Running to Paradise Read Online Free Page B

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