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Clifford regretted the pilgrimage to Scotland. He embarked on a misty morning, Field and Mrs. Bolton in tow, in a smart new car fitted with mechanical accommodations for his disability. The pedals were attached to levers, which he controlled with his hands, his strong capable hands! It was the motor car that inspired the journey, not the other way around. Everyone had an automobile these days, and what was an automobile but an overpowered wheelchair? There was no distinction between himself and any other Sir Somebody when seated in a modern, aristocratic Albatros. He was in the driver’s seat, he controlled the car in its great mechanical deadly force. He was finally unafraid in his presumption of superiority, if only in the confines of the great equalizer of the motorized vehicle. The ridiculousness of his father, and his father’s father, and all the Chatterley’s before them was no longer a potent threat to his psyche. Their stupidity Clifford sloughed off like dead skin, that dried and flaked away from him in the wind that rushed over the windshield of the Albatros, as he sped along some anonymous road at what was really the heart of England, the real England!
But still the old wound festered, though his conscious mind plastered over it with the airs of his baronetcy. The wound of Connie, her prodigal ladyship who had deserted him for a servant, his own gamekeeper. The spiteful part of him — which had grown to be a rather large part, he found — wanted to see her lowered. He wanted to see her in rough clothes, hair undone, patience undone from the squalling of her bastard child, her lover out of temper in whatever crude little hut he’d found for them in the Highlands. He wanted to gloat, remote and aloof, over the misery he’d assumed for them. There was a magnanimously conceited part of him that imagined knocking on their door, surveying with equanimity the squalid barrenness of their life together, and announcing that he’d generously grant the divorce she so longed for. Mostly, he wished their life was something he could listen in on with his clever little radio, as easily tuned into as Madrid or Frankfurt. Something that could be accessed anonymously, from the solid, comforting walls of Wragby, that were indisputably his by rights.
Of course it was Mrs. Bolton who told him where they’d gone to. Her loyalty was unwavering, almost like the bitch that always accompanied Mellors when he was hunting for poachers. He absently wondered whether she would be there, too, when he arrived, laying her head gingerly on her paws, watching the domestic drama unfold, or barking louder than the rest of them, biting the baby’s ear and toppling the furniture. Truthfully, he’d thought of Mellors more than Connie, since he’d hatched this scheme of driving to Scotland. His deliberate way of walking, of seeing, of his constant companions, the rifle and the dog. He spent many an evening robbing Mrs. Bolton blind at cards, wondering what his wife ever saw in him, such that he was forced to belatedly observe all he could from the scant memory of his erstwhile gamekeeper. It was a flattery he hated, but could not help but bestow. One he would never admit to, especially to himself, as Mrs. Bolton soothed him in the night, both of them anxiously awaiting the dawn when the darkness might be banished, and all his reminisces would dissipate like phantoms in the weak, determined light. He thought not only of Connie and Mellors, Mellors and Connie, and Mellors, Mellors, Mellors — but also of the War, of the trenches, of the dreariness of a deprived life as compared to the dreariness of a comfortable existence. He remembered, against his will, the gas and the bombs and the ash year-round, settling on his drab shoulder like winter snow, eternal winter. He relived the hospitals, the doctors and nurses, the impersonal helplessness of it all, where the ruling classes were reduced to nothing but shrapnel. Only he was lucky enough to have the pieces of shrapnel grafted together again, to form a recognizable human being . But a part of him had died then, he knew, and there was no resurrecting it. And it was on the border between sleep and wake that he had no defense against the ghosts of what had been. He was beset by what he once was, what England once was, in her fertile and picturesque glory. But when the sun finally showed her golden crown over the jagged horizon, and her light allowed him to distinguish between the sky and smog, he resettled into the new order of things, the new world, where he was still master, only not quite in the way he would want.
And there was Mrs. Bolton, to guide him through any terror, to brace him through any danger. She was certainly indispensable on this trip to Scotland. And Clifford certainly did not consider her sympathetic to her former mistress. It hardly occurred to him she had any sympathies at all, except those devoted to him, which, like Wragby, he understood as his by rights. He did not consider her at all involved in the tension between the classes that had been and continued to be Clifford’s perpetual headache in the management of his colliery. There were the sootstained faces of the miners, and then there was Mrs. Bolton — never mind her Christian name, he couldn’t remember it, even if he cared to try — as serviceable as ever, who kissed him and pressed him against her breasts.
So she sat beside him, as he motored the three of them to Scotland, on this ill-advised errand. Field, the chauffeur, sat in the back, ready to be made use of for whatever heavy lifting of Clifford and his possessions might be required. Neither he nor Mrs. Bolton had dared pose any impertinent questions as to the purpose of this excursion. Field went chalk-white at the prospect of having to throw Lady Lady Chatterley into the car by force, for what else could this journey be about? And he felt out of place as a passenger, above his station somehow, though Sir Clifford so clearly felt he was exhibiting his by driving the blasted thing. Mrs. Bolton, on the other hand, knew better, and concealed her excitement as best she could — for really she rejoiced at seeing Connie once more, in the arms of her real, true lover and with their babe in her arms. Down the pit of her soul, she sensed Ted most of all. Ted, Ted, that lovely forlorn syllable that rhymes with dead and meant nothing now, not to anyone except for her. Neither he nor she had seen this part of the country before, but she felt him there all the same, in the belly of every hill and the disruption of every stone.
The landscape passed them by, this odd trio, silent servants to an even more silent master. It almost seemed as if the bitch-goddess, Success, had morphed somehow with the image of Mellors’ Flossie (though of course Clifford was not so familiar as to know her name!) and had driven them north, in search of her. The heart of England melted away, and the sights of the Lake District filled its place, nonetheless scarred with the industrial North in the same haphazard and unfeeling way as Clifford’s native Midlands. Progress, progress, everywhere! And Clifford was irrationally upset that he was not the only technological innovator amongst his aristocratic peers. His sense of his own novelty was threatened by his easy identification of the numerous other chemical works they passed along their journey, the dozens of other collieries and domes of hopeless smoke wafting from all the other mines. It was the destiny of other men to be set, planted and productive in the earth, while it was his to manage the operation above, to carve the world with his automobile tracks. But how many others there were, handed the same fate! The sights of the journey, instead of refreshing him, only solidified his inner deadness, and impressed upon him the banality of his existence.
They stopped in at numerous estates, haughty, austere, and gorgeous, all in their own right, and Clifford spent the evenings chatting crude coal and noble philosophy to whoever would listen, while Field and Bolton were warily welcomed to sundry servants’ halls, inducted into the gossip and complaints that were the throbbing undercurrents of any household. Here, the maids had heard of a great lady who’d left her station for a gamekeeper, but this far north all the particularities had melted away, a cloud changing shape, still the same white wisps, but unrecognizable from the original image. Just one fairytale among dozens, traded on the floor of the millinery, where every woman loves a good tale though she only half believes any one of them. Still, when Clifford heard such reports in the stylish hotels they would stop in at, his whole body ran numb, to the crown of his head, so that it wasn’t only his legs that felt paralyzed.
Clifford had naively expected some sort of seismic shift in his consciousness once they crossed the border into Scotland. He’d assumed that the breach of this territorial line would feel momentous, almost akin to conquest as he traversed it. But he felt nothing. No milestone along their journey could arouse in him any feeling whatsoever. He was alienated from this landscape, this England that he felt was his, it was just a hollow bauble in a jewelry box, not worth hawking. Mentally, he sought to revel in the objective progress he saw, curling along the hills and dales like black tentacles, but still he felt no emotional, no spiritual contact with anything. His only genuine pleasure he found in Mrs. Bolton, when she shaved him every morning, and bathed him every evening.
He felt it as they approached the place. Felt it in the set of Mrs. Bolton’s shoulders, in the purse of her lips. He read disapproval where she strove to suppress a smile. Field was sentient baggage, the most suitable second pair of hands simply because he belonged to the car more than the butler or any of the footmen.
There again was the Scottish farmer hoeing his fields for potatoes, and there again was asked, this time by Sir Clifford, for directions to Oliver Mellors’ abode. And so the man gave them once more, feeling the gentle whiplash of deja vu without being able to name it — though reasonably certain that the one inquiring now was not Mellors’ lover as the last had been.
Of course, there was another, more accessible way than Connie had walked to Mellors’ cottage all those months ago. One accessible by automobile, as everything nowadays was obliged to be. After coming round, Clifford saw with elation the dirt path that led invitingly to the front door, which was newly painted a deep pine green. Field unstrapped the wheelchair from the back of the Albatros, and he and Mrs. Bolton helped set Sir Clifford snugly in the chair. The servants were prepared to leave him to his private affairs, but Sir Clifford grasped Mrs. Bolton’s hand as she was about to turn away. So she pushed him up the modest, cheerful little drive, while Field waited alert by the car, afraid to look as though it belonged to him, and inwardly cursing the way Sir Clifford was able to take Mrs. Bolton’s hand without a second or even first thought — a privilege for which Field himself would have gladly fought a dozen times over.
As Mrs. Bolton wheeled Sir Clifford along the uneven path, a fine film of dust settled over her shoes and the hem of her dress — and over Sir Clifford’s shoes as well, and the legs of his smart trousers. From behind, Mrs. Bolton could not read his face, yet she sensed the fragility that underpinned his recklessness. She would be glad for news of Connie, of Oliver and their child. But she could not help but fear for her beloved, hated Sir Clifford.
Clifford felt primarily cold. A frigid emptiness reverberated throughout his mind, such that he felt that the mental life had abandoned him for a spell. He had entered unprepared the territory of animal feeling, and it left him all the more bereft and afraid. The administrations of Mrs. Bolton went unnoticed, as natural as the motor of the automobile, as long as she was in working order. But at last they came to the end, they were at the door, and Clifford was painfully aware of his heart lurching in his chest, fluttering away from his superior control. He was nervous! He was a ninny. From his position in the chair, he couldn’t see in through the craggy stone openings of the windows. His eyes caught a bit of the stone ceiling, but that was all.
“Tell me what you see,” he told Mrs. Bolton.
For Mrs. Bolton, the windows were at eye level. Connie sat on a wooden chair in a white cotton dress, with the bodice unbuttoned to nurse her child. A soft creamy thing, six months at the most. But still, tiny, delicate, born from her mother’s nerves as much as from the hearty stock of Oliver Mellors. The cottage was quiet, except for the sound of the baby’s suckling, the kettle whirring placidly on the stove, and the sporadic snorts of Flossie, who was lying underneath the window, apparently asleep.
“Nothing,” Mrs. Bolton whispered.
But just then Mellors moved into the frame of the window, wearing the same old trousers and suspenders as ever, but looking a little less thin. He was possessed of the healthy love-glow as well, his skin had gone from wan to warm. He still coughed, though, his unsavory souvenir from the War, and Clifford tensed to hear it again. Clifford shot a venomous, petrified glance at Mrs. Bolton, whose knuckles clenched white on the handles of his chair. She stood out of sight, her profile flush with the knobby stone wall of the cottage. Clifford was much too caught up to issue any orders, verbal or otherwise, so Mrs. Bolton continued to look in on Lady Chatterley and her lover.
“If we can just wait a few minutes for tea, Oliver,” said Constance, hushed, warm, alive. “She’s almost asleep.”
Oliver crouched next to the chair where Connie sat, and grazed his thumb over the crown of his daughter’s head. Mrs. Bolton saw a slow, satisfied smile spread across his face, close-lipped but utterly candescent. He pressed a tender kiss to Connie’s neck, and ruffled her undone hair.
And then he stood and went about puttering with something Mrs. Bolton could not see. But she heard the scrape of wood and the whoosh of flame spurting to new life, so she guessed he was tending the fire. From this unseen corner he said, “She’s a beautiful girl”, and Mrs. Bolton heard the smile still on him, though she could no longer see it. “Shall we make another?”
“You don’t want a son?” Connie asked, in that low, full voice that Mrs. Bolton had never heard from her before. She’d risen, the baby still in her arms but no longer attached to her breast. Oliver deferred his response til after she’d been laid soundly in her crib, and showed no sign of crying out.
“I want”, he said, encircling her waist, “whatever comes of us”.
Connie’s dress was still open at the breast. She cast a glance back at their daughter, to make sure she really was asleep, and then melted into his embrace. And there was a flicker in the pit of Mrs. Bolton’s stomach as she remembered what that felt like. The peace and completeness of it all. Oliver pushed the sleeves of Connie’s already-unbuttoned dress off her shoulders, and just like that she was topless, the bodice of her dress laying like a second skirt over her hips.
Mrs. Bolton felt that it was time to go. Embarrassed, she tore her eyes away from the intimate scene, ashamed that she should be party to such spying. When she finally looked back at Sir Clifford, he wasn’t really there. His eyes were glazed over, the mind behind them utterly absent. He had heard every word, and, in a way, it had been like listening to the radio, since he saw nothing but varying shades of gray stone, and the wispy grass that constituted the garden. In his determination to look only at his shoes, his attention was caught by a little wooden toy, left abandoned in the yard, until he had gazed so long the thing ceased to have any meaning whatsoever.
“Shall we be going, Sir Clifford?” whispered Mrs. Bolton, though Connie and Oliver had long since vanished from her view. Clifford nodded mechanically, not for a moment taking his eyes from the toy half-hidden in the grass. They retraced the narrow grooves they had made in the path with the wheelchair, and found Field standing proper and upright by the Albatros, as though he hadn’t moved a muscle since they left him. Not an impossible feat — it had, after all, been only about five minutes since they’d been gone. Once settled into the driver’s seat of his newfangled contraption, Clifford turned to Mrs. Bolton sitting next to him and declared “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods!” And under such auspices they motored away, embarking on a journey geographically much the same as the first – though even in a few short days the landscape had begun to fade from summer to fall, the warm winds becoming chill, a few more fallen leaves gusting along the road than before.
***
A half-hour after Clifford’s departure, Flossie began to whine. Connie rushed down to prevent her from waking the baby, but seeing that Eleanor slept soundly, she heeded Flossie’s scratches at the front door, thinking the poor thing had been desperate to relieve herself. But instead of squatting in the grass, she lowered her snout to a parallel set of faint little grooves impressed onto their modest drive. She yapped and growled, such that her master strode out of the cottage, rifle slung over his arm, to confront any intruders. Connie’s heart leapt into her throat, but Oliver laughed his deep, ironic laugh that softened the edge of her worry.
“You’re getting old, Floss,” he teased. “He’s been gone a while yet. Snuck up while you were sleeping.”
And they all laughed together, even Flossie, in her canine way. And of course the baby started to cry, as she somehow sensed in sleep her parents were absent from the cottage, so Connie and Oliver didn’t have too much time to dwell on this encroachment, trouble them though it might.
***
Clifford had returned to Wragby. What had seemed to be vitality in former days was now showing itself to be more akin to a fever. Mrs. Bolton found he ran very hot, and all his reserves of energy seemed now utterly depleted. He could not stand the wood. Nor could he any longer stand the mines. The guests that used to come in droves trickled down to nothing, and Sir Clifford’s grand plans for Tevershall fell by the wayside without his momentum behind them. He cared not if the miners striked or starved. If they burned the colliery to the ground it was all the same to him. He no longer found amusement in fleecing Mrs. Bolton at cards, but he stayed up just as late all the same, listening to the radio, assuaged by her solitary company. Against Mrs. Bolton’s gentle remonstrations, he slept only when the dawn came, and even then only uneasily, and only for a scant few hours. His appetite decreased, but his reliance on drink filled the gap left by food.
Mrs. Bolton’s power over him was diminished. Neither wife nor companion, neither mother nor nurse, to Clifford she had become little more than the favorite, indispensable toy that no child can sleep without. There was no longer anything to relish in her days at Wragby. Every ring of the bell inspired a fresh pang of dread, and much of her strength was spent combating the tide of Clifford’s hopelessness that threatened to sweep her away, too, if her diligence flagged but a little. The dark days had come indeed. She could not steer clear.
“I feel I’ve been damnably cheated,” he said to Mrs. Bolton on that fatal night, as she helped him to bed at the crack of dawn. He’d grown rather thin — almost as thin as he was after he’d got back from the War — and Mrs. Bolton found him easier and easier to carry.
“Ay, Sir Clifford,” was the response.
“We never should have gone to Scotland. I don’t know what possessed me,” he continued, rolling over on his side to face Mrs. Bolton, who had settled into a wooden stool by his bed. “I could be master of the world, but I’ll never have that. And it hurts, it hurts though I’m hardly capable of wanting it.”
“You’re capable of quite a lot, Sir Clifford,” said Mrs. Bolton, leaning down to stroke his hair.
“It wasn’t even a son!” and he recoiled from her touch like a petulant child.
Mrs. Bolton fought to keep her expression neutral, though the darkness of the room and her master’s intoxication surely prevented her inner feelings of disgust from attracting notice. In her heart, she felt the last embers of affection dying, the last vestiges of a fire that had seemed so sure to last turning colder and colder, no matter how much anyone tried to prod it. The cheery little flame of goodwill and companionship had left her with nothing but ashes in her mouth, and the accompanying revulsion of lost respect. The glamor of the nobility, a keystone to her understanding of British society, had eroded, and the stolid towers of her worldview came finally tumbling down. It was now sheer momentum that propelled her, fetching a wet cloth and dabbing Clifford’s forehead with it, the benign smile still screwed on her face, smoothing her skirts with perfect composure and whispering the little nothings that Clifford liked to hear but never really listened to. After years, this was the first time she truly felt like the automaton that Clifford treated her as. Her disgust turned inward, pressing down on her own heart and mind and stomach.
At last Clifford would permit himself to be petted and soothed. As Mrs. Bolton felt him calm under her hands, she ventured to offer advice, uncalled for though it was.
“You’d best forget them, Sir Clifford,” she said, and with these words she felt her last bit of kindness for him leaving her body. “Divorce her, and let’s never speak of them again. You’ve a life yet to live, and there’s so much you can do with it, with your wealth and station.”
In the pause that followed Mrs. Bolton assumed he was simply content to ignore her, or had already drifted off to sleep. But as she moved to take her hands away, Clifford, abruptly seized by a frantic burst of energy, grabbed onto her wrists and pulled her down to him. The stool fell out from under her and clattered onto its side as Clifford forced her body to collide with his, and his lips pressed all over her face until they found her mouth. His mouth stayed hard on hers, immobile but insisting, its own kind of command. Mrs. Bolton would hardly deign to call it a kiss. In the shock of it she held herself as stiff as a board, but her instincts managed to save (and condemn) her before the return of her wits. She hardly knew what she was doing when she pushed him from her. His yelp of pain as his drunken head smacked against the headboard had already evaporated in the stale air before she was struck with the realization of what she had done.
Ivy Bolton was afraid, but a quick inventory of her feelings revealed that remorse was not among them. Clifford was too stunned to speak. His blue eyes were wide, just as vacant as they had been as he’d hesitated in front of that pine green door in the Scottish Highlands. His mouth hung agape, and Ivy could still smell the wine on his breath.
A beam of frosty light filtered in through the windowpane. It was the beginning of November, fourteen months since their journey north. Ivy kept herself collected, and rose from her master’s bed with the rising sun.
In measured tones she said, “I shall be gone by the end of the day,” and Clifford was still too stupid to say anything at all. Finally his verbal output matched exactly the substance of his mind. He had metamorphosed into the least flattering portrait in the gallery of his ancestors.
Ivy briskly vacated the room, not bothering to shut the door behind her. She packed her things at once. It was not a half-hour later she stepped out into the dew-slicked dawn. Though she could still see the yellow haze settled murkily over the hills, it seemed she inhaled the freshest breath of air she’d taken in years, decades even. With her, she brought the japanned doctor’s case Connie had given her a life or two ago, and thus armed she set off to seek her fortunes elsewhere. She never had another master again.
***
It was not terribly long afterwards that Lady Constance Chatterley (née Reid) was granted her precious freedom, and officially, quietly became Connie Mellors.
The last week of April brought the Mellors household news from the south. A missive bearing Mrs. Bolton’s meticulous hand.
Connie was home with her daughter when the post came. Oliver hadn’t yet returned from the fields. Eleanor, now approaching her second birthday, was throwing her food around, babbling the secret language of toddlers in a comical accent that slid between London, Derbyshire, and the Highlands. Connie’s stomach bottomed out when she saw the name of the sender. She sliced a trembling finger open on the envelope, and a few drops of blood dripped onto the crisp pages folded inside.
Though Mrs. Bolton had left Sir Clifford’s service some time ago, Field, the chauffeur, had informed her of the baronet’s passing. His already declining health, exacerbated by reclusive habits, prevented him from overcoming the pneumonia that had set upon him in early March. He did not live to see Easter. With no heir to Wragby, the estate was already being dismantled, suffering the same fate as Shipley a few years before. The wood was being uprooted, and the resulting timber, along with materials repurposed from Wragby, would be used to construct modern houses for the modern man, to whom the world now apparently belonged. But the mines were barren, Tevershall a ghost town. Yes, the Midland skies had regained their azure color of old, but the people who dwelled beneath them still had hardly a potato for their stews. And as the tale of the Lady and the Gamekeeper had migrated north, so too did the tale of the Knight who died of a broken heart.
Connie wept in sorrow, she swept in relief, and Eleanor wailed to see her mother in such distress. But soon they were both laughing, laughing at their own tears, and they sank to the floor together, amongst the scatterings of half-chewed bread and cheese to which Eleanor had reduced her afternoon meal, their mouths and bellies sore from happiness.
When Oliver returned to the cottage after a long day of planting, he found them still on the floor. Eleanor was asleep with her head on Connie’s lap, Connie’s fingers carding absently through her blond wisps of hair. Joyce's Ulysses lay abandoned by her hip, and next to it were five sheets of paper, and an envelope streaked with red across its jagged opening. Oliver didn’t yet know what the letter contained, but he immediately sensed its meaning. He knelt down beside his little family and kissed Connie’s bloody finger, her red cheeks and red lips. He gathered his daughter in his arms and listened to her gentle breathing, deep in sleep despite everything. The warmth of the hearth, the warmth of Connie’s tender hands on his face, the warmth of the sun returning after a long winter. He was a man, a beloved body amongst beloved bodies. He was alive and of the earth. His heart was so full it could burst.
They were wed in the summer. And so they lived —