John Thomas & Lady Jane

waiting for him? If it was a fuck, yes.
    The sense that all is well when it’s
true sex flooded him now and went down his trouser leg. He dreaded more than
ever exposing himself. False things, what was he talking about? About twelve
words a minute. He hadn’t got a false thing. Let her go to her own class. What
was she after? She was after a fuck. He couldn’t turn her out. She was
‘milady’. He was only a servant. They could turn him off. Lots of people turned
him off, like Isadora Duncan, Florrie Ford and Lady Astor. He found himself
gazing with hate at Constance as she sat in the hut.
    She opened her eyes and he was there,
so was she. He was looking at her asleep with hate. While she was asleep, had
she done something to offend him? She was about to go. He was bending over his
work with hate. He was making another clockwork tortoise with revolving eyes.
She went across to him. She glanced at him, her face was stiff and tired.
    ‘Good heavens, your face is stiff and
tired,’ he said. Constance was late for tea. She found Mrs Bolton under the
great beech tree on the knoll in front of the house with a telescope, looking
for her.
    ‘I wanted to see if you were coming,
my lady. Sir Clifford was asking for his tea and I didn’t want to make the
tea.’
    ‘Nonsense. Tea tastes the same no
matter who makes it.’
    She went in with a few wild-flowers
in her hand. ‘Sorry I’m late, Clifford. Why didn’t you tell Mrs Bolton to make
the tea?’
    ‘I never thought of it,’ he said
ironically. ‘Wouldn’t you have been surprised if you had come in and found Mrs
Bolton behind the tea pot?’
    ‘Everyone’s got to sit somewhere, so
why not behind a tea pot?’
    ‘What did you do?’
    ‘I walked across the wood.’
    She laid her gloves and flowers on
the small tea table. They always took tea in Clifford’s study. She was pouring
the boiling water from the silver kettle into the silver tea pot. She found a
little glass bowl for her flowers, arranging them lightly. The few daffodils
and primroses, the odd violets and drooping wild-flowers, and two bits of
pussy-willow.
    ‘They’ll all come up again,’ he said
and she put them down on the tea table and sure enough they came up again.
    ‘What did you want a key to the hut
for?’
    ‘To open it, you fool. What did you
think? The keeper was looking after the pheasants. Do you have to shoot them?’
    ‘Yes. It’s the only way to stop them.
He feels the hut is his private lair, where he sleeps sometimes and keeps
watch.’
    ‘How in God’s name can he sleep and
keep watch at the same time? But is it his hut?’
    He smiled at her with fine malice. It
was one of the finest malices she had ever seen.
    ‘Why not tell him that you have given
me permission to use the hut.’
    ‘I’m afraid he wouldn’t hear me from
here.’
    The next afternoon Clifford and
Constance went into the woods. The smoke partially obscured her from the chair.
There was a faint scent of apple blossom and diesel in the air. She gathered a
few apple blossoms and gave them to Clifford. He took them and looked at them
and ate them. He felt the situation demanded it.
    ‘ “Thou still unravished bride of
quietness,” ’ he quoted. ‘Spring flowers always seem like that to me, much more
than Greek vases.’
    ‘Ah, but you can’t smell a Greek
vase,’ said Constance.
    She said she felt tired. She felt the
situation demanded it. That evening with Clifford seemed interminable. She went
to bed at nine o’clock and he carried on being interminable on his own.
    Constance went out. She walked slowly, dimly, heeding
nothing. She walked into trees. The hut was closed and locked. Yes, it was one
of the silent, healing, unravished places. It was a pity about the chicken
shit.
    She stayed on and did not rise to her
feet until the brown wet dog ran towards her, waving the wet feathers of her
tail, and bit her ankle. The keeper followed, in a short oilskin coat and a big
hat down over his eyes, he had to hold his head back at an angle to see ahead.
    The keeper saluted very hastily, and
in doing so he stuck his finger into his eye, his face red and hot with rain.
    ‘I am just going,’ she said, and
went.

Chapter VII
    --------------
     
     
     
    S HE DISLIKED so intensely any sort of
unconscious sexuality. It was very hard to have sex when you are unconscious.
Better to avoid all sex than start messing about in ugly self-seeking, being
screwed on a blanket in a chicken shed wasn’t