Another fine story from Tessa Hadley in current NYer

As noted in previous posts I have become a fan of Tessa Hadley's short fiction - after initial indifference too her work, which seemed to me to calm, careful, "British" - so maybe she has evolved or maybe I have or maybe I just missed something crucial in her early stories. Her story in current New Yorker, Funny Little Snake (terrible title, but forget that for the moment - supposed to be a barbed term of endearment a neglectful mother uses for her 9-year-old daughter) is as strong and mysterious as anything she's written. Story focuses on a stepmother - 2nd and much younger wife of an established academic, historian, in a North England university town - who is suffering through a visit of her husband's daughter, who seems cold and anti-social. When the week-long visit is up, the husband announces that he has various academic obligations and can't bring his daughter back to London; the stepmom (Valerie?) does so, and on arrival at the young girl's home we see immediately that the mom is criminally neglectful: drinking heavily, using marijuana, the house is a sty, the girl's bedroom is a mess w/ only a ragged sleeping bag on the bed, a "musician" is hanging around in his underwear, and so forth. At the end, the stepmom "rescues" the daughter and decides to bring her north to live w/ her and her father. (It's possible that this is part of a longer narrative that will continue from that point; if so, I have to say that it does stand perfectly well as a story in its own right.) Hadley does a great job establishing the various scenes and moods that we move through with this narrative; where she's particularly great, though, is in her subtle, almost hidden touches, particularly about the father/husband: his whining way of asking/ordering wife to bring the girl back to London, his weird tendency to refer to himself in the 3rd person, his "corrections" of his wife's syntax (call it "dinner" or "supper," not "tea," e.g.), her sense of inferiority at her lack to college/university education - in other words, Hadley shows us the stress lines and small fractures in their relationship. How long can it last? Did they really "rescue" the young girl, or just bring her into another psychodrama?
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