Late in the Day

I'm not saying that the past was good, she went on, – or fair, or better, or anything. But nothing will ever be more beautiful than this, will it? It's surpassingly beautiful.

In the opening pages of Late in the Day, we are introduced to Christine and Alex in their London flat as they listen to classical music after dinner, a novel held but unread, a darkening sky contemplated out the window; the perfect vignette of privilege and repose (although even here, there are a few hints of cracks in the veneer: Alex chose the music without consultation, and Christine refuses to ask him what it is because “he took too much pleasure in knowing what she didn't know”). The phone rings and it is their friend Lydia, calling to inform them that her husband dropped dead at work – and the peaceful vignette is smashed apart. Christine thinks, “Unheard of for anything to harm Zachary. He was a rock, he was never ill. No, nothing so numb as a rock: striding cheerful giant with torrents of energy.” As Alex would later say, “The loss is so much more, we can't even...to take his death as yet more evidence of the supreme shitty law of life that takes away the best and uplifts the worst.” Kind and garrulous, rich and generous, patron and defender of the arts, it doesn't take the reader long to realise that Zachary was the linchpin that held this group together; not long to realise that their four lives had intertwined even further back than the dramatic opening had suggested. With Zachary gone, and Lydia helpless and numb, Christine and Alex invite her to stay with them for as long as needed – forcing decades-old undercurrents to bubble to the surface.

The book is divided into seven long chapters, and alternate between the present and the past. We learn that Christine and Lydia attended grammar school together (attracted to one another as the only two girls who regarded their elitist education with irony; reading The Communist Manifesto on lunch breaks and mocking the Founders Commemoration Day together), and that Alex and Zachary met at boarding school, where Alex's history as the son of a dissident Czech novelist made him just enough of an outcast for Zach's large patrician heart to embrace as a foundling. The foursome meet when the girls take a French course that the older Alex is teaching in college, and Lydia is immediately attracted to the brooding intellectual who seems to be the only man immune to her beauty and charm. Although she had initially tried to set Christine up with Alex's friend Zach, when Lydia – a queenly idler from modest roots who could both turn her critical thinking on and off and luxuriate in her own selfishness – learned that the fabulously wealthy man was actually interested in her, she scooped him up and they were soon married. Not long after, Alex – who had written one volume of poetry before disdaining his muse – went after Christine, and although she was afraid of “the force of his manner, his knowledge and inexorable critical judgment”, she also “felt the glow too, the golden good fortune of being chosen”. As Christine drops her PhD in English for a career as a painter, Alex decides to become a schoolteacher – which he is very good at, and which he finds fulfilling – Zach and Lydia move to NYC and home again, eventually opening an art gallery in a converted centuries old chapel, where Zach finds every opportunity to promote Christine's work. Each couple has a daughter of similar age, who have inherited an intriguing combination of their parents' traits, and Alex also has a son from his first marriage to an actress. I know I said I didn't want to give away too much of the plot, but this barely scratches the surface.

The point-of-view moves fluidly and omnisciently through the characters over time, but primarily, this feels like Christine's story, and she's the one I had the most empathy for. Always a conciliator, Christine is constantly explaining away Lydia's egotism as a charming trait, and whenever Alex makes one of his prickly intellectual pronouncements, Christine tries to smooth the situation with gentle irony – which nearly always leads to a massive fight. We see how, in the past, Zachary's presence was able to make things right in these situations, but with him gone in the present, everything is out of balance. I want to preserve here just one example of how Hadley interplays the past and present, with Christine's thoughts from today:

Long ago, when Isobel was a baby, Christine had fought Alex for her life, so that he would acknowledge that in the domain of the mind they were equals, separate as equals. She couldn't remember now why this had mattered so much, or where her appetite had come from for those long late-night sessions, prising away layer upon layer of resistance and falsity, confession matched with counter-confession.

And a scene from the past that undercuts everything that she now believes (even if she'll never know about it):

Chris' work, for instance, Zachary persisted, wanting to persuade his friend in this moment of openness between them. He wanted to open it wider: embrace the women inside their intimacy. – How has she been able to make her art so freely? It's poured out of her, hasn't it? Why hasn't she felt the heavy hand (of history) on her shoulder?

Alex looked startled, before a shutter fell across his expression, across some secret. It took him aback, Zachary saw, to have Christine's work invoked in the same scale as anything he, Alex, might have done. Zachary was startled too. He hadn't known that Alex didn't take his wife's work quite seriously: didn't, in their horrible old schoolboy phrase, really rate it. He must have only been kind, and condescending, and keeping a domestic peace, when he had acquiesced for all these years in seeming to rate it. The implications of Alex's mistake – Zachary was sure it was a mistake – seemed for a moment fairly tragic. And the night's happy mutuality deflated, each man was disappointed in the other. – As you say, Alex said drily, but with finality, as if it were the end of any discussion he wanted to have. – It pours out of her.

There is beautiful landscape writing (the part set in Venice was incredibly charming), relatable motivations, and big questions explored. Through music, literature, and painting, Hadley examines humanity through the lenses of art – it was uplifting to watch the widowed Lydia discard her usual pulp fiction reads for some nonfiction that showed her a “revelation of the framework underpinning things” and that set her mind afire with ideas and connections – and these passages felt natural and of the characters. I loved the dialogue, and the format, and the plot. I loved the whole thing.