Good Behaviour: A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick – Booker Prize Gems (Virago Modern Classics)

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While she finally has the opportunity to make a choice for herself, which should be to take her freedom; in my opinion, she does the wrong thing: she maintains this silly ideal of good behaviour no matter what dignity from which it follows that she does not allow herself to be happy: Yes, the young Aroon had parents who should never have been parents. Yes, she has a physique that does not meet the beauty criteria of her time. Yes, she was not loved.

Our water supply was meagre and my grandfather had deflected a considerable quantity of it to a pond on which, in the shelter of a grove of rhododendrons, he loved to row himself about. It was his escape from the land agent” So there is sex, murder, suicide, pregnancy, masturbation, nannies, class, queer characters and much more. But nothing is directly named. The satire is sharp as is the dissection of emotional relationships: This gap between the false surface and the dark thrust of tragic reality is why the narrator – and indeed the whole family – relies upon the ‘good behaviour’ of the title. When a tragedy occurs, everyone does their best to behave perfectly – to see who can cry the least, never mention it, ignore it and return to gardening or reading the Tatler. By forcing themselves to live in the surface, they try to make the surface cover up and suppress the underlying tragedy.Our good behaviour went on and on, endless as the days. No one spoke of the pain we were sharing. Our discretion was almost complete. Keane was born in 1904, in County Kildare. Her father, Walter Skrine, was a gentleman, a former colonial governor of Mauritius, and a fearless horseman, a man who “belonged to that species of Englishman who falls in love with Ireland”. Her mother, Agnes, was a poet (her Songs of the Glens of Antrim, published in 1901 under the pen name Moira O’Neill, sold 16,000 copies, outselling Yeats). And yet, in Molly’s youth, writing was something to hide – an undesirable gift that might frighten off the men. It was her duty to amuse – and she was good at it. She used to say: “Being a housewife is far more creative than writing but it does not pay so well.” In her milieu, riding mattered more than writing, and Phipps explains this in a way even the horse-averse will understand. Keane met her husband, Bobbie, at Woodroofe, a house where horsemanship was “an art form” practised with the “seriousness and insouciance of true artists in any sphere’’. This was an interval in his recovery; later in the year he was to have his wooden leg fitted. In the meantime he must rest, he must eat. He did both, and drank as well, growing every day more irritable and rather fatter. He followed Mummie about the garden at first; he even sat in the studio and watched her painting, after he had absorbed the small amount of racing news in the daily papers. All the time he seemed sadly unoccupied, as indeed he was. He couldn’t ride. He fell into the river when he went fishing. Long afterwards I knew things were on his mind then. Reeking, new, they must have been terrible. He had shot Ollie Reilly as he lay mutilated and dying; when he talked to Rose, Ollie’s death seemed quite enviable, here and gone, out like a light. The title is important and Kean has a way of using words effectively to put across a feeling with sinister undertones: https://web.archive.org/web/20071011230325/http://www.virago.co.uk/author_results.asp?TAG=&CID=&PGE=&LANG=EN&ref=e2007030614553308&SF1=data&ST1=profile

The book opens up to the present day of the life of Aroon St. Charles, 57 years of age. Her mother has just died from eating a rabbit mousse. She is deathly allergic to rabbit. Well, she is dead, so I guess the proof is in the pudding…oops, I meant mousse! 😝This polite murder is startling at the beginning, but by the end of the book you realise that really it is the very pinnacle of ‘good behaviour’. Aroon has developed manners so finessed, so smotheringly good that they really will allow her to get away with murder. Our good behaviour went on and on, endless as the days. No one spoke of the pain we were sharing. Our discretion was almost complete. Although they feared to speak, Papa and Mummie spent more time together; but, far from comforting, they seemed to freeze each other deeper in misery.”

In Loving without Tears, the widowed Angel, châtelaine of Owlbeg and the apogee of maternal selfishness, manipulates her children and household in equal measure, wishing only to repossess her returning son Julian. The novel was written only a few years after Bobby Keane’s death, and it is hard for Angel’s predicament not to resonate: she is ‘father and mother, too. A hopeless combination.’ This harshness belies the clear-sighted tenderness with which Angel is drawn. She can give as much as she takes, reminiscing to her retainer and erstwhile lover, Oliver: ‘You were so sad and sweet when we found you, that last lovely spring before the war, all alone in the Austrian Tyrol – and a gentian in your hat.’ It was these small accuracies that tied her charm to life.Animals, food and her brother are her consolation, her mother rarely responds even when Aroon reports that she thinks her baby brother is dead, she enquires where the staff are. Her father responds and inspires hope. She seeks out his company, a kind word, favour, he seeks comfort elsewhere.