Customer Reviews

To Bed with Grand Music

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Deborah Robertson, the anti-heroine of Marghanita Laski's novel (published in 1946), finds wartime Britain an opportunity for the pleasures she has denied herself as a housewife in Hampshire. Although she has promised her fidelity to her husband stationed in Cairo for the duration of the war, she begins cheating on him almost as soon as she moves to London. She drifts from man to man, making elaborate excuses to her mother, her small son's caretaker, and herself as she does for staying in the war-torn city. Elizabeth Bowen has explored the betrayals the sexual opportunities of war allow with more psychological subtlety but perhaps not with more honesty or such a cold eye: Laski presents Deborah's affairs with utter dispassion, with no eroticism, and with very little sympathy. Utterly selfish, Deborah does nothing for anyone but herself, and even manipulates her son's emotions during her times back in Hampshire by making extravagant promises to him she knows she cannot keep. Unlike in Hogarth, this latter-day harlot's progress cannot end in genuine disaster or death because Deborah is far too clever to allow that to happen, but we see her change into someone utterly recognizable from the beginning of the novel by its end. As in her later novel THE VILLAGE (also published by Persephone), Laski demonstrates here her enormous acute insight into the behaviors of the English uprooted physically and psychologically by the trauma of the Second World War.