Good Behaviour by Molly Keane
"But of course I notice everything."
Good Behaviour by Molly Keane (1981, André Deutsch)
New favourite murder weapon. You can keep your speckled band. In the opening chapter of Good Behaviour, Aroon St Charles ushers her invalid mother into the next world with quenelles of rabbit served in a cream sauce, "just a hint of bay leaf and black pepper", and all dished up on a "bright" tray with a "crisp clean cloth".
Her mother hates rabbit, you see. Always has, and everybody knows it. But what, reasons Aroon, "could be more delicate and delicious than a baby rabbit? Especially after it has been forced through a fine sieve and whizzed for ten minutes in a Moulinex blender."
The help, Rose, wonders if she is wise, but Aroon shuts her down. "I've often known her to enjoy rabbit… Especially when she thought it was chicken." But not this time. One sniff and she's done and she’s gone. Aroon is annoyed. Then she is frightened. Then she cries for Rose, who clatters upstairs and opens the window wide. They argue about who should attend the body. And then Aroon does something magnificently appalling.
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.'
Keep the lead piping warm, please, Mrs White. I'll have it for supper. As you might imagine, Rose is not impressed. "If it was a smothering you couldn’t have done it better," she screams, before going on to outline Aroon's litany of offences against her mother, against the family and the estate. But Aroon floats away, above it all.
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 a loss to know why their lives have been at times so perplexingly unhappy.
Having given us the monster, Keane now takes us back to discover how the monster was made. That "I am at a loss" is your instruction as to what's going to happen: Aroon is going to pass through childhood and into early adulthood seeing everything and understanding nothing. You, the reader, are going to have to pick it out. Our narrator is not so much flawed as staggeringly oblivious, though it's hard not to conclude that this obliviousness is less a question of simple idiocy and more a desperate survival mechanism.
It takes a village to raise a child; it takes an entire decaying class structure to fuck one up. Aroon was born into the Anglo-Irish aristocracy during the early years of the 20th century, when boys didn't cry and neither did girls, to a father comprised of horses and hounds and rampant infidelity and a mother that has had her children and now "longed to forget the horror of it once and for all." The money is running out. Miserable things are happening just offstage. The white mice in the nursery are making a terrible racket.
There's a very good LRB piece by Clair Wills on the novel and the life of its author, so I won't say much more here. But one thing Keane does throughout the book reminded me, in an odd way, of another novel of violent misery among social elites: American Psycho. Not the murders. This stuff.
He continues talking as he opens his new Tumi calfskin attaché case he bought at D.F. Sanders. He places the Walkman in the case alongside a Panasonic wallet-size cordless portable folding Easa-phone (he used to own the NEC 9000 Porta potable) … Price is wearing a six-button wool and silk suit by Ermenegildo Zegna, a cotton shirt with French cuffs by Ike Behar, a Ralph Lauren silk tie and leather wing tips by Fratelli Rossetti.
Keane doesn't go for the brand names with quite the same relentlessness, but we encountered the Moulinex blender earlier, and as the novel winds by we hear of Brown Windsor soap, Portugal laurels, Busvine suits, racehorses from "the School of Herring", Spi cartoons, Hepplewhite sofas, Shetland wool, Rimmel's toilet vinegar, a Tagel straw hat, Malmaison carnations, Robin starch, Egyptian cigarettes, chocolates from Charbonnel and Walker, suppers with a "Hunker-Munker Two Bad Mice quality", and of course "everything from Waring and Gillow". That takes us up to page 61.
I don't have much of a clue what any of that really means; what distinguishes Brown Windsor soap from Pear's or Imperial Leather or a Dove Original Beauty Cream Bar. (And in fairness, we do get a lovely description of the chocolates.) But then I don't really know what French cuffs by Ike Behar look like. What matters in American Psycho is that this is how these people understand one another and themselves: as a collection of signifiers of power and on-trend wealth. We don't find out if the cuffs look good or bad. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that they are expensive and correct.
And the same, in a quieter way, goes for Aroon's fixtures and fittings: the right soap, the right wool and the right cigarettes, even as the money disappears. These are the shibboleths of proper living, even as proper living becomes impossible. The power of the aristocracy is ebbing away but the performance goes on and on, chewing up child after child.
It may be the rabbit that does the work, but the most important item on Aroon’s mother’s breakfast tray is "the small silver fork (our crest, a fox rampant, almost handled and washed away by use)".
Incidentally, when Mantel and host agree that it should have won the Booker, what's unsaid is that it was up for the Booker in 1981. As such, it was beaten by Midnight's Children, which went on to win the Booker of Bookers in 1993 and the Best of Booker in 2008. So that's some compliment, or some beef.