It’s 1967, and the tendrils of the sexual revolution are reaching beyond the limits of London. Forty-year-old Phyllis Fischer is married to Roger, a senior civil servant in the Foreign Office. Phyllis is “pleased with her life” as a housewife, until Nicholas (Nicky), the twenty-something son of a family friend, comes for dinner one summer evening. An illicit kiss between the two rouses the desire buried beneath domesticity: “Under the placid surface of suburbia, something was unhinged.”
Free Love adds a Sixties twist to Anna Karenina. “If he won’t have me then I’ll die,” Phyllis thinks to herself. “Although she also knew that she wouldn’t really die, she’d go home and put macaroni cheese in the oven. And that would be worse.”
The heart wanting what it wants, despite the brain’s better judgment, is one of Hadley’s great themes. Lauded for elevating the “domestic novel” to literary fiction, her work often plots the shifting geometries of families (a May-to-December love triangle also figured in her 2007 novel The Master Bedroom). Love, of course, is never free. Besides having to swallow her jealousy when Nicky sleeps around, the cost is borne primarily by Phyllis’s children — 15-year-old Colette and nine-year-old Hugh — when she leaves home without a forwarding address.
The ensuing upheaval mimics the societal shifts around them. “What I want to write is politics,” Hadley once said. “Not big politics but small politics, the working out through individual lives of the outer realities.” Nicky’s anti-Vietnam stance challenges the views Phyllis has absorbed from Roger, who served in the second world war. When she makes her first foray to Nicky’s flat in the then-bohemian Ladbroke Grove, she had “never seen so many coloured faces before, anywhere in England”.
Phyllis understands “with a shock” that she can no longer rely on “the easy assurance of her class”. She gradually develops a friendship with Barbara, a Grenadian nurse. Denied the opportunity to pursue medical research, Barbara is instead assigned the worst jobs on the ward by her colleagues.
Phyllis’s freedom is juxtaposed to the choices Jean, Nicky’s mother, had when she felt stuck in her marriage 20 years before. Jean laments that “she’d allowed herself to submit to an outward order as if it mattered; now that order itself was crumbling anyway, and all the sacrifices made to it turned out to have been a sham”. The suppression of her desires led to suicidal ideation and “a spell in a rest home in the hills”.
By contrast, Colette, who is spurred to transform herself when no longer under Phyllis’s shadow, takes some inspiration from her bid for freedom. Having always assumed university was in her future — “a road stretching ahead down which she must inevitably plod” — Colette now “saw that she could choose something different, if only she knew how”. The men, too, are prisoners of prescribed paths: Hugh’s idyllic childhood is truncated when he follows his fate by matriculating at his father’s boarding school.
The driving force propelling Phyllis’s choices is less passion for Nicky than an aspiration to be free of the strictures of society. Revolutionary dreams remain unrealised even within the counterculture, however, let alone the world at large. The men in Nicky’s entourage — artists and hippies steeped in weed and ideology — are more interested in the idea of women’s liberation than liberated women. The dreams of the era are particularly poignant to read at a moment when Roe vs Wade is in jeopardy and structural racism persists. Sam, Phyllis’s black landlord, predicts that “when the white boys cut their long hair and went back to their careers, the blacks would still be left on the outside”.
Hadley has crafted an aesthetic that inspires trust, and the author’s free indirect style — informed, perhaps, by her dissertation on Henry James — allows us access to the characters’ inner lives. She is also a superb portraitist, rendering people with the tiniest of details. We grasp Nicky in an instant from his refusal to wear a tie “partly because ties symbolised a conformity he despised, and partly because he’d never mastered tying one” — having “shamefacedly” slunk to the school Matron whenever the knot came loose. The deftly deployed minutiae are often class signifiers: a world is contained in Phyllis’s dressing table, with its “cut-glass toiletry set and her bottles of L’Air du Temps and witch hazel and cleansing milk”.
Free Love is not, to my mind, the strongest of Hadley’s eight novels. It lacks the symmetry of The London Train (2011) and the devastatingly casual delivery of the plot twist — at once impossible and inevitable — of Late in the Day (2019).
In comparison, the denouement of Free Love, following the revelation of a family secret “as fatally twisted as a Greek drama”, feels rushed. No matter: a sumptuous stylist, Hadley is a writer for whom language trumps all else. Any publication of hers, whether of short or long fiction, is cause for celebration for the pure pleasure of the prose.
Free Love by Tessa Hadley Jonathan Cape, £16.99, 320 pages/HarperCollins, $26.99, 304 pages
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Free Love by Tessa Hadley — a fling at freedom
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