Going Up (4 page)

My father walked down Threadneedle Street to 5 St Mary Axe, where a wooden lift worked by a rope pulley in the hands of the punctual, waist-coated Len carried him up to his office. The letters, of three single-spaced paragraphs, that he posted to me when I was at school, first in Devon, then at Godalming, were dictated to his secretary and typed on paper as blanched and flimsy as £5 notes (so rare they often had to be signed before a shop would accept them). Cedric’s hieroglyphic signature was the only personal mark on the page. My mother wrote fluently in pen on blue headed stationery. She signed herself ‘Mummy’, during my childhood, or ‘Ma’, once I was married. Only in the 1980s, after overhearing my American-Armenian agent, Ron Mardigian, call his mother ‘Alice’, did I adopt the habit of calling my mother ‘Irene’. I never called my father by his first name.

Shell Oil had been founded by Marcus Samuel, the first Lord Bearsted. A posse of Jews figured in its original executive complement. My father joined the company just too late to be of their number. The company secretary was Alfred Engel, with whom Cedric had been at Oxford. Engel’s son George was an outstanding classicist at Charterhouse a generation before me. The sixth-form master, A. L. ‘The Uncle’ Irvine, a Mr Chips who said goodbye just before I could profit from his exacting tuition, dispensed young Engel, once he had won his Oxford scholarship, from the diurnal drudgery of composing Latin and Greek proses and verses. Instead, he encouraged his prodigy to become an expert on Corinthian black-figure vases. Since I would have nine months
between leaving school and going up to Cambridge, my father, while shaving one morning, in sleeveless aertex vest, commodious underpants and silk socks stretched to transparency by American-style suspenders, advised me to emulate young George. Arcane expertise could cut a key to distinction. As he spoke sound sense, I noticed that my father had a thickened and opaque left big toenail. Some twenty-five years after the reminder that winning scholarships was not identical with being a scholar, I was asked to review George Cawkwell’s
Philip of Macedon
, an academic work of more diligence than wit. In it, George Engel was gratefully acknowledged as editor. There were some negligible flaws, which I did not neglect, and one passage of entirely scrambled print. Printers can do things, after proofs have been corrected, that even a punctilious editor has no chance to put right. Would I have cited Engel in my review had an antique splinter of envy not been lodged in my psyche? My less-than-pretty conduct is worth mentioning only because there must be thousands of such uncharted pettinesses in every life. Biography is not a science, but a branch of taxidermy. The autobiographer alone has the privilege of stuffing himself. I now have an opaque left big toenail.

During my years at Charterhouse, contact with the opposite sex was limited to epistolary exchanges with Hilary Phillips; mine more passionate (and purposeful) than hers. Her sister, Diana – who had an unfortunate eye – had gone to Oxford. Her parents were keen that Hilary should follow her. My licence to be alone, for an hour or more, with their daughter on the sitting room sofa in Portman Mansions, off the Marylebone Road, required me to improve Hilary’s ability to construe Livy’s provincial Latin prose. Her admission to Oxford depended on achieving that now obsolete competence. My path to a rewarding session of deep kisses passed through the Caudine Forks, in which, on Livy’s account, a Roman legion was trapped by their Samnite enemies and obliged to ignominious surrender; which Hilary never was. As Latinist and as lover, my darling was of the Fabian persuasion. Had I been able to shape her into Oxford material, my ardour
might have been capped by her grateful subjugation. That achievement was beyond me and so, therefore, was her Non Licet Gate.

Hilary did concede that French kisses were ‘oddly satisfying’, but when I promised that there were things that were more satisfying still, she cited the creed that marriageable men did not want a slice from a cut cake. She greeted my Cambridge scholarship with dismayed congratulations. Quick to calculate that she would be at least twenty-one by the time I graduated, Hilary then added on the two years in which I could expect to be doing National Service. She would be twenty-three, and adjacent to senility, before she could hope to have that ring on her finger. With whatever regret, I had to be deleted from the roll of suitable suitors. I had a suspicion that there was already a candidate for Hilary’s favours, an off-stage Charles, of whom she spoke with teasing warmth.

My parents’ friends often asked me what I ‘wanted to do’. Cedric was keen that I qualify as a solicitor or an accountant, or both. Such people were rarely out of work. My uncle Lionel had been a barrister whose
mots
embellished the family anthology. Can he truly have been the first person to say in court, ‘I deny the allegation and defy the alligator’? On solitary walks through rainy London, I often sought shelter by climbing the many stone steps to the public gallery in the law courts. I listened with emulous appetite to the silky Mr Fox-Andrews making his pitch for damages after improperly loaded barrels had rolled off a brewer’s dray and done his client a thumping mischief. He displayed a neat wooden model on which he pointed out to his lordship how the barrels should have been ranged, and wedged, and how, in practice, they had been.

I could not understand why Mr Fox-Andrews spoke so slowly until I matched the spacing of his phrases with the movement of the judge’s fist across a stiff page of his red, leather-bound ledger. I presumed that I, like Cicero in most of his cases, should appear for the defence. Although it was an article of faith in the system of British justice that a jury’s verdict on the
facts be deemed infallible (otherwise how should the death penalty remain unquestionable?), it appeared to have required advocates of rare resource to save any number of defendants from being wrongly convicted.

Since a first-class degree in Latin and Greek promised access to enviable eminences, I resolved to do my bit of Tacitus or Thucydides, Homer or Virgil, every day until October of the New Year, 1950, when I was due to go up to Cambridge. Meanwhile, how could I earn enough money to take some new girl to dinner in Soho and to a movie, preferably Italian or French, but not with Fernandel in it, at the Academy Cinema, or to the theatre (Jean Anouilh rather than Terence Rattigan)? As a result of his being put in charge of press relations for Shell, my father seemed well placed to help me find newspaper work. He treated influential City journalists, such as the
Daily Express
’s Fred Ellis and
The Economist’
s Rowland Bird, to informative lunches at the Berkeley Hotel in Piccadilly. Apprentices – such as the young William Rees-Mogg, later editor of
The Times
– qualified only for Le Perroquet in Leicester Square.

For all its convivial perks, Cedric’s post-war office was a comedown. In 1945, he had been invited to return to New York, to take up the bigger and better-paid job that he had renounced, for patriotic reasons, at the outbreak of war. To his superiors’ displeasure, he declined to go back to Rockefeller Center. He told me that his decision was due to his wish not to rupture my ascent on the British academic
cursus honorum
. I did, however, remember him saying, when I was a small boy, ‘Never forget, you come third in this family.’ Perhaps it was fourth: Cedric’s mother Amy was a valetudinarian who contrived to move an inch nearer to death’s door whenever her wishes were not honoured. She was determined that her son not escape across the water for a second time.

My father was never again offered work worthy of his qualities. When I saw him sitting at our Macy’s dining room table, almost lipless with repressed fury, as he made itemised retorts, a), b) and c), to some chiding memo from
a boss, Trevor Powell, who took pleasure in putting down someone cleverer than himself, I determined never to work in an office nor, if I could help it, to have a boss; better an unranked artist, preferably in Paris, than the second, or third, or umpteenth, businessman in London.

With Cedric on hand, the widowed Amelia Sophia excelled in coercive helplessness. For another dozen years my grandmother, attended by the sisters Winifred and Ada Stanley (pious subscribers to
The Watchtower
), played the supine tyrant in her eau de Cologne-scented flat, 12a Dorset House, overlooking Dorset Square. Whether her intermittent crises were due to heart attacks, as Winifred claimed, or to a surfeit of Maison Lyons violet chocolates, as Dr Cove-Smith hinted, Amy wanted Cedric (named after Little Lord Fauntleroy) to be on hand, whatever his American wife might wish. Ex-England and British Lions rugger captain Ronald Cove-Smith asked Amy, on one occasion, whether she had had a particular condition before. When she said she had, he said, ‘Well, you’ve got it again.’ Diagnosis and diplomacy went together at a guinea a visit.

Although Amy and my mother were barely, and rarely, civil to each other, Irene claimed that she was happy to have stayed in England. On the last occasion when she saw her 22-year-old kid cousin, Lieutenant Irvin
Weintraub
USAAF, before he and his glider crew and their GI passengers were massacred by the SS, after skilfully crash-landing at Arnhem, he said to her: ‘For a Kansas City girl, you sure have come a long way.’ Irene’s uncle, Max’s brother Fritz, died fighting for the Kaiser in the Great War.

My father blamed Winifred, who referred to him always as ‘Mr Cedric’, for the rift between Amy and his wife. In practice, it suited both women not to see or even to have to inquire about each other. Irene Rose Mauser had been a clever girl. Denied a college education by the bankruptcy of her father, Max, she went alone, in 1929, to work in Chicago when she was eighteen years old. Out of office hours, she kept company with the Second City’s West Side bohemians. One of them – Herman, was it, or Mitchell?
– papered his living room, walls and ceiling, with silver paper. She had many followers but, I am pretty sure, no lovers. Buddy Cadison brought home an illicit, plain-wrappered copy of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
from Paris and allowed her to walk down State Street with it under her arm. During the war, he came, in uniform, with gifts from the PX, to see her at 12 Balliol House.

Irene was quick-witted, sharp-eyed and methodical enough to run a business. My father, who was almost eleven years older, preferred that she remain in the tidy flat. 12 Balliol House never needed as much daily help as Irene was given. Mrs Garrod’s thrice-weekly hoovering seemed to me, shut in my little bedroom at the end of the corridor, to moan for hours. Even in her thirties, my mother took an afternoon rest on her chaise longue, under a hand-knitted blue cover.

Now and again she went on the 14, 30 or 74 bus, with Adie Tutin, to Knightsbridge and a tour of Harrods. For a change, they would take the Underground to Kensington High Street and scan the merchandise at Derry & Toms or Barkers (‘Going up,’ the button-capped liftboys said, ‘going up!’), rarely Ponting’s, which had the low ceilings symptomatic of bargain basements. A congeries of overhead wires flew hermetic canisters of cash, with a pneumatic gasp, to a remote, inaccessible central till.

My mother had charge accounts, never a chequebook. Cedric gave her an allowance, but no access to his bank account. So far as I knew, in London she never set out to meet a man who was not her husband. In New York, she had had an admirer, a photographer called Vollmer, who took her picture with me in a sailor suit looking at a big book. Cedric had told her that he would divorce her if he ever caught her with another man. In hapless old age, sequestered in an olive-green hospital room, he told visitors that she had left him for a younger man.

During my teens, Irene’s most congenial daytime companion in Balliol House was a slim, grey-haired young woman from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Caroline Stewart lived directly below us and was literally on tap to come on up.
She and Irene drank noon Scotch, with plenty of water, and plenty of Scotch. Caroline’s Southern voice was charmingly cracked. Her husband Max worked for Esso petroleum. On Sunday mornings, he and I played tennis on the garage roof against Jack and Margaret Piesse, who lived in the ground-floor flat below Mr Love. One box of Dunlop balls would last us at least a month. In the summer, my mother bought them, at three and six for six after they had been used, for nine games, at the Wimbledon tournament. When they got dirty, Jack Piesse shampooed them and ranged them on the radiator to grow fluffy again.

Margaret, a pretty young Yorkshire woman (he called her ‘Tyko’), had been Jack’s secretary when he returned from the war. After discovering himself to be Weybridge’s most decorated cuckold, he retrieved his self-esteem by becoming the husband of a good-looking younger woman. Margaret had an excellent forehand and a bouncy figure. Her fiancé, an RAF fighter pilot called Budge, had been killed soon after he went on active service in 1941. She and Jack had compatible reasons to settle for second best.

Once I had left Charterhouse, I was eager for exercise and suggested that Margaret and I play singles on a weekday afternoon. We did so only once. Jack embargoed any further encounters. In my innocence, I could not imagine why. On New Year’s Eve 1949, coming back to Balliol House from a dinner dance in the Manor Fields restaurant, Caroline Stewart, out on the grass in her nylon feet, silver high-heeled sandals in one hand, grabbed me to avoid falling over and kissed me, thoroughly, on the lips. I tasted the whisky on her tongue, and the heat, but I was too proper an inhabitant of Mr Love’s domain to take advantage of the opportunity; or even to see it as one, although Max was in the States on business and I had been reading
Le Rouge et le Noir
, in the red Penguin translation.

Like Stendhal’s Madame de Rênal, Caroline was approaching thirty. Max, she indicated, was no eager lover, but – despite those inviting silken feet – I was never any sort of stand-in for Julien Sorel. It was unthinkable to try anything with a married woman, especially when she was known to my parents.
My long conviction was that ‘the Christians’ always behaved with propriety; it would require only some small infringement of their rules for a Jew to be revealed for what he really was and then to be pitched into the abyss.