Lady Chatterley's Lover

even at eight thrusts a second. That was true aristocracy.
    They reached the gate. ‘I’ll say good-bye then,’ he said.
    ‘Shall I come again?’ she asked wistfully.
    ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘You didn’t come this time.’
    He watched her walk away. He turned into the dark of the wood. He walked into a tree. He picked himself up, dusted himself down and started all over again. 33 He could see the rows of lights at Stacks Gate, the smaller lights at Tevershall pit, and screwing up his eyes, the gas lamp on the Jam Factory. How he hated jam, once contacted one couldn’t escape from it, he recalled a poem by a famous poet:

    Jam, beware beware of Jam
    It will get you p.m . or a.m.
    It’s always there at breakfast and tea
    That’s how it gets in, you see.
    There’s no escape from Jam
    It will find you wherever you am
    There’s that moment of dread
    When you find it on your bread
    No matter where you are
    It will come at you from ajar
    If you can give up Jam
    You can say what a man I am.

    This woman Lady Chatterley had cost him that bitter privacy of a man who had been a perfectly happy onanist. What had happened was not her fault. The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights, the diabolical rattling of the mine’s engines, roads roaring with traffic, that’s what made them fuck! People who lived between a coalmine and a motorway fucked themselves to death! He thought of the tenderness of her, oh, she was too nice for the tough lot she was in touch with like Ted Loon, Dick Squats, Len Lighthower, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Eric Grins and recently, Billy Bennett after a recent performance at Lewisham Hippodrome. Poor thing, she too had some of the vulnerability of the wild hyacinths, so why hadn’t he fucked them? Tender, Lady Chatterley was tender, tender... tender where the stones under the blanket had bruised her arse, eight thrusts a second remember. He would protect her with his heart, which wouldn’t offer much protection to an enraged husband approaching in a motorized wheelchair with a shot gun. He was alone, his room was clean and tidy but rather stark. It’s no good, he’d have to buy a Bechstein. He tried to read a book about India, but tonight he found it impossible to read, mainly because he hadn’t got a book about India, so he sat and thought about a book on India. He knew that conscience was chiefly fear of society, or fear of one’s self. He was not afraid of himself only the sound of an approaching motorized wheelchair.
    Lady Chatterley! If only she could be there with him! The desire rose again, his penis began to stir like a live bird, to make it worse it started to cluck. Putting it on the table and hitting it with a hammer brought it temporarily under control. He took his coat, his gun, the hammer and went into the night with his dog who, to avoid his arse being kicked, ran by his master, backwards. Mellors loved the intense darkness. He was rendered unconscious by a protruding branch. How he loved the darkness.

    Constance, for her part, and with that part, hurried home. She would be late for dinner. She was annoyed to find the front door locked, she discovered this when she ran face on into it. Mrs Bolton opened it.
    ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘There you are, your ladyship.’
    It was true, there she was her ladyship.
    ‘Sir Clifford is in the lounge with Mr Lindley, they’re talking over something, it looks like a table. Should I put dinner back an hour?’
    ‘No,’ said Constance, ‘put it back on the table they’re talking across, they’re bound to see it.’
    Mr Lindley stayed to dinner, it was stretched haddock. Constance was the ideal hostess, so modest, so sensitive, so aware with big, wide, blue eyes, not a bad cover for someone who had just been screwed by the gamekeeper.
    Mr Lindley was an elderly man from the north, mind you he’d have been just as old in the south. He loved stretched haddock.
    ‘There’s nowt like it,’ he said and how right he was, there was nowt like it, even stretched elephant.
    Shaka Zulu (1801-1847) loved stretched elephant. After eating one he said ‘Umgaga xlamua daloola’ (there’s nowt like it).
    After dinner Constance went to her room. She felt vague and confused. She didn’t know what to think, if only she had a book on India. Mellors; what kind of man was he? Did he like books on India? He was kind, possibly the wrong kind. 34 He had a warm kindness, that almost opened her womb to him in another life. Was he a