He liked dressing up, too, but Mrs Brock felt that such games were not quite the thing for little boys.

Certain extended scenes are unforgettable, as when Richard, Aroon’s fantasy lover—but in fact her brother’s preferred bedmate—spends the night in her room to deflect attention from the men’s true relationship. Widows and spinsters had always appeared as minor characters in her books—marriageable men were thin on the ground after World War I—but in this new phase of her career, when Molly was an unmarried woman in her thirties, they took center stage. The journalist Maureen Cleave wrote to Keane that the earl of Longford, Thomas Pakenham (Anglo-Irish historian and brother of Antonia Fraser), ‘is dying to meet you. A narrator in denial; a style purged of description; a plot never spelled out; a love that dares not speak its name. Same time period, and similar things happen, although Swift's is set in England and this is Ireland.She doesn’t choke on it: Aroon has made sure that the quenelle in cream sauce is perfect, with ‘just a hint of bay leaf and black pepper, not a breath of the rabbit foundation’, the mousse irreproachable ‘after it has been forced through a fine sieve and whizzed for ten minutes in a Moulinex blender’. The men were the flowers in these mysterious forests, sleek and orchidaceous in their hunt coats, the facings and collars pale, thin gold watch-chains crossing meagre stomachs, white ties as exact as two wings on a small bird’s back, long legs black as cypripedium stems, hands sometimes gloved, eyes focused distantly, as if a fox stealing away from its covert was still the thought in mind. She lifted the small silver fork (our crest, a fox rampant, almost handled and washed away by use) as though she were heaving up a load of stinking fish: ‘The smell – I’m – ’ She gave a trembling, tearing cry, vomited dreadfully, and fell back into the nest of pretty pillows.

It’s both a practical assent to economic reality and a way of saying no to convention (look at the pile-up of negatives in Keane’s description): ‘That extreme and unaffected uninterest in what her neighbours might think of her actions, which is one of the few unassailable prerogatives left to the aristocracy, Aunt Dicksie possessed in a marked degree. Grania, the silly 18-year-old protagonist in Two Days in Aragon (1941), lacks imagination for a future in which her lover will abandon her. She survives through her alliances with the world outside the Big House, first with Mrs Brock, and later with the local solicitor, Mr Kiely, to whom she demonstrates an utterly pragmatic and unfamilial way with money. Readers of Clair Wills’s essay about Molly Keane and Good Behaviour may be surprised to hear that this extraordinary novel almost didn’t get published ( LRB, 18 March).So there is sex, murder, suicide, pregnancy, masturbation, nannies, class, queer characters and much more. There are several very transparent clues that Rose has been, to use vulgar parlance, giving the Major a hand job. Aroon has been so isolated, kept in ignorance, that she knows nothing, perhaps refuses to know anything. It is obvious to the reader (and indeed to several of the other characters) that instead Richard and Aroon's brother Hubert were having a homosexual affair.