Lady Chatterley's Lover by Spike Milligan Read Free Book Online

nothing, thank you Mellors.’ said Clifford. ‘Thanks for pushing me uphill between fainting fits.’
    ‘I hope it wasn’t too heavy for you,’ said Constance.
    ‘No, your ladyship, I do have a hernia but I wear a Hollins & Gaithorpe patent truss.’
    He gave Lady Chatterley an intense gaze. She gave him an intense gaze back. He then gave her in return another intense gaze. She returned it with yet a further intense gaze. Yet again he gave her a renewed intense gaze. Clifford noticed this intense gaze and gave Mellors an intense gaze for gazing at Constance intensely. Mellors took his leave, he saluted smartly, knocked his hat off, and because of it kicked his dog’s arse again.

SIX
    ----------

    ‘Y OUR GAMEKEEPER,’ said Constance at lunch. 16 ‘Where did he come from?’
    ‘Nowhere,’ said Clifford.
    ‘And where exactly is that?’ She sat elbows on the table, her head in her hands.
    ‘Your elbow is in your soup,’ he said.
    ‘Yes, I was testing to see if it was too hot.’
    ‘Yes, Mellors was a Tevershall boy, my father first employed him as a gamekeeper,’ said Clifford.
    ‘What does he do?’ she said.
    ‘He shoots people who trespass, poach game or dishonour the fair name of His Majesty King George V,’ said Clifford, chewing on his portion of stretched haddock.
    ‘Is he married?’ said Constance.
    ‘Was,’ said Clifford, chewing on his portion of stretched haddock. ‘His wife ran off with a Pakistani juggler.’
    ‘What did she see in him?’ said Constance.
    ‘I don’t think she could see in him but she knew it was curry,’ said Clifford swallowing a piece of masticated stretched haddock.
    Clifford looked at her with slightly bulging blue eyes. It was either his thyroid or the new jockstrap he was breaking in. There was a certain vagueness, he seemed alert in the foreground, but dazed in the background. Like a haze and smoky mist, the haze seemed to be creeping into the foreground of his mind filling up with mist, so much so she couldn’t see him across the table. When it cleared, he stared at Constance in his peculiar way, with binoculars; like a good wife she reminded him his stretched haddock was getting cold.
    ‘Let me remind you,’ she said. ‘Your stretched haddock is getting cold.’
    ‘No, it isn’t,’ he said, testing it with his elbow. ‘It’s still warm.’
    So life at Wragby went on and bloody on. Clifford was sure of life and writing his stories. ‘Once upon a time there were three bears...’ Mentally he was still alert. Asleep by the fire Constance would poke him with a cattle-prod, he would spring awake and shout, ‘Second Lieutenant Chatterley. C 95402A sah!’ But the paralysis was spreading in his effective self. Constance felt it spread in her, it spread out the door, down the garden into the woods hard by Tiverton village and stopped just before the river. When Clifford was aroused he could talk brilliantly. Without warning Constance would arouse him, in an instance he would say brilliantly, ‘The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs!’ Constance would pat him and give him a lump of sugar. But, thought Constance, day after day all the brilliant words seemed like dead leaves, crumpling up and turning to powder, meaning really nothing, blown away on a gust of wind. They were not the leafy words of an effective life, they were the ghosts of fallen leaves of a life of coming gloom and disaster. What a miserable cow she was.
    His books were making him famous, his photograph appeared everywhere, the Kent Messenger , Bexhill Observer , there was a bust of him in Marks and Spencer’s in Lewisham. He had an uncanny lame instinct for publicity; he would arrange to be hurled in front of an oncoming bus but pulled away at the last moment. He became one of the new young intellectuals. Where the intellect came in Constance couldn’t see. (Actually it was the bathroom window.) This was the feeling that echoed and re-echoed at the bottom of Constance’s