Loving And Giving

Book 223: Virago Modern Classics

by Molly Keane

Genres: General Fiction; Classics; Family Life; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction; Romance

Synopsis

FROM THE SHORTLISTED AUTHOR FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE

'Molly Keane is astonishing . . . an exquisitely written black comedy with a shock ending' GUARDIAN

'Quite the best book she has written' DAILY TELEGRAPH

'I admired many authors. But Molly, I loved' DIANA ATHILL

In 1914, when Nicandra is eight, all is well in the grand Irish estate, Deer Forest. Maman is beautiful and adored. Dada, silent and small, mooches contendedly around the stables. Aunt Tossie, of the giant heart and bosom, is widowed but looks splendid in weeds. The butler, the groom, the landsteward, the maids, the men - each as a place and knows it. Then, astonishingly, the perfect surface is shattered; Maman does something too dreadful ever to be spoken of.

'What next? Who to love?' asks Nicaranda. And through her growing up and marriage her answer is to swamp those around her with kindness - while gradually the great house crumbles under a weight of manners and misunderstanding.

Release date: January 22, 2015

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 256

Sample

Loving and Giving is Molly Keane’s finest novel. First published in 1988, it is a work of her maturity as a writer, and this shows in both subject matter and treatment. Less superficial, less obviously funny than most of her previous fiction, the story unites emotional depth, precise, sensual description, and noirish social satire, inside a well-constructed plot driving inexorably towards a horrific denouement.

Molly Keane, born in 1904 in Co. Kildare, Ireland, into the country gentry, traditionally wrote about that privileged milieu in which she grew up and which she knew so well: the decaying great houses and their hidebound, narrow-minded owners; the repeated round of hunting and fishing, gardening and church-going. Loving and Giving is distinguished from all her other novels by the amount of attention it gives to the pain and cruelty rife in that world, in particular the pain and cruelty routinely inflicted by the upper classes on their children.

Most of Molly Keane’s novels concern adults only, with children kept on the sidelines or given minor walk-on parts. This reflects the standard child-rearing practices of the time: children are to be seen but not heard. Allowing the heroine of Loving and Giving a childhood, and describing it in minute detail in the opening section, Molly Keane acutely demonstrates how damage done to an eight-year-old scars the soul forever. The emotional injuries of her childhood edge the adult Nicandra towards disaster.

The domestic and sexual drama is played out within a closely observed and tightly ordered, hierarchically structured world, teeming with servants below stairs and in the stables, and, above stairs, a few of the elite wandering the large spaces connected by sweeping double staircases, wide landings, lofty-ceilinged corridors. The favoured dogs can spend time with their employers in the morning-room and drawing-room, whereas little Nicandra, whom her parents find unattractive and boring, is routinely banished to the nursery or commanded to run outside and play.

Their rejection of her, and rigid control over her, is explained as parental duty: in her best interests. The child’s feelings are denied and invalidated. It’s like a training for later madness, reminiscent of case-studies by R.D. Laing. Maman and Dada are a chilly couple, one keen only on parties and the other devoted to horses. Nicandra, subjugated into never answering back or expressing her own needs, internalises their view of her as a nuisance: ‘bewildered and cast down as she was, Nicandra managed a few skipping steps – this jolly movement her evidence that she was not in a state of unattractive sulks’.

Needy and confused, she explores the house, looking for love, venturing into all the forbidden, dark, hidden places. Her charting of the secret recesses of the mansion not only demonstrates her willpower and curiosity in the face of parental authority but also works as an image of a search through the unconscious, an interior world that is womblike, teeming with marvels. Nicandra, we imagine, would like to take shelter, and to be reborn; then there might be some hope for her. She wanders disconsolately through ‘the lower regions … the kitchen passages … the dark passage-ways of the basement’. Molly Keane encourages us to peep over her shoulder, giving us pictures precise and sensual as Chardin still lifes. We visit, for example, the dairy, with its fountain set in a grey marble basin: ‘Heavy slate slabs ran round the walls – on some pans of milk were set and left to stand until cream rose to the surface, on others there were pounds of butter, ridged by wooden “butter-hands” and stamped with swans, which sweated cold salt like beads or tears to their surfaces.’ We tiptoe into the laundry:

a steamy, rather smelly place where sheets were stewed in the boiler and then hand-scrubbed on a ridged board and further rinsed and processed before they progressed in a wooden tub, a girl at each handle, to hang under the sun or the rain in their private drying-ground, screened by laurel and flowering currant from the sensitive eyes of the gentry.

Nicandra, with the innocent and ruthless honesty of a child, also notes, in the gentlemen’s lavatory, which she is not supposed to use, the fanned squares of Bronco tissue, carefully arranged by the maid, who likes to make things look nice; the chair in the nursery which always smells ‘in a hesitating way’ of Nannie’s bottom; the need for dress-preservers to scent ladies’ armpits; the stink of Aunt Tossie’s breath after she’s been filching whisky. Aunt Tossie, rich and fat and generous, lives with the family and is the only person to love Nicandra. It’s Maman’s love that Nicandra is searching for, however, and so she ignores the treasures of indulgent affection that Aunt Tossie, like a good fairy godmother, casts in her path.

All Nicandra’s efforts to charm and please her beautiful, adored Maman fail. Maman sees her daughter as a wild creature to be tamed, by rules of behaviour and rules of dress:

Someone who knew about these things had told Maman how the perpetual wearing of boots might encourage the proper shape of a girl’s ankles. So Nicandra wore white kid boots for after-tea sessions, dancing classes and parties … Maman held to a rather Chinese theory on the suppression of growth; the white kid boots were on the small side and not often replaced because they were French, very expensive, and not obtainable from Start-rite.

Finally, Nicandra commits the ultimate misdemeanour, which all her repressive training has not been able to teach her to avoid. Unwittingly betraying Maman’s affair with one of the servants, she is punished by being tied to her chair and ordered to eat the bitter, slimy spinach she loathes, while Maman, denying her own sadism, stands over her and pretends to be sweet. When Maman vanishes in pursuit of her lover, Nicandra knows it is all her fault.

The rest of the novel charts Nicandra’s blundering search for love as an adult. Her husband Andrew marries her for her money, and for the house Aunt Tossie buys them. He is a classic bounder, exploiting her in every way and carrying on with her best friend. He is undoubtedly a monster of selfishness, but the besotted Nicandra cannot see this. She suffers from what modern self-help books would label low self-esteem. She is a woman who loves too much; a Cinderella gazing adoringly at her shining prince. The reader is not terribly surprised by Andrew’s bad behaviour and final betrayal. Nicandra is too generous and too trusting; she brings out the sadist in him. She ignores his treatment of her, just as she rewrites her childhood history: ‘The house was her object now: the house where, she told herself and believed, she had been so happy in a bright, unshadowed childhood. She saw herself as such a jolly little girl. She must have been quite a joker … it had all been wonderful outdoor fun.’

Interwoven with Nicandra’s sad story is that of the decline and fall of the great house in which she has grown up. The fortunes of its owners are contrasted with those of the servant, William. At the beginning of the novel, he is Silly-Willie, the ‘idiot’ boy, in the parlance of those times, confined to a back room in the lodge, the illegitimate child of the woman who works as the lodge gatekeeper. He is promoted, as he grows older, to staying up all night to keep the fires burning in the entrance hall, and to accompanying Dada, otherwise known as Sir Dermot, out shooting. Dada is growing old: ‘Of course, as time went by, he missed more birds than he killed. One late afternoon, swinging on a crossing bird, he slightly peppered Silly-Willie who only laughed and jumped about delightedly.’ The servants are used to not complaining:

Lizzie died, quietly and by herself, giving nobody any trouble. One morning, on his way down to breakfast, Dada saw her kneeling on the left-hand flight of the double staircase; thinking she was saying her prayers, she was bent so low, Dada stepped past her politely. After breakfast someone found her, sprawled in difficult death.

When Dada in turn dies and is buried, a pregnant maid holds the fort at the wake: ‘It was a disappointing finale, but at least there was a plethora of sandwiches. Brigid, nearly in her birth throes, had been summoned back to cut and butter and trim them.’

As the old retainers die off one by one, Willie’s star ascends. He becomes indispensable. The house is shabby and cold, infested by rot. Aunt Tossie starts living in a caravan in the grounds, whisky bottle in her bedside cupboard. Willie brings her drink and hard-boiled eggs and pork chops. He is powerful because he knows all about her alcoholism, her constipation, her recourse to cascara pills, the subsequent soiling of her sheets. He resists all Nicandra’s efforts to shift him, because he is taking a sweet revenge on her for the humiliations she inflicted on him in childhood. Nicandra is not just a poor little rich girl. Slighted by the adults she loved, she, in her turn, found someone to bully and torment. Molly Keane’s clarity about the child’s wish to dominate and hurt as she has been dominated and hurt lift the novel out of any possible sentimentality and make it extraordinary. The unexpected ending is a metaphor. The house, swallowing Nicandra up, has, in a certain sense, allowed her childhood wish to come true.

Michèle Roberts

2001



It was first love – there had been no time for earlier romance because Nicandra was only eight on April 8th, 1914. She had been christened Nicandra on the insistence of her father who, in his luckier years, had bred and trained and ridden an outstanding winner of that name. He very much objected to the inevitable contraction of Nicandra to Nico, which seemed to him common. Perpetually subdued by the rigours of behaviour, and almost unable to express himself outside the vernaculars of Hunting, Racing, Shooting, Fishing and Cricket, he had never been able to make his case against Nico: “Awful, awful” was the best he could do.

It was to her mother that Nicandra clung spellbound in loving (she was born to trouble) since life began. Love had found its proper expression when she became old enough to repeat little verses her governess taught her, mostly in French, or to stumble ludicrously through songs her mother sang. She almost knew her performance was good for a laugh, sometimes a kiss. She was pretty sure of the places to make her baby mistakes. Few things earned more pleasant congratulation than abstinence: “No thank you,” to a second chocolate, and Maman’s face lighted gently as she snapped the lid back on the choc box before Nicandra could change her mind.

Her mother’s hands were very important – a distant importance for they scarcely ever touched her (old Nan still did up her buttons), or she them; but she felt a longing to kiss their faintly pink thumbs – bite them perhaps, not to hurt, of course. She enjoyed the faint intoxication in the scent of violet soap or handcream when Maman pulled her gardening gloves off her warm, dry hands – the gloves were gauntlet-cuffed, the right gloves for a very small armoured knight – smaller than the suit of armour in the hall, a baby knight.

Love encapsuled every minute they spent together – not many minutes as there was a lot for Maman to do in the day, hours of grown-up stuff which ate up her time. When she was absent, the shadow of her presence was the assurance of a world of love. To earn her displeasure was to forgo all delight; through the days Nicandra devised love tokens, as much to stimulate interest towards herself as to express her deep affection.

Nicandra came every morning to her mother’s room, accompanying the early morning tea. Punctually at eight o’clock Lizzie the housemaid, apron fresh and cap on head, carried the tray, large enough to hold two cups, a charming pattern of violets scattered over them, matched by a teapot, also wreathed in violets, and a plate of bread and butter, slices cut as thin as veils, up three flights of stairs. She knocked quietly, as good discreet housemaids do, on Maman’s door.

Nicandra waited breathless for “Come in” to sound, before running to Maman’s bed for the first kiss of the day. Her father would groan sleepily as she hurried her kiss to him through the smell of cigars on his night’s breath. His morning kiss was always rather a trial. Apart from the smell, there was his gritty chin and his sweeping moustache to repel affection. Neither could she approve his striped pyjamas, coarse and unpleasing in contrast to Maman’s ribboned cambric nightdress.

After kisses, Prayers: God bless Nicandra and kind Maman and Dada, and Aunt Tossie and all of us…. As she prayed, Nicandra squinted through her fingers to watch the exquisite bread and butter swallowed and followed by gentle sips of tea on her mother’s part and grosser gulps from her father’s side of the bed.

There was a silver hand-candlestick on each side of the big bed. Among the stacks of pillows there was not one without its goffered frill. Nicandra tried to think of something pleasing to say: “Maman, do you think the Little Lord Jesus heard me?” she came out with at last. “Of course he did darling.” “He’s always on the look-out, watching the corner of some covert,” her father sounded a bit impatient. “Oh give her a lump of sugar,” he said; she might have been one of his least favourite horses. “It’s so bad for her teeth,” Maman wailed. Much as she disliked her pony, Nicandra was undefeatable in her wish to please: “I’ll keep it for Ducky,” she promised. She dragged her way slowly towards the door, waiting for Maman to call her back. Before she had quite shut the door she heard Maman give a tiny laugh, and her voice say “Oh darling, no, not now….” She trotted off, content that Dada too had been deprived of something or other.



Good morning with Aunt Tossie was a more comfortable, if a more pedestrian affair. Before knocking on her door Nicandra had quite a way to go. Turning her back on Maman’s room, and Dada’s dressing room, she crossed the pavilion-like hallway – useful only to light the double staircase through its long floor-to-ceiling window. Passing the proper guest room and its dressing room (where Aunt Tossie did not sleep) Nicandra went halfway down her favourite side of the stair flights to the landing space from which both stairs ascended and descended like swooping birds. Here a door opened into the older and more modest side of the house, the side where, in stages of inferiority, less important guests, children and, in a still more distant wing, servants slept. There was only one bathroom in the wing, the bath in it a classic example of early plumbing furniture. It was made – built rather, for its size was mammoth – of some kind of fortified china, cold as iced marble. Its great plug was lifted up or dropped down through a tubular cage of brass, and its brass taps gaped wide as the mouths of sea lions. On either side of the taps, two shells, nearly the size of soup plates, were sunk – the largest cake of brown Windsor soap seemed a wafer in their generous spaces. The bath was widely rimmed by mahogany, its noble proportions rightly left naked, to descend with dignity into brass claw feet of a proper size. The hand basin, blue and white china, patterned in a Venetian design, was surrounded by, and supported on, legs of wrought iron with a motif of lilies.

Nicandra thought it might be a good idea to go to the lavatory, next door to the bathroom, rather an adventure as this lavatory was sacred to Dada. There, sitting on comforting mahogany, she ate both the sugar lumps. On a plate beside the water plug (a hand-lifted device) Bromo paper was arranged in a semi-circular pattern, kept in place by a white stone. Lizzie liked perfecting this pretty piece of domestic felicity. “There’s always time to make things nice,” she would say with precise pleasure in her voice. When Nicandra had refastened all three buttons on the placket back of her white drawers, she felt ready to pay her morning visit to Aunt Tossie.

Aunt Tossie, Mrs Florence Fox-Collier, was Maman’s (Lady Forester’s) elder and widowed sister – widowed for two years but still wearing full mourning regalia. She knew it became her. She enjoyed nearly everything, even widow’s weeds … perhaps most of all widow’s weeds, as her married life had not been as exciting as she might have wished, and besides, they were so graceful and pretty. She ironed their tiny strips of white embroidered cuffs and collars herself, and sewed them on fresh nearly every day. Now she could fabricate for herself rich and happy memories. She liked to do that. She now lived permanently at Deer Forest, family home of the Forester family, fulfilling many useful functions in the household; nothing came amiss to her. Oddly enough, for one in pseudo-authority, all servants loved her and she liked them and made allowances for their faults and failings. She enjoyed dispensing their weekly portions from the store room on Monday mornings: a quarter-pound of tea for each – that made one and a half pounds and quite enough too; half a pound of butter; one pound of sugar for each and a small tin of Epps cocoa between them all.

Her duties were many, and none of them seemed onerous to her. She kept her eye on things generally, such as: tactfully suggesting to an under-housemaid (caught out bypassing Lizzie’s careful instructions) that pos were meant to be scrubbed till their inner china gleamed, as well as being emptied every morning. She knew the long list of silver almost by heart and counted it monthly that nothing might go astray. No dishonesty was suspected, only carelessness. Brass rods, tethering the red carpet to the flights of the staircase, were importances she never saw neglected. She loved their pale shining; clean brass was a pleasure, its proper maintenance a pleasure to herself as well as to Lizzie.

Another pleasure was “doing the flowers”, their arrangement in the drawing room, in the morning room, on the dining room table. She absorbed praise with delight and laughed off criticism with good humour. She had a plot of ground in the kitchen garden where no ignorant person could tamper with her treasures. As well as that, she had a private, unheated, frame for her cuttings. What more could she want? The constant diligence she gave was given ungrudgingly. She never questioned or regretted her position. She was part of the family.

She had, of course, her private life to maintain. Some part of her energy was spent inventing her own luxuries – luxuries that preserved a precious self-importance such as: the photograph of herself wearing a train and with presentation feathers in her hair, and the one of Hubert Fox-Collier in full dress uniform, with decorations. She had fits of putting things back in their exactly proper places, thus leading to the postponed satisfaction of finding them again, laying a hand on them without thought. At those times nightdresses were folded and piled, sachets between each; camisoles threaded anew with narrow ribbon after washing – all glimmered secretly in a deep drawer. Gloves were important – always made of chamois leather, white with black stitching, or faintly primrose coloured, soft as kid from careful washing. They were soaped and stretched on hands and ivory glove-stretchers while drying. Shoes were kept on wooden trees, never to lose their shape, or seam across with age. Shoes should be ageless. Good shoes, made by the right house, were beyond any whim of fashion – a mellowing lifetime lent them extreme quality.

Hair combings from her brush went at once into hiding – a small stoup, designed for Holy Water, concealed their rather sordid twirls – in accordance with the unspoken law that anything ugly should be put out of sight, which applied to more things than hair combings.

One of Aunt Tossie’s luxuries was an early breakfast in bed – later she came down to the dining room where she ate a second. Ignoring the existence of six servants she organized this breakfast herself. There was a tiny kettle in her room. Ignorant of the fact that it was Battersea enamel she lit the wick beneath it, well soaked in methylated spirits. While she waited for the water to come to the boil she put on her boudoir cap to conceal the steel haircurlers (dragon’s teeth through the night but never mind that), and her Jaeger dressing-gown (which . . .