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Dukes. ‘You mean fellows fucking jazz girls with small-boy buttocks, like two collar-studs.’
    There was a baffled silence, then Clifford said, ‘What are you talking about?’
    ‘I think’, said Dukes, ‘I’m talking about twelve words a minute, the world record is twenty-three held by Arthur Mince Junior, a Canadian haddock-stretcher.’
    ‘Don’t you believe in anything?’ said Berry. ‘I believe in a good heart and a chirpy penis.’ A good penis roused his head and said, ‘How do you do!’
    ‘Renoir said he painted his pictures with his penis. I wish I could do something with mine,’ concluded Dukes.
    ‘Why not tie a brush to it and start painting?’ said May.
    That night Constance looked at her behind in the mirror. At no stretch of the imagination did it look like two collar-studs. What utter rubbish they had been talking, she would rather have talked to Dick Squats. Alas! He was on the footplate of the eleven-fifty to King’s Cross.

FIVE
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    O NE MORNING Clifford and Constance went to cross the park to the woods, he in his motorized wheelchair doing fifty miles an hour with Constance running behind trying to keep up. The air smelt sulphurous, it could have been the factory, then again it could have been Clifford. ‘Sorry,’ he finally admitted. For the last mile Constance had hung on to the back of the wheelchair and been dragged along. When he stopped she was a mass of mud and leaves. In the wood everything was motionless, trees couldn’t do much else. A jay called harshly.
    ‘Look, Clifford,’ she said, ‘There’s a jay called Harshly.’ But there was no game, no pheasants, quail or elephants. They had been killed off during the War, when the Germans had overrun the British lines. Clifford loved the old Oaks ( Quercus robur ) he also loved old Walnut trees ( Juglans regia ) and Rowan ( Sorbus aucuparia ). His wheelchair chugged up a slope stopping by a sapling ( Betula pubescens ). The area had been logged, patches of blackness were where woodsmen had burnt rubbish, that or coloured illegal immigrants were hiding. It was a good hiding place, when caught they all got a good hiding. Clifford sat admiring the view, the coal-mine, the slag heaps, the gasometer and the Jam Factory. Affectionately he patted a tree trunk 15 ( Aesculus hippocastanum ).
    ‘This,’ he said, ‘this really is the heart of England.’ Constance thought otherwise: to her it was the arsehole. The eleven-o’clock hooter sounded from Stacks Colliery. Clifford beamed, ‘Three generations of Chatterleys have heard that sound.’
    ‘How exciting,’ said Constance.
    Clifford looked into the near distance, say a half a mile. His face was inscrutable; once or twice he turned and gave Constance an intense scrute. ‘This is our horrortige,’ he said. ‘No, that can’t be right. Heritage , that’s it, and we must preserve it like, like’, he struggled for the word, like the blackcurrant.’ That was it! Blackcurrant preserve, yes that’s how he’d protect his horrortige, with blackcurrant preserve! There was a sad pause. ‘I think I’ll have another one,’ said Clifford and went straight into a sad pause, to accompany it he sang ‘The Last Rose of Summer’. ‘These trees are older than my family,’ he said.
    ‘And taller,’ said Constance.
    He suddenly said, ‘I would like a son.’ With his dead willy Constance knew it was impossible. ‘It would be a good thing if you had a child by another man. How about Dick Squats?’
    ‘But Dick Squats is a full-time engine-driver and has a tight schedule.’
    ‘He could do it between arrivals and departures.’
    ‘No,’ said Constance, ‘I’d get covered in coal dust and smell of engine oil and end up at Crewe.’
    ‘Oh then, somebody else, you had that lover in Germany, he’s forgotten now! Where are the snows of yesteryear?’
    Constance thought hard. ‘I’m sorry, darling, I’ve no idea where the snows of yesteryear are.’
    ‘I wouldn’t