John Thomas & Lady Jane

like a blood bank?
Sometimes, through her sleep, she would wake feeling strange and she felt
herself and she would feel strange. On such a day she came down and saw
Clifford. Oh how miserable and despicable he was.
    ‘Oh how miserable and despicable I
am,’ he said.
    Her mood was on her like an insanity
and she could not shake it off. She shook and shook and yet it would not come
off. She would show the world, she would stop making curtains, carpets,
cupboards, tables, chairs and bows and arrows for the poor of Africa. They
would have to get on without her. It seemed to her that something ghastly and
deadly blew from the North Pole. And there was a stranglehold of
death-breathing air. She saw it in the household staff. Yes, the
death-breathing air was getting into the servants, she could see it go in and
come out a different colour at the back. And on the awful corpse-days the sheep
huddled and hopped. (Sheep don’t hop, they must have been kangaroos.) She
loathed sheep. Pigs were poetic in comparison.
     
    Oh pig oh pig
    You really are big
    Yet you don’t give a fig
    The pig — I dig.
     
    She was like the earth in Labrador. Why? It was a puzzle because she didn’t look anything like the earth in Labrador. She didn’t even look like the earth in Bexhill-on-Sea.
    On one of her bad days she hurried
out to walk alone in the woods. In the distance she heard the report of a gun.
Why must some fool of a man be letting off a gun at that hour? Perhaps it was
Clifford killing a poacher. She walked on oblivious to everything — oblivious
to the Statue of Liberty, the Arc de Triomphe, and Bexhill-on-Sea. She didn’t
know how far she had gone. She heard a child crying, sobbing; someone was
illtreating a child. Down a narrow path she saw two figures, a little girl in a
purple coat and moleskin hat. Soames in his terrible velveteen corduroys
bending over her, saying:
    ‘Shut it up, now, shut it up! Enough
on it! If Ah dunna kill ’im, ’e kills th’ bods an’ th’ rabbits. Are ter goin’
ter stop it, eh?’ With that he put his gun to the child’s head.
    Constance strode nearer with blazing face, eyes and neck,
nose and teeth.
    ‘What’s the matter? Why is she
crying?’ demanded Constance. ‘Don’t you dare kill that child.’
    His eyes narrowed for the moment,
then they slitted into slits. He did not deign to answer but looked into Constance’s blazing face, eyes and neck, nose and teeth.
    ‘Yo’ mun ask ’er!’ he said, curt and
decisive. ‘And if she gives the wrong answer she gets it.’
    Constance started as if he had smacked her in the face.
    ‘I asked you, you slit-eyed swine!’
    ‘Ay! Ah know yo’ did! But ’er’s none
towd me why ’er’s scraightin’, so ’appen yo’d better ax ’er.’ What in God’s
name was the oaf saying? She turned her back on him and crouched before the
child.
    ‘What is it, my dear? What has he
done to you?’
    ‘It’s the pussy!’ came in shaking
tones.
    ‘What did he do to your pussy?’ said Constance.
    ‘ ’E shot it there!’ she said.
    ‘What did he shoot your pussy for?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Yi that does!’ came the derisive,
contemptuous voice of the man. ‘Tha’rt a little liar.’
    ‘You brute, swine, scum, murderer,
rapist and serial pussy-cat killer!’ she said. ‘She was sorry for the cat.’
    ‘There’s the cat! There! If anybody
wants to be sorry for him!’ And stretched out in the brambles lay a large,
rusty black moggy with a big head and amazing flat flanks. He had so much buckshot
he looked like a cribbage board.
    Constance and the child went off down
a narrow path leaving the man, his gun, his dog and a dead cat. What a romantic
tableau. They walked slowly away feeling they had scored which was more than
the English football team.
    They arrived at the cottage, the door
was open. ‘Look, Gran, what the lady gave me!’
    She held out a sixpence. The
grandmother snatched it out of her hand and put it in her purse. ‘And what do
you say?’
    ‘Thank you,’ said the child.
    ‘Thank you, Your Ladyship. You
know what your father said, don’t you?’
    ‘Yes. Stop crying, you little
bastard!’
    ‘Bye bye,’ said Constance, laughing
and backing away.
    Constance continued to walk away till she was out of
earshot, not that anybody would want to shoot her ear at that time of night.
That man had been so insolent, insolent, brute, swine, bastard, murderer,
rapist and serial cat killer.
    And back in the woods Soames