Running to Paradise by Virginia Budd Read Free Book Online Page B

shocking truth revealed: the man was a sodomite! Luckily for posterity, however, there were a few who read the notebooks at the time who realised that their contents, although unpublishable in the then literary climate were, nevertheless, the work of genius. Now, of course, they form part of what is grandly known as our literary heritage and every girl or boy in the throes of A-level Eng Lit knows at least one of Elliott’s poems by heart.
    *
    (Char’s Fragment of Autobiography appeared to be missing a couple of pages at the beginning. It was originally written in her own big, scrawling handwriting on torn-off sheets from an old exercise book, but I somehow managed to inveigle a kindly secretary at work to type out a fair copy. I remember having to take the latter, at her request, out to dinner at The White Tower in Percy Street as recompense for her labours.)
    ... but there’s no doubt that my parents, Con and Dick Osborn (‘Ma’ and ‘Pa’), were an ill-assorted couple. They only had two things in common really. The first was their background: both children of the emergent, monied middle class, and the second an overpowering, mutual, physical attraction. The latter leading them to become engaged and married in a matter of weeks rather than the customary months after their first meeting at a dance given for Ma’s best friend, Gwendoline Philbert’s twenty-first birthday.
    Their friends and relations watched in astonishment the couple ’s whirlwind courtship. She tall, angular, sandy haired, with nice eyes, good teeth and a magnificent seat on a horse: not much else, apart from a mind like an adding machine. He small, emotional, attractive to women, full of charm and style and fun. Not a lot on top, but enough to get by in the family business of tea merchants. She, one of ‘that damned fella Shaw’s’ New Women, an admirer of Ibsen, a believer in women’s suffrage and all that sort of rot. He a believer in not much, really, except having a good time and keeping more or less within the guidelines laid down by his class and the era in which he lived. In other words, he believed in the Empire, the Class System, the Army, Navy and Public Schools, and the fact that sex should only be fun when practised with ‘women of a certain order’, i.e. tarts. Ladies, one’s wife in particular, were merely serviced, as a stallion a mare, in order to continue the family line. Bearing all this in mind, it seems even odder that he and Ma ever got together, but the fact remains, they did.
    ‘ It’s the attraction of opposites,’ people said, as they sipped their champagne at the couple’s wedding in May 1900. ‘It couldn’t be money.’ (Ma’s father was director of at least a dozen City companies and Pa made no mean living, himself, in the tea business.)
    ‘ It’s passion,’ said Gwendoline Philbert, greatly daring. ‘They’re mad for each other, can’t you see?’
    And passion, initially anyway, it was. Unfortunately, passion proved not to be enough, for despite the fact it not infrequently overpowered them both, it was unable, paradoxically, to overcome their mutual inhibitions about each other: namely, they continued to see in one another traits of which, in the ordinary course of events, they would strongly disapprove.
    However, they settled down conventionally enough in a large, comfortable house in Bedfordshire, where two years later I was born. The birth was long and painful and the arrival of a daughter instead of the hoped-for son a disappointment shattering to them both.
    ‘ Never, never, never, will I go through that again,’ Ma vowed and meant it, but Pa had other ideas: he wanted a son. He needed one, after all, to carry on the family business.
    ‘ Treat her gently,’ chaps at his club advised. ‘She’ll get over it, they all do. Don’t force the filly, it could lead to trouble in the long run.’ But somehow or other as the months went by, Ma didn’t seem to be getting over it. She still