John Thomas & Lady Jane

ladylike.
    Was that what she wanted? Answer: Yes.
And women, she knew, were worse at the game than men. Take Olive for instance.
She picked up a man for the sole and simple purpose of putting herself over
him. She would screw in a coal shed for a free hundredweight of coal and come
up black as a miner. So was it so bad if she was fucked in a chicken house?
When women were into each other like Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West,
all women wanted to do was impose their own will and ego over the man. Mind
you, with women between fifty and sixty the men charged.
    Our civilization has one horrible
cancer, one fatal disease: the disease of acquisitiveness. Many doctors have
told their patients: ‘I’m sorry to tell you but you are suffering from a
surfeit of acquisitiveness.’ Neurotics are people who climb trees, take all
their clothes off and sing ‘Ave Maria’. There is no future in climbing trees,
stripping off and singing ‘Ave Maria’.
    By now Mrs Bolton did everything for
Clifford. She drank his tea for him, ate his dinner for him, and went to the
loo for him. Constance saw them both rise in their own conceit.
    Dave Alsop also came to see Clifford.
He was a journalist on the Tevershall & Stacks Gate News. The
best thing that was ever in it was fish and chips.
    There was dissent in the village
after Princess Mary had been given gifts from the miners and for her wedding
she was given exquisite gifts beyond anything the miners could afford. They
were seeing women slaving their insides out and it must have been a ghastly
sight, women with their insides out.
    Clifford had a new vision of his own
village. He tended to think of it as unchanged. He knew in his bones, yes in
his bones, that it was unchangeable. There was hostility by the miners to
himself, and Wragby, to the Chatterley vice-chairman, to all colliery owners,
all managers, senior manager, chairman and so on up to the Pope. They hated the
manager, the owner, the Archbishop of York, Bishop of Durham, Cardinal Wolseley
and Cardinal John.
    He suddenly wanted to go down in the
mines. The colliers were hostile, were they? Then he would face them and a lot
of bloody good it did.
    Colliers were waiting to see Wragby
wiped out. Well, he would show them. He went down the pit and sat eight hours
in his chair ‘showing them’. Unfortunately after four hours the miners had to
go home and he spent the night in darkness, waiting for them to come back next
morning. He came home that night covered in coal dust, he showed them, he
showed them, he said through gritted teeth.
    She felt she would surely die, in the
interim. Her soul would have to have some relief, some hope, some touch. It was
what she wanted. Not any revelation nor any new idea. Just a touch, even a good
grope.
    He was there, building a straw house,
on four posts, for the birds.
    ‘How nice, a little hut for the
birds!’ he said.
    ‘A bit of shelter, like!’ On which
bit was it?
    They both stood silent. She was aware
of his deep, quiet breathing, except from his nose, one nostril had a whistle
in it.
    ‘It’s spring!’ she said. ‘Oh joy!
Have the birds made their nest? Please say yes, please say yes.’
    ‘Ay! There’s a jinny-wren’s just
theer!’
    ‘Where? Where? Oh show me do!’ and
twirled.
    He took her across to a tree where a
wren had inserted his nest in a cunning fork of the bough. There was a little
ball of moss, and grey hair and down.
    ‘Oh, it was a little round ball of
moss and grey hair and down.’
    ‘Aye, there is a bloke in the village
bald and they had every hair of his head to make this nest.’
    ‘I wish I were a bird!’ she said with
infinite wistfulness.
    ‘I think of you as a bird,’ he said
with a vulgar laugh.
    He went back to his work making a
clockwork tortoise with revolving eyes.
    ‘You won’t see me much longer,’ she
said.
    ‘You’re long enough,’ he said.
    ‘I’ve got you that key you wanted,’
he said suddenly, in a lowered, altered voice.
    ‘Did you?’ she said in a higher
altered voice.
    He was in his shirt-sleeves, she was
in a floral cotton dress. After a moment he came back with the key.
    ‘Thank you so much. You’re sure you
won’t mind if I come?’ she said. ‘Do say you won’t.’
    ‘You won’t,’ he said.
    He looked away in the woods, all he
saw were trees.
    ‘If your ladyship doesn’t mind me, I
— you’re very welcome to — I mean — you do as you please, it’s your own place.’
    She was silent for a