Full House – Molly Keane (1935)

For those used to the world of Molly Keane with Full House we are back in familiar territory. Molly Keane has become an old favourite of mine, there can’t be that many of her books left for me to read.

An Irish mansion; Silverue stands between the hills and the sea. Home to the Bird family it is presided over by Olivia Bird a beautiful, selfish woman in her late forties, proud of her youthful looks. The house dances to Olivia’s tune, her husband Julian is usually to be found in his study – his adoration of his wife is a somewhat quiet affair.

Their youngest child is Markie – a delightful, irrepressible seven year old who runs happily around the grounds followed closely by his governess Miss Parker. Miss Parker is a rather pathetic figure, though Markie loves her – plagued by embarrassing facial hair – she is thought of as being rather furry by the family she works for. There is, naturally enough a disaster with her latest mail order depilatory. When not running around after Markie, poor Miss Parker is harried to pieces by Olivia – who thinks nothing of asking her to plant a thousand crocus bulbs.

The Birds’ middle child is Sheena, a rather lovely nineteen year old, teetering on the brink of either great love or great heartbreak. She has been spending more and more time with Rupert, the son of another local landed family, whose older sisters take it upon themselves to interfere in their brother’s love life.

As the novel opens family friend Eliza arrives, thirty-five with divorce and bereavement in her past – she has loved Julian from a far for years. She arrives on an important day, the day the Birds eldest son John arrives home – the reasons for his previous absence are glossed over – but it is clear that he has suffered a breakdown and been away recovering. John is Olivia’s darling, and Eliza has some concerns as to whether Olivia is up to the delicately balanced situation.

“In the rod-room, coldly and devastatingly the same as he had always known it, John shut the door and waited for a moment almost without thought. I don’t mind. You’re not lonely because you’re alone, he protested. I’m all right if I keep quiet. All right. I’m quite all right. It’s only for a second I feel a bit wretched. Was it this room being so inevitably the same that made him feel terrible for a moment, so divided from all he had a right to ask of life? The same shelf of dog’s medicines. The same row over row of rod-rests, and the rods one knew so familiarly lying on them one above another. The fuchsias half-darkening the windows, and the Boody with yet another litter of healthy and illegitimate puppies in the box in the corner. All these things were rather drearily the same as they had always been. That was it. That was why they hurt him so much.”

Julian’s diplomatic way of removing John from his mother’s over whelming presence is to arrange an evening of fly fishing for after dinner. At dinner John’s black humour about his illness rather takes everyone aback. He welcomes the fishing though, despite knowing it to be too early in the season. John meets Nick, a local man who lives simply, his little cottage on the extreme point of the peninsula where one door looks out on the sea and the other door out on the hills.

“And John was more than ever like John, with a curious unlikeness to himself which all this clamour could not shelter. He had come back to them, and they must not think he wanted any nonsense about nervous breakdowns and the like. It made things much worse for him. And if he defended himself from worse so wildly, the present must hold some terror of soul for him past imagination. Eliza wondered where he found the refuge.”

While Olivia is organising her garden fête – which everyone has to suffer for – Eliza recognising that John is still not completely at home finds that she can help him with the love she is unable to give to Julian. Eliza is also worried for Sheena – who in her desperate love for Rupert is so terribly miserable. Can a secret that Eliza has been keeping for Olivia help Sheena?

Full House is another excellent Molly Keane novel, beautifully written with gorgeous descriptive passages, it’s a novel that recognises the sometimes precarious emotions within families.