Good Behaviour

by Molly Keane, Maggie O'Farrell

Genres: General Fiction; Classics; Family Life; Religious & Inspirational; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

A BBC TWO BETWEEN THE COVERS BOOK CLUB PICK (BOOKER PRIZE GEMS)

'Molly Keane is a mistress of wicked comedy' VOGUE

'She was . . . marvellous' GUARDIAN

'Dark, complex, engaging . . . a wonderful tour de force' MARIAN KEYES

I do know how to behave - believe me, because I know. I have always known . . .

Behind the gates of Temple Alice, the aristocratic Anglo-Irish St Charles family sinks into a state of decaying grace. To Aroon St Charles, large and unlovely daughter of the house, the fierce forces of sex, money, jealousy and love seem locked out by the ritual patterns of good behaviour. But crumbling codes of conduct cannot hope to save the members of the St Charles family from their own unruly and inadmissible desires. This elegant and allusive novel established Molly Keane as the natural successor to Jean Rhys.

'I have read and re-read Molly Keane more, I think, than any other writer. Nobody else can touch her as a satirist, tragedian and dissector of human behaviour. I love all her books, but Good Behaviour and Loving and Giving are the ones I return to most' MAGGIE O'FARRELL

Release date: May 18, 2021

Publisher: NYRB Classics

Print pages: 320

Sample

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.


The most painful thread running through the book is Aroon’s misplaced love for Richard. This is where Keane’s skill with an
unreliable narrator comes into play: the reader realises pretty quickly that Hubert and Richard are in love with each other.
But Aroon is convinced that something exists between her and Richard, remaining ever alert for signs, joyous at her inclusion
in their outings, heart-rendingly unaware that her brother is using her to put their father off the scent. She is baffled
by an evening when she arrives unannounced at their room to find Richard belting up his dressing-gown ‘with exacting discretion’
and Hubert ‘wrapped in one of those great rough bath towels’, both distinctly unenthusiastic at seeing her. When she leaves
them, she hears them ‘begin to laugh, relieved giggling laughter’. The experience leaves her ‘puzzled and anxious … [with]
a mistrust in happiness.’


Keane pulls up short of making Aroon the faultless martyr. The book is too subtle, too dark, for that. Aroon is offered an
escape from icy, comfortless Temple Alice in the form of Kiely, the solicitor. ‘“When you need someone,” he said, “will you
think of me?”’ Aroon, in extremis, proves herself to be her mother’s daughter, dismissing him with ‘one of Mummie’s phrases’:
‘“You must be out of your mind,” I said … I was, after all, Aroon St Charles.’


Molly Keane is often categorised as a comedic writer, a satirist of drawing-room chatter, of interminable balls and horrendous
social gatherings. But to view her as a kind of Hibernian Noel Coward is to do her a disservice. Yes, her books are shot through
with painful parties and awkwardly inane dining-table conversation, but her themes are vast, universal, Shakespearean in their
reach: inheritance, survival, familial love, intergenerational strife, bereavement, betrayal, marriage, adultery, murder. She writes better than anyone else about
the mother–daughter relationship, in all its thorny, fraught, inescapable complexity.


The title of the novel is ironic, because the way these people conduct themselves is nothing short of execrable – and also
mutable. ‘Good behaviour’ at the start means keeping oneself upright and benign in the face of adversity. By the end it has
become a byword for enacting cruelty and revenge on your nearest relatives, all, of course, with the utmost subtlety and discretion.


In the closing scene of Good Behaviour, Aroon learns that her father has bequeathed Temple Alice to her, not Mummie. It is at once a relief and a terror to see
Aroon finally come into her own, to step out of the shadow, the threat of lovelessness. She surveys the cowering, shocked
partnership of Mummie and Rose: ‘Empowered by Papa’s love I would be kind to them. Now I had the mild, wonderful power to
be kind, or to reserve kindness.’ We, of course, have already been witness to where that power and kindness ends. Keane gives
her masterpiece a beautifully looping structure that turns back on itself, like a Möbius strip, linking the beginning with
the end. When Aroon says, ‘remember that I’ll always look after you,’ we know what she means, and so does Mummie. You can
almost smell the rabbit mousse coming.


Maggie O’Farrell, 2011

Rose smelt the air, considering what she smelt; a miasma of unspoken criticism and disparagement fogged the distance between
us. I knew she ached to censure my cooking, but through the years I have subdued her. Those wide shoulders and swinging hips
were once parts of a winged quality she had – a quality reduced and corrected now, I am glad to say.


‘I wonder are you wise, Miss Aroon, to give her the rabbit?’

‘And why not?’ I can use the tone of voice which keeps people in their places and usually silences any interference from Rose.
Not this time.


‘Rabbit sickens her. Even Master Hubert’s first with his first gun. She couldn’t get it down.’

‘That’s a very long time ago. And I’ve often known her to enjoy rabbit since then.’

‘She never liked rabbit.’

‘Especially when she thought it was chicken.’

‘You couldn’t deceive her, Miss Aroon.’ She picked up the tray. I snatched it back. I knew precisely what she would say when
she put it down on Mummie’s bed. I had set the tray myself. I don’t trust Rose. I don’t trust anybody. Because I like things to be right. The tray did look charming: bright,
with a crisp clean cloth and a shine on everything. I lifted the silver lid off the hot plate to smell those quenelles in
a cream sauce. There was just a hint of bay leaf and black pepper, not a breath of the rabbit foundation. Anyhow, what could
be more delicious and delicate than a baby rabbit? Especially after it has been forced through a fine sieve and whizzed for
ten minutes in a Moulinex blender.


‘I’ll take up the tray,’ I said. ‘When the kettle boils, please fill the pink hotwater-bottle. It makes a little change from
the electric blanket. Did you hear me? Rose?’ She has this maddening pretence of deafness. It is simply one of her ways of
ignoring me. I know that. I have known it for most of my life.


‘I see in today’s paper where a woman in Kilmacthomas burned to death in an electric blanket. It turned into a flaming cage,
imagine.’


I paid no attention to the woman in the blanket and I repeated: ‘When the kettle boils and not before.’ That would give me
time to settle Mummie comfortably with her luncheon before Rose brought the hotwater-bottle and the tale of the woman in Kilmacthomas
(who I bet did something particularly silly and the blanket was quite blameless) into her bedroom.


Gulls’ Cry, where Mummie and I live now, is built on the edge of a cliff. Its windows lean out over the deep anchorage of
the boat cove like bosoms on an old ship’s figurehead. Sometimes I think (though I would never say it) how nice that bosoms
are all right to have now; in the twenties when I grew up I used to tie them down with a sort of binder. Bosoms didn’t do
then. They didn’t do at all. Now, it’s too late for mine.


I like to sing when nobody can hear me and put me off the note. I sang that day as I went upstairs. Our kitchen and diningroom
are on the lowest level of this small Gothic folly of a house. The stairs, with their skimpy iron bannister, bring you up
to the hall and the drawingroom, where I put all our mementoes of Papa when we moved here from Temple Alice. The walls are
papered in pictures and photographs of him riding winners. Silver cups stand in rows on the chimney-piece, not to mention
the model of a seven-pound sea trout and several rather misty snapshots of bags of grouse laid out on the steps of Temple
Alice.


Mummie never took any proper interest in this gallery, and when her heart got so dicky, and I converted the room into a charming
bed-sit for her, she seemed to turn her eyes away from everything she might have remembered with love and pleasure. One knows
sick people and old people can be difficult and unrewarding, however much one does for them: not exactly ungrateful, just
absolutely maddening. But I enjoy the room whenever I go in. It’s all my own doing and Mummie, lying back in her nest of pretty
pillows, is my doing too – I insist on her being scrupulously clean and washed and scented.


‘Luncheon,’ I said cheerfully, the tray I carried making a lively rattle. ‘Shall I sit you up a bit?’ She was lying down among
her pillows as if she were sinking through the bed. She never makes an effort for herself. That comes of having me.


‘I don’t feel very hungry,’ she said. A silly remark. I know she always pretends she can’t eat and when I go out makes Rose
do her fried eggs and buttered toast and all the things the doctor says she mustn’t touch.


‘Smell that,’ I said, and lifted the cover off my perfect quenelles.


‘I wonder if you’d pull down the blind –’ not a word about the quenelles – ‘the sun’s rather in my eyes.’

‘You really want the blind down?’

She nodded.

‘All the way?’

‘Please.’

I went across then and settled her for her tray, pulling her up and putting a pillow in the exact spot behind her back, and
another tiny one behind her head. She simply refused to look as if she felt comfortable. I’m used to that. I arranged the
basket tray (straight from Harrods) across her, and put her luncheon tray on it.


‘Now then,’ I said – one must be firm – ‘a delicious chicken mousse.’

‘Rabbit, I bet,’ she said.

I was still patient: ‘Just try a forkful.’

‘Myxomatosis,’ she said. ‘Remember that? – I can’t.’

I held on to my patience. ‘It was far too young to have myxomatosis. Come on now, Mummie –’ I tried to keep the firm note
out of my voice – ‘just one.’


She lifted the small silver fork (our crest, a fox rampant, almost handled and washed away by use) as though she were heaving
up a load of stinking fish: ‘The smell – I’m—’ She gave a trembling, tearing cry, vomited dreadfully, and fell back into the
nest of pretty pillows.


I felt more than annoyed for a moment. Then I looked at her and I was frightened. I leaned across the bed and rang her bell.
Then I shouted and called down to Rose in the kitchen. She came up fast, although her feet and her shoes never seem to work together now; even then I noticed it. But of course I notice everything.


‘She was sick,’ I said.

‘She couldn’t take the rabbit?’

Rabbit again. ‘It was a mousse,’ I screamed at the old fool, ‘a cream mousse. It was perfect. I made it so I ought to know.
It was RIGHT. She was enjoying it.’


Rose was stooping over Mummie. ‘Miss Aroon, she’s gone.’ She crossed herself and started to pray in that loose, easy way Roman
Catholics do: ‘Holy Mary, pray for us now and in the hour of our death … Merciful Jesus … ’


She seemed too close to Mummie with that peasant gabbling prayer. We should have had the Dean.

‘Take the tray away,’ I said. I picked Mummie’s hand up out of the sick and put it down in a clean place. It was as limp as
a dead duck’s neck. I wanted to cry out. ‘Oh, no—’ I wanted to say. I controlled myself. I took three clean tissues out of
the cardboard box I had covered in shell-pink brocade and wiped my fingers. When they were clean the truth came to me, an
awful new-born monstrosity. I suppose I swayed on my feet. I felt as if I could go on falling for ever. Rose helped me to
a chair and I could hear its joints screech as I sat down, although I am not at all heavy, considering my height. I longed
to ask somebody to do me a favour, to direct me; to fill out this abyss with some importance – something needful to be done.


‘What must I do now?’ I was asking myself. Rose had turned her back on me and on the bed. She was opening the window as high
as the sash would go – that’s one of their superstitions, something to do with letting the spirit go freely. They do it. They
don’t speak of it. She did the same thing when Papa died.


‘You must get the doctor at once, Miss Aroon, and Kathie Cleary to lay her out. There’s no time to lose.’


She said it in a gluttonous way. They revel in death … Keep the Last Rites going … She can’t wait to get her hands on Mummie,
to get me out of the way while she helps Mrs Cleary in necessary and nasty rituals. What could I do against them? I had to
give over. I couldn’t forbid. Or could I?


‘I shall get the doctor,’ I said, ‘and Nurse Quinn. Not Mrs Cleary.’


She faced me across the bed, her great blue eyes blazing. ‘Miss Aroon, madam hated Nurse Quinn. The one time she gave her
a needle she took a weakness. She wouldn’t let her in the place again. She wouldn’t let her touch her. Kathie Cleary’s a dab
hand with a corpse – there’s nothing missing in Kathie Cleary’s methods and madam loved her, she loved a chat with Kathie
Cleary.’


I really felt beside myself. Why this scene? Why can’t people do what I say? That’s all I ask. ‘That will do, Rose,’ I said.
I felt quite strong again. ‘I’ll telephone to the doctor and ask him to let Nurse know. Just take that tray down and keep
the mousse hot for my luncheon.’


Rose lunged towards me, over the bed, across Mummie’s still feet. I think if she could have caught me in both her hands she
would have done so.


‘Your lunch,’ she said. ‘You can eat your bloody lunch and she lying there stiffening every minute. Rabbit – rabbit chokes
her, rabbit sickens her, and rabbit killed her – call it rabbit if you like. Rabbit’s a harmless word for it – if it was a
smothering you couldn’t have done it better. And – another thing – who tricked her out of Temple Alice? Tell me that—’


‘Rose, how dare you.’ I tried to interrupt her but she stormed on.


‘ … and brought my lady into this mean little ruin with hungry gulls screeching over it and two old ghosts (God rest their
souls) knocking on the floors by night—’


I stayed calm above all the wild nonsense. ‘Who else hears the knocking?’ I asked her quietly. ‘Only you.’

‘And I heard the roaring and crying when you parted Mister Hamish from Miss Enid and put the two of them in hospital wards,
male and female, to die on their own alone.’


‘At the time it was totally necessary.’

‘Necessary? That way you could get this house in your own two hands and boss and bully us through the years. Madam’s better
off the way she is this red raw minute. She’s tired from you – tired to death. Death is right. We’re all killed from you and
it’s a pity it’s not yourself lying there and your toes cocked for the grave and not a word more about you, God damn you!’


Yes, she stood there across the bed saying these obscene, unbelievable things. Of course she loved Mummie, all servants did.
Of course she was overwrought. I know all that – and she is ignorant to a degree, I allow for that too. Although there was
a shocking force in what she said to me, it was beyond all sense or reason. It was so entirely and dreadfully false that it
could not touch me. I felt as tall as a tree standing above all that passionate flood of words. I was determined to be kind
to Rose. And understanding. And generous. I am her employer, I thought. I shall raise her wages quite substantially. She will
never be able to resist me then, because she is greedy. I can afford to be kind to Rose. She will learn to lean on me. There is nobody in the world who needs me now and I must be kind to somebody.


‘You’re upset,’ I said gently. ‘Naturally you’re upset. You loved Mrs St Charles and I know you didn’t mean one word you’ve
just said to me.’


‘I did too, Miss Aroon.’ She was like a drowning person, coming up for a last choking breath. ‘God help you, it’s the flaming
truth.’


‘Don’t worry,’ I answered. ‘I’ve forgotten … I didn’t hear … I understand. Now we’ve both got to be practical. We must both
be brave. I’ll ring up the doctor and you’ll take that tray to the kitchen, and put the mousse over a pot of boiling water
– it may be hours till lunchtime.’


She took up the tray, tears pouring down her face. Of course I had expected her to obey me, but I won’t deny that before she
turned away from the bed, the tray, as it should have been, between her hands, I had been aware of a moment of danger. Now,
apart from my shock and sorrow about Mummie, a feeling of satisfaction went through me – a kind of ripple that I needed. I
needed it and I had it.


I went into the hall and picked up the telephone. While I waited for the exchange (always criminally slow) to answer, I had
time to consider how the punctual observance of the usual importances is the only way to behave at such times as these. And
I do know how to behave – believe me, because I know. I have always known. All my life so far I have done everything for the
best reasons and the most unselfish motives. I have lived for the people dearest to me, and I am at a loss to know why their
lives have been at times so perplexingly u. . .