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

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

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

from the October 28th, 2019 issue of the magazine.

Hadley has published 10 books of fiction, including the story collections Married Love

and Bad Dreams and Other Stories, and the novel Late in the Day, which was published

earlier this year.

Now here's Tessa Hadley.

The Buntunting Club.

Serena was out in the garden in the early morning before her two sisters got up.

It was the best time.

Reflected off the estuary water, the light seemed a blonde powder sifted through the summer air onto grass that grew waist-high, its mauve seed heads heavy with dew that soaked her skirt. She dipped to wash her arms in it. Even her face, she was fanciful and ecstatic and she loved long grass.

Earth smells and the pungency of privet and balsam were still acute at this hour, unmingled.

The shadows were as bold as in a child's picture book,

Swifts and House Martins tracked across the pale sky overhead, shrilling in thrilled

anticipation. Everything was to come, this unknown day. The garden was so much more lovely now,

Serena thought, than in the past when it was scrupulously cared for.Her crimson rambler rose, unmoored from its trellis,

"'had flopped fatally forward into the grass,

"'where it bloomed copiously but mostly unseen.

"'Flower beds were knotty with convolvulus and bramble.

"'The dense hedge of Blackthorn and Holly

"'had grown too thick and high for her to see over the top.

...