Cockfosters by Helen Simpson review – dry and tenderly measured

From varifocals to the menopause, a virtuoso of the short story turns her attention to the ageing process

Helen Simpson has been publishing short stories, and only short stories, for her entire writing career, little miracles that cut straight to the heart of the matter – be that love, lust, babies, death, apocalypses global or individual – without ever losing their mystery. She introduced her 2012 selected works, A Bunch of Fives, with a wonderfully barbed Q&A in which an imaginary interviewer takes her to task for her “domestic” subjects, her slim output and her lack of a novel. “Five years per collection, though! – Why so slow?” “Surely you find [the short story form] limiting?” “Are you a man-hating feminist?”

“Funny how these stories start with sex then move on to babies and finish up with cancer…” muses her passive-aggressive interlocutor. “Well, what do you expect over 25 years?” Simpson replies. Her books have tracked the stations of life, with groundbreaking collections such as Dear George and Hey Yeah Right Get a Life illuminating the shock, intensity and boredom of early motherhood, as well as the way parenthood inevitably “gender-politicises relationships”. Her sixth book, Cockfosters, moves on a stage: now the women are standing uncertainly on the brink of menopause, buying varifocals, remarking how very glad they are not to be “doing that any more” when they see younger women struggling with small children; while the men are having heart scares or moving, with a combination of exhaustion and entitlement, on to their second wife and set of children.

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