Going Up Read Online Free Page B

‘character’. At a post-war reception at the UN, she was being presented to the guest of honour when her pants fell down. She stepped out of them, handed them, between thumb and forefinger, to her husband – ‘Here, Frank!’ – and proceeded with the polite formalities.
    My brunette mother was beautiful enough not to be taken for what she did not deny that she was but would as soon not be called. Irene (the final ‘e’ silent, as in Goodnight, Irene ) never lost her American accent, but she showed little nostalgia for New York, still less for Kansas City, where her mother continued to live until the mid-1960s. In an access of daughterly loyalty, Irene then persuaded Fanny to cross the Atlantic and spend her remaining years, of which there turned out to be more than a few, at 12 Balliol House.
    In 1930s New York, my mother’s bankrupt father, Max, had separated from his wife and come to live in our spare room at 30 W 70th St. Cedric never complained then, nor did he when his deaf mother-in-law moved into the back bedroom that I had vacated in 12 Balliol House. She oftentook offence at what she thought she had overheard. My father nicknamed her ‘Canasta-puss’ on account of her addiction to the game, which she had played regularly with ‘the girls’ back in K. C. In exile, the skeletal Fanny smoked incessantly; but even in her nineties she would jump up when I came to the flat. ‘Want a cup of coffee?’ She made quantities of wide, flat, nutty and delicious cookies, in accordance with an allegedly Lithuanian recipe that existed only in her head.
    Cedric hated cigarette smoke. Yet he treated Fanny with implacable politeness. Was his self-restraint a form of penance? As we were sailing back to England from New York, when I was already eighteen years old, my mother disclosed that, in his dancing twenties, Cedric had fathered a daughter on a certain Molly Hall, who had been a member of the Baltic Exchange, a rare distinction for a woman in those days. Molly had promised her lounge-lizard lover that she could not have children. A few months later, she informed him that she was pregnant. Cedric’s father Ellis paid for her to go away, less because of the shame of the imminent bastard than because its mother was not Jewish. At some stage during the war, Molly opened a hairdressing salon in Surbiton called Chez Raphael . After 1945, she emigrated to British Columbia with her daughter, Sheila, and took the name Raphael-Hall. I have no clear idea why Irene waited so long to break the seal on that previously well-kept secret.
    In 1929, Cedric went, on an immigrant’s visa, to sell Shell gas in northern Illinois. He did so with career-enhancing success, although his Oxford accent was not an immediate plus among the area’s filling station managers, many of them Irish. Before catching the boat-train to Liverpool, Cedric had promised his parents, with implacable gratitude, that he would marry the first Jewish girl he met who had a good figure, a pretty face and no moustache. The nineteen-year-old Irene Rose Mauser, who was working as secretary to an architect in Chicago, qualified on all counts.
    Though he never thought well of her dancing, Cedric was always proud of Irene’s smartness, in both transatlantic senses, and of her long-lastinggood looks. They met, on a blind date, on a very cold Chicago Christmas Eve, at the Edgewater Beach Hotel. My mother promised that it was love at first sight. She did, however, discover – not long after they were married, in 1930 – that Cedric was still writing love letters to his old dancing partner, Phyllis Haylor. ‘Phyll’ had since turned professional and again won the World Dancing Championship, with a new partner. In old age, when Cedric was broken by ill health, she visited him several times in the Royal Hospital and Home for Incurables. Phyll’s lover, the bisexual film critic and memoirist Nerina Marshall, was then living in Manor Fields. She became more friendly with my