Running to Paradise (3 page)

Sophia
rang me at last shortly after the Christmas break. She’d had to return to the States, she said, for a few more weeks to sort things out and stayed on to spend Christmas with friends in New York.

Over
dinner at her flat in Keats Grove in Hampstead, very posh with a huge walnut tree in the garden, I told her about my work on her mother’s papers.

‘
What fun,’ she said, rather to my surprise. ‘Would you like me to help? As one of my lovers once told me, I’ve got practically total recall, so I could supply the background: we might even make notes. But...perhaps you’d rather not. I know how you felt about Mum.’ Suddenly she looked young and vulnerable, doubtful of my reaction to her offer.

‘
There’s absolutely nothing I’d like more,’ I said, meaning every word of it and this time surprising myself.

‘
That’s great,’ she said. ‘When do we start...?’

3

I have to admit that although somewhat distracting, Sophia was a great help, and it was from her (over pleasant suppers at my place or hers, or Sunday walks in the park) that I gained what knowledge I have of Char’s parents and general family background. I had heard snippets, of course, from Char herself, but never took too much note of these: Char, despite being spot on in, say, the subject of Wellington’s deployment of troops at Waterloo, tended to be considerably less so on the subject of her own family history, inclining towards such generalities as ‘Of course all Ma’s family were thieves and horse-copers,’ or ‘Whatever else the Osborns may have been, they were at least gentlemen.’ Both these assertions, according to her more prosaic daughter, being some considerable distance from the truth. Be that as it may, the known facts, as given me by Sophia, are as follows.

Charlotte
Mary Osborn was born the year the Boer War ended, two years into the twentieth century. Her parents, Constance — always known as Con — and Dick Osborn, an ill-matched couple of modest affluence, had married in 1900. Con was the youngest daughter of one Joseph Pratt, a shipping magnate, and he was the eldest son of Bertram Osborn, a tea merchant in the City of London. The marriage was a love match, in spite of the marked disparity of the two participants, who had apparently scarcely a taste in common. After their marriage, the pair set up a comfortable establishment in a large, rambling, early Victorian mansion in Bedfordshire, the Renton House of Char’s drawing book, where both Char and her younger sister Rosie (the latter died of pneumonia in 1911) were born.

According
to Sophia, her mother remembered little of her maternal grandfather, Joseph Pratt, apart from his funeral: apparently a spectacular affair only rivalled in her mother’s memory by that of King Edward VII’s some three years later. In his youth Joseph Pratt had been a Victorian merchant adventurer in the true swashbuckling tradition. Coming from yeoman farming stock in the Midlands, he managed in a comparatively short space of time to amass a considerable fortune. His descendants were never too sure how he accomplished this, but took the sensible view that the less they knew about his early business activities the better. One of his many youthful escapades had been to elope over the roofs of Seville with a sixteen-year-old Spanish heiress, whom he had snatched, quite literally, from the very jaws of the convent in which an irate father had been about to incarcerate her. She became Joseph’s first wife, but the poor girl did not, however, manage to survive long: she died, probably from cold, her first winter in England. His second wife, Char’s grandmother, was a shadowy figure, remembered by no one apart from the fact she brought some much needed capital into the flagging Pratt enterprises following the cessation of hostilities in the Crimea. This, one cannot but feel, rather unfortunate lady, after presenting her husband with eight sons and two daughters, died giving birth to Char’s mother, Con. Sophia has an anaemic portrait of her great-grandmother: pale skinned, pale haired, wearing a pale blue taffeta dress, her hands folded patiently in her lap, her pale blue eyes sad.

On
Joseph Pratt’s demise from, so it was alleged, eating a bad oyster — on the face of it an unlikely way for so robust and powerful a figure to die — the Pratt fortune seems to have simply melted away. ‘Gran had eight brothers and not one of them ever did a day’s work,’ Sophia said. ‘She used to get quite steamed up about it.’ It seems, instead, they lived in considerable style off the Pratt money which, luckily for them, appears to have lasted them out. By the time they were dead little remained of Joseph Pratt’s fortune apart from a few useless shares in a now defunct South American railway.

I,
myself, never really knew Char’s mother. I only met her two or three times before she died. However, I do remember our first meeting. It was a bitterly cold day in January: Beth and I, chaperoned by Char, had been summoned to tea. I was to be given the once-over as a prospective grandson-in-law. Old Mrs Osborn’s last years were spent at Cowleaze Farm, a disintegrating farmhouse about eight miles from Maple, crammed with good, but decrepit and extremely dusty furniture where she was looked after by a series of indigent relatives and an assortment of women who came in from the village. We were received on the verandah, our hostess reposing in an ancient basket chaise longue, enveloped in piles of equally ancient horse blankets. She wore a brown felt hat shaped like a pudding basin and was wrapped in a purple shawl of excruciating design. To an innocent young history graduate from Epping she appeared quite terrifying. She waved a gracious arm: ‘Come in, dears, and sit down. Such a lovely, clear day, d’you see, no point in being cooped up in a fusty old drawing room.’

Of
the ensuing tea party I remember little. I was probably too numb with cold to take much in. There was, however, one thing that struck me — later borne out by subsequent meetings — and that was that Char was frightened of her mother, albeit concealing her fear behind a mask of what I can only describe as adolescent sulkiness. This attitude on the part of her daughter appeared to give Mrs Osborn considerable malicious pleasure, and I remember how she would turn to Beth and myself in mock surprise whenever she had goaded Char into behaving in this way. I found their relationship strange and rather disturbing. An only child from a comfortable, suburban home, this was the first time I had glimpsed that twilight world of locked human relationships, where two people, seemingly under a spell of their own making, find themselves repeating the same pattern of behaviour towards each other over and over again for reasons they have both long since forgotten.

Dick
Osborn, Char’s father, I never knew. He died in 1955, three years before I met Beth. He was, according to his granddaughter, quite irresistible to women. This, in spite of the fact he was bald at the age of twenty-five and only five feet tall.

‘
You’ve no idea,’ Sophia said. ‘Grandpa at eighty, incontinent and heaven knows what else, could still look you up and down in that special way some men have and make you feel a million dollars.’

‘
If he was like that at eighty, what can he have been like at twenty?’ I asked, feeling for a moment a twinge of jealousy. ‘The mind simply boggles,’ she said.

Like
his daughter, he married three times. His marriage to Con broke up some time during the First World War, entailing a lengthy and messy divorce. However, they appeared to have continued to see a great deal of one another and indeed, as soon as the Decree Absolute had been granted, they rushed off to France together on a second honeymoon.

‘
Gran only divorced him to tie up the money, you see. She felt he was getting through it much too fast, but they still loved one another.’

‘
I see,’ I said, but didn’t really.

Love
one another or not, several years after the divorce, Dick suddenly announced he was marrying again, this time a White Russian countess, thirty years his junior. Natasha Osborn was beautiful, funny and given to emotional outbursts of a quite horrendous nature. Sophia remembers a Christmas at Amberley, Dick’s palatial home in Hampshire: he had apparently made a great deal of money between the wars and lived in some state. Sophia, herself, was only five years old at the time, but says the sight of her step-grandmother, her gorgeous red hair falling about her shoulders, bosom heaving, eyes wild, hurling the leg of a twenty-pound turkey at her grandpa, will be etched for ever on her memory.

‘
We simply watched in awe,’ she said, ‘while globules of bread sauce and gravy and little pieces of turkey ran down Grandpa’s face and on to the front of his beautiful, red velvet smoking jacket.’ And she was silent for a moment, remembering.

‘
What happened then?’ I asked crossly. Sophia has this habit of starting stories and then forgetting to finish them.

‘
I can’t remember,’ she said maddeningly. ‘I was only five. I expect Grandpa laughed, he was that sort of person.’

‘
I wouldn’t have laughed if some bitch had thrown a leg of turkey at me in front of all my grandchildren,’ I said.

‘
Ah, but you aren’t Grandpa,’ she said and I don’t think she meant it as a compliment. However, I digress. Evenings with Sophia seem to have an odd effect on me.

To
return, then, to Dick, or Pa as his daughters always called him. Natasha, it seems, eventually ran off with the gardener. ‘You’re sure it was the gardener?’ I asked. ‘A gardener seems somehow an unlikely sort of person for a White Russian countess to run off with.’

‘
He was an Italian prisoner of war, actually. Grandpa had somehow managed to get hold of him towards the end of the War to help in the garden. He was frightfully handsome and Nat always had this earthy quality about her. He became naturalised later on and they went into the market garden business and did pretty well I believe.’

Pa,
bereft, returned to Con, who welcomed him back with open arms. She, herself, hadn’t re-married, but spent the years arranging her daughter’s life, buying and selling horses and antique furniture and having what her granddaughter described as ‘menopausal turns’. She must, however, have continued to hold a torch for Pa. Inevitably the idyll didn’t last.

‘
You wouldn’t believe it,’ Sophia said. ‘Their attraction for each other was still there. I saw it with my own eyes, but of course it was thirty years since they had lived together: Gran had got used to living in ramshackle houses with no servants, eating meals when she fancied and spending most of the day in her garden. Grandpa couldn’t live like that and didn’t want to try. Mum found the whole business upsetting: she was terribly steamed up about her parents, you know. She had this idea they behaved the way they did just to make her look silly.’

‘
And did they?’

‘
No, of course not. Quite honestly, I don’t think she was that important to them.’ Poor Char.

Pa
’s third and last marriage was to his secretary, Mildred, in 1947. Mildred, it seems, was a lady of surpassing dullness, but with a kind heart and considerable organising ability. She always referred to Pa as ‘Mr Dick’, a hangover from their office days together. ‘Mum loathed Mildred,’ Sophia said. ‘I could never understand why. She was the most harmless creature and terribly kind. She and Grandpa had a little house in Hove. It always smelled of Crosse and Blackwell soup, I remember, and was so crammed with furniture you couldn’t move. Mildred was a big woman, too. I used to stay there sometimes when I was a teenager.’

‘
Didn’t Pa find it rather dull? It seems a far cry from Amberley and the Russian countess.’

‘
No, I don’t think so. He spent most of the day watching TV. It had just come in then and they had one of those enormous sets that looked like a piece of antique furniture: you opened little doors in the front and everything on the screen seemed to be taking place in a snow storm. Mildred spent hours twiddling knobs while Grandpa shouted instructions.’

‘
Sounds fun,’ I said. ‘How did he die?’

Sophia
lit another cigarette. She smokes twenty a day. It is her only vice.

‘
He picked up a tart on Brighton Pier one Sunday afternoon while Mildred was at Chapel and died in the act.’

‘
That must have been very embarrassing for Mildred.’

‘
She didn’t mind that part of it too much. It was losing Pa she minded: she loved him, you see. But Mum did. She flatly refused to believe that was how he died and hinted Mildred had murdered Grandpa for his money. He left it all to her, you see, apart from a trust made at the time of his and Gran’s divorce, and the tart story was just a cover up.’

‘
But the evidence, surely...?’

Sophia
shrugged. ‘You must have known my mother long enough to realise she only believed what she chose to believe,’ she said.

There
was silence for a bit, then: ‘Sophia,’ I said, ‘did you love your mum? You always speak of her so objectively, as though you had deliberately distanced yourself from her. Look, if that’s prying, just don’t answer, give me a kick on the shins instead. It’s the researcher in me, or perhaps I’m a novelist
manqué
. I like to nose things out.’

Sophia
shivered and thrust her gloved hands deep in the pockets of her fur coat. We were in Kensington Gardens; the winter trees stark against a grey-pink sky, a thin wind blew brown crunchy leaves across the grass, and you could hear the distant shouts of children sailing their boats on the Round Pond. We walked slowly towards the Albert Memorial. When she spoke, it was so softly I had to bend my head to hear the words.

‘
I had to distance myself from her,’ she said, ‘we all did.’ She was silent again. High above us a skein of geese flew towards the setting sun, the lights were coming on in Kensington Gore. Then: ‘It’s sad how families come to an end; ours has, I think. Mum was the only reason we kept in touch: now she’s dead there’s nothing to bring us together any more, no common link. The thing about Mum was she had this massive capacity for love, but it was always destructive and in the end became sterile and destroyed itself. Can you understand what I mean?’

‘
I think,’ I said, ‘you judge her a little harshly.’