John Thomas & Lady Jane

corduroy and a big hat. He looked appalling, like
a scarecrow on the moors. ‘Oh, I say, Soames,’ said Sir Clifford, seeing his
red face like a bum with a rash on it.
    ‘Sir?’
    ‘Turn my chair around for me and get
me started. It makes it easier for me, Soames.’
    ‘You want me to get you started or
the chair?’ Soames was a great thinker.
    Soames came striding up the slope
with a quick small movement, slinging his gun over his shoulder. It missed, and
fell in the mud. He was of medium build, his face was of medium build with
vermilion-ruddy colour, he looked like a weather report. He had a rather large
sticking-out brown moustache. His bearing had a military erectness and
resistance. He was silent, it hurt his brain to talk, his movements were soft,
silent, oafish, almost secretive and evasive. He could be an outrider for MI5,
and if so they were desperate for recruits.
    The man touched his hat to Constance. He also touched his trousers, sleeves and socks. ‘Shall yer manage for yerself,
or should I wheel you?’ he asked in a harsh, neutral voice with a local accent.
    ‘Perhaps you’d better come along and
give her a bit of a push up the park incline.’
    So Soames pushed Lady Chatterley a
bit up the park incline. Clifford had referred to the wheelchair but Soames MI5
had misunderstood the hidden message in Clifford. The man turned to close the
gate and Constance let him. She bent and patted the dog which wagged its tail
before it bit her again.
    ‘Sorry about that, marm,’ and he
kicked the dog up the arse.
    Constance came on a little up the rear, aware of
Clifford’s face glancing around to see where she was and she was exactly where
she was.
    The gamekeeper pushed the chair with
a slow, deliberate step taking his foot lingeringly from the ground. Constance liked the colour of his appalling greenish velveteen corduroys with fawn cloth
leggings. What a strong back the man had! What she did not know was that
Soames, by pushing the chair, had ruptured himself. Since she had got used to
the Derbyshire-Yorkshire dialect of the people round Wragby, she found other
dialects, like the hill tribes of Assam and the Cocos Keeling Islands,
distasteful. Since his wife had left him, Soames had lived quite alone in the
cottage in the woods. Clifford liked him because he was a good keeper, did not
drink or smoke, but he was a compulsive onanist. Every morning he had to break
his blankets. He was a man nearing forty but he wasn’t speeding. During the war
his wife had gone loose, so loose bits used to fall off her. She would
entertain men down in the cottage to the disgust of the old Sir Geoffrey, only
because he wasn’t in on it. She used to do a dance, ‘Isadora Duncan and the
Dance of the Seven Veils’, using surplus army blankets to the disgust of old
Sir Geoffrey because he wanted to do it — he wanted to entertain men in
the cottage. She had gone off to Stacks Gate and that was the end of her.
    Soames was apparently a cruel man. He
would put mustard on cats’ arses and watch it set off. Constance herself did
not care for his harsh tenor voice that had a peculiar clanginess. ‘Good
morning — clang — Your Ladyship — clang,’ he would say. He had a soft
furtiveness of his movements as if he were hiding himself, this he did behind
trees. She watched the slow, sensitive way he lifted his feet and put them back
on earth again. He had to, he lived there. She realized something, he was
alone. Well, she couldn’t see anybody else. It was no good Clifford talking to
her about lovers. She could no more have a score of lovers than a tiger cat
can. Tiger cats have 100 matings a year; each one lasted half an hour, and for
her it was too late. It had nearly gone six o’clock, much too late to start
mating. She didn’t want people, she wanted to draw away from them more and
more. Drawing away by walking backwards she ended up eighteen miles away in the
wheat field in the park. Living a life meant avoiding people, the best way to
avoid people was go round them. And yet she did want — as even a tiger cat
wants a mate, though the mate will probably devour his offspring. She would
never mate with a man who would eat their children.
    Clifford had waited for her at the
top of the slope, by his watch one hour and twenty minutes. The day was already
drawing to a close. He was drawing to a close. The damp mist was beginning to
close up. It closed up on Clifford and you could not see him, just his head
stuck out of