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

automatically subtle about the disposition of energy, his own or anyone else’s. If he had not had good eyes and a capacity to ignore physical discomfort he would have changed the lamp, or its position. Since he had decided without thinking that it required no attention he gave it none.
    He was not a great reader. He was slow, and had always been slow. He had been a pale, heavy little boy, who had felt his fat as something he was under, weighing on him. Just before his conversion, when he was fifteen, he had read that fat was fuel, to be burned into energy; this hadmoved him; had shifted his sense of the relation of the inner Daniel to the outer; had indeed made it seem for almost the first time possible that the two were intimately related. He now frequently used the idea of fuel, humorously, against himself, in the pulpit. Being fat entailed, at some level, acting fat. Acting fat, both for the child and the man, had been a question of bearing. One could carry oneself with the assumption of placid good temper; the Billy Bunter alternative, playing the fool, was sometimes thrust upon one, and was now a professional hazard.
    When his father was alive he had known there was power under the fat. His father was an engine-driver. Daniel grew up in Sheffield, in a little row of blackened smoky houses with closed yards and slate-roofed bogs. Engine-drivers were respected, a cut above the other workers in the street. The Ortons’ curtains were crisper, their doorsill whiter, their brass shinier than other men’s. Ted Orton was huge and noisy. When he came in through the front door he brought the clatter and heat and thrust of his engine with him. He irritated his fussocky wife by falling over things, displacing ornaments, eating loudly. He liked crude jokes – would suddenly whip a hot teaspoon out of a scalding cup of tea and sting Daniel’s hand with it, would discover, grossly, half-crowns and florins in his helpings of Spotted Dick, perform a lengthy and excruciating mime of the shattering of his teeth, and give the coin to Daniel. At home, he glared and shouted, bidding Daniel to jump to it, get a move on, stir himself. Daniel opposed his flickering wrath by moving with unnaturally stately deliberation; he thought he was afraid of his father; he cast his eyes down and his fat face was heavy and neutral; but secretly the eddying violence, the constant requirements excited him.
    Away from home, Ted’s clumsy vitality became a smoother power, an engine which had left the station and exchanged its choked preliminary puffing for the voracious smooth flow of a long run. He liked to take Daniel round the engine sheds, up the track, in his cab. He scrutinised Daniel’s work, suddenly firing at him strings of words to spell, or a long mental arithmetic problem. He promised him a stamp album and a trip to the seaside if he passed the 11+.
    Daniel did pass, not spectacularly. He still had the stamp album. The trip to the seaside never materialised. Ted was knocked down by an errant string of crude ore trucks on a gradient only a week later. There was a further week when he lay, monumentally broken, in the hospital. Then he died. Daniel was not taken to see him. First he was told that when Dad recovered consciousness he could visit, then that it was all over. He was curiously angry with his father, he now saw, for going in this untidy and evasive way, seeming to promise, as he had never done before, something that he could not perform. Daniel was not taken tothe funeral, but left to “play” with another boy in the street. His mother did not speak to him of what had happened.
    Later, he used to tell people that he could not remember the time of his father’s death. This was a deliberate half-truth. He closed his large face, he behaved, as he understood it, “normally”, he survived. There were days when, falling asleep, sitting inactive in a chair, some mechanism took him back to the moment of the first telephone call, as though