Running to Paradise Read Online Free PDF Page A

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