Lady Chatterley's Lover

Smith.’
    ‘Get plucked,’ said Dukes.
    A new guest had joined the party, a Mr Berry. ‘What do you all think of Bolshevism?’ he said as everything led up to it.
    Clifford asked among them all, then said, ‘I’ve just asked and none of us ever think of Bolshevism, why?’
    ‘Bolshevism’, said May, ‘is a hatred of things called bourgeois.’
    ‘What things do you call bourgeois?’ said Clifford, oiling his wheelchair. ‘Would you call a wooden leg bourgeois?’
    ‘If it was on a sailor, no, but if the Queen had one, yes,’ said Dukes, who sprang to attention when he mentioned the Queen. ‘Here’, he said, ‘is a photograph of her.’
    Clifford took the photograph. ‘This isn’t the Queen,’ he said. ‘This is a photograph of a horse.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Dukes. ‘I haven’t got one of the Queen.’
    ‘I don’t think the Queen with a wooden leg is bourgeois,’ said Hammond. ‘I’d say she was aristocracy.’
    ‘Ah yes,’ said May. ‘She is aristocracy but her wooden leg is bourgeois.’
    ‘To be a Communist’, said Hammond, ‘you must submerge yourself in the greater thing.’
    At the mention of the ‘greater thing’ Constance thought of Paddy and his.
    ‘The only time I submerged myself was at Lewisham‘ municipal baths, does that make me a Communist?’ said May laughing.
    ‘Russian Communism is nothing to be laughed at,’ said Clifford.
    ‘Oh, I’m sure they can’t hear me from here,’ said May.
    ‘I can think of nothing worse than being a Bolshevik,’ said Hammond.
    ‘Yes, you could be Tom Loon, Dick Squats, Len Lighthower, Lord Mountbatten or Eric Grins, any of those,’ said Clifford.
    Mr Berry changed the direction of the argument to NorNorEast, roughly parallel with the London and North Eastern line to King’s Cross where, in fact, at this moment the eleven-fifty train was arriving. By coincidence the engine-driver’s name was Dick Squats.
    ‘Do you believe in love?’ Berry said.
    ‘Oh,’ said Dukes. ‘You mean fellows fucking jazz girls with small-boy buttocks, like two collar-studs.’
    There was a baffled silence, then Clifford said, ‘What are you talking about?’
    ‘I think’, said Dukes, ‘I’m talking about twelve words a minute, the world record is twenty-three held by Arthur Mince Junior, a Canadian haddock-stretcher.’
    ‘Don’t you believe in anything?’ said Berry. ‘I believe in a good heart and a chirpy penis.’ A good penis roused his head and said, ‘How do you do!’
    ‘Renoir said he painted his pictures with his penis. I wish I could do something with mine,’ concluded Dukes.
    ‘Why not tie a brush to it and start painting?’ said May.
    That night Constance looked at her behind in the mirror. At no stretch of the imagination did it look like two collar-studs. What utter rubbish they had been talking, she would rather have talked to Dick Squats. Alas! He was on the footplate of the eleven-fifty to King’s Cross.

FIVE
    ---------

    O NE MORNING Clifford and Constance went to cross the park to the woods, he in his motorized wheelchair doing fifty miles an hour with Constance running behind trying to keep up. The air smelt sulphurous, it could have been the factory, then again it could have been Clifford. ‘Sorry,’ he finally admitted. For the last mile Constance had hung on to the back of the wheelchair and been dragged along. When he stopped she was a mass of mud and leaves. In the wood everything was motionless, trees couldn’t do much else. A jay called harshly.
    ‘Look, Clifford,’ she said, ‘There’s a jay called Harshly.’ But there was no game, no pheasants, quail or elephants. They had been killed off during the War, when the Germans had overrun the British lines. Clifford loved the old Oaks ( Quercus robur ) he also loved old Walnut trees ( Juglans regia ) and Rowan ( Sorbus aucuparia ). His wheelchair chugged up a slope stopping by a sapling ( Betula pubescens ). The area had been logged, patches of blackness were where woodsmen had burnt rubbish, that or coloured illegal immigrants were hiding. It was a good hiding place, when caught they all got a good hiding. Clifford sat admiring the view, the coal-mine, the slag heaps, the gasometer and the Jam Factory. Affectionately he patted a tree trunk 15 ( Aesculus hippocastanum ).
    ‘This,’ he said, ‘this really is the heart of England.’ Constance thought otherwise: to her it was the arsehole. The eleven-o’clock hooter sounded from Stacks Colliery.