At the end of September I visited the city of Bath in Somerset, England and there found the headquarters of Persephone Books, a small publishing company specialising in the works of various female authors from the twentieth century. They started twenty five years ago in 1998 and all their books are bound in this silver/grey design with an identical dust wrapper but the end papers are different in each book and you also get a bookmark which matches that volumes’ end papers. Also each book, regardless of length, is priced at £14 but with a deal of any three books for £36. Restricting myself to three from the one hundred and forty nine titles available was tricky but at least from this book, number 86 on their list, I seem to have chosen well. It was originally printed in 1946 with the author taking the pseudonym of Sarah Russell almost certainly due to the scandalous nature of the subject matter. For Mrs Deborah Robertson says goodbye to her husband Graham in the early part of of the war as he is posted to Egypt and after moping about at their marital home in the country for a while with their young son Timmy, leaves him in charge of the housekeeper during the week and gets a job in London to keep herself occupied and starts on a series of affairs.

In fact the first ‘affair’ would nowadays be regarded as rape as the man involved got her drunk and they ended up in bed together for what was definitely a one off occasion which Deborah was completely disgusted with. However she soon moves in with a friend and starts relationships deliberately this time, partly for the company but mainly for what she can get out of them and she does seem to do rather well for quite a long time. The first proper affair was with Joe, an American lieutenant with a wife back in the States and this lasted quite a while with Deborah even taking him back to her marital home for what turned out to be an uncomfortable weekend to meet Timmy and this relationship lasted until he was posted out of the UK. He is followed by another American lieutenant called Sheldon who didn’t last very long before she found a French member of the London embassy called Pierre. This is the time when Deborah decides that what she really wants is to be a ‘professional mistress’ and asks Pierre to teach her what men are looking for is their dalliances. Pierre agrees but is also repelled by the task so after a few more weeks takes her for a meal with Brazilian diplomat Luis Vardas and after enjoying the meal simply leaves her with him as her new partner. By the end of affair number six she is completely manipulative over her lovers as can be told from the below extract when she has decided to get rid of her first British lover Anthony.

After Anthony we no longer have a lover by lover account of her partners instead there is a succession of men about who we find out very little and presumably neither does Deborah, she simply sees them as a means to an end although she is by now overspending in order to keep up the appearances needed for the class of man she is aiming to attract. Chapter ten begins…

Geoffrey was succeeded by Martin and Martin by Nils from the Norwegian Navy. Usually Deborah managed to avoid any awkward interregnum by building one up before the last had faded away, but sometimes this would fail and a gap would yawn. Then Deborah would give a party.

At such a party she would invite several possible successors for her favours and pick one to work on. By now Deborah is thoroughly unlikable as a character but the book is written so well that it is difficult to put down. Laski was a lover of words and the novel is beautifully put together so even as the ‘only in it for herself’ nature of Deborah becomes more and more dominant the novel still draws the reader in. Laski wrote six novels, five of which have been published by Persephone Books but her love of words is mainly shown by the fact that she contributed over a quarter of a million illustrative quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary and was also a regular panellist for twelve years on the BBC game show ‘What’s My Line’. I’ve loved the book and will almost certainly pick one of her other novels in my next group of three Persephone publications.

The end papers and the bookmark are printed with a design entitled ‘Good Night Everybody’, from a silk scarf made by London based silk specialist Jacqmar around 1940 and held in a private collection.