John Thomas & Lady Jane

Clifford couldn’t pull his own. Sometimes Tommy Dukes came, he
was a Brigadier General who was one of Haig’s generals who managed to put a
year on the war: the old Cambridge light, or another poet whose brief flower
was blown.
     
    I wander lonely as a cloud
    That floats aloft o’er dales and hills
    When all at once I came upon
    A host of bloody daffodils.
     
    His was good company to be in. They
were BP. Usually when it wasn’t some relation it was some lone man who smoked a
pipe and wore strong brogue shoes.
    But Constance and Clifford were a
great deal alone. The months went by, even the years, no one could stop them.
Clifford, with his eyes very wide open, bright and hard, and staring: he really
needed glasses. He read a good deal though he wasn’t profoundly interested in
anything. That left nothing. He was interested in elephants, but he didn’t have
any. Constance made quaint drawings and illustrations for old books; sometimes
her illustrations were published. Clifford was quite proud and always sent her
books to titled relatives, titles like the Welterweight Champion of Wales and
the Light Heavyweight Champion of London.
    The great thrill of being alive began
to wear off Clifford; it came off in handfuls. At first it had excited him
terribly to be able to push his chair at sixty mph through the woods and see
squirrels gathering nuts. If only he had a pair of his own. ‘I’m alive, I’m
alive,’ he said and he sped off at sixty mph with Constance running beside him
trying to keep up. If he heard a rabbit scream, caught by a weasel, his heart
would stand still. ‘Another one gone to death! Another one! And I’m still
alive!’
    Constance prayed that a giant weasel would come and put
him out of his misery. He never betrayed his occupation with death to Constance
but still she did not guess his strange, weird excitement when he took a gun in
the autumn to shoot at his pheasants, the strange thrill he felt at banging
away (something he couldn’t do in bed), when he saw a bird ruffle in the air,
and make a curving dive. When Constance objected he said, ‘Look, the fall would
have killed it!’ He was acting very queer (if not to say gay). She tried to
dissuade him from shooting. ‘It’s not good for your nerves and it is very bad
for the birds.’ And for a long time he would not touch his gun. Then some
evening, frothing at the mouth, he would sit in a chair, sit waiting for a
rabbit, or a bird, or a poacher — he often shot poachers. When he saw a thing
fall dead, a puff of exaltation exploded in his fart (sorry heart), and he was
proud of his aim, which he had trouble with when urinating. He thought a great
deal of the preservation of his game though after three seasons’ shooting at
Wragby there was hardly any left. He concentrated on shooting poachers and
became irritable and strained. He would sit for a long time doing nothing, he
would do it in different languages — doing it in French was not as good as
doing nothing in German, and best of all was doing nothing in Polish and
Mongolian.
    ‘You know a lot about mining,
Clifford,’ said Constance. ‘Couldn’t you do something about the pits?’
    ‘Everything will have to close down
in the long run,’ he said. Constance had no intention of going for a long run.
‘We shall have to leave Wragby.’
    To hear him like this chilled the
life in her. She had to put on a fur coat. He had a terrible fear of drowning
and wore a life belt. He was exacting about food. He liked things exactly like
food. He couldn’t sleep and that tortured him. He used to blame the Chinese.
    Constance was silent and dogged, sometimes she would
bark. Clifford could never be a husband to her. She lived with him like a
married nun, and became a virgin again by disuse. Their memory of one month of
married life became unreal to her. Mind you, they did it so much it should have
lasted a lifetime.
    For the first few years. And then
something began to bend under the strain: it was her back. She began to walk
with a slight stoop, she became abnormally silent and would start violently if
addressed suddenly. She shut sex out of her life and out of her mind. It was
denied her so she despised it and didn’t want it. But something was bending in
her. It was her oesophagus that bent her food which started to go sideways.
Some support was slowly caving in, she could feel it. She felt it every night,
it was still there, in the morning she felt, ‘now I’m getting up, now