John Thomas & Lady Jane

instance he could
tell it was raining in Bexhill and the French fishing fleet were putting out to
catch mackerel.
    She fell into a deep sleep. After an
hour he’d had enough.
    ‘Wake up! Do you hear me!’ he
shouted. ‘Wake up! I’ve done without women when I had no woman. I can wait.’
    ‘You will wait for me, won’t you?’
    ‘I’m waiting for you now,’ he said.
And immediately he started to wait.
    ‘If you do want another woman, then
have her, never mind.’
    ‘All right,’ he said. ‘If I want
another woman then I’ll have her and never mind.’
    ‘I want to go now,’ she said.
    ‘There’s a ladies’ just on the
corner,’ he said.
    ‘Don’t say goodbye.’
    ‘So remember!’ she said as he drew
away. ‘I want you to stay there.’ At each sentence she drew a little further
off. ‘But remember!’ she said.
    ‘Yes, I will remember,’ he said
gently. What in God’s name did she want him to remember?
    As she reached a thicket she picked
up a rock and threw it at the back of his head, knocking him down.
    ‘You won’t forget, will you,’ she
called after him.
    Constance found it hard to settle down again in Wragby.
She could not get back inside the life. She realized she was outside and that
was why she got wet when it rained. Clifford had recovered from his inertia and
had a certain access of energy. But he had ceased to be a man to her.
    The four pits were to be worked in
conjunction under an intense pressure and they were going to pay. In this,
their last lap, they would make Clifford’s fortune, a modern fortune.
    He raised Mrs Bolton’s wage, this
brought about her collapse.
    He went to Sheffield where he
purchased a dozen knives, forks and spoons stamped EPNS.
    He looked a mixture of an idiot and a
corpse: something essentially dead, yet idiotically alive. And it shocked her
so much that, to be on the safe side, she ordered a coffin and kept it hidden
in the bushes. She put a rock on the lid in case it blew off.
    ‘Where’s her ladyship?’ was
Clifford’s first question, when he had been out. But he had to know that
Constance was somewhere about. When she was away in France it strung him up
and he didn’t want to be strung up. So Mrs Bolton cut him down.
    Yet when she was out of the house and
he didn’t know where she was, he was tortured with anxiety, as well he should
have been. It was at that time when Soames was giving it to her in the chicken
house.
    Mrs Bolton said to her: ‘It’s a
different house when your ladyship is away.’
    ‘Oh, how is it different? Does it
change shape?’
    She knew that Clifford wanted to know
of any man she had been familiar with at the Villa Natividad. He wanted to know
secretly.
    Constance was furious when Mrs Bolton came up to her room
in the morning, bringing the tray, instead of the maid Annie or the footman
Ernest. Some mornings she brought up the maid and the footman on a tray.
    The two of them, Clifford and Ivy
Bolton, pressurized her to find out if she had had a man on holiday. She only
had a mountain.
    No, Soames was not good to her! He
ought to know that she must be taken away from Wragby! He ought to know that
something dreadful would happen to her if she was left there. Instead of that,
he thought she was in a sort of earthly Paradise of wealth and well-being and
he was the poor sufferer having to work making EPNS cutlery. He was selfish, a
serial cat killer. Was this the man she loved?
    She wept and fretted because she was
now really afraid of Clifford, of Wragby, of Mrs Bolton.
    ‘Lend me your money, money, money,’
she shrieked, but her money was all her own. He had settled nothing on her at
her marriage except confetti. And suddenly, like a heroine, in the eighteenth
century, she swooned and he yelled for somebody to come. There came Carl
Aubunge, a famous chef from the Cafe Royal.
    ‘It’s nothing, Clifford!’ she said.
‘Only liver! You know I get liver sometimes.’
    ‘I get mine from the butcher’s,’ he
said. ‘It never made me faint.’
    But he was terrified in his soul,
what soul he had. His life depended so abjectly on hers. And if anything
happened to her, if she were attacked by a lion, could he rely on Carl Aubunge
to save her?
    Soames had been gone ten days and he
had not written. Then a letter came from Sheffield inviting her to have tea at
the house of the Tewsons.
    On the day she made her way to 57 Blagby Street, the taxi-driver looked a little mystified, but drove out of the
substantial,