Aroon picks her mother’s hand (‘limp as a dead duck’s neck’) out of the sick and puts it down on a clean place. Perhaps it is this that so disturbs, I like a book in which a character can in some way redeem themself, can change or transform, ‘nasty, black comedies’ and characters that take pleasure in using their wounds as weapons against another isn’t entertaining for me, I am unable to wear a mask and pretend otherwise. She was an editor for the publisher Andre Deutsch, and she was responsible for approving that the publishing house accept and publish the book…this is at the end of a review of the book written by Athill: “Not long before she died in 1996, when guiding a pen over paper had become difficult, she wrote me a little goodbye letter.

She wrote until 1946 when her husband died, and didn’t start again until 1981 when this novel was published and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. There was no money for new clothes; Molly’s older sister Susan was sent to a coming-out ball in a tennis dress.

Half the meat was eaten while the other half went bad, hanging in the musty ice house without any ice. She needed money, and perhaps the brooding, melancholic tendency that came out in her novels felt too dangerous. She has enough generosity and humanity to ward off the icy breezes generated by most every other character.

When Richard skips out of England before his wedding and moves to Kenya with Baby Kintoull (‘Married? I’d really only started because when I was seventeen the doctor said there was a threat I might have TB and I had to stay in bed. Once back at Ballyrankin, however, she contracted a mysterious illness that her biographer, her daughter Sally Phipps, suggests may have been psychosomatic. I fix my eyes on the strip of morning light where wooden rings join curtains to curtain pole and think about my bantams .Marvelous characters, unlikeable, weak, mean, nearly good, and you can feel the chill in the place, in the relations between people. But crumbling codes of conduct cannot hope to save the members of the St Charles family from their own unruly and inadmissible desires. Molly Keane was in her late seventies when Good Behaviour was first published in 1981 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize ( Midnight’s Children won). In Two Days in Aragon the story of the hat-box baby is refigured: the river is an abortionist’s graveyard ‘where babies’ bones were little and green scattered skeletons on the river bottom’. She knows exactly how to turn the conversation to the weather or when to decide to exercise a horse if emotion needs to be deflected, but she is a finely tuned instrument when it comes to her own feelings.

Alone she preserves a kind of dignity, even when masturbating Papa under the sheets, partly because Aroon can’t fathom her (and doesn’t try to). Nobody in the St Charles household would dream of treating the dogs or horses badly; servants and local tradesmen don't fare so well. Nothing is ever brought above the level of what is decent, not a flinching emotion not a tear not a raised voice. Either we, out of love, feel obliged to help her manage her life, or the way she manages her life has a negative impact on those around her. She was a great one for boiling roots and seeds at the right turn of the moon and a terrible effect they took if a girl went to her in time with her trouble.

I didn't get some on my first read and only after reading the reviews were there even more "so THAT'S why he said that! We can't be entirely frustrated with Aroon, though, because her mother is a horrible person, who with tremendous decorum--it's all about good behaviour, really--engages in relentless verbal abuse of her daughter. Diana Athill: Bad Behaviour is so clever, it’s mind-blowing…There are moments when the reader pauses to congratulate him or herself for being astute enough to twig what is really going on…It is as though we are seeing events unfold which we can then interpret for ourselves, and the effect of this is much more poignant than explication would be. Now the title extinct and estates entirely dissipated, Temple Alice, after several generations as a dower house (a house intended as the residence of a widow), came to Mummie when her mother died.