Running to Paradise Read Online Free Page A

— 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