Lady Chatterley's Lover

her she could feel the humming of passion 44 like the sound of bells.
    ‘You rang, my lady,’ said Mrs Bolton.
    Her answer was drowned out by Clifford’s blaring voice. ‘All German Admirals who partook in the War are to be taken out to sea and sunk by naval gun-fire.’
    He went on reading in a louder voice, yet she had heard not a syllable. He looked at her for a moment. She fascinated him helplessly, as if some perfume about her intoxicated him, 45 what she was smelling of was gas. Clifford’s voice grated on about the banning of Zeppelins, military balloons and carrier pigeons.
    She was like a forest, humming with the sound of opening buds (it was bells, now its buds). She was in the same world as her man, beautiful with the phallic mystery. Yes, he certainly had a beautiful phallic mystery, twelve inches of it.
    Clifford’s voice went on, clapping and gurgling with unusual sounds, ‘Thulggg! Kragonk! Xacactx!!
    Suddenly she realized he had stopped reading the terms of the Armistice and was improvising!
    ‘Clifford, what are you doing?’
    ‘I was just testing to see if you had been listening.’
    ‘Of course I was,’ she lied.
    ‘Then what have I been saying?’
    ‘You said Thulggg, Kagonk, Xaxacts.’ It was an inspired guess.
    ‘I’m sorry I doubted you,’ said Clifford. He went on full of confidence. ‘Germany will not be allowed anti-aircraft guns but they can throw stones.’
    Mrs Bolton brought in two glasses of malted milk for Clifford to make him sleep, and Constance to fatten her again. Clifford drank his and crashed to the floor in a deep sleep, Constance drank hers and immediately to her horror she put on a stone. She shook Clifford awake to say goodnight, sleep well. She didn’t kiss him goodnight. The cow, he’d spent two hours reading the Armistice terms of the First World War and no kiss! He’d teach her! Tomorrow he’d read her T-Kreigshat-Mullers Treatment of Haemorrhoids among Kurdish Homosexuals by Professor Richard Inghams! He gazed coldly and angrily at the door whence she had gone, the door took the full force of it.
    And again the dread of night came on him, he had a dead willy he couldn’t work. Coincidentally, like the gamekeeper, he had tried hitting it with a hammer with no result. He thought how cold Constance had become: otherwise why had she put extra blankets on her bed? Life was a terrible hollow somehow, actually it was a workman’s hole outside the front door into which he kept crashing his motorized wheelchair. Energyless at times he felt he was dead, really dead. To verify this, every day he got them to lie him in a field with a shovel by his side. Nothing much happened except a Martian approached and left his card.
    He couldn’t sleep at night. But now he could ring for Mrs Bolton. She couldn’t make him sleep either. She made him a coffee, sold him a packet of biscuits and sang him the Seventy-Ninth Psalm. ‘Fear not the night for they that go must surely come back, and as wherefore so they shall. Verily it will be thus after.’ They played piquet, she bet sixpence; Lord Chatterley £100,000, Wragby Hall and 120 acres of arable land. She never won, so she stayed on. As they played she thought of her Ted, long dead — quite long: he was nearly seven foot. She had a grudge against the masters who had killed him, like Lloyd George. Lloyd George did not kill Ted, he was nowhere near him. No, Ted was in the canteen. Suddenly there was an air raid, German planes started dropping exploding tea urns and one fell on Ted.
    Playing cards with Mrs Bolton made Clifford forget himself. He kept asking her who he was. He was winning, he was up sixpence. With his sex life, he was happy to be up anything.
    Constance was in bed fast asleep. While at his cottage, the gamekeeper was sitting close by the fire and thought he could smell burning. He was right, it was him. The brigade came and put him out. Continuing, scorched black, he thought of his wife, he hadn’t seen her since 1915, yet she was not three miles away, not three but two. He could have seen her — all he’d to do was get on his roof with a telescope and focus on her windows. If he did it at eight o’clock of a Monday evening he’d see Bill Grongler the coal-man screwing her against the kitchen sink, before delivering a hundredweight of best nuts. I mean he could take a Thermos and sandwiches up on the roof and watch it all the way through. He hoped he’d never see her again as long as he lived; it