Lady Chatterley's Lover

to be sufficed by Mrs Bolton. The sisters called on Mrs Bolton, a woman of forty-odd in a nurses’ uniform seventy-odd. Hilda showed her a pound note and she immediately accepted the job. Her husband Ted had been killed in a pit disaster, something fell on his head, believed to be a tea urn. At the inquest, the coroner asked a survivor what a tea urn was doing six hundred feet underground.
    ‘It was falling on Ted Bolton’s head,’ said the survivor.
    Clifford got on very well with Mrs Bolton. She would say, ‘Shall I do this now Sir Clifford or shall I do that?’ and he should say, ‘Yes, do this now and then do that.’ When she finished he said, ‘Come back in half an hour.’ Softly she went, softly she came back. ‘What do you want me to do?’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to do anything, I just wanted you to come back. No, go away and do this and that somewhere else,’ he said.
    Mrs Bolton came from a very poor family. At Christmas when rich people were finding silver threepenny bits in the puddings, Mrs Bolton’s family only found pieces of paper with ‘IOU threepence’ on them.
    Now Constance had more time to herself, she could softly play the piano to herself and sing, ‘Black bottom I’ve got ‘em’. She realized with Clifford how loose the bonds of love were; certainly they were not as secure as the nine per cent Bonds in Southern Railway her father had given her. She was glad to be alone. She could break wind without Clive saying, ‘Go on, stink the house out,’ and when she felt like it, she could open the window and sing quite loudly ‘God Save the King’.
    But she spent the evenings with him, when he liked to talk and read aloud, so much so voices from the village shouted, ‘Shut that bloody noise!’ When the villagers marched on the home Constance was forced to close the windows and put up the shades and hand out pieces of paper with ‘IOU threepence’. Fortunately every night at ten Mrs Bolton took Clifford away to put him to bed. She did this by racing the wheelchair across the room then tipping him into the bed.

8½
    -------

    I T WAS A blowy day, up the legs and into the swonnicles. Mrs Bolton said, ‘Why not take your swonnicles for a walk, you’ll see the prettiest daffodils in a day’s march.’
    Constance didn’t want to do a day’s march to see daffodils; but on second thoughts she decided to go. After all, one could not stew in one’s own juice, her mother always used Bisto. Spring was here. ‘Seasons return, but not to me returns the day, or the sweet approach of Ev’n or Morn.’
    ‘Very nice,’ said Mrs Bolton wringing out Lord Chatterley’s vest, is it a poem or something?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Constance, who knew it was hopeless. ‘Yes, it’s a poem or something,’ she said, crossing and uncrossing her legs for reasons only known to God (Book of Psalms, 38, iii: ‘And ho they crosseth and crosseth their legs and the Lord was with them’). She was a stranger, she could walk better, she had stopped going sideways and by alternatively using first the left , then the right leg she could go forward in that order. She wanted to forget the world, and all those dreadful carrion-bodied people, Tom Loon, Dick Squats, Len Lighthower, Lord Louis Mountbatten and Eric Grins. They all had carrion bodies, most of them kept them in a refrigerator. As the March wind blew, endless phrases swept through her consciousness. ‘A stitch in times saves eight.’
    ‘You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him jump it.’
    ‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s leg.’ They were endless. The first wild flowers were out, as were the miners. ‘The world has grown pale with thy breath.’ But! It was the breath of Persephone! It had left Greece two thousand five hundred years ago and here it was at Wragby! She walked on not knowing where she was. An Ordnance Survey map would have shown her precise position on co-ordinates NE120 0 by SW8°. The exact spot in the woods was called Scrotts End, it was the exact spot where a woodsman called Ted Scrotts had been struck by lightning in 1831. Constance sat down with her back to a young pine tree that swayed alarmingly in the wind. There it was, powerful and rising up. It fell on her. Doing Isadora Duncan gyrations, she managed to free herself, she rose a little stiff, another little stiff was Ben Dreggs, a dwarf from Cottles Circus who died the day before.
    The next day she went out again. She came across