READING IRELAND MONTH 2022: GOOD BEHAVIOUR BY MOLLY KEANE

Published in 1981, Good Behaviour was Molly Keane’s first novel for twenty years. It tells the strange, often blackly comic, and ultimately tragic story of the Anglo-Irish St Charles family, who, in the early years of the 20^th century, are clinging on to their aristocratic life in rural Ireland as all around them the world is changing fast.

The narrator of the story is Aroon. When the book opens she is 57 and ministering to her aged invalid mother with the help of Rose, their one remaining servant. It is clear that they have moved to a smaller house, Gulls’ Cry, quite recently. Rose and Aroon are arguing over Aroon’s intention to give her mother rabbit for lunch – but there are clearly much bigger battles being fought between them.

When Mummie suddenly – and dramatically – expires in mid-mouthful, Aroon (still arguing with the equally stubborn Rose) begins to think about the past;

If I look back beyond any shadow into the uncertainties and glories of our youth, perhaps I shall understand more about what became of us.

So begins Aroon’s highly partisan account of life at Temple Alice, the vast, dilapidated mansion in which she grew up with Mummie, Papa, her younger brother Hubert, and an army of servants. Molly Keane herself spent her childhood and youth at Ballyrankin House in County Wexford, and draws on her time there – in what in some ways was a very similar family – to provide the background for Aroon’s story.

In a 1985 RTE interview with the journalist John Quinn, collected in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl (review here), Keane spoke about the childhood in which she rarely saw her parents, was educated at home (‘I am probably the worst educated woman in the world’), and made friends of the estate workers and servants. Aroon’s mother is no doubt a caricature of Keane’s own, in that she is not only distant but cruel. She makes it clear that she despises Aroon for her large size and lack of beauty, focusing instead on the perfect Hubert. Hubert is of course sent away to school, so Aroon, left alone, turns instead to her father, a man obsessed with the usual country sports of hunting, racing, shooting and fishing – and a few other things. Whilst her mother is a virtual recluse, interested only in gardening and painting rather poor pictures, Papa is madly sociable and always out. If he’s not riding, he’s paying visits to some of the equally eccentric neighbours, such as the impoverished (but still ‘like us’) Crowhurst sisters;

(they) were almost identical twins; Nod and Blink were the baby names they still went by, though at the time they were almost thirty, nearing middle age. Everybody was kind to them because they had no money, nothing but Good Old Blood…

Like horses. (And they are exceptional horsewomen.)

Aaroon worships her father and longs to please him

I saw quite a vista of things I could do for Papa – plans and pleasures for which he would love me.

Although often absent, he is kinder to her than her mother is, and tries to engineer her happiness when he can.

Both parents, and Mummie in particular, are of their time and class; this means that keeping up appearances is essential, anything ‘unpleasant’ is simply ignored (especially by Mummie), and conformity to good behaviour – their version of it – is paramount. Throughout almost all of her life, Aroon is convinced that she alone understands people, their needs and best interests;

All my life so far I have done everything for the best reasons and the most unselfish motives. I have lived for the people dear to me, and I am at a loss to know why their lives have been at times so perplexingly unhappy. I have given them so much, I have given them everything, all I know how to give…my brain is fairly bright, brighter than ever I sometimes think, and I have a cast-iron memory.

Aroon seems to have no idea how thoroughly she has been deceived, and has chosen to deceive herself, for so long. As her narrative proceeds, the reader begins to realise just how very little Aroon has understood of what has been going on right under her nose.

As a teenager she fantasises about a romance with her brother’s friend Richard. In fact Richard has very different interests, but something he does to protect those interests gives the naïve Aroon false hope – a hope she clings on to relentlessly and unreasonably, for decades. Similarly, she completely fails to see what her father is up to, always taking his excuses at face value.

When Papa becomes disabled and later bedridden, Aroon fights a bitter, largely unspoken, war with Rose over the provision of his care – and still she does not realise the truth of the situation. With so little in her own life, her conviction that she and only she is right about everything is her only comfort – but although the reader might otherwise have felt sorry for her, she is so wilfully stubborn, and just as much of a snob as her mother, that we struggle to care. Aroon is a wonderful creation, a character who exerts a grim fascination as we observe her deluded foolishness.

Mummie, meanwhile, is a typical member of the old upper classes, in that she is totally sure of her superior position, and that in that position she has the right to live as she has always done, even when the estate is bankrupt and the bills are piling in (these she simply sweeps into a drawer and ignores

‘Oh, letters. There’ll be nothing but nasties. Nasty upsetting things.’.)

When Papa’s nurse wants to be paid, she is furious and demands to know why nurse should be paid at all – ‘she’s practically a house guest.’ When tradesmen refuse to supply any more items on credit, she sees them as petty;

‘Monstrous, shop people are.’

Unlike Aroon she is not really oblivious to what is going on within and without the household, but to speak of it – even so much as to acknowledge it – would not be good manners. Like so many of her class, she believes that anything unsavoury, whether personal or financial, is simply to be ignored.

‘I expect everything will have simmered down by now.’

‘But Mummie, you know it won’t have simmered down.’

After Papa’s death, the story turns full circle back to Gulls’ Cry, and it is then that Keane drops her bombshell. The final twist in this story is so clever – I hope I’m not being as blinkered as Aroon when I say I didn’t see it coming – and provides proof, if proof were needed, that Good Behaviour is not only a fascinating record of a long gone way of life, but also a brilliant novel in its own right.

Good Behaviour by Molly Keane is published by Virago Modern Classics, and in the USA by New York Review of Books Classics.