Lady Chatterley's Lover

him down the stairs. ‘What’s wrong with only being half a virgin?’ said Clifford.
    ‘Well,’ said Sir Malcolm, ‘she’s getting thin... angular, it’s not her style.’
    ‘Then whose style is it?’ said Clifford.
    ‘It’s Mademoiselle Marie la Taché of 17 Rue de Lyon, Paris.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Clifford with as much meaning as possible.
    ‘Constance is not the pilchard type of girl, she’s a bonny Scotch trout,’ said Sir Malcolm.
    ‘I disagree,’ said Clifford. ‘She’s more of a boiled hake of a girl.’
    ‘How dare you call my daughter a boiled hake of a girl,’ said Sir Malcolm, still fiddling with the brakes on Clifford’s wheelchair.
    ‘I challenge you to a duel,’ said Clifford.
    ‘Name your weapon,’ said Sir Malcolm.
    ‘I name my weapon Dick,’ said Clifford.
    ‘Very well,’ said Sir Malcolm. ‘It’s Dicks at fifty paces.’ He wanted to say something to Constance about the demi-vierge business, like should they start one, also the half-virgin state of her affairs, was she having any? He was at one with her mind, but bodily non-existent: neither could bear to drag in the corpus delicti . Who wants that on the carpet when you’re having dinner?
    Constance guessed her father had said something to Clifford when she saw them duelling with weapons called Dick. She knew that Clifford didn’t care whether she was a demi-vierge or a boiled hake of a girl. She knew that she was too thin every time she fell through the kitchen grating.
    They had been two years at Wragby, Clifford writing his novels and Constance falling through the kitchen grating. She didn’t feel she was leading a real life; she was a figure somebody had read about in the Fishmongers’ Gazette , he saying she was not a pilchard girl but a boiled hake one. Her father, Sir Malcolm, had criticized Clifford’s novels and said they had nothing in them. Clifford challenged him to a duel, wheelchairs at fifty paces. ‘Why should there be anything in them?’ said Constance. She thought ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,’ also ‘Wealth maketh many friends but the poor is separated from his neighbour’ ( Proverbs 9:4), ‘The slothful man sayeth, there is a lion without, I shall be slain in the street.’
    Many people were numbered among Clifford’s friends, his favourites were numbers six, eight and twelve; they were critics, writers and haddock-stretchers and a Jewish duck-resuscitator. Constance was hostess to them all, the guests saw her as a buxom country girl with big tits, except the Jewish duck-resuscitator, he saw her as a 200-metre hurdler. When he told her, tears came into her eyes. ‘Nobody ever said that to me before,’ she said, controlling herself. It was moments like this she wanted to strip, but she knew how jealous Clifford would be, knowing he couldn’t rise to the occasion.
    His relatives treated her quite kindly; why they were treating her puzzled Constance, she wasn’t ill. Their kindliness indicated a lack of fear, these people had no respect unless you frightened them a little. So at three o’clock of a morning she would burst into their bedroom screaming and covered in a luminous sheet. Alas, some of the guests were taken short in their beds so the practice stopped.

THREE
    ---------

    C onstance was aware of a growing restlessness, it twitched her legs when she didn’t want them twitched, like at the Opera. It jerked her spine, when she didn’t want it jerked: on the loo, her arms shot up in the air, when she didn’t want them there, at a dinner party throwing her chicken leg in the air. It thrilled inside her body. 9 She felt she must jump into water and swim away from it. She tried it in the bath but only got as far as the taps, it was a mad restlessness, what she needed was a good fuck, and she was getting thin. As a precaution Clifford put a grill over the bath plug-hole. Vaguely she knew herself that she was going to pieces, when she walked bits fell off her. Her father warned her, ‘Why don’t you get yourself a beau, someone to give you a good fuck?’ She said she would think about with Clifford as he was, that’s all she could do about it.
    That winter Paddy Michaelis, an Irishman who had made money by his plays in London and New York — plays for the smart set, until they realized that, like Oscar Wilde, he made them look fools, so he was cut dead and his corpse thrown into the refuse-can — a miracle survivor, here he was, an inauspicious moment in