Lady Chatterley's Lover

once,’ he said, giving her a twisted smile that reached his right ear and got stuck; she left him trying to straighten it out with a gurning iron. 20

    ‘The gamekeeper’, said Constance to Clifford, ‘is a curious person, he might almost be a gentleman.’
    ‘Is he?’ said Clifford. ‘Tell me when he is.’
    ‘Isn’t there something special about him?’ she insisted.
    ‘Well,’ said Clifford, ‘he happens to have delicate white loins.’
    ‘How did you know that?’ gasped Constance.
    ‘I asked him and he showed me,’ said Clifford finishing the last of his stretched haddock.
    Mellors had been a serving soldier in India on the Northwest frontier in a war against the frontier tribes. ‘He was injured in the fighting,’ said Clifford.
    ‘What happened?’ said Constance.
    ‘A naafi tea urn fell on him.’
    ‘Were his delicate white loins injured?’ said Constance.

SEVEN
    --------

    W HEN CONSTANCE went up to her bedroom, she took all her clothes off and looked at herself naked in the huge mirror. She saw her fanny excessively hairy, looking for all the world like a crow’s nest. She was supposed to have rather a good figure. She had, it was ten thousand pounds in the Halifax. Her body lacked something: big tits. Instead of ripening its firm, down-running curves, her body was flattening and going a little harsh. It was as if it had not had enough sun and warmth; it was a little greyish and sapless! And her belly had lost the fresh round gleam it had in the days of her German boy, she recalled him saying ‘Ach meiner Constance! Zee your belly hast einer fresh round gleam, it must be zer fuckink!’ Her thighs that used to look so quick (the hundred in eleven seconds) were now flat, slack, meaningless, the doctor had told her so.
    ‘Lady Chatterley, I’m sorry to tell you your thighs are flat, slack and meaningless, five guineas please.’ Fashionable women kept their bodies bright like delicate porcelain, and only used Fairy Liquid to wash themselves. She looked in the mirror, in profile it looked even more like a crow’s nest. She was getting thinner, she put her hat on to make sure she hadn’t disappeared. The longish slope of her buttocks had lost its gleam and its sense of richness. Crone! Only the German boy had loved it. Time after time he would come up behind her, lift up her skirt, pull down her knickers, and show his pals the slope of her buttocks and its gleam! O what romantic days. Why oh why couldn’t Clifford lift up her skirt and pull down her knickers like other men? Her body was shaped like ‘hillocks of sand’ the Arabs say, another Arab saying was, ‘Dirty postcards, you want fuck my sister?’ The front of her body made her miserable, so she walked sideways to avoid it.
    Next morning she was up at seven to help Clifford, help him with intimate things, taking his bed socks off before he awoke, uncovering the parrot. Clifford had refused to have a manservant. However the housekeeper’s husband Len helped him with any heavy lifting. For this purpose Clifford kept two 150-pound bar bells which he made Len lift three times a day.
    ‘I’ve got to keep fit,’ said Clifford.
    Constance did everything for him, she went for walks for him, she climbed trees for him, and when he wasn’t well ate his dinner. She swam the Channel for him, with 60,000 matchsticks she made a model of the Vatican for him, and finally for him she won the Grand National, it wasn’t easy, she didn’t have a horse. Poor Clifford, it wasn’t his fault, it was Grenadier Gunter Halm in the 1041 Panzer Grenadier Regiment who had fired the shell that wounded Clifford, who at the time was hiding behind a naafi tea urn on the Somme.
    And yet was he not to blame? He was never more than seventy-six degrees Fahrenheit. He was never warm as a man could be to a woman, even her father was warm to her, reaching 102 degrees Fahrenheit, but then he had malaria, which he had caught off a naafi tea urn in India. To Clifford’s class you didn’t show warmth, it was just bad taste. You had to go without it, and had to hold your own, which he frequently did, due to a weak bladder. What was the point when even the smartest of aristocrats had nothing of their own to hold? This was due to war wounds for many had the DSO. 21
    A sense of rebellion smouldered in Constance. What good was devoting her life to Clifford? Did he care that her thighs were once quick and were now flat? Did he care she was walking around with