Good Behaviour

VIRAGO
MODERN CLASSICS

Molly Keane (1904–1996) was born in County Kildare, Ireland, and was sketchily educated by governesses. Interested in ‘horses
and having a good time’, Keane wrote her first novel,
The Knight of Cheerful Countenance
, to supplement her dress allowance. She used the pseudonym M. J. Farrell ‘to hide my literary side from my sporting friends’.
Between 1928 and 1961 Molly Keane published ten novels under her pen name, novels in which she brought acuteness and good-tempered
satire as well as affection to her portrayals of the ramshackle Anglo-Irish way of life. She also wrote several successful
plays. The untimely death of her husband brought a break in her career which ended only in 1981, when
Good Behaviour
appeared under her own name and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

T
HE
D
ESIGNER

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THE KNIGHT OF CHEERFUL COUNTENANCE

YOUNG ENTRY

TAKING CHANCES

MAD PUPPETSTOWN

CONVERSATION PIECE

DEVOTED LADIES

FULL HOUSE

THE RISING TIDE

TWO DAYS IN ARAGON

LOVING WITHOUT TEARS

TREASURE HUNT

TIME AFTER TIME

LOVING AND GIVING

Published by Hachette Digital

ISBN: 978-0-748-13285-0

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 1981 Molly Keane

Introduction copyright © Maggie O’Farrell 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

Hachette Digital

Little, Brown Book Group

100 Victoria Embankment

London, EC4Y 0DY

www.hachette.co.uk

ALSO BY MOLLY KEANE

COPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Molly Keane hadn’t published a word for twenty years when, so the story goes, a visitor to her house chanced upon a manuscript
languishing in a drawer. The visitor was actress Peggy Ashcroft, the novel
Good Behaviour
; she read the manuscript and urged Keane to submit it for publication.

It’s easy to see why Ashcroft might have been immediately struck by the book.
Good Behaviour
has a quiet, measured confidence to it. You can feel, from the first line, that this is an author at the top of her game.
The characters are glass-clear, the dialogue piercingly accurate, the pacing leisurely yet muscular, the prose deceptively
delicate, carrying the resilience and sting of a scorpion. Quite simply, there isn’t a word out of place.

Critics have long speculated about the hiatus in Keane’s career, suggesting she was unable to work after her husband’s death
or that the unfavourable reception of her 1961 play gave her writer’s block. I’ve always found it refreshing that Keane refused
to be drawn on what lay behind her prolonged wordlessness. Why should she explain herself, especially
when the work that broke the silence was of such searing quality?

On its appearance in print,
Good Behaviour
was seized upon as an astonishing late flowering for its septuagenarian author. Malcolm Bradbury called it ‘an extraordinary
tour de force’; elsewhere it was ‘a distinguised comeback’ and ‘a masterpiece’. Shortlisted for the 1981 Booker Prize, it
narrowly missed out on winning to Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children
.

Molly Keane had a variety of names. She was born Mary Nesta Skrine in 1904 in County Kildare to a ‘rather serious hunting
and fishing, church-going family’. She was educated, as was the custom in Anglo-Irish households, by a series of governesses
and then at boarding school, where she said her ‘unpopularity, that went to the edge of dislike, drove me into myself.’ Life
at home wasn’t much better: ‘my mother didn’t really like me and … my father had absolutely nothing to do with me.’ Distant
and awkward relationships between children and their parents would prove to be a recurring theme for Keane. She began writing
as a teenager in order, so she claimed, to supplement her dress allowance, producing numerous novels and plays under the name
M. J. Farrell. She said in an interview with Polly Devlin in 1983 that the pseudonym was essential because, ‘for a woman to
read a book, let alone write one, was viewed with alarm; I would have been banned from every respectable house.’ She married
Robert Keane in 1938 and had two daughters. Then came the famous two-decade silence and then
Good Behaviour
, the first novel she published under her own name.

It begins with a murder. Aroon St Charles is struggling for supremacy over her mother’s lunch tray with the servant, Rose.
Aroon has prepared a rabbit mousse for Mummie but
Rose objects, saying that ‘rabbit sickens her’. Aroon pulls rank – ‘I can use the tone of voice which keeps people in their
places’ – serves her mother the mousse, at which point Mummie protests, vomits and dies.

Rabbit mousse. Is there a more unappealing dish to be found in fiction? But worse is to come. Just when you think Keane is
about to round off her perfect opening scene, mesmeric in its impact, she sends a parting shot over the bows. As Aroon leaves
the deathbed, she instructs Rose to put the mousse over some hot water, to keep it warm for her own ‘luncheon’. It’s one of
the most appalling moments in the book. Surely,
surely
, you think, she can’t eat it now?

This is matricide most foul, but with a veneer of gentility. Oh, to be so well-bred, so refined as to be killed by a dish
of food. As with most things in
Good Behaviour
, Mummie’s death is an issue of deeply ingrained social mores. Rabbit in Keane’s world is a food more suitable for the lower
echelons of society (and children: ‘the cook sent up [to the nursery] whatever came easiest, mostly rabbit stews,’ Aroon notes).
It is available to all from the fields; it is not procured from butchers, sanitised and billed-for. Mummie’s shrinking refusal
of the mousse – she would, quite literally, rather die than eat it – is an act of propriety, of protest, of self-elevation.
It is her final act of ‘good behaviour’.

Good Behaviour
is Keane coming back, as if from the dead, with a novel much concerned with the infinitesimal calibrations of society and
kin. The Anglo-Irish occupied a strange position in 1920s Ireland, the time in which the book is set. A breed apart, poverty-stricken
yet proud, they were struggling to keep their niche in a changing country.

Aroon’s flowing recall of her past offers glimpses of this
peculiar, hermetic world. Boys are beaten for reading poetry, grocers are called ‘robbers’ for sending in their bills, dogs
are fed chicken while the servants are forced to eat laundry starch to stave off hunger, terrified children are put on horses
at a remarkably young age, a nanny is dismissed for drunkenness but still given a good reference because to do otherwise ‘would
have been unkind and unnecessary’. The proper way to conduct oneself in all matters is to employ selective silence: Papa has
affairs with the staff right under Mummie’s nose but nothing is said; a beloved governess commits suicide but nothing is said;
the son of the house is killed but nothing is said. ‘We exchanged cool, warning looks,’ Aroon says, after her brother’s funeral:
‘which of us could behave best: which of us could be least embarrassing to the others?’

The unspoken hangs like smoke in the rooms and corridors of Temple Alice. What is uttered are small asides, loaded with venom:
‘They say whales can live for months on their own fat – do they call it blubber?’ Mummie observes to Aroon, while outlining
her economy drive, which boils down to neither of them having anything to eat. Food is a constant flashpoint between mother
and daughter. Aroon feels herself to be ugly, enormous, ungainly, taller than is acceptable, ‘bosoms, swinging like jelly
bags,’ forever cursed as the plain daughter of a beautiful mother. Much of the emotional heart of the book is Aroon’s overwhelming
urge to love – and be loved. All around her people are forming partnerships and allegiances, but none of them include her.
Her mother with her father, her father with Rose, her brother Hubert with his friend Richard, and then her mother with Rose.
Aroon is always on the outside looking in, always the unwanted hanger-on, the gooseberry.