John Thomas & Lady Jane

Constance,
Clifford? She’s gone so terribly thin and she has turned into a frog.’
    ‘Oh, that’s her trying to get
sympathy.’
    ‘I don’t see how a frog can get
sympathy. I think we had better find out.’ Hilda insisted she should be taken
to London to Hilda’s own doctor. ‘We will only be away one night, Clifford. You
don’t mind?’
    ‘I hate being alone!’
    ‘You must have a nurse,’ said
Hilda.
    ‘I don’t want a nurse. I’ve had
enough of nurses. The last one I had was during the war, it was a knee-trembler
in a doorway.’
    ‘When you’ve worn Constance out so
that she can do nothing for you, what will you do then? You are not a cheerful
man.’
    ‘I’m a cripple, you expect me to be
cheerful with a frog for a wife?’
    ‘You will have to have a nurse.’
    Hilda put a frog on the doctor’s
table. ‘I see she has had a personality change,’ he said. ‘She is living too
much off her reserves and now she’s got no reserves. She must get away and take
her mind off things. If she doesn’t, I can’t answer for the consequences.’
    ‘What sort of consequences?’ Hilda
insisted.
    ‘Her mother died of cancer, didn’t
she? These things start out of some depression, or repression which lowers the
vitality. The fact she’s a frog shows me stress and strain, but she will soon
be back to her old self.’
    ‘We had better get a nurse for
Clifford,’ said Hilda. ‘Perhaps we can get Mrs Bolton.’
    Mrs Bolton was a widow, good-looking
in a quiet way. If you put your ear to her, you couldn’t hear a sound. Clifford
agreed. He hated giving himself into strange hands. She had not got strange
hands. ‘They were perfectly normal,’ said Constance.
    Mrs Bolton was glad of Lady
Chatterley’s offer. She had got tired of humping miners up the mine-shaft to
the surface.
    ‘Yes, I have known Sir Clifford since
he was a tiny toddler, and a lively one he was. He used to put firecrackers
under cats’ tails.’
    It was obvious she did not like Sir
Clifford. Whenever she got a chance she tried to push his wheelchair over the
cliff. She did not believe the upper classes had any heart. The upper classes
didn’t have them. What they did have was frogs’ legs and Champagne for
breakfast.
    So Ivy Bolton appeared at Wragby. For
the first two days she was very nervous: she hid under the piano. She was
extremely circumspect and subdued. But now she couldn’t say fuck off to miners.
Clifford let her do things for him though his resentment amounted to hatred of
her. He tried to bite her tits through her dress. She kept very quiet, never
trying to command him, for his own good, as she did the colliers. ‘Bring a
hundredweight of coal, you bastard, and put it down my coal hole.’ Those days
were gone. She kept herself quiet and mysterious. She dressed as a
fortune-teller for the first week and hid under the piano. Grey eyes downcast,
like this she used to walk into walls.
    ‘Shall I do this, Sir Clifford, or
would you rather I didn’t bother.’
    ‘Do you mind if we leave it for an
hour or so?’
    ‘Yes, Sir Clifford.’ One hour later
she poured out stone-cold tea.
    Constance went, and the house took on a new rhythm.
Before her the servants had lived way off. Now they seemed to come nearer, a
little too near. Clifford woke to find his manservant in bed with him.
    Mrs Bolton helped Clifford to bed at
night. She put on his pyjamas and saw his poor, shrunken willy, and she crossed
herself. All the heavy, intimate jobs that had fallen to Constance now fell to
her, like giving Clifford a piggyback to the bathroom. Clifford never any more
felt closeness to Constance. He would on occasions ask her to strip and do the Charleston.
    Clifford, on his way to total lunacy,
had mystical experiences, sort of exaltations and experience of identification
with the One. Constance mistrusted these experiences: who was the One? But he
insisted on the necessity for everyone to have the mystical experience of
identification with the One. Who was the One? Was it anyone she knew — it
seemed to him like pure Light — and to bring this experience with them down
into life.
    With the One it seemed that he
insisted that he was the One — the great I am. Mrs Bolton knew nothing
of it. Mrs Bolton would not give him a piggyback any more even if he was the
One. As the One he read Plato’s Phaedrus.
    The Phaedrus myth had a certain
fascination for her, that is, she didn’t understand it. True, she didn’t care
about the