THE death of Molly Keane marks the end of an era in Anglo Irish literature. The contemporary and "great chum" of Elizabeth Bowen, she wrote 14 novels and a large number of plays and restored to fiction the long missing ingredient of style.
Molly also had style. Innocently birdlike and exquisitely spoken, she had a wicked sense of glee and enjoyed recounting how her mother dealt with sex instruction when she was 17. "There's a thing men do," mummy said, "and you won't like it." She said she had actually known all about sex from the age of 12. "We have a governess who told us everything in the most ghastly way.
In spite of this, she enjoyed life's spicy side and asked what she believed to be the most important things in life, she said: "I have come to believe that the two strongest motivations in life are sex and snobbery and I do most awfully believe in love."
Born in a Georgian manor, she was happiest in her small fairytale cottage in Co Waterford, with magnificent views over Ardmore Bay, where she lived for the past 30 years. She was an endlessly kind and witty hostess to a stream of visitors from John Gielgud to Russell Harty, to numerous journalists and young writers.
She loved parties but those who behaved badly had to resign themselves to becoming entertainment for later visitors. She once told how the actress Margaret Rutherford was invited for a weekend but stayed for a fortnight, bringing with her "a green melon, a bottle of vermouth and an enormous girl with polio".
The loves of her life were hunting and her husband Bobby Keane, a gentleman farmer with whom she lived for five years before they were married. "In those days, of course, it wasn't done - but it was done." His sudden death at the age of 36 was a lasting grief that influenced her life and career for many years.
She once told me how she tried to live with her in laws after his death, until driven back to her home in the Blackwater Valley by homesickness. "I had the feeling that once I got home everything would be all right. But the house would not accept me without Bobby. The most ghastly experience was walking up the big double staircase. As a kind of joke, Bobby and I always walked up the different sides and met at the top. When I got to the top of the stairs I realised I was absolutely and completely alone. It was a moment of complete desolation."
This and the failure of her last play, Dazzling Prospects, made her give up writing until her return to fiction at the age of 76 ("too old to ride to hounds, too poor to pay a gardener, but possessed of a rattling good idea") with her Booker short listed novel, Good Behaviour, an exquisitely black tale of nasty people with gorgeous manners.
"When Bobby died the first person I told was my daughter Sally, who was six. I thought she would die. She was completely stricken. We were both in the most dreadful state. Then this tiny six year old composed herself and said: `We must stop crying now, Mummy. We have to go in and face the servant'."
She disliked old age and in her last years used to apologise for the "appalling form" which meant that, incapacitated after two strokes, she could no longer drink cocktails or write letters. "You suddenly discover, with great dismay, that there's no such thing as getting old," she said. "It only happens on the outside. Sometimes I get dressed up to go to a party and then I have to pass a mirror and I'm faced with this frightful vision.
"And you get lonely, but you don't let on. There's the fear always of the dreadful time when one won't be independent. I keep promising myself I'll get a delicious old queer to live in the basement. I have a good social life and I have my daughter but, by God, when I let myself in the door I do miss talking with a chum."
In her life, as in her writing, Molly Keane was never bored. She always claimed she did not enjoy writing, but only did it for the money. "I like my friends and I like a little nip now and then," she would say very firmly. By her friends and the world of literature, she will be hugely missed.