John Thomas & Lady Jane

moment, about
three seconds.
    ‘I don’t want to interfere with you —
or seem to.’
    ‘You don’t interfere with me, your
ladyship.’
    ‘Very well then,’ she said softly.
They’d had this conversation before.
    He stood for some moments motionless,
staring away into the wood. The trees were still there. Then automatically he
reached for some straw from the heap. He was an automatic gamekeeper.
    ‘It’s the end of the day,’ she said
unthinking. Even then she got it right.
    ‘Ay! Another!’ he replied.
    And his ‘another!’ rang strangely in
her soul. God she was daft.
    ‘Good-night, then!’ she said.
    And as she went home she saw a new
moon, bright as a splinter of crystal in the western sky. It was so beautiful
she started to cry. She came home with the front of her dress soaked.
    Every day after this she went to the
hut. Across there was a carpenter’s bench, across there some tools on the
bench, across there was some straw, across there a couple of bags of corn for
the pheasants, across there a couple of old blankets. There was nothing else
across there, that was it. On closer inspection there was a clockwork tortoise
with revolving eyes.
    He had only four hens. Constance would offer them a bit of com in her hand, but the fierce mothers would peck
savagely until they pecked her hand like it was a dart board. In the end she
had to wear a boxing glove so when they pecked her she punched them.
    Sometimes Soames would absentmindedly
throw her a handful of corn. Whenever she went, she found him there. And she
could tell, by the quick, eager way he looked round, that he was looking for
her.
    They seemed to be drawing together
but they never touched. There was always a two-foot space between them. He
carried a ruler to make sure the measurement stayed. When she saw him coming, a
queer fire would melt her limbs and trickle down her \ body. She would
wait and wait and wait. It was a foregone conclusion that he would screw her.
    He always looked for her to be there
and when she j wasn’t he would stop looking. He wanted her to be there; he even
marked the place on the ground with a cross. He was streaming towards her from
his knees, j he was streaming towards her from the middle of his breast, from
his teeth, from his nose, and other bits were all streaming towards her. To
help keep up streaming towards her he drank half a bottle of malt whisky and
even the whisky went on streaming towards her.
    Gradually a sort of sleep or hypnosis
was coming over him. He was losing his sense of time. He had to ask a policeman
what time it was. He was melting away into the unknown but infinitely desirable
flood of wholeness. What could a man do! Screw her.
    The young pheasants began to hatch
out, ready for Clifford to blast them from the skies. Constance came and wept
with excitement and for the first time in her life she loved an old hen, the
bright, fierce warm creature, with the chicks under her feathers so softly.
    For two days Constance did not go
into the wood, a tree fell on her. One of Clifford’s aunts descended on them.
She parachuted in. But she slipped away, breathless and bewildered.
    There he was in his shirt-sleeves and
she was in a knitted two-piece. She went straight towards him and she measured
two feet between them.
    ‘How many more are hatched?’ she
said.
    ‘Oh, they’re nearly all out,’ he
replied.
    She quivered, he stood so near to
her. Then she crouched down before the coop he had not shut up.
    Tiny heads were poking out
inquisitively between the yellow foliage of the old hen’s feathers. He stood
above her and she could see right up his nose.
    He crouched down at her side and
slowly he put his hand into the coop and brought forth a faintly piping chick.
He put it in her hand.
    ‘Isn’t it adorable!’ she cried.
    In spite of herself, tears came into
her eyes.
    ‘It’s one o’ th’ lively ones!' he
said.
    She bent her head, shook the tears
from her eyes, the chick was beginning to devour, and looked up at him with a
wet face.
    ‘It’s’ — she said with a broken laugh
— ‘It’s that they’re so unafraid — ’ and following the laugh came a torrent of
tears.
    He had to take the chick from her to
stop it from being drowned. He laid his hand softly on her back and on her
loins in a blind caress — dirty little devil. Her loins were at the back. He
quickly put his hand to hers, and taking the little, piping bird, ushered it
gently back.
    His hand spread slowly round her