Lady Chatterley's Lover

flat thighs?
    There were people staying at the house, among them Clifford’s Aunt Eva Lady Bennerly, a thin woman of fifty with a red nose, a widow, her late husband an Indian Army colonel had died in some kind of accident in a naafi . She was still something of a grande dame or a great Dane. She was a past mistress at holding her own, and holding other people’s a little lower, this she did in the kneeling load position.
    ‘You’ve done wonders for Clifford,’ she said through lips rouged like a chicken’s bum.
    ‘Oh, I don’t think it’s any of my doings,’ said Constance.
    ‘It must be! It can’t be anybody else’s doings. I don’t think you get out enough.’
    ‘How?’
    ‘Look at the way you’re shut up.’
    So Constance looked at the way she was shut up. ‘Now what?’ she said.
    ‘I told Clifford’, said Aunt Eva, ‘that if one day you leave him, he will only have himself to thank.’
    Constance wondered how Clifford would thank himself. Would he sit in a room alone and say thank you?
    ‘Look here, my dear child,’ said Aunt Eva.
    So Constance looked there.
    ‘Clifford should bring you to London — there’s places like Lewisham Hippodrome and Catford Greyhound Track.’
    Her ladyship lapsed into silence, smoothed by the pint tumbler of brandy she was drinking. Slowly she keeled forward face down on to the carpet.
    ‘Ups-a-daisy,’ said Constance, gradually Aunt Eva upped her daisies and sat down again. But Constance, still depressed by her flat thighs, didn’t want to go to Lewisham Hippodrome or Catford Greyhound Track.
    ‘But’, said Aunt Eva, ‘you’d be able to see Billy Bennett.’
    ‘Is that a greyhound?’ said Constance.
    ‘No, no,’ said Aunt Eve. ‘He’s a comedian.’
    ‘What’s a comedian doing at Catford Greyhound Track?’ said Constance.
    ‘No, he’s at the Hippodrome, he’s very funny, he wears evening dress and a grass skirt.’
    ‘Would he bring the fresh round gleam back to my belly?’ said Constance.
    ‘No,’ said Aunty Eva. ‘He’s not that funny.’
    Tommy Dukes was at Wragby, Harry Winterslow, Jack Strangeways, his wife Olive. Winterslow owned a thriving monkey-packing factory. Those not present were Dick Squats, Len Lighthower, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Eric Grins and Houdini. The latter had been invited but was in the middle of a trick and couldn’t get out. Everyone was a bit bored, there was only billiards and the pianola to dance, sometimes they just danced to the billiards.
    Olive was reading a book about the future, when babies would be bred in bottles.
    ‘It would have to be a large bottle for people to copulate in, and everybody could see you doing it,’ said Dukes, who was a prat.
    ‘It also says women should be immunized,’ said Olive.
    ‘How would you like to be immunized?’ said Strangeways.
    ‘By Rudolph Valentino on the great bed of Ware,’ she laughed.
    Strangeways didn’t laugh, how dare Rudolph Valentino fuck his wife on the great bed of Ware!
    ‘Perhaps all women will float off into space,’ said Dukes, who was a prat.
    Strangeways wanted children, Olive didn’t, she wanted elephants.
    Clifford gave a genteel cough, if we bred babies in bottles, all this love business might as well go,’ he finished with a Gentile 22 cough that dribbled down his chin.
    ‘No,’ cried Olive. ‘That might leave all the more room for fun, hide and seek, hunt the thimble and beg o’ my neighbour.’
    ‘I suppose’, said Aunt Eva, draining her brandy glass, ‘if fucking schtopped shomething elsche would takes its plache.’ Like a great ship being launched she slowly slid face down on to the carpet.
    ‘I know,’ said Dukes. ‘Morphia would take its place.’ Dukes was a prat.
    ‘So long as you can forget your body you are happy,’ said the face down on the carpet.
    ‘I never forget my body,’ said Clifford. ‘I take it with me wherever I go, I daren’t take a bath without it.’
    ‘Imagine if we floated like tobacco smoke,’ said Dukes, who was a prat.
    ‘I believe our schivilization ish going to collapsche,’ said Aunt Eva, who already had.
    ‘Our civilization is going down a bottomless chasm, the only bridge across the chasm will be the phallus,’ said Dukes becoming an even bigger prat.
    ‘You mean we all have to cross a phallus bridge to be saved?’ said Clifford.
    ‘Yes,’ said the prat.
    ‘I’m not walking over that at my time of life,’ said Olive. ‘Supposing it goes soft.’
    When they’d all