It was all very strange and complicated. It looked as though nothing were quite so simple as it seemed; it looked as though the people we thought we knew best carried secrets that they didn’t even know themselves. Charley had a sudden inkling that human beings were infinitely mysterious. The fact was that you knew nothing about anybody. (p.213)
At 250 pages in the Pan paperback edition – notably longer than either Cakes and Ale or The Moon & Sixpence – this is a leisurely, rather rambling story of a young man’s trip to 1930s Paris in search of romance and adventure, and the more sordid realities of what he actually finds there.
Charley Mason
Charley Mason is 23 and just down from Cambridge. The opening fifteen or so pages give a light satirical portrait of his family, notably his bien-pensant, middle-class parents (Leslie and Venetia) who pride themselves of being abreast of all the latest developments in the arts from Virginia Woolf to Stravinsky.
Their comfortable lifestyle and complacent opinions are in fact based on the commercial reality that grandfather Mason was a canny market gardener who bought up patches of what was then countryside just north of London, which he and his heirs developed into a sizeable property empire, the rents of which fund the Mason’s high mindedness.
Charley’s dad wants him to inherit the steady, comfortably-paid job of managing these estates, but Charley wants to be an artist. Or maybe a musician. His parents persuade him to go to Cambridge while he thinks it over. Emerging with a good degree, Charley decides to look up his friend from prep school, Rugby public school and Cambridge, Simon Fenimore. Simon had been a fire-breathing communist at Cambridge and had left after just two years. He used his posh connections to get himself a job as foreign correspondent to a good newspaper, currently based in Paris.
Thus it is that Charley has arranged to look up his old friend on a visit to Paris for the Christmas holiday. So far this has been told in brisk flashback.
From now on the narrative becomes more dense and slow-moving. Firstly, Simon isn’t there to meet Charley when the latter arrives at the Gare du Nord. And then Simon has arranged his accommodation in a more upmarket hotel than Charley wished. Charley wants to experience romantic, Bohemian Paris, he wants to starve in a garret and write sonnets to his mistress. So is he is miffed to find himself staying in relative comfort at a cheap, but comfortable hotel.
Simon Fenimore
When Simon does finally call by and take Charley out for dinner it is to reveal himself to be – via an extensive monologue – a fanatic, a man who thinks ‘the people’ are sheep, that they need a strong leader, that the revolution is coming, and that he must achieve total mastery over himself, through mortification and self-discipline, in order to make himself ready for the great day.
Thus Simon had really wanted to rush to the Gare du Nord to meet his good friend off the train – but had forced himself not to, in order to conquer his wishes, in order to mortify himself, to perfect his will-power. As he explains:
‘These are my Wanderjahre. I’m going to spend them in acquiring the education I never got at the stupid school we both went to or in that suburban cemetery they call the University of Cambridge. But it’s not only knowledge of men and books that I want to acquire; that’s only an instrument; I want to acquire something much harder to come by and more important: an unconquerable will. I want to mould myself as the Jesuit novice is moulded by the iron discipline of the Order. I think I’ve always known myself; there’s nothing that teaches you what you are, like being alone in the world, a stranger everywhere, and living all your life with people to whom you mean nothing. But my knowledge was instinctive. In these two years I’ve been abroad I’ve learnt to know myself as I know the fifth proposition of Euclid. I know my strength and my weakness and I’m ready to spend the next five or six years cultivating my strength and ridding myself of my weakness. I’m going to take myself as a trainer takes an athlete to make a champion of him. I’ve got a good brain. There’s no one in the world who can see to the end of his nose with such perspicacity as I can, and, believe me, in the world we live in that’s a great force. I can talk. You have to persuade men to action not by reasoning, but by rhetoric. The general idiocy of mankind is such that they can be swayed by words and, however mortifying, for the present you have to accept the fact as you accept it in the cinema that a film to be a success must have a happy ending. Already I can do pretty well all I like with words; before I’m through I shall be able to do anything.’
Like the young socialist, Ernest, in Maugham’s last play, Sheppey, Simon is portrayed as deeply confused and troubled, his ideas veering wildly from Leninist communism to a Nietzschean view of the Strong Man rising through strength of will above the common mob.
Is he a communist or a Fascist? Like so many other young men between the wars, he could be either, in the sense that his core characteristics are burning anger and a sneering contempt for contemporary social values and for the sheep who passively accept it.
To prove how superior he is to conventional morality, Simon tells Charley some rather shocking stories about how brutally he treats his women.
I thought the novel would expand on Simon’s entertainingly unpleasant character and that, maybe, it would lead towards a big political rally or terrorist outrage, and that Charley would turn out to be a pawn in his friend’s fiendish conspiracy.
Maybe I’ve been watching too many superhero movies with their bubblegum plots. Maugham’s plot is – as so often – much more mundane and domestic in scale.
Simon takes Charley to a Parisian brothel, but a brothel with a twist. It’s called the Sérail and the women wear Turkish and Levantine outfits, sitting around bored until some man or other picks them to dance with to the small live band. Simon chooses a couple of women for them, pairing off Charley with a slight girl who turns out to be Russian, and here the narrative takes a massive unexpected turn.
Lydia
Before Simon disappeared off to have sex with his hooker, he had given Charley tickets to the Midnight Mass at St. Eustache, which he knew Charley wanted to see. On a whim Charley asks the prostitute Simon selected for him – introduced as ‘the Princess Olga’ because she is Russian – to accompany him to the church.
On the way she tells him that her name is really Lydia and she isn’t a princess. The church service is OK, Charley isn’t that impressed, but the biggest impression is made by Lydia who burst into tears and then collapses on the floor in a crumpled heap, crying her eyes out. Turns out she is fainting with hunger.
Embarrassed, Charley picks Lydia up and takes her for a meal at a very late-opening cafe, and it’s here that she tells him her story in a long monologue: briefly, she married a dashing French man, Robert Berger, who turned out to be an inveterate gambler and thief. Berger’s mother encouraged the match in the hope it would calm her son down, but it didn’t, and one day he stabbed a bookie to death. A few days later the police came, searched the little house they all lived in (Lydia, husband, mother-in-law), found and took Berger away. Berger was charged, tried, found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years’ penal servitude at St. Laurent in French Guiana. Lydia still loves him, but was forced to move in with some Russian friends of her mother’s, Alexey and Evgenia, the man a drunk, the woman unsympathetic.
By now feeling very sorry for her, Charley invites Lydia back to his clean but tatty hotel room: being a jolly nice chap he doesn’t make a move on her and they sleep in separate beds. Next day – Christmas Day – they stay in the room all day long, in front of a little fire, sending down to the concierge for food, while Lydia continues telling her story in great and entrancing detail, describing every single step in their relationship, wooing, falling in love, meeting the mother-in-law, marriage, domestic happiness, and then the slowly dawning realisation that all is not right.
I like the comment made by Eric Ambler, that Maugham isn’t a great novelist, but he is a great storyteller. For the purpose of the novel, the long excursion into Lydia’s story is a) not really necessary b) is artistically flawed in the most basic sense that she recounts a host of conversations and incidents which took place years before, with word perfect recall of all the details and every word of the conversations, something the reader can’t help noticing would be palpably impossible.
But who cares? As always with Maugham, something about the psychological penetration with which he describes her character and (after all, not that exceptional) story, is hypnotic, overcoming all logical drawbacks and really drawing you into her story.
So why, Charley asks, is she now working at the Sérail? Not for the money, she replies, she could earn more elsewhere. It is to mortify and punish herself. Why? Because she believes that through her suffering she can, maybe, atone for the guilt and suffering of her beloved husband.
‘There’s no logic in it. There’s no sense. And yet, deep down in my heart, no, much more than that, in every fibre of my body, I know that I must atone for Robert’s sin. I know that that is the only way he can gain release from the evil that racks him. I don’t ask you to think I’m reasonable. I only ask you to understand that I can’t help myself. I believe that somehow – how I don’t know – my humiliation, my degradation, my bitter, ceaseless pain, will wash his soul clean, and even if we never see one another again he will be restored to me.’ (p.131)
So within just 24 hours of his arrival in Paris (and by page 140 of this 250 page book), Charley has a) realised that his best friend has become a semi-Fascist fanatic and b) spent Christmas Day with a depressed Russian émigrée married to a convicted murderer.
What does the remainder of Charley’s Christmas holiday have in store, the reader wonders?
Simon’s account of the trial of Robert Berger
What it turns out to have in store is a lot more of the same. Charley suggests to Lydia that she stay with him in the hotel for the rest of his stay: no sex, just friendship. She is hugely relieved to get out of the household of Alexey and Evgenia. They are typical emigré Russians; he had once been a lawyer in Petersburg, now he is reduced to playing the violin in an orchestra at a Russian restaurant, and Evgenia runs the ladies’ cloak-room. Lydia goes to fetch her things, and Charlie goes to see Simon at his newspaper office.
Here Simon explains that he set Charley up with Lydia partly as a typically callous joke: he knew that Charley bears a resemblance to Lydia’s husband, Robert Berger, and was interested to see what would develop.
There then follows a deeply implausible 20 or so pages where Simon describes in mind-boggling detail the police investigation which led up to the conviction of Robert Berger. He gives a fly-on-the-wall account of Berger’s interrogation, and he is magically privy to the thought processes of the chief investigator who carried it out. The whole text turns for a while into an Agatha Christie novel in which we eavesdrop on Poirot’s thoughts.
The explanation given for Simon’s in-depth knowledge of every aspect of the case is that Simon, as journalist, had covered the investigation and trial in minute detail. Thus his narrative goes on to give us a court-room drama-style account of Berger’s trial, down to the appearance and behaviour of all the witnesses, the speeches of the lawyers for the prosecution and defence, of the judges and so on.
Over and above reporting the trial, Simon then went on to write a series of articles about Berger, taking him as a type of ‘the murderer’. He gives Charley a copy to read. It had become clear during the trial that Berger committed crimes for the fun and the excitement. He liked to wait outside department stores for posh people to drive up in their cars, park them outside and go in. That’s when Berger strolled out of the hotel, stepped into the car and drove it off (in the long-distant days before cars had car locks etc).
Berger would then drive round at night seeking likely-looking women waiting at bus stops and offering them a lift home. He was handsome and smooth-talking; many said yes. A little into the drive he would fake the car breaking down, ask them to poke around under the bonnet for him while he went through the charade of pressing the pedals etc, and at the first opportunity drove off with their handbags and purses. He stole the money and jewellery and threw the bags away.
Simon’s article had speculated that all these petty crimes led Berger on towards the ultimate crime. Simon speculated on how Berger had spent some time thinking about the perfect victim, eventually settling on the small, homosexual bookie, Teddie Jordan, who he routinely met at Jojo’s bar and other low-life haunts. Berger led Jordan on to think that he himself was gay, made an appointment with him and, as the little man was changing a record on the gramophone, stabbed him from behind, then stole all his cash.
Charley is horrified by Simon’s cynical depiction of Crime as Sport, and repelled by the cold calculating criminal mind of Berger.
Charley finished the essay. He shuddered. He did not know whether it was Robert Berger’s brutal treachery and callousness that more horrified him or the cool relish with which Simon described the workings of the murderer’s depraved and tortuous mind.
Charley is also dismayed by the fact that lovely Lydia was attracted to such a hound. They finish their drinks, separate and Charley walks back to the hotel, considerably disillusioned.
Back at the hotel, Lydia returns with her stuff from the flat where she’d been staying She expands on her Russian background. Her father was a socialist who accepted the revolution but nonetheless was expelled from his job at the university and, when he heard the police were coming for him, fled with his wife and baby Lydia to England.
Here they lived for 12 years but Lydia’s father missed Mother Russia and, when he contacted the Bolshevik Embassy in London, and they assured him they’d find him a good post back in Moscow, he went back. Instead, immediately on his arrival, he was arrested, imprisoned, tortured and then thrown out a fourth floor window. Ah Russian soul. Russian culture.
Lydia explains to Charley that Simon is obsessed with the figure of Felix Dzerzhinsky. This was the cold, unfeeling head of the Cheka or Bolshevik Secret Police, responsible for the arrest, torture, imprisonment and execution of hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens, and the terrorisation of the entire nation. Lydia explains that Simon asked her again and again about Dzerzhinsky’s life and career, and wanted to meet Alexey, because Alexey had once defended Dzerzhinsky in a Tsarist-era trial.
Why? Because deep down Simon sees himself as the English Dzerzhinsky.
Nonsense, says Charley. The English will never have a revolution and no such figure would be tolerated in England. Besides, the lives of the working classes were being improved all the time, with guaranteed working hours, social security, pensions, paid holidays, and slums being cleared to provide better housing.
Lydia replies – in terms which echo George Orwell’s opinions of this period – that a war is coming and regardless of the outcome, it will trigger sweeping social and political change in Britain. She ends with a personal warning:
‘You’re deceived in Simon. You think he has your own good nature and unselfish consideration. I tell you, he’s dangerous. Dzerzhinsky was the narrow idealist who for the sake of his ideal could bring destruction upon his country without a qualm. Simon isn’t even that. He has no heart, no conscience, no scruple, and if the occasion arises he will sacrifice you who are his dearest friend without hesitation and without remorse. (p.183)
The Louvre and the piano – Russia versus England
The following day they get up and Charley takes Lydia to the Louvre; after all, as well as ‘adventure’, he had come to see the paintings.
Scattered throughout the novel so far, at moments of reflection, Charley had tended to compare the Christmas Eve and Christmas Day he is having with a Russian prostitute with the traditional family Christmas his jolly English parents would be enjoying back in Blighty with their cousins.
While he is sat in a shabby Paris hotel room with an ugly, crying Russian prostitute, they were exchanging presents, pulling crackers, wearing silly hats and tucking into roast turkey and all the trimmings.
In other words, the complacently comfortable middle-class existence of Charley’s parents is used to set off the fanatic Simon and, even more, the rough life of Lydia the Russian exile, murderer’s wife and prostitute.
The next thirty or so pages intensify this theme. In it Charley takes Lydia to the Louvre and Maugham contrasts the worthy platitudes with which his mother and father (Leslie and Venetia) had shown him and his sister round, carefully allotting a fixed time to each masterpiece and lecturing them on each painter’s respective merits – with the simple, uneducated passion of Lydia.
Unlike his parents’ pedagogic perambulations, Lydia leads Simon hurriedly through the rooms of the Louvre and past countless ‘masterpieces’ in order to show him a small still life by Chardin. She she then proceeds to interpret this as an emblem of the Passion of Christ and epitome of how art can transform suffering.
‘It’s so humble, so natural, so friendly; it’s the bread and wine of the poor who ask no more than that they should be left in peace, allowed to work and eat their simple food in freedom. It’s the cry of the despised and rejected. It tells you that whatever their sins men at heart are good. That loaf of bread and that flagon of wine are symbols of the joys and sorrows of the meek and lowly. They ask for your mercy and your affection; they tell you that they’re of the same flesh and blood as you. They tell you that life is short and hard and the grave is cold and lonely. It’s not only a loaf of bread and a flagon of wine; it’s the mystery of man’s lot on earth, his craving for a little friendship and a little love, the humility of his resignation when he sees that even they must be denied him.’
It is, in other words, an artistic emblem of the self-sacrifice she is carrying out on behalf of her transgressing husband.
They eat in the Latin Quarter, then go back to the hotel room where Lydia reveals that she has brought some piano music from the apartment she shares with Alexey and Evgenia.
Now it just so happens that Charley is an expert pianist, a natural at school who continued his training at Cambridge. As Lydia places Scriabin or Schumann in front of him, he is immediately able to play them note perfect. Lydia has a go, plays terribly, but with an inspiring Russian passion.
Leaving aside the implausibility of all this, Maugham’s aim is, very obviously, to contrast Charley’s bright cheerful perfectionism, reflecting the happy sunlit life he has led in carefree England, with Lydia’s uninformed, uneducated, but infinitely more passionate and heart-felt emotionality.
Russia versus England – in which Russia beats England dead for passion and vibrancy. The only slight catch with all this being that Russian passion and spirituality seems to have led to… Stalin and Dzerzhinsky – to a world of terror, labour camps and death. Whoops. So England beats Russia for providing peace, stability and comfortable living for the majority of its population.
I found it difficult to understand what Maugham was getting at in these pages. Is he just presenting these two points of view with no intention to judge, leaving it to us to draw conclusions? Or is he hinting at what we could call ‘the Orwell Vision’ i.e. that peaceful complacent England is doomed.
The life Simon described lacked neither grace nor dignity; it was healthy and normal, and through its intellectual interests not entirely material; the persons who led it were simple and honest, neither ambitious nor envious, prepared to do their duty by the state and by their neighbours according to their lights; and there was in them neither harm nor malice. If Lydia saw how much of their good-nature, their kindliness, their not unpleasing self-complacency depended on the long-established and well-ordered prosperity of the country that had given them birth; if she had an inkling that, like children building castles on the sea sand, they might at any moment be swept away by a tidal wave, she allowed no sign of it to appear on her face.
Last day
They wake up on Charley’s last day in Paris. During the night he had seen Lydia crying in her sleep (a haunting image which recurs in several Maugham stories) but she remembers nothing on waking.
1. They go to a café to meet two men recently returned from the colonial penitentiary where Berger is being held. They describe conditions there. (Maugham had actually visited this far-away French prison on an island off South America and set two short stories there which give a lot of information about the lives and conditions of prisoners, A Man With A Conscience and An Official Position). The two men describe meeting Berger and reassure Lydia that, as a confident, quick-witted, intelligent crook, he’s doing just fine. They explain how Lydia can get money to him through back channels.
2. Charley goes off separately for a last meeting with Simon. (pp.224-234) Simon reveals himself to be even more fiercely contemptuous of his fellow man than we first thought, having become convinced that most men are cattle ruled by boundless egotism and only kept in check by brute force.
‘Democracy is moonshine… The rise of the proletariat has made it comparatively simple to make a revolution, but the proletariat must be fed. Organisation is needed to see that means of transport are adequate and food supplies abundant. That, incidentally, is why power, which the proletariat thought to seize by making the revolution, must always elude their grasp and fall into the hands of a small body of intelligent leaders. The people are incapable of governing themselves. The proletariat are slaves and slaves need masters.’
Simon systematically trashes the ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy. For Simon the Bolshevik revolution, and the Italian and German fascist movements which followed, all tell the same message: ‘the people’ are idiots, most of them born to be slaves. All that matters is power, having the charisma and force of personality to become a dictator. And now he brings up the name of Dzerzhinsky, representing him as the man who brought the implements of terror and repression to scientific perfection.
By now we realise that Simon Fenimore is a portrait of an English Fascist dictator-in-waiting.
This is all highly schematic – sort of interesting as social history, but questionable as fiction, or only as the kind of fiction of ideas found in Brave New World (1932) or in George Orwell’s pre-war novels with their obsession with impending social collapse.
Charley goes home
Then Charley goes home. He tries to kiss Lydia at the station but she turns away and walks away without looking back.
Charley has lunch on the train with ‘half a bottle of indifferent Chablis’, opens a fresh copy of The Times with its reassuringly thick paper, and a few hours later soon steps out onto the soil of England. Phew! What a relief.
At Victoria station he’s met by his mother, crying with relief, then taken home to the bosom of the family and, after a hearty dinner, is soon caught up in a game of family bridge, being told all the gossip about the in-laws at Christmas, especially the fact that cousin Wilfred has been offered a peerage. How simply ripping!
But as he sits there half-heartedly playing the game and listening to his parents prattle on, Charley finds his mind drifting back to Simon with his tortured, dark eyes fantasising about a Fascist dictatorship, to the vision of Lydia once more heavily made-up and plying her trade at the Sérail, to the big Russian singer they heard at one of the émigré nightclubs, pouring out her heart in songs of barbaric passion, to the two returnees from the French convict island, shifty, paranoid and damaged, and to the figure of shaven-headed Robert Berger wearing his prison pyjamas 5,000 miles away, off the coast of South America – and Charley realises he is greatly changed.
His sister had asked him if he had had adventures in Paris and he had truthfully answered no. It was a fact that he had done nothing; his father thought he had had a devil of a time and was afraid he had contracted venereal disease, and he hadn’t even had a woman; only one thing had happened to him – it was rather curious when you came to think of it, and he didn’t just then quite know what to do about it: the bottom had fallen out of his world. (p.252)
Inelegant prose
I’ve pointed out in other posts the surprising trouble Maugham had writing plain, clear English and my theory that it stems from the fact that for the first six or so years of his life he spoke only French (having been born and brought up in the British Embassy in Paris).
I don’t know whether it’s a sign of his disengagement from the subject of this novel, or of his age (he was 65 when the book was published), or the fact that writing a long work of prose always brought out the oddity in his writing – but the problem recurs in this book in sentences which often make you stumble as you read, and sometimes force you to reread the whole thing to understand it properly.
The situation was odd, and though it was not to find himself in such a one that he had come to Paris, it could not be denied that the experience was interesting. (p.79)
He talked quite naturally, but she had no notion what were his powers of dissimulation, and she could not help asking herself whether he proposed the drive in order to break unhappy news to her. (p.99)
She felt on a sudden warm with love for that woman who but just knew her, and yet, contrary to all expectation, because her son loved her, because with her sharp eyes she had seen that she deeply loved her son, had consented, even gladly, to their marriage. (p.102)
He decided to settle the matter there and then, but being shy of making her right out the offer he had in mind, he approached it in a round-about way. (p.237)
Maybe he’s trying to copy Henry James’s lengthy, ornate and carefully balanced periods, in which case – quite simply – he can’t manage it, not without coming over as clumsy and obscure.
Related links
Somerset Maugham’s books
1897 Liza of Lambeth
1915 Of Human Bondage
1919 The Moon and Sixpence
1921 The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands (short story collection)
1921 The Circle (play)
1922 On a Chinese Screen (travel book)
1923 Our Betters (play)
1925 The Painted Veil (novel)
1926 The Casuarina Tree: Six Stories
1927 The Constant Wife (play)
1928 Ashenden: Or the British Agent (short story collection)
1929 The Sacred Flame (play)
1930 Cakes and Ale: or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard
1930 The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey From Rangoon to Haiphong
1931 Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular (short story collection)
1932 The Narrow Corner
1933 Ah King (short story collection)
1933 Sheppey (play)
1935 Don Fernando (travel book)
1936 Cosmopolitans (29 x two-page-long short stories)
1937 Theatre (romantic novel)
1938 The Summing Up (autobiography)
1939 Christmas Holiday (novel)
1940 The Mixture as Before (short story collection)
1941 Up at the Villa (crime novella)
1942 The Hour Before The Dawn (novel)
1944 The Razor’s Edge (novel)
1946 Then and Now (historical novel)
1947 Creatures of Circumstance (short story collection)
1948 Catalina (historical novel)
1949 A Writer’s Notebook
1963 Collected short stories volume one (30 stories: Rain, The Fall of Edward Barnard, Honolulu, The Luncheon, The Ant and the Grasshopper, Home, The Pool, Mackintosh, Appearance and Reality, The Three Fat Women of Antibes, The Facts of Life, Gigolo and Gigolette, The Happy Couple, The Voice of the Turtle, The Lion’s Skin, The Unconquered, The Escape, The Judgement Seat, Mr. Know-All, The Happy Man, The Romantic Young Lady, The Point of Honour, The Poet, The Mother, A Man from Glasgow, Before the Party, Louise, The Promise, A String of Beads, The Yellow Streak)
1963 Collected short stories volume two (24 stories: The Vessel of Wrath, The Force of Circumstance, Flotsam and Jetsam, The Alien Corn, The Creative Impulse, The Man with the Scar, Virtue, The Closed Shop, The Bum, The Dream, The Treasure, The Colonel’s Lady, Lord Mountdrago, The Social Sense, The Verger, In A Strange Land, The Taipan, The Consul, A Friend in Need, The Round Dozen, The Human Element, Jane, Footprints in the Jungle, The Door of Opportunity)
1963 Collected short stories volume three (17 stories: A Domiciliary Visit, Miss King, The Hairless Mexican, The Dark Woman, The Greek, A Trip to Paris, Giulia Lazzari, The Traitor, Gustav, His Excellency, Behind the Scenes, Mr Harrington’s Washing, A Chance Acquaintance, Love and Russian Literature, Sanatorium)
1963 Collected short stories volume four (30 stories: The Book-Bag, French Joe, German Harry, The Four Dutchmen, The Back Of Beyond, P. & O., Episode, The Kite, A Woman Of Fifty, Mayhew, The Lotus Eater, Salvatore, The Wash-Tub, A Man With A Conscience, An Official Position, Winter Cruise, Mabel, Masterson, Princess September, A Marriage Of Convenience, Mirage, The Letter, The Outstation, The Portrait Of A Gentleman, Raw Material, Straight Flush, The End Of The Flight, A Casual Affair, Red, Neil Macadam)
2009 The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings
Books & Boots 