Read The Dreaming Suburb for Free Online Page A

elope with Saul Cooper, the painter who had bewitched her.
    Parson Clegg's wife had died when Becky was born, and the tubby little man had resisted all the efforts of his parishioners to get him married again. Instead, he had sunk into a morose half-life, content to perform the barest minimum of his parochial duties, and devoting the greater part of his time to building model ships.
    His study, where he should have been writing sermons, became his workshop, and dozens of calf-bound theological works were pulled from the shelves to make room for the exquisitely-made galleons, and carracks, and clippers, he fashioned. He seldom addressed more than a word or two to his daughters, and throughout her adolescence Edith had been obsessed by the fear that the Church Authorities would dismiss him for neglect of duty, and throw them all into the street.
    They never did, however, and she came to believe that he must have had some influence with them, of which she was unaware.
    One winter morning, on his way back from a funeral, he staggered and fell as he passed through the lych gate, dying an hour or so later of coronary thrombosis.
    That was in 1909, years after the Saul Cooper scandal, and Edith had had the two of them on her hands ever since she found Becky abandoned in London, and had successfully fought her father, and parish busybodies, on the issue ofbringing Becky home again, and not sending her to an institution.
    Edith was never able to discover anything of importance about the man who had shattered Becky's health, and had reduced her, in the space of a few months, to a semi-imbecile. Nor, for that matter, was she ever able to learn much of what happened after the night Becky stole into her room, kissed her, took the wash-leather bag containing fifteen gold sovereigns, and said: “I'm going now, Edie darling!”
    In the morning there was the terrible scene with her father, the meeting with the vicar's warden and, later, with the Bishop; the futile visits of Parson Clegg to the police in Barnstaple, and ultimately, the ill-spelled letter from a stranger, who kept a boarding-house in Lambeth.
    Even now Edith shuddered when she recalled her arrival outside that boarding-house. It was a shabby stucco villa, in a sunless street off the Embankment. Inside the narrow entrance passage there was a strong smell of cabbage, and rancid cooking fat. The stairs were so dark that Edith had to grope her way up, despite the services of the elderly slut who admitted her, and on the uncarpeted landing, where the pervading stench suggested something more unpleasant than cabbage water, the landlady had wheezed her version of events.
    “She's in there now. Can't get nothing out of her. Been bashed about, she has. He's gone, owing three weeks. Never saw much of 'im when he was here. Heard 'em ‘avin' a fight or two, but never took much note. Get used to it in my line o' business. Learn not to stick your nose in too far!”
    “How did you find my address?” Edith had asked, fighting her nausea, and trying hard to control her trembling limbs. “Did my sister tell you about me?”
    “Not her,” said the slut, with a mirthless chuckle. “ She ain't in no state to tell nothing. See for yourself!” And she flung open the door of a back bedroom and, marching in, flipped up the blind and let daylight into the hideous little room.
    Becky was sitting on the bed, naked except for a short cotton chemise. Her beautiful chestnut hair was loose, obscuring the greater part of her face. Her brown eyes, eyesthat had always been so full of laughter, were fixed on the distempered wall immediately opposite, in a stare so blank that Edith knew at once it would be hopeless to expect recognition.
    She made a supreme physical effort, and turned back to the landlady.
    “Has she had a doctor?”
    The woman snorted, “Doctor? I told you, he went off owing three weeks!”
    “What about food?”
    “She 'asn't touched nothing, not fer days; I tried to feed her once,