- [57:53]
Debra Treisman
Yeah, yeah. I mean, what's interesting to me is that I. I don't know if I see it as confidence. Right. I mean, she jumps in the pool and goes swimming, oblivious to the others because Fiona has come out and one upped her. So it's almost like she's just given up. And it's also an innocence because she isn't yet really aware of her body. She's not really aware of attractiveness. She hasn't felt this kind of, you know, sexual urge before.
- [58:28]
Aishagal Savage
Right.
- [58:28]
Debra Treisman
She doesn't care if they're watching her or not. She's lost track of them.
- [58:34]
Aishagal Savage
Right. I mean, I guess, yes, innocence is a better way to put it, but just the fact that she's not self conscious and that innocence is so untainted. Like at the end when I was reading the story. And every time I read the story, I cry. Reading the last paragraph, I find it so touching, you know, the offer of herself.
- [58:55]
Debra Treisman
Yeah.
- [58:55]
Aishagal Savage
I mean, yes, confidence sounds a little cocky, but there is something self assured about it. That generosity is very pure. And that's why I think the purity I find quite robust.
- [59:14]
Debra Treisman
Yeah, I suppose it's fearless. Right?
- [59:18]
Aishagal Savage
Right.
- [59:18]
Debra Treisman
She doesn't even know what to fear. And what's amazing is that that quality is what actually attracts Daniel. You know, he becomes most interested in her when she is swimming and oblivious.
- [59:35]
Aishagal Savage
Right.
- [59:36]
Debra Treisman
He's interested in her ability to forget herself and go into her own world. And that's intriguing to him. Whereas Fiona's simping around and trying to show off her legs.
- [59:48]
Aishagal Savage
Right. And it seems to me that you know, at the end, Daniel's lost that moral quality, you know, of being able to recognize someone purely in focus and oblivious to what others think of them or how they might see them.
- [60:03]
Debra Treisman
Yeah.
- [60:04]
Aishagal Savage
It hasn't touched him in such a way that that purity, lack of self consciousness would have shaped them in any way. But there was a time in his life, you know, in his youth that he could recognize it.
- [60:16]
Debra Treisman
Yeah. And there was a time when she could feel it. So they've both. I mean, I'm sure we all do. We all lose that. Right. Maybe it's not so remarkable. We get older and we don't find that specialness in other people because as happened with Daniel, he's seen too much, he's had too much happiness, he's had too many good experiences to remember this one, which was insignificant to him relative to more recent times.
- [60:44]
Aishagal Savage
Right.
- [60:45]
Debra Treisman
Whereas Jane hasn't had more.
- [60:48]
Aishagal Savage
Right.
- [60:48]
Debra Treisman
It's interesting with Jane, you know, as you were saying, this abduction, it's so sequestered from her normal life. She goes back and she can't bring what she's learned into her life. It just remains out there in this little capsule of a 24 hour period.
- [61:09]
Aishagal Savage
Exactly. And somehow we're taught to think that if we're reading about an abduction and it's a short story, and it's called an Abduction, you know, short stories are about these moments when things, you know, change forever or things will never be the same again. And yet it doesn't change them or it doesn't change the course of life is so beautifully done and so surprising to me. And it does narratively. It shifts my expectations in a very original way.
- [61:41]
Debra Treisman
Yeah. You would expect to see the ramifications in life. And we do see the ramifications, but in Jane, the ramifications are that she has this thing she can't get past but can't digest. You know, she can't make it part of herself. So it's not so much that it changed her. It didn't change her because I suppose because she opened herself up to this. She was unafraid, she did offer herself and then immediately was shut down.
- [62:16]
Aishagal Savage
Right.
- [62:17]
Debra Treisman
Like, if Daniel had still been there in the morning and hadn't been with Fiona, it might have been quite different.
- [62:23]
Aishagal Savage
That might have changed her.
- [62:26]
Debra Treisman
Yeah. So I suppose I feel that the sadness of it is that indigestibility, you know, the sadness of it is not really that she finds him with another girl the next morning. The sadness is that she has this momentous experience. She learns a huge amount and Then can't really retain that or apply it to the rest of her life.
- [62:54]
Aishagal Savage
Right. That there's not enough room either in her life or in her imagination to do too much with it. And that's why it has this, like, very cramped little place in her mind underneath the bed where she seems to have been stuck for decades. And I think that is the sadness. But, you know, the fact that Daniel has had too much happiness. It sounds that he's had a good life. I mean, he has, but I sort of read that, as, you know, it's also mocking of Daniel in some ways, that there's something so shallow about his decent, nice life. So at the end, I'm like, you know what? Jane's had a good life, too, because she's held on. She's held on to that openness in some way. She still recognizes or remembers the girl who gave herself up.
- [63:53]
Debra Treisman
Yeah.
- [63:54]
Aishagal Savage
You know, without. Without reserve. Whereas Daniel now is, you know, showing off to his friends, and he's had so much happiness, he can barely distinguish one from the other.
- [64:06]
Debra Treisman
Yeah.
- [64:07]
Aishagal Savage
And that, to me, sounds a little depressing.
- [64:11]
Debra Treisman
Yeah. He's complicated at the end because also he's turned out to be far more moral than one expected. He's a human rights lawyer and a good father and all of these things, and yet he's no longer likable in the way that he was.
- [64:26]
Aishagal Savage
Right. Exactly. And also the same way that Jane has turned out exactly as we expected her to turn out. You know, she's turned out like her family. So has Daniel in some ways. You know, the way that his social class and his education would have him turn out. So there isn't a great surprise. And that's why I think all of the good things he's achieved in life sound a little flat. They sound a little ordinary. And there is something quite extraordinary about Jane's inner childishness.
- [65:02]
Debra Treisman
It's true. She's in a way, stunted.
- [65:04]
Aishagal Savage
Yeah.
- [65:06]
Debra Treisman
Sort of frozen in time at that moment because she can't. Because she can't absorb it. When the story came out, I did a Q and A with Tessa about it and just read a little bit from that. She said her imaginative, passionate life has been set going, and then it's thwarted abruptly. It isn't shame that thwarts her. One of the things I liked about my character as she came to me was that she isn't actually squeamish or guilty. She's a real sensualist, wide open to experience. Yet somehow, when she's prevented from progressing in her first experience of love. She doesn't have anywhere else to go. She can't make any kind of sense of the abduction in her ordinary life. She has no worldly narrative to fall back on. She doesn't read novels.
- [65:57]
Aishagal Savage
Tessa Adi said that.
- [65:58]
Debra Treisman
Yes, she doesn't read novels. They help. She's a kind of blank, really, partly because of her upbringing and partly because of her character, which is a very interesting one, Deeply impressionable and receptive, but not forceful, not able to carve its own way. So it's interesting. Tessa sees her as a full person. She's got this full understanding of this character.
- [66:23]
Aishagal Savage
Right. I mean, that's such an interesting reading. Again, I think this is what I was saying about Hadley's work that moves me so much is, you know, some sort of constant reckoning with the imagination. And the fact that she's talking about Jane's imagination as not having grown and flourished following this experience is spot on. Yeah. I don't think I would have worded it that way, but that feels exactly right.
- [66:57]
Debra Treisman
Yeah. Whereas Daniel has really lost something. You know, maybe Jane hasn't flourished. Daniel, at the time of the abduction, he's thinking about the soul. He's thinking about revolution. He's thinking about immortality. And these are, you know, maybe cliches for college students in the 60s, but he is porous like Jane. He's observant. He sees exactly what's happening, and he's attracted by Jane's lack of self consciousness. And I feel, as the last line of the story says, it's all gone. That's all gone when we catch a glimpse of him later in life.
- [67:38]
Aishagal Savage
And we also see him at a threshold in his life just because, you know, here's this young man who's doing a lot of drugs and reading mystics and thinking about the soul, and yet he might be kicked out of school or not be able to sit his finals. And then when we fast forward at the end to what became of his life, we basically understand that after that summer, he pulled himself together and he was like, okay, well, enough of that and back to business.
- [68:07]
Debra Treisman
Yeah, exactly.
- [68:08]
Aishagal Savage
And he sort of made a choice. Yeah, that's what I feel. And there's something so unremarkable about that choice, even though obviously, like, that's the choice one makes as an adult and has to say, okay, well, enough hypothetical discussions and, you know, musing about the soul like, we need to get jobs and we need to have good grades. That sounds so reasonable and the right thing to do and the thing you want your children to do. But in this story, I feel a bit disappointed, I think. Really, is that all the risk to Daniel's life? And as boring as Jane's is, I do still, at the end of the story, I do think there is greater depth to her and, you know, her life doesn't feel wasted.
- [68:51]
Debra Treisman
I feel that there's a greater potential for depth in her.
- [68:56]
Aishagal Savage
Right, right.
- [68:57]
Debra Treisman
Maybe she hasn't quite fulfilled at any other time.
- [69:01]
Aishagal Savage
Yes. And I think the fact that she doesn't read books, it's so funny she said that, you know, that it would have been fulfilled if she had read books, because then she would have had words for what happened.
- [69:11]
Debra Treisman
She would have had words. She would have been able to conceptualize it and make it part of her life, because she would have had other narratives that showed her similar things, you know.
- [69:23]
Aishagal Savage
Exactly.
- [69:25]
Debra Treisman
I want to just talk about the way Tessa tells the story, because there are some expository moments, especially that ending section, that are omniscient, and then we get a few flashes into other people's thoughts, like Daniel's, Fiona's, the therapists. But most of the story, we are in a very close third person seeing through Jane's eyes. How different do you think it would be if it were narrated in the first person? Maybe. Maybe it's not possible because Jane might not have had the words. That's. It's an issue, actually, in the story about words. We start with the cerulean, where these strange big words are sticking to her and she doesn't quite like it.
- [70:11]
Aishagal Savage
Yeah. She doesn't know what to do with them. And yet she also can't help these words come to offer themselves. You know, when Fiona arrives, she can't help but think we'll be gone.
- [70:25]
Debra Treisman
Yeah.
- [70:26]
Aishagal Savage
And. Well, exactly. I think in first person, it would have been very difficult because we wouldn't have had the sense of crossing as precariously as we have in this story between childhood and adulthood, or, you know, between not knowing yourself at all and knowing yourself just a little bit. She wouldn't have been able to tell us how the boys see her with her freckles or how Daniel sees her swimming in the pool. And the thing is, the moments when we hear Jane talk, they're all very funny, in part because, you know, she's trying to speak like her mother.
- [71:05]
Debra Treisman
Yeah.
- [71:05]
Aishagal Savage
And so we don't have a sense. You know, we see her in character when we're hearing her talk, and then, you know, also be so innocent when she says, oh, yes, that's the poet. One day. I love that line. But I guess, you know, she sounds a lot more childish.
- [71:24]
Debra Treisman
Yeah.
- [71:24]
Aishagal Savage
Than her inner potential, which I think, you know, first person would have made the story too funny. Too cute.
- [71:32]
Debra Treisman
Yeah.
- [71:33]
Aishagal Savage
Not enough depth.
- [71:34]
Debra Treisman
Yeah.
- [71:35]
Aishagal Savage
Not enough possibility for movement between those stages.
- [71:39]
Debra Treisman
There's a long stretch where everyone else speaks about her in the third person. When the boys pull up, they say, she'll do. I like her. She doesn't talk too much. Now she belongs to us. Even Fiona comes in saying she can borrow my old swimsuit if she wants. You know.
- [71:57]
Aishagal Savage
Yeah.
- [71:58]
Debra Treisman
Why?
- [71:59]
Aishagal Savage
It's so painful. Those parts are so painful. Even her little sister and her little sister's friends are bossing her around.
- [72:09]
Debra Treisman
She's ugly. Yeah.
- [72:10]
Aishagal Savage
You know, she's ugly. We don't want her. And she doesn't bother saying anything back to them. I think it's the sense that you feel, you know, you feel Jane is the type of person you can boss around or you can manipulate and you can make her do things and you know that she's not really noticed. So it's all of that.
- [72:32]
Debra Treisman
Yeah. Yeah.
- [72:33]
Aishagal Savage
I mean, it's all funny. I can imagine all of this happening with my older cousins. But then. And you know, the fact that she's not reacting and she's not getting angry or frustrated. The one time she does get very upset is her father shouting at her.
- [72:50]
Debra Treisman
Yeah.
- [72:51]
Aishagal Savage
And she's like, well, I was trying to do something good. And even the one person who's on my side shouted.
- [72:59]
Debra Treisman
Yeah. One feels a lot for Jane.
- [73:02]
Aishagal Savage
What do you think would have happened in the first person?
- [73:06]
Debra Treisman
I think she would have had to acquire a vocabulary she doesn't have. She wouldn't have been able to express any of it.
- [73:15]
Aishagal Savage
And what would have happened in her third person point of view if we didn't zoom out?
- [73:22]
Debra Treisman
Yeah. We wouldn't understand in the same way, would we? And I think it really is just her lack of words and her lack of perspective. Right. Because she doesn't read novels. She doesn't have a context in which to understand this experience. Which is why it remains this thing over there on the other side that she can't even access from her adult life. The one thing it does do and does have a lasting effect on is her sexuality, her understanding of desire. You know, we get that moment where for the rest of her life, whenever she's in a slightly urine smelling phone box, she's suddenly hit with desire.
- [74:04]
Aishagal Savage
Overcome with desire.
- [74:06]
Debra Treisman
Yeah. One thing we don't see at all in the story is what happens when Daniel does go to bed with Her. We don't know much about the sex except that it seemed sort of amazing in the beginning, and then it got a bit clumsy because she didn't know what she was doing. And we get the gift of herself, the generosity of that at the end, but we don't. I think we very purposefully don't know what happens in the bedroom. Why do you think that choice was made?
- [74:39]
Aishagal Savage
I think just what we do have, it mimics how she would have thought about it as, you know, a whole bunch of, like, vague things happening. And it's so interesting because it is totally a story about not having the words and that she would have experienced this as, you know, a tangle of sensations, some painful, some pleasurable, and would not have had the vocabulary to talk about the individual stages. And also the experience would have come to her in sort of waves. Right. That she would have remembered one flash and then she would have remembered another flash, as opposed to see the whole thing from beginning to end, which is the way it's delivered to us. You know, that at first we know that they took off her swimsuit, and then sometime later we really know what happened. And then at the very end, you know, when she gets her period, we're told she hadn't feared that she could have been pregnant. It's almost like. Oh, it's almost like the reader is thinking in a Jane, like state. Oh, they had sex. Like that's what it's called. Right. As opposed to this, like, very confusing experience that she went through and she's now trying to untangle. And in comparison to that, actually, the phone booth desire is so surprising to me because I don't think even having thought about Jane and knowing her future, I don't think I would have said that that would be her sexual awakening, because it sounds, with her husband like she hasn't explored very much and they haven't really discussed anything. And he never inquires, you know. You know, I know you slept with someone. I'm not going to ask you who. And a lot has been left unexplored. And the fact that she still has this reflex of desire or awakening of desire is surprising.
- [76:46]
Debra Treisman
Yeah. It's also that moment in the phone box as a. It's almost like the fantasy where he's leaning on the phone box and she's putting her hand on the other side of the glass, almost touching his back, but he doesn't even realize it. It's kind of like that final moment where he doesn't, you know, in her fantasy, that he's Touching her without waking up. She's sort of touching him in a sense, on the floor by the bed.
- [77:15]
Aishagal Savage
Right, right.
- [77:17]
Debra Treisman
It's both pathetic and also enormously sensual.
- [77:23]
Aishagal Savage
It is. And there's something interesting because in both of those instances I almost push with my mind and I think, but go further. Like just push a little further. You know, imagine touching him or, you know, raise your hand or something. And she's so inactive and she just sort of. She just waits or she just rests in the present moment, which is both so patient and very sensual, but at the same time so mute.
- [78:05]
Debra Treisman
Yeah.
- [78:05]
Aishagal Savage
And I just want her to go a little further. And I guess, you know, she doesn't know how to. And she also doesn't quite know how to imagine, even in her 50s.
- [78:16]
Debra Treisman
Yeah. She just has a passivity almost like when she loses to Fiona, she's just resigned to losing. She's resigned to not being noticed. That's the way she's grown up.
- [78:29]
Aishagal Savage
Yeah. Except I guess that part where she lies to her mother so beautifully.
- [78:34]
Debra Treisman
She's very surprisingly good at it. She's never had to do it before. Exactly.
- [78:40]
Aishagal Savage
I mean, when she first of all, like in the. In the off license, when she puts all those bottles in the bag.
- [78:46]
Debra Treisman
Yeah.
- [78:46]
Aishagal Savage
And then afterwards she thinks that was surprising. And again, like the surprise of it is like the abduction. It's both surprising and nothing at all. She thinks, huh, Will I ever see my home again? I don't think so. It's so dramatic and she's so alright with this drama.
- [79:04]
Debra Treisman
It's like she's crossed over to another world. She thinks, okay, now this is the world I'm in. And she cannot bring those worlds together.
- [79:14]
Aishagal Savage
Yeah.
- [79:15]
Debra Treisman
But at that first moment of rejection, seeing him in bed with Fiona, she instantly, you know, goes down. I'd like to go home now, please, she says in her mother's voice, you know, and it's actually quite demanding, you know, come on, Nigel, get in the car and drive me.
- [79:33]
Aishagal Savage
Yep, yep, yep. Her. Her demand there is wonderful. The fact that she doesn't bow down to Nigel's schedule. And she says, no, I'd like to go now. You know what I also am very surprised by in that scene is Nigel saying, now you know.
- [79:50]
Debra Treisman
Yeah.
- [79:51]
Aishagal Savage
Because that's also an insight into Nigel. He's like, well, now, you know, you and I are the ones that are left out. They're the stars of the show. And now you know what the reality is.
- [80:05]
Debra Treisman
Now you know how thankless it is to want Daniel for sure.
- [80:09]
Aishagal Savage
Yeah.
- [80:09]
Debra Treisman
But also now you know, Sex now, you know, rejection now, you know, a lot of things.
- [80:16]
Aishagal Savage
Yeah. I think it's a very compassionate thing to say. Not maybe empathetic, but compassionate.
- [80:23]
Debra Treisman
Maybe. Yeah. I hadn't read it that way. I can see that. I can see that. But I thought it was just saying now, you know, you're just like me. You should give up this hope.
- [80:33]
Aishagal Savage
Yeah. I mean, basically saying, like, I understand.
- [80:36]
Debra Treisman
Right. Fellow feeling. Yeah.
- [80:38]
Aishagal Savage
Yeah. I'm not going to give you a hug, but I understand and I will. I'll put down the nets and drive you home now.
- [80:46]
Debra Treisman
Yeah. Poor Nigel. Well, unlike Patti, Patti is the worst off. He just never gets out of drugs and he dies.
- [80:55]
Aishagal Savage
Yeah. And, you know, again, because I read Daniel in such an ungenerous light because of his wonderful life, I almost think of Patty because of his bookishness and his intelligence, that he couldn't snap out of it and he couldn't snap into practicality and, you know. Yes. Like, the reality is that he was doing too much drugs, but that there was something, you know, flourishing. His imagination got the better of him is how I read it. Right.
- [81:27]
Debra Treisman
He just didn't have the control that Daniel has. Daniel has a lot of self control.
- [81:31]
Aishagal Savage
Yeah.
- [81:32]
Debra Treisman
And less passion, probably.
- [81:34]
Aishagal Savage
Right. Patti is such a. He's such a cool character in some ways when he makes these remarks like, you know, we're going to find the girls one by one, and I think we made a great pick. And then he's, you know, he's not unkind to her.
- [81:50]
Debra Treisman
No.
- [81:51]
Aishagal Savage
And he's not flirting with her either.
- [81:54]
Debra Treisman
No.
- [81:55]
Aishagal Savage
And he sort of understands that sometimes Daniel talks gibberish when he goes off, you know, talking about the spirit and immortality, and he lets him do his thing.
- [82:07]
Debra Treisman
Yeah. But it's a fairly common grouping with these three boys where there's the one who's sexually desired by every woman and the one who's just sort of smart sidekick, and then another one who throws in a more complicated longing.
- [82:27]
Aishagal Savage
Right.
- [82:28]
Debra Treisman
I mean, that's why they work as friends. Right, right, right.
- [82:31]
Aishagal Savage
Exactly. And also, you see why they work as friends that summer.
- [82:36]
Debra Treisman
Yeah.
- [82:37]
Aishagal Savage
And how they won't work as friends once they figured those things out about.
- [82:41]
Debra Treisman
Themselves because they're also on a cusp. It's not. They're not much older than Jane.
- [82:47]
Aishagal Savage
Exactly. Exactly. And that's, you know, that's also why in this very strange moment, Jane can join their group. I mean, it's so unlikely. Right. She's so young. She doesn't belong to their sort of group. And she's not Cool in any way. But it's this bizarre transformation they're all going through, and there isn't too much choice. And, you know, they haven't had too much happiness yet in life. And they say, okay, she'll do.
- [83:18]
Debra Treisman
Well, I guess, you know, having gone through, having to go through life, being known as the one who'll do. It's a sad fate, ultimately.
- [83:28]
Aishagal Savage
Right, right.
- [83:30]
Debra Treisman
And then we get this, you know, this closure, which is so, like, the beginning. Nobody noticed in the beginning, and at the end, it's all gone.
- [83:38]
Aishagal Savage
Yeah. And yet there was so much drama and there's so much yearning.
- [83:44]
Debra Treisman
And all for naught.
- [83:47]
Aishagal Savage
Right. And I think part of the reason the all for Naught works is because Hadley's so generous with detail and letting us see all of, you know, the boring summer day and all of the activities and, you know, bouncing the ball around. And that nothingness amounts to so much in its ordinariness.
- [84:14]
Debra Treisman
Poetry of the mundane. And ultimately, maybe it just comes down to what we said, that Jane didn't have the words for it.
- [84:22]
Aishagal Savage
Yeah. I'm going to remember this reading. I think that's a very wonderful way to think about it, and I think it applies to actually quite a lot of Tessa Hadley's stories, how words can shape one's understanding of oneself and also of, you know, events and of memory.
- [84:40]
Debra Treisman
Well, thank you so much, Aishigal.
- [84:42]
Aishagal Savage
Thank you, Deborah. This was a pleasure.
- [84:49]
Debra Treisman
Tessa Hadley, a recipient of the Wyndham Campbell Literature Prize, is the author of more than a dozen books of fiction, including the novels Late in the Day and Free Love, and the story collections Bad Dreams and Other Stories, and After the Funeral, which came out last year. She's been publishing fiction in the New Yorker since 2002. Aishtegul Savage has published three novels, Walking on the Ceiling, White on White, and the Anthropologist, and one nonfiction book, the Wilderness, an essay and memoir about the first 40 days of motherhood. A collection of stories, Long Distance, will come out next year. She's been publishing fiction in the New Yorker since 2019. You can download more than 200 previous episodes of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast or subscribe to the podcast for free in Apple Podcasts. On the Writer's Voice podcast, you can hear short stories from the magazine read by their authors. You can find the Writer's Voice and other New Yorker podcasts on your podcast app. Tell us what you thought of this program on our Facebook page or rate and review us in Apple Podcasts. This episode of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast was produced by Chloe Prosinos I'm Deborah Treisman. Thanks for listening. Hi, this is David Remnick and I'm pleased to share the news that I'm Not A Robot. A live action short film from the New Yorker's Screening Room series has been shortlisted for the Academy Awards. This thought provoking film grapples with questions that we can all relate to about identity and technology and what it means to be human in an increasingly digital world. I encourage you to watch I'm Not a Robot along with our full slate of documentary and narrative films@newyorker.com video.
- [86:43]
Aishagal Savage
From PRX.