Excerpt from After the Funeral and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Later, their uncle Richard, the dentist, turned up to make sure they were all right, bringing leftover food that Nanna had sent from the reception—sandwiches and coleslaw and Madeira cake, also two servings of jelly with mandarin oranges set in it, for the little girls. The sisters felt a hostility to this uncle which wasn't rational, but based on their sessions in his terrible chair, equipped so exquisitely for torturing them. Now it was Richard's turn to be made uncomfortable. Clearly he didn't know where to look, in the face of his nieces and sister-in-law's predicament, and what he assumed were the excesses of their emotion. His brother's death was an embarrassment: brash and scene-stealing, he thought, like everything Philip had ever done. Not only that, but the black cocktail dress Marlene was wearing—it was the only black thing she'd got—was very low-cut; for the duration of the funeral, the girls had made sure she kept her cardigan buttoned over it. Richard was rather like Philip in appearance—tall and burly and sandy. As soon as Marlene saw him she lunged into his arms, breaking into hysterical weeping. Uneasily he extricated himself. —Now, come on, Marlene. You have to buck up, you know.

—But I've lost everything, she sobbed.

—Well, not everything. You've got your girls. You have to be brave for them.

—I can't be brave without Philip! I can't be!

—You have to look to the future.

—I don't want the future. I want Philip back! I should have thrown myself into his grave today! I wish I was dead too!

Impressed, the sisters exchanged glances, and Richard saw it.

—Isn't it time these girls were in bed? he said severely.

Then Lulu, too, burst loudly into tears, hiding her face against her mother's half-bare breasts, arms squeezed around Marlene's small waist so that she couldn't unfasten them. Richard was out of his depth. Only Charlotte could calm them all down. When he'd gone she looked in the Radio Times and found that at 9:25 on BBC1 there was an episode of one of their favourites, Ironside. They watched it while eating the ham sandwiches and crisps, snuggled together, as always for the telly, under a wool blanket on the sofa. Charlotte only just remembered not to exclaim, Isn't this cosy? Marlene used to put the blanket back in the spare room whenever their father was due home: but now there was no one, ever again, to stop them enjoying themselves. By the time Ironside was over Marlene was fast asleep, exhausted by sorrow, snoring lightly with her mouth open and her eyebrows, plucked to a thin line, raised quizzically. The girls crept into the kitchen; Lulu stood on tiptoe to see over the top of the kitchen counter, surveying what their uncle had brought them from the party.

—Nanna sent us jelly, Charlotte said. —In her special best glass dishes, for a treat.

Lulu was small like her mother, and her wide face was pink and creamy as an angel's in a painting, dark eyes set far apart under thick lashes, the mass of her dark-brown corkscrew curls shivering with impatient energy. She took one of the jelly dishes carefully in her two hands, lifted it up over her head, and—before Charlotte had time to grasp what she intended—let it fall deliberately on the tiled floor, where it smashed in a satisfactory splat of red jelly and orange segments. Shards of glass went skidding across the floor and under the cupboards; they heard their mother stirring in the sitting room, but knew she hadn't woken, because she would have called out to them. After a moment's frozen outrage, Charlotte stepped over the mess to smack her sister hard across the face. Charlotte was tall for her age and very thin, with her pale hair cut short like a boy's; her grey eyes were huge and their heavy lids, dropping over her expression like shutters, conveyed her burden of responsibility. As Lulu prepared to break out in wailing, Charlotte shook her urgently by the shoulders. —We have to clean this up, she said. —We'll tell them it was an accident; they're bound to forgive us, today of all days. But we can't ever be naughty again, now that Daddy's dead.

Excerpted from After the Funeral and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley. Copyright © 2023 by Tessa Hadley. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.