Lady Chatterley's Lover

photograph appeared everywhere, the Kent Messenger , Bexhill Observer , there was a bust of him in Marks and Spencer’s in Lewisham. He had an uncanny lame instinct for publicity; he would arrange to be hurled in front of an oncoming bus but pulled away at the last moment. He became one of the new young intellectuals. Where the intellect came in Constance couldn’t see. (Actually it was the bathroom window.) This was the feeling that echoed and re-echoed at the bottom of Constance’s soul.
    ‘What’s that noise?’ said Clifford.
    ‘It’s my feelings echoing and re-echoing on the bottom of my soul,’ she said.
    ‘Well, it’s keeping me awake,’ he said testing his nightcap Horlicks with his elbow.
    Paddy was writing a play about Clifford. Constance had heard about it long ago, 1909. Clifford was thrilled, he invited the Celtic copulator down to Wragby with Act One, what he would also bring down was the sex-act, when he arrived he gave Constance a bouquet of orchids which concealed a long-life Dutch cap. Act One was a great success, but the sex act that followed was even better. Constance was thrilled to what bit of marrow she had left. She kept it in a small snuff-box.
    Next morning Paddy seemed uneasy, his hands restless in his trouser pockets, turning over the family jewels. Under his breath he counted them — one-two-three. He crept up to Constance’s room and in case Clifford spotted him he disguised himself as Rudolph Valentino’s Sheikh of Araby. Constance heard his knock, before he could open the door she stripped naked and lay on the bed, in one bound and a cry of ‘Allah is great’, he landed on her and away they went like a steam train. During this, without stopping, he said, ‘Do you think Clifford liked Act One?’
    Constance tried to answer but every thrust banged her head against the bed’s headboard, which eventually fell off, so they started again on the carpet. It was an expensive one made in Afghanistan; it was a Fezhan made from various coloured (in this case red, cobalt blue and yellow) silk threads all knotted by hand with inlaid Muslim prayers in Arabic black calligraphy. Right now Constance’s bum rested on ‘There is no other god but Allah’. The carpet had been bought by Clifford’s father, it had cost £12,000, and his father and mother had spent their honeymoon on it.
    Still banging away, and steam coming from every orifice, he said, ‘Why don’t we get-grunt-grunt married?’ Constance’s eyelashes fluttered. ‘Oh,’ she said, gradually being pushed off the carpet on to the floorboards, ‘but I’m already married.’
    ‘Oh, he wouldn’t care, he’s entirely wrapped up in himself.’
    ‘Yes, he does wrap up,’ said Constance, ‘when it’s cold.’
    ‘I could give you good times,’ said Paddy.
    ‘What sort of good times?’
    ‘Well,’ he said for a start, ‘Six-thirty, half past twelve and eleven-fifteen.’ After a few more orgasms and a fag he said, ‘I could give you jewels up to a point, about three pounds ten shillings; any night club like the Las Vegas at Catford; and know anybody you want to, like Dick Squats, Len Lighthower, Lord Louis Mountbatten, or Eric Grins, even Dick Turner the retired haddock-stretcher; and travel! Glasgow! Bexhill, Southend, Lewisham.’ He spoke almost in a brilliancy of triumph. He had finished and it was now hanging down looking like the last turkey in the shop. 17
    ‘Look,’ said Constance. ‘It may seem to you that Clifford doesn’t count. Well, he does: using his fingers he can get up to thirty.’
    ‘And after that?’ said the relentless Irishman.
    ‘After that it would be the unknown,’ said Constance. One day Constance went for a walk in the woods. As she went, she heard voices and recoiled, crashing backwards into a tree. People! She didn’t want people, she wanted a herd of Gnus, or Wildebeest as they are sometimes called. She caught a sound of something sobbing. It wasn’t Gnus, or Wildebeest as they are sometimes called. Turning a corner she saw the gamekeeper and a child crying.
    ‘Why is she crying?’ demanded Constance, peremptory and a little breathless.
    ‘Pardon me for saying so,’ said the gamekeeper, ‘but you look a bit peremptory and a little breathless.’ A faint sneer came over the man’s face and slid down into his socks.
    ‘Don’t cry,’ said Constance to the child, at the same time in her pocket she found a sixpence 18 that Paddy had left under her pillow after his last