We communicated mostly by letter, meeting only briefly on her infrequent visits to London, and I accompanied her to the Booker prize dinner in 1981, when Good Behaviour was shortlisted. As for Molly herself – her personality: well, I liked and admired many of “our” authors, but Molly … Molly I loved. I think I can say that such an experience is true of no other novel I ever published. I could move about in the story as easily as I can move about in memories of my own past. I only had to pick the book up and there it all was in my head. Although Time After Time was wonderfully entertaining and Loving and Giving was perhaps the most amazing thing she ever did, considering her age and frailty at the time she wrote it.īecause it is many years since I last read Good Behaviour I thought I ought to read it again. Her two subsequent novels – Time After Time and Loving and Giving – were less brilliant than Good Behaviour. 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. But clever Molly has used her “distancing” technique to turn us into something nearer watchers than story-readers. There are moments when the reader pauses to congratulate him or herself for being astute enough to twig what is really going on – but never any when he or she is exclaiming “Clever Molly”.

This is mindblowingly clever – and the best thing about it is that it is never clever for the sake of cleverness. She makes Aroon, her narrator, tell a long and complicated story without ever understanding what that story is about. With Good Behaviour she achieved something quite extraordinary. I think the shape her modesty took was simply not feeling that being a very good writer was all that important. Molly was essentially modest, but like all good writers she knew deep down that she was good. She simply did not feel that being a good writer was all that importantīut with Good Behaviour it was instantly clear to me that she ought to step forth as herself, and her own hesitation about it was very slight. How I sympathised! She knew deep down she was good. “Brainy” was why Molly published all her early novels under a pseudonym. “Oh, you’re the brainy one, aren’t you?” said one of my partners at a hunt ball – and he might as well have accused me of reeking of halitosis. Both of us started out “horsey”, and both had learned to flinch at the word “brainy”. East Anglia and Ireland are chalk and cheese, but there are still resemblances between big-house families (particularly if short of cash) and both of us came from such families. What had moved me to such bad behaviour was not only the novel’s quality, it was also the extent to which I shared Molly’s background.

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