John Thomas & Lady Jane

his clothing did he have
that beautiful white body that she had seen? Yes, yes, yes yes! Steadily
growing the flame of passion went over her and down her knickers and up her
back again. Suddenly she said:
    ‘I have told Sir Clifford I might
have a child.’
    He stopped in his tracks. His bottle
went.
    ‘You told him that?’ he said, his
legs shaking. Sir Clifford was a dead shot.
    ‘Yes, you see, I might.’
    ‘You don’t do nothing to stop it,
then?’ he said, his bottle going again a second time.
    He put his hat on again, it still
fitted.
    ‘And Sir Clifford would take it for
his own, would he?’ he said.
    ‘Oh no!’ she said.
    ‘So there was no mention of me being
the father?’ He breathed a sigh of relief and came out from behind a tree.
    ‘I’m going abroad with my father next
month. He could think I have found somebody else.’
    ‘How long will you be abroad?’
    About five foot six inches.
    ‘How long? Until the middle of June.’
    He gazed at her. So he was going to
lose her for a time. He thought very fast. Perhaps he could fuck Mrs Bolton. At
last he turned to her with a quick, awkward movement and fell over.
    ‘Was that what you wanted me for, a
baby?’ he said. ‘You didn’t think much of me, like?’ he said.
    She looked up at him dumbly.
    ‘I liked your body,’ she said dumbly.
    ‘Then we’re quits! I like yours!’ he
said.
    As long as they could go on screwing
everything was okay. Wrong! He looked at her a little mockingly. He knew she
wanted to keep relatively free of him. Wrong! She wanted to keep as much of him
as she could.
    ‘And do you like it when I feel of
you?’ he said.
    ‘Yes, I love it,’ she admitted.
    What a couple of dummies; as long as
they could go on screwing, the child could be ignored.
    ‘Eh well then — Have you left your
underthings off for me?’
    ‘Yes!’
    His eyes were flashing,
on-off-on-off.
    ‘Let’s go inside then, and be
private.’
    He closed the door of the hut. This
started the hens clucking. He pulled off his boots and leggings and trousers
and stood in his shirt, the tip of his willy showing below the hem of his
shirt. What a bloody fool he looked!
    ‘Now you can feel me if you’ve a mind
to,’ he said coming to her and lifting back her skirts and, coming to her naked
body with a queer, constrained smile of passion. And she put her arms around
him under his shirt and she met pimples. She was afraid of his body. She shrank
afraid, away. Difficult to do when you’ve somebody thirteen stones on top of
you.
    And when he said, in the queer
heart-sad croon of the voice of his passion: ‘Tha’rt nice; tha’rt nice!’ her
body loved it. But something in her spirit, and in her will, stiffened with
resistance, from the intimacy, and from the peculiar haste of his possession.
And if the sharp ecstasy of her own passion did not overcome her, if her spirit
managed to keep aloof, then his buttocks butting away would seem ridiculous to
her, and the sort of anxiety of his penis to come to its conclusion would seem
almost farcical. And then it would occur to her that this was love, this
ridiculous butting of buttocks, and wilting of a poor little penis. And she
would say to herself, as so many men, poets and all, have said, that surely the
God that created man, created him a reasoning being, and yet forced to
procreate himself in this humiliating ridiculous posture, all buttocks and
bollocks, created him surely out of savage irony and contempt for his own
creation.
    ‘Tha mun com’ ter th’ cottage for a
naight, sholl ter?’ he said to her, his speech getting broader. ‘Tha mun com
an’ slaip wi’me, afore tha goos wi’ thy feyther. Shall ter? When sholl ter? We
can be long at it.’
    What was the oaf trying to say?
    He seemed to slide through centuries,
thousands of years of human culture, in this hour with her. When she came, he
was an ordinary man, not very different from Tommy Dukes or Clifford. But when
his eyes began to dilate and flash, he began to slide back through the
centuries.
    Now in another breath he had moved
forwards again another thousand years.
    ‘Shall yer come one night ter th’
cottage?’ he said, quite changed and distant, in an almost ordinary voice. And
now, instead of naight, sharp, it was ni-ight, with a long heavy i — it seemed
to weigh him down. And now also he did not urge further. He left her to it. And
now she had to say yes to him for fear he should not ask her again. She wanted
to go to the