Running to Paradise Read Online Free

Three Quarters of the Twentieth Century’ . How about that? It might even merit an article in History Today . Char would love that. There I was again thinking of her in the present. But you couldn’t really make a woman you’d loved a footnote to history, could you, it just wasn’t possible.
    Perhaps I should have mentioned, I’m not really a historian, I simply dabble in it as a hobby. Actually, I’m in the business of insurance. I’ve done quite well in it too: people call me Mr Horton, and I have my own secretary. I’ve worked hard, I suppose, and I’ve got the right sort of face. It’s not a bad job, actually, a lot more interesting than most people think.
    ‘ Isn’t insurance a bit of a bore, darling? I mean just paying money to people who’ve lost things,’ Char said.
    ‘ It’s much more than that,’ I said. ‘Have you ever heard of invisible assets?’
    ‘ No,’ she said, ‘and I don’t wish to. They sound rather rude to me.’
    In the end, having made my decision to go through the contents of the green trunk, I didn’t actually get down to it until the leaves on the trees along Chelsea Embankment had fallen and already there were ominous signs the Christmas bonanza was about to erupt. Work had been hectic and anyway, I somehow wasn’t ready. Then one Sunday evening in early December, I started. I decided initially I’d sort everything with a date on it chronologically into bundles, each individual bundle representing a year in Char’s life: a mammoth task in itself, but by the time it was completed about a fortnight later, I was well and truly hooked. Nothing could have stopped me now. I even found myself leaving the office at the same time as everyone else. I usually stayed on until six thirty p.m., when the traffic was better and I could work in peace. Now, however, all I wanted to do was to get home, make myself a quick snack, pour myself a drink and dive head first once again into that other world, Char’s world, a world so alien to mine it might have been another planet.
    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