Running to Paradise (22 page)

‘
Don’t be an ass,’ Dick said, ‘we can’t,’ and, of course, he was right.

There
was a record at that time you heard all over the place. ‘Don’t Fence me In’, with Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters. They played it on the little radio I have by my bed not long ago, and I saw again Char and George dancing in the hall at Amberley: George so tall, bending his head to look into Char’s face. Char, the top of her head no higher than his shoulder, smiling her secret smile, her hand resting on his arm, the long, red fingernails tapping to the beat of the music. She took him back to Cuckoo Farm with her. They looked so happy when I saw them off in the train at Basingstoke, and yet I cried, I remember, when I left the empty station after the train had gone.

I
only saw Char once after that. The four of us — George and Char, Giovanni and myself — met in London a few months later, after Dick and I had parted. But our meeting was not a success: Giovanni and I were late and they were dining afterwards with George’s parents. In the Ladies Char said, ‘How can you — after Pa?’

‘
How can you, after Dave?’ I said. And that was that. Later, we patched things up, but all the same that moment in the Ladies’ room at the Berkeley was really the end of our friendship.

So
Guy, I have, alas, no more to tell you. But now we’ve met, can we stay friends please? I would so like that. And will you one day bring Sophia to see me? I should like that, too.

Natasha

*

From
the marriages column of the
Times
, 5th October 1945.

Seymour-Brent. On 3rd October at Chelsea Register Office: George Frederick Seymour to Charlotte Mary Brent (née Osborn).

Attached
to this yellowing newspaper cutting was a copy of the wedding photograph that, framed, always stood on the mantelpiece in the sitting room at Maple and later in the dark house at Belton, the latter now replaced by one of the aged George, the same bright smile on his face, at his side the ‘Welsh woman’, her navy straw wedding hat tastefully decorated with a single, large, white rose.

*

From the births column of the
Times
, 26th February 1946.

On 24th February, to Charlotte Mary Seymour, the wife of Major George Frederick Seymour, a son.

Ripling
Park, Stowmarket, Suffolk

28th
February 1946

My
dear Char,

Maddy
and myself send our warmest congratulations on the birth of your son. What a cold, austere world to be born into: your Labour government hasn’t done much for us yet, has it? Where’s that ‘Brave New World’ they all used to talk about!

We
moved in here just before Christmas, to be met with chaos complete and total. The army only left in September and the place is a shambles. Maddy is coping somehow, with the not very able assistance of a bevy of sullen young women of vague Middle European extraction. I’m not much use as I’m rushed off my feet at the office: only half of us have moved back to Basinghall Street, the other half remain in Gloucester until the spring, so chaos there as well.

I
bumped into your Pa last week in the City Club. I hadn’t seen him since before the War and he didn’t look a day older. He told me your new husband has dashed off again to the Far East — not very good management on your part if I may say so! He also hinted at approaching nuptials for himself, but was a little evasive about the lady. Are you pleased?

It
’s quite a coincidence your living in Perdita Grant’s flat in Charlotte Street while George is away: I’m living in Bunny’s! He’s still out in Germany and is letting me have his rooms in St James’s as a
pied à terre
for the time being. How is Per? I haven’t seen her for years. Bunny tells me that after they split up, practically the entire US army ‘passed through her hands at one time or another’, (his words). I’m afraid things must seem a little flat for her now; do give her my love.

As
we’re both in London, once you’re out and about again, can we dine? One can still get a tolerable meal at Pruniers, no whale steaks or nonsense of that sort. I’ll ring you, if I may, one day next week. There’s a lot to discuss. Sophia writes she’s joined the Debating Society and will I ‘ante up’ for a school trip to Hamburg. A rather odd place to want to go, on the face of it, but she claims it is to ‘promote an awareness of the consequences of total war’. Oh my God, the young!

Maddy
sends her regards,

Yours,
Algy

With this letter from Algy is a note written on the back of one of his business cards; it appears to have accompanied a bouquet of flowers.

Wed

To Char

F
rom Algy

Dinner was such fun. I do hope you enjoyed it as much as I
did. I’d forgotten how we could laugh together: next time we must remember to discuss the children!

A

*

Bombay

17th April 1946

My
precious, precious Darling,

It
looks as though by next week I’ll be on my way home at last. I seem to have been rushed off my feet for weeks now, what with one thing and another, and to add to everything else they’ve asked me to organise some wretched polo match! Never mind, I’ve had time to buy you a marvellous length of pink embroidered silk and a pair of red high-heeled sandals: I hope the sandals fit. They are the right size, I think.

Your
mother’s idea of our buying a house near her is just not on, I’m afraid, darling. We simply haven’t the cash, and even if we had, it would be much safer and simpler just to rent a place. My parents would never lend me anything anyway, and the last thing we want is to be in hock to your mother! No, darling, now is
not
the time to buy property; everyone says so: much best to wait and see what your precious Labour people will do next. If we don’t get them out pronto, no one will be allowed to own anything anyway!

Sophia
writes she’s off to Hamburg with the school at Easter: isn’t that rather an odd place for them to go? Algy’s paying, I hope!

So
longing to see you, my darling, and little Perry too. I’m glad you’re waiting until I get home for the christening. Only one more letter before we sail.

All
love,

Your
Georgie

PS
. The house at Camberley you’ve found sounds promising. It would probably be best to take it until September when I should know where my next tour of duty will be: £4 a week doesn’t sound too bad — does that include electricity?

Cuckoo Farm

20th
April 1946

Darling
Mummy,

I
hope you and Perry and Nanny are well. I am well and so are Granny and the horses and the dogs. We have a postcard from Sophia today from Hamburg, she says she is having a luvly time but the food is not very nice and she has a runny tummy.

I
am glad I will be able to come and stay with you and George and Perry at Camberley. I am practising for the Gymkhana.

Lots
of love from

Beth

14

Over
a year had passed since Char’s death and I was well down into the bowels of the green trunk. The stiff-backed notebooks, the fading photographs and letters, all were carefully annotated and put away in my filing cabinet for possible future reference. What were left were mostly letters and postcards from her children, odd diaries sketchily kept, programmes for long-forgotten gymkhanas, race meetings, hunt balls; boring stuff mostly, giving little away of the turbulent years they represented

The
only items of any significance were the order of service for Dick Osborn’s funeral at a church in Brighton in April 1955 and a cutting of the announcement of his death from the
Times
. The latter describes him as ‘beloved husband of Mildred’. Was Char upset at being left out? There’s nothing to say so. All I’d ever heard Char say on the subject of her father’s third marriage was that he became ‘quite impossible’ in old age and was forced to marry his secretary in order to have someone to look after him. Be that as it may, the picture that emerged was slowly becoming a more familiar one for me. People as I remembered them began to appear; events I had heard mentioned, or in some cases taken part in; Maple, and of course Perry, the child of Char and George’s first, fresh, newly discovered love: the last child, the child that helped turn their marriage from a moderately happy one into a desolate ruin.

‘
Isn’t that putting it a bit strong?’ Sophia asked. ‘Don’t blame poor Perry for George and Mum’s hang-ups; they used him as some kind of emotional punchball.’

‘
I suppose they did, but all the same, you have to admit he helped destroy their marriage.’

‘
I don’t admit anything of the sort.’ She picked up a postcard of Caernarvon Castle from the scattered heap of letters and cards in front of her. It was a cold evening and we were sitting on the floor by the gas fire in my sitting room, the curtains drawn tightly against the autumn evening.

‘
Dear Old Mum,’ Sophia read, ‘I hope you are well. It has rained here every day but we have done a lot of climbing. Ponsonby has sprained his ankle and Devenish fell in the river. We have chips, sausages and peas every day. Love, Perry.’

Carefully
she placed the card face downwards on the pile. I cleared my throat nervously; I knew how much she had loved Perry. Personally I had always found him rather obnoxious, and Beth and he had never got on. I picked up the programme for some village fête held to mark the coronation in 1953. On the back was an elongated drawing of the young Queen Elizabeth, sceptre in hand, seated on a chamber pot. Underneath was scrawled, ‘Perry Seymour’. In silence I passed the thing to Sophia: she studied it carefully and smiled suddenly.

‘
He was such a happy little boy,’ she said. ‘When he was only three he could dance in time to music. There was a song then — “If I knew you were coming I’d have baked a cake” — we had it on an old seventy-eight record and I would play it over and over again for him. He used to dance round that horrid little sitting room at Foxglove Cottage clapping his hands and shouting, “baked a cake, Sophie, baked a cake”.’

‘
That was the house near Camberley, wasn’t it?’

‘
Yes. Mum moved there after Perry was born. They originally rented it for a few months, but stayed on until George came out of the Army in 1953. It wasn’t very nice: it always looked as though it should have been a bungalow, but someone had built another floor on by mistake. When Mum first moved there, it stood in the middle of a scrubby field full of gorse bushes, but when they left it had been swallowed up in a huge housing estate.’

‘
I’ve seen photos,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t look that special. Why on earth did they stay so long?’

‘
Because, as I’m sure you know only too well, George has always been a man of few ideas and even less initiative. Mum found the place while he was still out in India in 1946 and he was perfectly content to stay there until someone found him somewhere else to hang up his hat. His life has always been ordered by someone, as Mum’s was: that’s why they were so hopeless together. Did you know George was terrified of his father? If old Mr Seymour said jump, he damn well jumped. He sent George out to Shanghai after he left school to work in the family shipping office with his Uncle Horace, in spite of the fact George actually wanted to study to be a vet — he’d never have passed the exams, mind you, but that’s by the way. He hated his Uncle Horace and the Chinese and was frightfully homesick, but there he stayed for five solid years, until he was ordered home again in 1936 because of the Japanese invasion of China. As far as I could make out, the only thing he learned during those five years was how to make love in a distinctly un-British way. Mum told me this, by the way, not George, who although he has been known to make the odd pass at one from time to time, never, ever discussed sex.’ Had George really made a pass at Sophia — I’d no idea. Wisely, I refrained from comment.

‘
When he got back,’ Sophia continued, ‘he lived in his parents’ flat in the Bayswater Road until he was rescued by the outbreak of war and the Army. He’d been a territorial since 1938, so he went in as an officer. I’m sure he’d never have made one otherwise; of course, all that really happened was the War Office replaced his old Dad: the only independent thing he’s ever done was to marry Mum. Even then, I think he assumed that as she was ten years older, it was she who would make the decisions, and up to a point, I suppose, she did, but she wasn’t very good at it and relied heavily always on Gran. It wasn’t until Gran became gaga and unable to cope, that Mum and George’s marriage really went into a spin. Did you know not only did Gran get George his job with Drayton Motors, but she also found Maple and persuaded Mum and George to buy it?’

‘
No,’ I said. This did surprise me: George’s attitude towards his mother-in-law, in my presence anyway, had always been one of amused contempt.

‘
Gran sold Cuckoo Farm, the house she had near Sherborne, soon after the War. She moved to the Corsham area because that was where Aunty P’s son Adam and his wife lived. I think she thought it would be useful to have a relative on hand in case she was ill — Mum, as no doubt you know, never having been too good in that department. You must have seen Cowleaze, Gran lived there until her death.’ I nodded.

‘
Anyway,’ Sophia continued, ‘Adam, Aunty P’s son, was a director of Drayton. So when George’s mobile canteen lark failed — George went into this with some ex-army chum who, so he alleged, “let him down badly” — Gran persuaded Adam to take him on as personnel officer, and there he stayed, as I’m sure you know, for the next twenty years. Well, Gran having found George a job, had to find him and Mum a house; hence Maple, semi-derelict in 1954 and going for a song. It had been uninhabited since the Army had it in 1945 and due for demolition when Gran discovered it. I can see her now: a witch wearing an orange pixy hood, striding through the house pursued by Mr Bone, the builder, clutching his clip board and pencil and whistling through his teeth every time Gran’s ideas became too outrageous.’ I remembered Mr Bone, a tiny, completely bald man, who rather resembled an aged jockey: in my time his son, Dolph, ran the business and was frequently invoked by George in moments of crisis.

‘
And your mother, didn’t she have any say in the matter?’ I asked.

‘
She drifted about saying she wanted a black bathroom and her bedroom floor painted white, and they must turn the lawn into a paddock for Perry’s pony, you know how she went on.’ I nodded crossly: the words had an unpalatable ring of truth. ‘What about George, then. Didn’t he object to his mother-in-law taking over?’

‘
George? Never! He simply accepted Gran’s services and money and by the time they’d settled in at Maple and Mr Bone and his men departed, he’d persuaded himself he’d organised the whole thing single handed. That’s how he is, you know that.’ I nodded again: I knew that.

Sophia
bent down and picked up a family wedding group
circa
1954. Evie Charterhouse and David Holloway looking radiant, backed by a phalanx of (presumably) Charterhouse relations including Sophia herself, a bridesmaid encased in puppy fat, smiling apprehensively into the camera from beneath the brim of a large, pink, picture hat. ‘Poor Evie,’ she said, ‘life is unfair. She and David were so happy together — much happier than any of the rest of us. I remember staying with them in Melbourne — 1959 I think it was — and having such a marvellous time. Evie inherited my Pa’s
joie
de
vivre
; everything you did with her somehow turned into a party. It’s odd how often those sorts of people die young, and odder too that after she died David married Paula. Paula’s somehow achieved the impossible and made a pompous bore out of David. They came back to the UK a couple of years after they were married, and I used to spend the odd weekend with them as David seemed to want to keep in touch. But I always dreaded going, especially as apart from everything else, Paula appeared to be quite pathologically jealous of all of us...Let’s have another drink, Guy, I shall have to go in a minute.’

‘
But surely you’re staying?’ Even to me my voice sounded like a spoiled child’s. Was I becoming too dependent on Sophia?

‘
I can’t,’ she said, ‘I’m being collected at seven a.m., my flight’s at eight fifteen.’ She was off yet again, this time to Japan.

‘
Of course,’ I said. ‘I’d forgotten.’

‘
I suppose,’ she said, still holding the wedding photo and peering into its depths as though from those bright, smiling faces in their smart, outdated clothes she might somehow find a clue to life itself, ‘it was after that, when Evie married and disappeared to Australia — Ann was already married and frightfully pucka living in the north of Scotland — that the way was clear for Mum to concentrate all her emotional energies on poor little Perry, with disastrous results. He wasn’t a frightfully strong character, anyway, but until then he’d been used to battling away at the foot of the family, trying to get himself noticed. Then, suddenly, he was top of the heap and the competition had evaporated.’

‘
But surely it wasn’t done consciously,’ I asked, ‘on Char’s part? I mean, she didn’t just say to herself one day, “Now that Ann and Evie have escaped my clutches, I’ll turn my attention on Perry.” ’

My
attempt at sarcasm was, however, wasted. Sophia took my remark at face value. ‘I honestly don’t know,’ she said. ‘Partly conscious, I should think. The trouble was she was that much older than when we were growing up and correspondingly had less to occupy her mind. Poor Perry, rising ten, a bit backward and lacking in confidence, simply hadn’t a dog’s chance. You see, if you found yourself the recipient of Mum’s undivided love and attention you were in big trouble; like having a Star Wars ray-gun trained on you; more or less totally destructive. What’s more,’ she said, rising gracefully to her feet, ‘you know I’m right; look what she did to you and Beth.’

For
a moment I felt such a wave of absolute rage wash over me, I wanted to seize her by the hair, or bang her face against the wall. I didn’t, of course. I just sat quite still, but I noticed the hand holding my drink shook a little, spilling a few drops of wine on to the carpet. There was silence while Sophia walked over to the mirror and started to fiddle with her hair. ‘I must go. Goodnight, Guy dear, I’ll send you a card from Tokyo.’ She pecked me on the cheek and in silence I saw her downstairs to her car and in silence watched her fasten her seatbelt, start the engine and drive away. As the Metro turned into Vicarage Crescent, she let down the window and waved; I didn’t wave back.

Later,
I stood watching the lights across the river, thinking of what she had said about Beth’s and my marriage, my anger slowly evaporating. The pain, however, stayed with me. She was right, damn her, as always. Was that, I wondered savagely, ashamed of the thought, the reason she had never married: to be right always is not a quality that endears one to others.

For
a couple of weeks after Sophia’s visit I was — fortuitously perhaps — too caught up in work to think of anything else. The overseas conference I had been arranging for months finally came to fruition, with all the attendant traumas that such an event usually brings in its wake. Once or twice, as I listened to an earnest young life manager from Ghana air his view on the latest software, or escorted a party of enthusiastic Malaysians round a seething Tower of London, Sophia’s words returned, unbidden, to my mind, but I thrust them firmly back into my subconscious; they must wait, I told myself, until I had time to do them justice. All too soon, however, the conference was over and the smiling bespectacled delegates, in their neat lightweight suits, briefcases under their arms, had taken their last photocall for the house magazine, packed their holiday snaps and Marks & Spencer sweaters and melted away; it was time to return to Char. But now, I noted with some surprise and no little guilt, for it had never happened in all the years I had known her, I felt a reluctance to do so.

A
few days after the conference had finished, for some reason or other I cannot now remember, I was seated on top of a number nineteen bus as it jerked ponderously along Theobalds Road in the midst of the rush-hour traffic. In front of me sat a girl wearing a camouflage jacket, her pale, blonde hair tied in a pony tail. I accidentally brushed against her as I sat down and she turned and smiled. Suddenly, I saw Beth as she had been when I first met her, and knew the time had come for me to face up to the implications of Sophia’s comments on her mother’s destructive powers and the doubts and uncertainties those comments had raised in me.