A Card Trick, by Tessa Hadley

 SUMMARY

This is a capital story of the collection; with it, Tessa Hadley won the 2005 O. Henry award.

Gina, a 47-year-old scholar and writer, is revisiting Wing Lodge, the house where John Morrison, her favourite novelist, whose works she has deeply studied and about whom she has written a book, lived during the last and most productive years of his life.

There she remembers her holiday at her mother’s friend (or client), Mamie. Mamie has a glamorous family of three boys and a daughter. Although Mamie belongs to the high class, she and her children are natural, free and easy, frank, kind and welcoming; but they aren’t much into culture, literature and art, and haven’t gone to university, so their academic education is a bit limited; however, they aren’t silly and can have interesting conversations. In the other hand, Gina is very clever about these subjects, and she’s a very good student, but she’s socially clumsy and shy; moreover, she feels awkward in her body, because she’s tall and a bit plump.

There, in their house near the beach, she spent two weeks, but she didn’t go much to the beach, neither did she take part in their open-air entertainments; instead, she pretended to study to prepare her exams and spent most of the time alone in her room; but, when the family is away, she roams the house searching and prying and making herself comfortable with food, drink, cigarettes and lying on the sofa.

One day, believing she was alone at home, she discovers that Josh, the less glamorous of the brothers is at home. She had some feelings for him. Gina doesn’t know what to do and spends a lot of time shut in her room.

But the last day of her holiday there, she feels a lot more confident. One of the sons is in London, Mamie and two other children have gone to see some friends, and Tom is staying at home building houses of cards; as he cannot finish a difficult one, Gina offers to show him a card trick. The boy is astonished and enraptured at the trick. For Gina, this meeting is a kind of symbolic sexual encounter.

The next day, she went back home and never again met anybody of Mamie’s family. Afterward she will know that Mamie got divorced and, after some time, she died, and one of her sons also died drowned; so perhaps a glamorous family has also their misfortunes.

But now, as she remembers this fortnight in a coastal village, she isn’t that awkward 18-year-old girl any more: she’s a tall woman, perhaps not beautiful, but “statuesque”, who has had some success in her field and feels confident with her life and her body. In John Morrison’s house she gets emotional when she sees a manuscript with a scene that has been erased in the published book: a middle-aged woman, daughter of the man just dead in bed, declares her love to the doctor who has taken care of him until the last moment; the doctor, who is married, feels disgusted and, amazed, rejects her.

The end of the story is a bit mysterious. Something (and insect, the lady guide) calls her attention, and the memories of that holiday come back to her, and she regrets that isolate life of hers when she could cheat someone to be her friend. Maybe, as she’s now a public person, she can play tricks no more to anyone.

QUESTIONS

-Why Gina’s appearance is important for the plot?

-What is Wing Lodge? (Compare to Lamb House). Have you ever visited a house of a famous person? Do you like visiting museums? Somebody said museums were like churches: do you agree?

-What can you say about Mamie and her family?

-Is a friendship between people of very different social classes possible? Why do you think so?

-Do you follow a diet? For your health or for your body shape / weight? Do / did you trust your diet?

-What are A levels and S levels?

-Is it usual that rich people don’t go to university? Do you think everybody should go?

-Do you know who were Walter Gropius, Conrad, Ford, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, Mansfield, Pound?

-What kind of books do you imagine John Morrison wrote?

-What different talents (from the protagonist) did Mamie’s children have?

-Do you feel curiosity about how authors write? (I mean technical aspects: computer, pen, with music…) Do you know any singular case?

-What does “a Spartan boy carrying the fox under his shirt” refer to?

-What are “Honey” and “19”?

-Can you describe Tom?

-What do you know about “Derek and the Dominoes”?

-What good memories do you have about your holidays?

-“It was her mother fault”. What do you think of your parents’ responsibilities for our successes and failures?

-“It feels more sympathetic”. What can this mean when talking about a pack of cards?

-What do you think it’s the best way to break the ice in an embarrassing situation? For instance: “Charming day, isn’t it?” “Pray, don’t talk about the weather. Whenever people talk about the weather, I always feel they mean something else.”

-Do you know an easy card trick?

-What is it the meaning of the card trick for Gina’s maturing?

-How did Gina change over the years?

-What kind of novel was “Winter’s Day”?

-What books did made you cry?

-At the end, who is the victim in this sentence: so that your victim wouldn’t be able to put a card down wrong?

 

VOCABULARY

clothes-wise, Laura Ashley dress, pinafore, hair slide, toppling, glass-topped wicker table, raid, S level, awe, duffers, retakes, disingenuous, pushbike, wetsuit, fitting, sundial, gnarled, conkers, sparely, ferreting, off-handedness, frowsty, herbs, scuttled, fry-up, double declutching, sec, loo, tipsily, estate hands, drawn out (coffee), till, entropy, takeover, longhand, overspill, floundering