Going Up Read Online Free Page A

looked at him and said, ‘ Ach so, Herr Major !’ Who would not wish to have been as superbly prompt as ‘Paddy’ at that moment? I wonder with what eyes Billy Moss, whatever kind of a Jew he was, observed this time-out-of-war exchange between his commanding officer and a Wehrmacht general.
    I had been as diligent and house-spirited a Lockite as dread and ambition could contrive. When in office as a house monitor, I called my colleagues by their first names, but after what had happened a year or so earlier, I trusted none of them, even those innocent of overt malice. The version of myself seen or heard in public was carefully edited. I learned from Jeremy Atkinson how to tighten the lips in order to instil dread in the lower deck, as it were; but I was careful not to reveal to him, or to anyone else, anything that might be used against me. I kept a straight enough face to seem to be one of them, and a straight enough bat to get my house colours; but I walked alone, myself and my double.
    Cicero’s favourite clausula carried the concluding phrase ‘ esse videatur ’, which we construed as ‘that he may seem to be’, whether one thing or another. While appearing to be a proper Carthusian, I was primed by Mr Maugham to take unforgiving note of my fellows’ forms of speech and personal habits. I did so in a wide spiral notebook, ruled feint, that I had bought in New York City. A Writer’s Notebook had shown me how neatly and surreptitiously a man might can his beans before opportunity came to spill them.

II
    D URING HOLIDAYS FROM Charterhouse, I had contrived to kiss a few girls, on unparted lips. English girls furnished a passive and interminable assault course: one got as far as one could, in a given time, before being stalled. Mona had the biggest, most enticing breasts. I never surmounted them. Two New York girls I dated during ten days in their city in the summer of 1949 were more accessible. Necking in the American style had its limits, but they were elastic. I sailed for England, on the Queen Mary , convinced that I was passionately in love with freckled Mary Jane, whom I had kissed deep into the early hours.
    After I had returned to my Carthusian monastery, Mary Jane wrote me scented letters, in pale blue ink, on petalled paper, promising full-length proximities when we met again. In the interim, I convinced myself that my true love was the pretty Hilary Phillips, whom I had met, when we were sixteen, at the Liberal Jewish synagogue in St John’s Wood. In a surge of ancestral allegiance, my father had sent me to be prepared for ‘Confirmation’, an anglicised form of Bar Mitzvah, appropriate for assimilated Jews. No Hebrew was required, apart from the ritual Shema Yisroel . More ardent in pursuit of Hilary than of hereditary solidarity, I had learned only withdisappointment, in 1948, of the foundation of the state of Israel. Hilary’s family celebration of the end of 2,000 years of Jewish homelessness obliged her to cancel a date on which I was hoping to proceed a button or two lower down the front of her nicely frilled, and filled, blouse.
    My parents had chosen to live in SW15 not least because they did not care to be identified with ‘north London’. Golders Green, with its Jewish connotations, stood for everything from which they wished to be discrete. My father neither denied his Jewishness nor was he at pains to declare it. He flinched when called ‘Rayfle’, a pronunciation that he took to insinuate that he was an alien. He insisted on our Raphael being said in the same way as the name of the Renaissance painter and the anglicised archangel. Out in Putney, we did not celebrate the foundation of the state of Israel. Zionism made no call on my father, although he would be pleased when, in 1952, his friend Sir Frank Evans was named British ambassador to Israel. My parents had met Frank and Mary in the 1930s, when Evans was British consul-general in New York. Mary was what my mother called a