Lady Chatterley's Lover

weak... In her womb and bowels she was flowing and alive... she realized the immense difference between having a child to oneself and having a child to a man whom one’s bowels yearned towards.
    Why is Lawrence so involved with bowels?
    Simply, after two shags with the gamekeeper, she adored him. She was all bowels and sexual fantasy. Ah yes! O to be like a Bacchanal. 42 O to flee scantily clad through the woods 43 to call on Iacchos, the bright phallos (was it floodlit?) that had no independent personality behind it (what’s happened to the gamekeeper?). Oh! let not man intrude, he was but a servant, the keeper of the bright phallos, her own. (She wanted one of her own.) These days she had but to enter a sex shop and buy a good Japanese vibrator.
    The old passion flamed in her for a time, man dwindled to a contemptible object, something like John Major is today. The mere phallus-bearer, to be torn to pieces (possibly then a kebab?) She felt the force of Bacchae in her limbs and body (and presumably the bowels), the woman gleaming and rapid, beating down the male, perhaps using a hammer like Mellors. She would like to sink in the new bath of life, in the depth of her womb and her bowels.
    ‘I had tea with Mrs Flint today,’ she said to Clifford.
    ‘You didn’t drink it,’ he said worriedly.
    She shook her head. ‘I saw the baby, it’s adorable, with hair like red cobwebs.’
    ‘How terrible,’ he said.
    ‘I saw you go across the park,’ said Mrs Bolton.
    ‘Of course you did,’ said Constance.
    Mrs Bolton was almost sure she had a lover. Where was that man? That man was in his cottage washing out his semen-stained underpants, occasionally using a cheese-grater.
    ‘I’ve invited the Flints to tea,’ she said.
    Clifford grabbed his chest as though he had a heart seizure. ‘Invited them?’ he gasped. ‘What for?’
    ‘To see the baby.’
    At this he slid from his wheelchair to the floor. ‘The baby with hair like red cobwebs?’ he said.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Oh Christ.’
    Mrs Bolton hoisted him back into his chair, her charge was a modest two pounds. The cheque should be made out to Boltons Haulage & Co.
    ‘Don’t you want to see the baby?’ said Constance.
    ‘All right, but I don’t want to sit through tea with it.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Constance.
    She didn’t really see him, he was somebody else, she wasn’t sure who to choose, finally she settled on Mr Stuart Wilson, a surgeon serving in the 7th Hussars during the Crimean War.
    ‘You have tea with Mrs Flint in your room, my lady,’ said Mrs Bolton. ‘I’m sure Mr Wilson in the Crimea would prefer that.’
    Constance didn’t take her bath that evening, instead she took her gas stove. The sense of his flesh touching her was dear to her and in a sense holy, like the Sermon on the Mount, or even dismounted.
    Clifford was very uneasy, he kept thinking he was Stuart Wilson, a surgeon in the Crimea. After dinner he said to her, ‘You smell nice, was it the bath?’
    ‘No, it was the gas stove.’
    She thought she heard cannon fire emanating from him. ‘It’s the Crimea,’ he explained.
    After dinner, would she like to play a game, ‘Or shall I read to you?’ he said.
    ‘I’ll play hide and seek,’ she said. ‘You read.’
    He read out the First World War Armistice of restrictions and limits imposed on Germany. ‘Listen to this. They are not allowed any submarines. Destroyers are limited to eight in number with the limit of three-inch guns.’
    As the cannonade in the Crimea grew louder, Clifford had to raise his voice so Mrs Bolton put bricks under the wheels of his chair.
    ‘Cooeee!’ said Constance who was hiding in the pantry. ‘Guess where I am.’
    ‘The library,’ he said.
    ‘No, but you’re getting warm,’ she called.
    ‘You hear that, Mrs Bolton, bank the fire down a bit.’
    ‘Cooeee!’ When Constance called again she had moved further away. ‘Where am I now?’
    ‘The Crimea?’ he said.
    ‘No,’ she giggled. ‘You’re getting colder.’
    ‘Mrs Bolton,’ he said. ‘Stoke the fire up again.’
    Aloud he read how Germany was only allowed two battleships of under 30,000 tons and no aircraft.
    After that Constance shouted, ‘Do you give up?’
    He only nodded but loudly but she heard it above the noise of the Crimean cannons. She came out of hiding. ‘I was in the wine cellar,’ she said.
    Clifford went on reading the terms of the Armistice aloud, ‘German bicycle platoons mustn’t have wheels.’ Inside