Free The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt Page A

she said, the nurses in the hospital had told her. Daniel dismissed this memory. He reached for the Vicar’s library ladder and surveyed the bookshelves.
    The complete Shakespeare, tooled in black and gold, was on the top shelf. The glass door was locked. Daniel surveyed the other doors. No key. Heavily he descended the ladder, searched the surface of the desk in the feeble circle of light, opened a silver box, tobacco-scented, a wooden coffer full of paper-clips and economy labels. He began, like a thief in the night, to rifle through the desk drawers, turning over little caches of coins, rubber bands, old woven Palm Sunday crosses. In a drawer within a drawer, worked by a secret spring in an upper pigeonhole, he found what he was looking for: the collection of keys on a gilt keyring which operated various household arcana, from the safe to the sewing-machine. He mounted his small ladder again, breathing heavily, swung back the door, and, after some peering at gilded letters in the gloom, reached down
King Lear
. The concave trough of pages was deep with dust: Daniel blew out a fine cloud of it, watched it disperse and fall, spoiled a handkerchief with black smudges. He closed case, drawer, desk, study softly behind him, and went on upwards.
    His room was on the first floor. It was vast and cavernous, with a high moulded ceiling, bulging with swags of dust-darkened roses and white plaster apples stained onion-skin gold by creeping damp; there were two high windows still hung with the Ellenby’s war-time blackout curtains, black and gold cotton-rayon twist, with a raised pattern of large gold links. This room, inhabited by all Mr Ellenby’s curates, was described as a bed-sitting room: it had a hard little divan in one cornerand a curtained alcove in which was a washbasin and a Baby Belling stove on which Daniel was expected to make himself cups of Nescafé and cook his own evening meal. (Breakfast and lunch he was expected to eat with the Ellenbys.) It was at once over- and underfurnished, both cluttered and bleak, like a furniture store. There was a real sense in which it was a furniture store: Mrs Ellenby’s natural course was to relegate to the bed-sitting room pieces of furniture which had no present function but were too good to throw out. Daniel was surrounded by two wardrobes, three chests of drawers, an ottoman, a wash hand stand, two coffee tables, three armchairs, a writing table, a roll-topped bureau, three standard lamps, a bookcase with glass doors, a pouffe, and three tiny whatnots. There was also a pile of stacking chairs in tubular steel and mock leather. Some of these pieces were oak, some walnut, some mahogany, some whitewood. The upholstery was dark blood red or an indeterminate dun. On the walls were Dürer’s Praying Hands, Van Gogh’s sunflowers, and a large photograph of two lacy altar boys and a brass vase of lilies in a very long shaft of sunlight. The floor was covered with mottled smoke-grey linoleum, islanded with carpet pieces: a crimson Jacobean patch, a peg rug with a white ship on ultramarine waves, a florid Wilton with a splashy impressionistic pattern of splayed marguerites and tumbling ears of corn.
    Daniel pushed a shilling into the gas meter, and lit his fire, an old Sunbeam which roared and spat in uneasy bursts; two of the radiants were damaged. He pushed behind his little curtain and washed, quickly, to the waist, frowning. He folded his black clothes, put on pyjamas and a shapeless speckled sweater and got into bed.
    The bedside light had a shade made of woven ribbons of crimson plastic; its bulb was economically dim; the effect was grim and hectic. Daniel leaned out sideways to let the red light spread on the pages and began, awkwardly, to read
King Lear
.
    He read slowly and carefully, concentrating. He did not like his room, but he had made no attempt to change it, or mitigate its gloom. That would have been a waste of energy, and he was increasingly controlled and