To onlookers she looks like a Fat Lady in a peepshow with her “bosoms swinging like jelly bags”.

She’s tall and full blossomed in a way that is totally out of synch with the fashion in 1920s for slim, boyish figures. She is further burdened by her size and shape. Her mother is either distant or dismissive and cruel and her father only seems to pay attention when she is exhibiting her horsemanship even when this results in a near tragic episode where she clings onto a troublesome horse. They seem to be series of entertaining anecdotes about Aroon’s childhood in her ancestral country home yet it’s obvious to us, even if it isn’t to her, that she is being largely ignored and starved of affection. The chapters that immediately follow the rabbit episode reinforce our initial impressions that more is going on beneath the surface than first appears.

The result of an error of judgement by a well-meaning daughter or a deliberate act of a woman grown embittered over the years? The reader is left to decide but that episode is already a signal that maybe Aroon is going to prove an entirely unreliable narrator of her story. The tone is set in the opening scene in which Aroon, now a mature woman, prepares a rabbit mousse for her invalid mother’s meal, despite protestations from housemaid Rose that mum gets sick if she eats rabbit. Time and time again in Good Behaviour a darkness seeps through that is all the more disturbing because it’s so subtly introduced and then glossed over. Daughter Aroon and her younger brother Hubert are consequently left in the care of their beloved governess Miss Brock with whom they swim and picnic joyfully. Mummie is so busy with her gardening and her painting she has no time or patience for all the dull business of housekeeping and child rearing.

Papa occupies his time hunting, fishing and generally having a good time with his coterie of female admirers. But for the St Charles family, it’s imperative that appearances are maintained and they uphold the standards of good behaviour befitting the Anglo-Irish gentry. The ancestral home of Temple Alice might be crumbling and the debts piling up.

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