It is a condition of our times that a moment’s slippage from the public eye could spell a long, cold, sometimes irreversible, winter of oblivion for a writer. One would have thought that the publishers of a writer as fine as Rose Tremain wouldn’t feel the need to keep flashing her to the public consciousness, but clearly such is not the case, otherwise why publish her new book, The Darkness of Wallis Simpson, a collection of mostly unremarkable short stories, that feels as if it has been desultorily gathered together for the sole purpose of keeping her name burning in the capricious hearth of the reading public?

It is indisputable that Tremain can write elegant, effortless prose standing on her head while juggling plates and performing open-heart surgery. That is not the question here. The fatal flaw running through the volume is that of overexplanation. The best short stories are resiliently ungiving creatures; they hold back information, refuse to explain, creating that special aura of not so much opacity as the irreducible complexity of life compacted to six pages.  ‘Nativity Story’ would have been more powerful without that hypersignalling title while ‘The Over-Ride’, a story of loss, grief and healing, could have done with its final paragraph, where the title is used as a verb to point out egregiously to the reader its significance, sloughed off. ‘Peerless’ spells out the vanquishing of a childhood trauma in old age with the numbing regularity of a mathematical equation. Where the stories work, they do so with intense empathy and generosity but also by that special holding back, much like the porous, degenerating mind of Wallis Simpson in the title story. ‘The Beauty of the Dawn Shift’ is an extraordinarily tight story, strange, lucid and cruel, about chasing the shifting mirage of a dream.

The fact that the British publishing industry, so hostile to the short story, hasn’t managed to squeeze out Helen Simpson, whose reputation rests solely on her outstanding short stories, and push her on to writing novels, is something to sing and shout about. Her new collection, Constitutional, although stalked by mortality, illness and endings, gives off a perfume of strange joyousness, even fun. It is a beautifully minor-key work, examining minute details of domesticity sometimes, such as the school-run and snatched moments of privacy in a swimming pool on 21 December, and vast issues at others, such as the way the war in Iraq impinges on the love-life of a young couple.

Simpson has something of Cheever in her, a sparkling naughtiness tinged by an awareness of the slightly surreal by which human lives are ringed around. And she has the greatest gift available to the true short story writer – knowing what to leave out or leave unsaid. The title story, for example, centred around an unfailingly regular lunch-hour walk on Hampstead Heath taken by the Head of Science in a nearby school, brings together illness, old age, friendship, time, late pregnancy and the end of a relationship with such seemingly easy grace and intelligence that it takes a while to work out that the most urgent emotion, grief, has been left out for the readers to supply. It is a slow-ticking explosive of a story. She is wry, if predictable, about compulsive male infidelity in ‘If I’m Spared’. The gentle irony with which she deals with the hypochondria of the middle-classes goes hand in hand with something far more incongruous – humour at terminal illnesses and untimely deaths – in ‘Every Third Thought’. It’s an almost impossible trick to pull off but Simpson does it with mischievous élan. A book of abundant delights, alive and electric with the quirkiness of life itself.