Young Entry

Book 232: Virago Modern Classics

by Molly Keane

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

Synopsis

Prudence, at nineteen, is reckless, laughing, wild; the despair of her elderly guardians. With her best friend, the subversive but very female Peter, she rackets round the Irish countryside among her beloved horses and dogs. But she feels betrayed by Peter's growing interest in the new Master of Hounds, 'Saxon' Major Anthony Countless. And what is Prudence to make of handsome Toby Sage, neighbour, huntsman and accredited flirt? Or of an inexplicable haunting? First published in 1928, this high-spirited novel with its subtle erotic undercurrents, is a glorious story of a ramshackle, tolerant society and of Prudence's turbulent coming of age.

Release date: May 2, 2013

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 316

Sample

The future author of Young Entry was seven when the cook turned on her one day, wagging a finger: “Now you listen to me, you wild little red rip …”

Molly Keane was seventy-nine when I first met her in 1983; small, deceptively frail-looking, no longer a redhead, but still something of a rip, there was little change in the original cocktail of her engaging qualities. Her small alert eyes missed nothing; her face is not photogenic, the infinite charm of it lying in its subtle mobility, but when it is still, perhaps when she is listening to someone, which she does with almost inspired concentration, her eyes are among the saddest I have ever seen. Her flick-knife wit, especially against herself, has never shadowed; she loves the incongruous, the unexpected lapse, the kaleidoscopic disarrangement of values. There is an element of steel in Molly Keane, as there is in most survivors, and this is more than equalled by a desperate vulnerability and a kind heart.

It has been said of Arnold Bennett that he conducted his literary education in public. The same may be said of Molly Keane. She was twenty-one when Young Entry was first published. She has said of her own work that its subjects have always stayed within a small canvas because she never writes about anything unless she knows about it really well. So what did she know about really well aged twenty? She knew about hunting and flirting and the lives of the Anglo-Irish landed gentry and its adamantine class structure. Young Entry has a minimal story line: Prudence, nineteen, who hunts and flirts, is being brought up by three guardians.

Prudence flamed and sulked, growing wilder than ever in her conduct, and hating her three guardians, severally and collectively. She hated Oliver, because he ignored her; Kat, because she was untidy, grubby—almost, and fussing—always. And Gus, Cousin Gus—she hated because she feared her. The influence of a strong personality which has ruled you absolutely, for almost as long as you can remember, is marked and abiding.

The italics are mine. It seems that Molly Keane’s mother, a linguist, musician and published poet, loved Molly the least of all her four children; she was the “odd one out”. In the character of Gus she gives a first and relatively slender example of the matriarch who preys on youth for her own narcissistic purposes. In each following novel this ensnaring, feline character is expanded and refined with irony and intense inner knowledge until in Good Behaviour it reaches its apotheosis in the character of Mummie, whose daughter Aroon, the large worm, in the end steps into Mummie’s shoes, immaculately trained. A Keane novel without one of these appalling creatures is unthinkable.

Prudence’s best girl friend who also hunts and flirts is, inexplicably, called Peter. They talk to each other and, indeed, to their suitors and their dogs, in caricature style.

“Peter, little little you!” Prudence picked up one of Peter’s hands and crushed it ecstatically in both of her own. “Where would I be without you? Let’s see who has the dirtiest nails.”

This absorbing occupation kept them enrapt for quite three minutes.

“You win, Puppy.” Prudence sat back in her seat, and pushed some of the damp, yellow mist of hair beneath her small, felt hat.

But the real subject of Young Entry is hunting. Will the new Master of Harriers be allowed to hunt its pack over the same country as the resident Master of Fox Hounds hunts his?

For twenty-five minutes, without a semblance of a check, hounds ran over the best of Toby’s borrowed country; twenty-five minutes while fire ran in the veins of their three followers, and drunk with the headiest of all wines, the glory of fox-hunting, they flung the fences behind them; nor ever encountered one strand of wire; for the great God of foxhunters looked down, and smiled, and blessing them, decreed that it should be so.

Young Entry is a juvenile work, extravagantly overparodic throughout, but the talent of its author is unmistakable. For Molly Keane’s worldwide admirers its charm and interest lie in this very factor; it was written before the exuberance and wit and innocence had come under a more conscious control, soon to be evident in every succeeding book she wrote. She has always insisted that after her first novel, published in 1926, when she saw herself as “a second Shakespeare”, she wrote the subsequent novels with difficulty and solely for money. But this can only be a fraction of the truth. The difficulties of the craft of writing came as something of a surprise to her after the easy fluency of the first successful attempt, but the exercising of a natural gift and the tapping of hitherto bottled up self-expression must have brought its own reward. To this day she becomes uncomfortable when charged with being a “born writer”. In Two Days in Aragon, she says of a character:

But life was Nan’s province, every aspect of life on which she could lay a finger; some octopus-like quality in her seemed able to reach out its sensitive strength and grasp the essential of what she heard and saw, and hold it tenaciously within herself until the moment for its use should come.

Molly herself had been doing this all her life.

As is now widely known, her first eleven novels were published under the name M.J. Farrell, a name she adopted for fear of ridicule and cold shouldering from the Anglo-Irish hunting set, the only friends she had at that time. Then, still as Farrell, between 1938 and 1946 she stopped writing novels and wrote four plays in collaboration with John Perry, all of which were put on in London by Binkie Beaumont and directed by John Gielgud.

But in 1946 something devastating happened. Mrs Keane’s adored husband Bobby suddenly died. Without question this was the most shattering blow in her life. For thirteen years theirs had been a marriage of the most fulfilling harmony and enjoyment. A perfect companion, a sharer, loving and full of life and fun, Bobby was equally at home with the Anglo-Irish hunting crowd, into which he had been born, as with the sophisticated London theatre world. Now this was over, as though by the guillotine. All her friends and her only remaining brother Godfrey know that on the dreadful day of Bobby’s death something irrevocably broke in Molly. She was left with not much money and two small daughters aged five and a half and one and a half.

Molly’s emotional life had never been straightforward. First there had been her alien status as a child in her own family, unloved by her mother. Following this she claims that at school she was hated and tormented by all the other girls. And she hated them. When she told me this I was surprised. In someone who had formed and held so many long friendships and was herself so gregarious by nature and so open with strangers, it made little sense. At least it turned on its head La Rochefoucauld’s axiom: “Les défauts de caractère s’augmentent en vieillissement comme les défauts du visage.” The hated schools had exacerbated the feeling of separateness, and when she started writing novels she felt obliged to follow the same pattern of isolation and use a fictitious name. Later, with the newer London friends, theatre people, writers, publishers, who stimulated and nourished her intellect and humour in a way that the hunting crowd could not, the need to compartmentalise became even greater. Only with Bobby had the whole of her diverse nature been able to flourish. Equally at home among artists and sportsmen he had understood her duality and never mocked her. He appreciated her gift as a writer and was proud of her success, and at the same time he loved hunting with her and going to parties and giving them. He was also a helpful and devoted father. He had fitted the needs of Molly’s complicated nature like a sheath.

Another blow, though not on the same scale, had hit Molly Keane very hard slightly earlier. Her latest play had flopped. The one she was working on when Bobby died was never finished, but the one before had been put on in London and taken off a few days later. A radical change which would soon proclaim itself with the trumpet blast of Look Back in Anger, was taking place in the theatre and the Farrell/Keane style of drawing-room comedy was no longer acceptable. In 1946, disillusioned about her talent and alive only to the constriction of pain in her heart, she stopped writing altogether for the next thirty years.

The texture of Molly Keane’s prose is like a Matthew Smith painting, voluptuous, sumptuously rich and curvy; her empathy with nature, her feeling for the changing of the seasons, of dawn through to midnight, has been, from the beginning, one of her great strengths as a writer. You can touch a Farrell/Keane countryside, and you can smell it:

On they jogged, by blackberry-filled hedges and twisting by-roads. The sky lightened slowly to disclose the witching sadness of the Irish countryside. They rode by little tumbled houses—lonely on the edges of dull, purple bogs; here, was a burnt fox covert—Anthony’s face darkened at the sight; there, a haunting, wet, little wood, where the old twisting birch stems were like crooked, silver spells; and the tang of the purple loosestrife rose on the smoke of the morning.

She was writing like this aged twenty; in Two days in Aragon, published in 1941:

The scent of azaleas caught in the back of her nose like a fog of honey and pepper. The harsh almost animal breath that is behind its scent was not here yet, only the wild pungent sweet of its earliest flowers.

Every one of her books is dotted with descriptive passages which cause the reader to stop and go back to re-read slowly with joy.

Like the young Molly herself, Prudence is a wilful, vulnerable, larky girl, brimming with life, attractive to men, very popular and devious. With almost no money she hunts, tears about in cars, flirts, visits friends’ houses, goes to the races, hunt balls and parties. Someone or other always pays her hunt subscriptions, lends her horses, gives her clothes. As Molly Keane told me, “You simply didn’t need money in those days. Everything was somehow always there.”

Always there for the Anglo-Irish in the Big Houses. Molly Skrine, as she then was, grew up in just such a way, but unlike her friends and contemporaries, her unsleeping eye never failed to catch the nuances of speech and behaviour between the privileged and the working classes. In the twenties this was even more marked and unbridgeable in Ireland than it was in England. M.J. Farrell recorded it all. “Peter dropped a half-smoked cigarette behind her back, setting her foot upon it; she did not smoke before ‘the people’.”

Good Behaviour, published in 1981 is, without queston, Molly Keane’s masterpiece, but Young Entry (which title might fittingly apply to its author) will give delight to the hunting fraternity with its many descriptions of the chase, and also much pleasure to those readers turned detective in sighting planted seeds in the author’s literary greenhouse—seeds which in time grew to such masterly and fruitful luxuriance.

Diana Petre, London, 1988

“So like Prudence!” the tennis party said. They also said: “God help her when the old ladies hear about it!”

Prudence, playing efficiently up at the net, concentrated her attention entirely on the game. She seemed to have utterly ignored the fact that a pair of jodhpurs—be they ever so well cut—are hardly the correct kit for a tennis party; even when supplemented by the best of fair-isle jumpers and undeniable socks.

After all, when one’s cousins (who are also one’s guardians) refuse to lend the car, what is one to do about it? Bicycle, perhaps? Not if you are Prudence; especially when the distance to be covered exceeds one mile. She rode, of course. And if she could successfully overcome the difficulties of playing tennis in so cramping a kit, no one else need object to it. Peter, in the opposite court, obviously approved; and if Peter approved, no other opinion mattered very much to Prudence.

The two girls, Prudence and Peter, exchanged the unconcerned glances of good friends as, their set finished, they walked off the court, and made their way towards the benches and rugs where the other members of the tennis party were seated.

They did not speak to each other at once. This afternoon’s show was in the nature of what Peter—whose ways of expressing herself were concise and rather picturesque—called, a “distinctly low party.” This only meant that their hostess, and most of her guests, did not belong to quite the same strata of Irish county society in which Peter Trudgeon and Prudence Lingfield-Turrett had been born and brought up; which fact accounted for the cousin’s refusal of the car that afternoon, as well as for the almost morbidly polite interest Prudence was showing in the few remarks volunteered by her late partner.

He was an overwhelmingly shy curate; Prudence was being kind to him partly because she hated people to be shy of her; and chiefly because she wanted so badly to talk to Peter—whom she had not seen since yesterday—and yet earnestly desired that Mr. Bennet should not guess that she felt anything but rapt interest in his conversation.

“Do you fish, Miss Turrett?” Mr. Bennet asked, quite easily, once the ice had been broken—or rather, melted—in the lighting of a cigarette.

Miss Turrett shook her head regretfully:

“No, Mr. Bennet, not even trout. You tie rather a good fly, don’t you? Miss Trudgeon got a four-pound white trout on one you gave her.”

Mr. Bennet’s glassy eyes popped. He was so pleased.

“Ah, Miss Trudgeon’s a grand fisherman. She’s a great sport all-round—don’t you think so?” Thinking perhaps that he had been too profuse in his admiration of my lady’s friend, Mr. Bennet caught himself up, adding as a diplomatic afterthought, “I believe you’re a very keen follower of the hounds, Miss Turrett.”

Prudence was delighted. The remark was so delicious as to quite repay her for trouble previously taken.

“Indeed, I am, Mr. Bennet,” she schooled her speech easily to the subtleties of his, “only I’m awfully frightened of the jumps, you know.”

“T’ch, t’ch, they’re surely a fright!” Mr. Bennet agreed in a heartfelt murmur. “But I hear you’re always the first lady in at the death.”

“Oh, not always, Mr. Bennet.” Prudence was enjoying herself more and more. “And if I am,” she continued, “all the credit belongs to the Puckhorn. When hounds are running Pookie takes charge of matters, and all I have to do is to stay with him. He’s priceless.”

“Oh, yes! He’s a lovely animal.” Mr. Bennet felt about in his mind for some safe remark about horse-flesh. Finally, he brought it out:

“Lovely gloss on his coat!”

Prudence nodded—wordlessly. Twisting sideways, she battled for a moment with helpless mirth, and the massed attacks of midges on her slight ankles. Then, once again she faced her companion, with lovely, grave eyes.

“Major Countless is cubbing in Knockbeale Wood on Tuesday morning,” she told him, casually. “You should put an alarm clock in a tin basin, and get up at 5.30 to hunt on your feet. Didn’t you board two and a half couples when the committee gave up? You’d like to see how they’ll do for this new fella? I think he’s only had them out for road-work, so far.”

Mr. Bennet sucked his teeth retrospectively:

“I’ll not forget in a hurry the three months I put in with the lot you and Miss Trudgeon landed down on me. Only I was sorry for the poor brutes, I’d have had the whole lot in the river twice over, before your cousin had the new master enticed to take them. Oh, such a crew! What’s this, now, their names were? Dimity, and Draughtsman, Ruby, and Ranger and Rally. I could never get their names, at all. It was mostly Spot, and Dot, and Dash, I had on them.”

“Well, Mr. Bennet,” Prudence rose to her lean, conspicuous height—she was much too thin—“promise me you’ll be out on Tuesday morning. And—I tell you what—beat up all the people you can who boarded hounds, I know they’d be interested; and we’d like to have a good field out to, er, to—as it were—welcome Major Countless. I think it would be a nice idea, don’t you?”

“T’ch, lovely!” agreed Mr. Bennet, who was quite aware that, should the alarm clock and the tin basin fail in their functions, Miss Lingfield-Turrett was perfectly capable of rousing him from slumber herself. There was that story about the sleeping curate—but, of course, it was quite among the indiscretions of her extreme youth.

Prudence was indiscreet. And yet she had, as she often told one, been beautifully brought up. So, leaving all her sins heaped at the doors of Heredity, she went her careless way—the despair of her guardians, and the joy of all fellow irresponsibles.

These guardians—the Misses Lingfield—were old ladies (or rather, middle-aged ladies) of some character. Character which did not, however, make them the best possible guardians for their young cousin. Still, since Miss Augusta, Miss Kathleen and their brother, Oliver, were the only near relatives that Prudence’s father possessed, it was both natural and obvious that he should leave his little daughter in their charge, when he went out to the Great War—from which he never came back. Under their guardianship she was to remain until she should come of age, and inherit both the property of Lingarry and the Turrett money.

This blessed day was still two years distant on the afternoon upon which Prudence wore her Cousin Oliver’s jodhpurs at a tennis party—a party given by people whom she knew her cousins listed among the “impossibles” of the neighbourhood; and imposed her wiles on the long-suffering and indulgent Mr. Bennet.

Now, after a faint smile, and a murmured, “I know I can rely on you,” she left him, moving across the grass to Peter, with quite unconscious stateliness.

Peter, who had done her duty equally by her late partner, now felt no compunction in isolating herself and Prudence—for a short space—from the rest of the party. They drifted vaguely towards the house; finally installing themselves unobtrusively in somebody’s new Dodge car. Prudence seated herself before the wheel, and stretching forth a surprising length of leg, absently took out the clutch and fingered the various gadgets on the switch-board while Peter spoke.

“My dear bird,” Peter said caressingly, “I’m so glad to see your face again. But what are you doing in Cousin Oliver’s breeching? You know, I don’t call it nice. And I’m sure the girls wouldn’t like it, either.”

“Oliver is away for the day—with Major Countless,” Prudence explained. “And the girls don’t know one pair of breeches from another. They’d get equally fierce whether they saw me walking about the passages in my cami-knickers, or this perfectly excellent yoke.” She passed approving hands down her lean thighs; then turned serious eyes to Peter: “Do you know, they have an old coat hung on a nail inside the stable-arch, and I’m supposed to drape my nakedness in it, before Tom Hinch or John Strap see me, when I come in from riding? ‘Exposing your legs’—that’s what they say.”

“My God!” Peter was momentarily deprived of speech. “My Ma is bad enough, but these two old—” she flicked past another word, and finished—“old cats, they take the barbed wire spittoon. They do, really.”

“Peter, little little you!” Prudence picked up one of Peter’s hands, and crushed it ecstatically in both her own. “Where would I be without you? Let’s see which of us has dirtiest nails.”

This absorbing occupation kept them enrapt for quite three minutes.

“You win, Puppy.” Prudence sat back in her seat, and pushed some of the damp, yellow mist of her hair beneath her small, felt hat. “And now let’s think of some serious diversion. It’s ages since we’ve had a real good crack.”

Peter nodded slowly. Screwing her blue eyes into slits, she trod absent-mindedly on the self-starter. With the consequent jar, came inspiration.

“Pet—I’ve thought of it!”

Prudence remained nearly impassive.

“Sweet one,” she said, “tell me. At least—you needn’t. It’s what I’ve thought of too. I know. We—we’ll rag the guts out of that horrid little fella, Major Anthony Countless, M.F.H. I hate him, and so must you. You do, don’t you?”

Peter threw up her round chin and laughed. She laughed with her throat, and chin, and her whole body, in the most infectious way—but not noisily. Suddenly grave again, she turned to Prudence.

“Poor brute! I pity him from my soul, if you and I really have taken a dislike to him. I suppose we have. After all”—she ticked off the points on her fingers—“Oliver Lingfield produced him, when Toby Sage’d have taken the hounds, if we’d put up another two hundred. Then, the girls approve of him. Also, he’s a dam’ Saxon; and, he’s been disgustingly rude to you, in your own house—”

“No,” Prudence broke in, swiftly. “He hasn’t even taken the trouble to be rude. He hasn’t asked me anything about the hounds—though he must know I took more trouble about them than anyone, when the committee gave up. He hasn’t even asked me to go and see the new kennels. He refused to take Jack Stevens back—even as second whip; Jack, who knows every inch of the country, and I promised him I’d do my best to get him taken on again. And he’s put down three-and-a-half couples. One of them was Dainty, too.”

“No, Prudence, he hasn’t!”

Prudence nodded.

“He has—this morning.” An even note of indignation was in her voice. “Oh, I don’t find him very difficult to dislike. A nasty little fellow! A stiff-necked, fox-catching, little Saxon!”

Peter said: “Dammit, Prudence, fox-hunting is his job; he is badly wanted in this country. He has the money; he has the hounds; he has the horses; he doesn’t even mind if we do dislike him. What are we going to do?”

“Dash! I believe they are looking for us to play,” Prudence jerked abstractedly at the catch of the door nearest to her. “Look here, Puppy. To-day’s Saturday. Between now and Tuesday we’ve got to collect every soul that walked a pup or boarded hounds during the last six months. They’ve all got to come out cubbing at Knockbeale. Be persuasive, but don’t over-do it. I’ll explain it all, later. Yes, Mrs. Roche—are we to play again? Come on, Peter.” The pair descended and walked across the gravel; Peter, ponderously, yet with something of the grace of a very well-fed cat; Prudence, with a free, impatient stride.

It was not until they were thoroughly engrossed in their game that a car slid noiselessly down the slight gradient to the hall door, and there came to a well-ordered stop. It was a high-powered car, with very limited seating room. As Mrs. Roche hurried hospitably forward, two men—preceded by a tall, and excellently tailored, lady—got out. The lady was Miss Augusta Lingfield, Prudence’s guardian; an. . .