John Thomas & Lady Jane

naked breast, kissing the male
nipples. What a little raver! ‘Look how pretty the brown hair is on your
breast!’ In fact it was very scruffy and patchy.
    He put his face to her belly, and
rubbed his nose among the sharp hair of her body, kissing her gently on the
gentle mount of Venus, letting the little hairs brush his mouth. Quite a few
got inside and he had to spit them out.
    ‘You don’t want me shaved or
anything, do you?’ she said.
    He suddenly kneeled in front of her
and folded her close, rocking her in a queer rhythm, while the phallic sway
enveloped them again, another screw with the Golden Phallus ensued.
    She crossed his body to see the time
by his watch on the far side of the bed. He laughed, and caught at the breast
with his teeth.
    ‘Oh, ouch, not so hard,’ she said.
    ‘You must get up,’ he said softly.
    ‘Yes!’ she said, reaching for her
nightdress.
    He was in the scullery when Connie
came down the steep little stairs.
    ‘Don’t bother to come out with me,’
she said.
    ‘Shan’t you have nothing to eat?’ he
asked.
    ‘It’s twenty past seven! I’d better
go.’
    ‘I’ll come with you to the green
riding, then?’
    He hastily combed his hair,
forgetting a little tuft of hair sticking up from the crown making his head
look like a coconut.
    ‘How lovely it is here!’ she said as
they crossed from the little white gate of the front garden.
    ‘If the world was different, I should
love it,’ she said, ‘to stay here with you. If the world were only different.’
    ‘Ah!’ he said at last. ‘If only it
were flat — we wouldn’t fall off it.’
    The body! It was a greater mystery
and complexity than anything. It was not even physical. It was like the
hyacinths, a thing of bloom, the love body. A thing of bloom. She just got home
in time before she went barmy with nature’s beauty.

Chapter XII
    --------------
     
     
     
    A T WRAGBY she went up to her room. She
did not bathe. She changed into fresh clothes slowly, leaving Soames’s
fingerprints all over her.
    She had a letter from Hilda. ‘Send
your trunk to London by train.’ What did she think she was, an elephant?
    She put off telling Clifford. He was
in a mood that irritated her: she couldn’t stop scratching herself. Whoever
came near him, he would try, in silence, to make her feel small. She was made
to feel four foot and one inch.
    He would ring for Mrs Bolton.
    ‘Did you ring, Sir Clifford?’
    ‘No, it was the bell.’
    Then he would look at her in the
eyes, with his cold, devilish look till she had to turn her face aside and he
was talking to her ear hole.
    So that evening Constance told
Clifford of Hilda’s letter.
    ‘She thinks I’m an elephant.’
    ‘Well!’ he said calmly. ‘I suppose
you’re going.’
    ‘I must, I must,’ she said.
    ‘Your sister Hilda comes on Thursday
and you will be back when?’
    ‘In a month or five weeks, as I
said.’
    ‘That is, if you come back at all.’
    ‘Why? Why should I not come back.’
    ‘Is your sister Hilda going to look
for a new husband for you when you’re on holiday?’
    ‘I haven’t asked her.’
    ‘Ah! The plot only concerns
yourself?’
    ‘There is no plot. Who do you think I
am, Guy Fawkes?’
    ‘Do you mind hearing my stipulations?
The child shall be English by both parents: and shall not have two heads.’
    He was in a deep, grudging mood and
he felt superior to them all. Secretly inside himself he felt superior to
everything on earth. He desperately wanted to be crucified and raised from the
dead and ascend into heaven. Next week he was to see a psychiatrist.
    ‘You’ll entertain, of course,’ he
said to her, ‘the possibility of your being swept away by love?’
    ‘Swept away where to?’ she said. She
was a simple girl.
    ‘The answer is obvious! The arms, and
the bed, of the man who is going to make a mother of you.’
    ‘What man?’ she said. She was a very
simple girl. ‘You are going to find out,’ he said. ‘You take a flight into Egypt to get a babe — ’
    ‘I won’t!’ she said. She had no
intention of flying to Egypt. Who did he think she was, the Virgin Mary?
    So ended a long boring marital
discord.
    ‘Do you intend to come back to
Wragby, after your jaunt,’ Clifford asked at tea-time, then at lunch, then at
dinner, then at breakfast.
    Finally she answered. ‘Yes, I shall
come back.’ At tea-time, then lunch, then at dinner, then breakfast, then when?
    She was also afraid of Soames, more
than she was of