第11章 PART TWO(3)

They did not discuss the possibility of getting married.It was too remote to be worth thinking about.No imaginable committee would ever sanction such a marriage even if Katharine,Winston's wife,could somehow have been got rid of.It was hopeless even as a daydream.

"What was she like,your wife?"said Julia.

"She was—do you know the Newspeak word goodthinkful? Meaning naturally orthodox,incapable of thinking a bad thought?"

"No,I didn't know the word,but I know the kind of person, right enough."

He began telling her the story of his married life,but curiously enough she appeared to know the essential parts of it already.She described to him,almost as though she had seen or felt it,the stiffe-ning of Katharine's body as soon as he touched her,the way in which she still seemed to be pushing him from her with all her strength,even when her arms were clasped tightly round him.With Julia he felt no difficulty in talking about such things;Katharine,in any case,had long ceased to be a painful memory and became mere-ly a distasteful one.

"I could have stood it if it hadn't been for one thing,"he said. He told her about the frigid little ceremony that Katharine had forced him to go through on the same night every week."She hated it,but nothing would make her stop doing it.She used to call it—but you'll never guess."

"Our duty to the Party,"said Julia promptly.

"How did you know that?"

"I've been at school too,dear.Sex talks once a month for the over-sixteens.And in the Youth Movement.They rub it into you for years.I dare say it works in a lot of cases.But of course you can nev-er tell;people are such hypocrites."

She began to enlarge upon the subject.With Julia,everything came back to her own sexuality.As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness.Unlike Winston,she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism.It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible.What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria,which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship.The way she put it was:

"When you make love you're using up energy;and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything.They can't bear you to feel like that.They want you to be bursting with energy all the time.All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour.If you're happy inside yourself,why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?"

That was very true,he thought.There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy.For how could the fear,the hatred,and the lunatic credulity which the Party nee-ded in its members be kept at the right pitch except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party,and the Party had turned it to account.They had played a similar trick with the instinct of par-enthood.The family could not actually be abolished,and,indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children in almost the old-fashioned way.The children,on the other hand,were systemati-cally turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and re-port their deviations.The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police.It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him in-timately.

Abruptly his mind went back to Katharine.Katharine would unquestionably have denounced him to the Thought Police if she had not happened to be too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of his opinions.But what really recalled her to him at this moment was the stifling heat of the afternoon,which had brought the sweat out on his forehead.He began telling Julia of something that had hap-pened,or rather had failed to happen,on another sweltering sum-mer afternoon,eleven years ago.

It was three or four months after they were married.They had lost their way on a community hike somewhere in Kent.They had only lagged behind the others for a couple of minutes,but they took a wrong turning,and presently found themselves pulled up short by the edge of an old chalk quarry.It was a sheer drop of ten or twenty meters,with boulders at the bottom.There was nobody of whom they could ask the way.As soon as she realized that they were lost Katharine became very uneasy.To be away from the noisy mob of hikers even for a moment gave her a feeling of wrongdoing.She wanted to hurry back by the way they had come and start searching in the other direction.But at this moment Winston noticed some tufts of loosestrife growing in the cracks of the cliff beneath them. One tuft was of two colors,magenta and brick red,apparently growing on the same root.He had never seen anything of the kind before,and he called to Katharine to come and look at it.

"Look,Katharine! Look at those flowers.That clump down near the bottom.Do you see they're two different colors?"

She had already turned to go,but she did rather fretfully come back for a moment.She even leaned out over the cliff face to see where he was pointing.He was standing a little behind her,and he put his hand on her waist to steady her.At this moment it suddenly occurred to him how completely alone they were.There was not a human creature anywhere,not a leaf stirring,not even a bird awake. In a place like this the danger that there would be a hidden micro-phone was very small,and even if there was a microphone it would only pick up sounds.It was the hottest sleepiest hour of the after-noon.The sun blazed down upon them,the sweat tickled his face. And the thought struck him....

"Why didn't you give her a good shove?"said Julia."I would have."

"Yes,dear,you would have.I would have,if I'd been the same person then as I am now.Or perhaps I would—I'm not certain."

"Are you sorry you didn't?"

"Yes.On the whole I'm sorry I didn't."

They were sitting side by side on the dusty floor.He pulled her closer against him.Her head rested on his shoulder,the pleasant smell of her hair conquering the pigeon dung.She was very young, he thought,she still expected something from life,she did not un-derstand that to push an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing.

"Actually it would have made no difference,"he said.

"Then why are you sorry you didn't do it?"

"Only because I prefer a positive to a negative.In this game that we're playing,we can't win.Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds,that's all."

He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent.She always con-tradicted him when he said anything of this kind.She would not ac-cept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated.In a way she realized that she herself was doomed,that sooner or later the Thought Police would catch her and kill her,but with another part of her mind she believed that it was somehow possible to con-struct a secret world in which you could live as you chose.All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness.She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness,that the only victory lay in the far future,long after you were dead,that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse.

"We are the dead,"he said.

"We're not dead yet,"said Julia prosaically.

"Not physically.Six months,a year—five years,conceivably.I am afraid of death.You are young,so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am.Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can.But it makes very little difference.So long as human beings stay human,death and life are the same thing."

"Oh,rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with,me or a skeleton? Don't you enjoy being alive? Don't you like feeling:This is me,this is my hand,this is my leg,I'm real,I'm solid,I'm alive! Don't you like this?"

She twisted herself round and pressed her bosom against him. He could feel her breasts,ripe yet firm,through her overalls.Her body seemed to be pouring some of its youth and vigour into his.

"Yes,I like that,"he said.

"Then stop talking about dying.And now listen,dear,we've got to fix up about the next time we meet.We may as well go back to the place in the wood.We've given it a good long rest.But you must get there by a different way this time.I've got it all planned out.You take the train—but look,I'll draw it out for you."

And in her practical way she scraped together a small square of dust,and with a twig from a pigeon's nest began drawing a map on the floor.

Chapter 4

W inston looked around the shabby little room above Mr.Charrington's shop.Beside the window the enormousbed was made up,with ragged blankets and a coverlessbolster.The old-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was tick-ing away on the mantelpiece.In the corner,on the gateleg table,the glass paperweight which he had bought on his last visit gleamed softly out of the half-darkness.

In the fender was a battered tin oilstove,a saucepan,and two cups,provided by Mr.Charrington.Winston lit the burner and set a pan of water to boil.He had brought an envelope full of Victory Coffee and some saccharine tablets.The clock's hands said seven-twenty;it was nineteen-twenty really.She was coming at nineteen-thirty.

Folly,folly,his heart kept saying:conscious,gratuitous,suicid-al folly! Of all the crimes that a Party member could commit,this one was the least possible to conceal.Actually the idea had first floated into his head in the form of a vision,of the glass paper-weight mirrored by the surface of the gateleg table.As he had fore-seen,Mr.Charrington had made no difficulty about letting the room.He was obviously glad of the few dollars that it would bring him.Nor did he seem shocked or become offensively knowing when it was made clear that Winston wanted the room for the purpose of a love affair.Instead he looked into the middle distance and spoke in generalities,with so delicate an air as to give the impression that he had become partly invisible.Privacy,he said,was a very valuable thing.Everyone wanted a place where they could be alone occasion-ally.And when they had such a place,it was only common courtesy in anyone else who knew of it to keep his knowledge to himself.He even,seeming almost to fade out of existence as he did so,added that there were two entries to the house,one of them through the backyard,which gave on an alley.

Under the window somebody was singing.Winston peeped out, secure in the protection of the muslin curtain.The June sun was still high in the sky,and in the sun-filled court below a monstrous woman,solid as a Norman pillar,with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her middle,was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothesline,pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as babies' diapers.Whenev-er her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful contralto:

"It was only an 'opeless fancy,

It passed like anIpril dye,

But a look an'a word an'the dreams they stirred

They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!"

The tune had been haunting London for weeks past.It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department.The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an in-strument known as a versificator.But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound.He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones,and the cries of the children in the street,and some-where in the far distance a faint roar of traffic,and yet the room seemed curiously silent,thanks to the absence of a telescreen.

Folly,folly,folly! he thought again.It was inconceivable that they could frequent this place for more than a few weeks without being caught.But the temptation of having a hiding place that was truly their own,indoors and near at hand,had been too much for both of them.For some time after their visit to the church belfry it had been impossible to arrange meetings.Working hours had been drastically increased in anticipation of Hate Week.It was more than a month distant,but the enormous,complex preparations that it en-tailed were throwing extra work onto everybody.Finally both of them managed to secure a free afternoon on the same day.They had agreed to go back to the clearing in the wood.On the evening be-forehand they met briefly in the street.As usual,Winston hardly looked at Julia as they drifted towards one another in the crowd,but from the short glance he gave her it seemed to him that she was pa-ler than usual.

"It's all off,"she murmured as soon as she j udged it safe to speak."Tomorrow,I mean."

"What?"

"Tomorrow afternoon.I can't come."

"Why not?"

"Oh,the usual reason.It's started early this time."

For a moment he was violently angry.During the month that he had known her the nature of his desire for her had changed.At the beginning there had been little true sensuality in it.Their first love-making had been simply an act of the will.But after the second time it was different.The smell of her hair,the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him,or into the air all round him.She had become a physical necessity,something that he not only wanted but felt that he had a right to.When she said that she could not come,he had the feeling that she was cheating him.But just at this moment the crowd pressed them together and their hands accidentally met.She gave the tips of his fingers a quick squeeze that seemed to invite not desire but affection.It struck him that when one lived with a woman this particular disappointment must be a normal,recurring event;and a deep tenderness,such as he had not felt for her before,suddenly took hold of him.He wished that they were a married couple of ten years' standing.He wished that he were walking through the streets with her just as they were doing now but openly and without fear,talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends for the household.He wished above all that they had some place where they could be alone together without feeling the obligation to make love every time they met.It was not actually at that moment,but at some time on the following day, that the idea of renting Mr.Charrington's room had occurred to him.When he suggested it to Julia she had agreed with unexpected readiness.Both of them knew that it was lunacy.It was as though they were intentionally stepping nearer to their graves.As he sat waiting on the edge of the bed he thought again of the cellars of the Ministry of Love.It was curious how that predestined horror moved in and out of one's consciousness.There it lay,fixed in future time, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100.One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it:and yet instead,every now and again,by a conscious,wilful act,one chose to shorten the interval before it happened.

At this moment there was a quick step on the stairs.Julia burst into the room.She was carrying a tool bag of coarse brown canvas, such as he had sometimes seen her carrying to and fro at the Minis-try.He started forward to take her in his arms,but she disengaged herself rather hurriedly,partly because she was still holding the toolbag.

"Half a second,"she said."Just let me show you what I've brought.Did you bring some of that filthy Victory Coffee?I thought you would.You can chuck it away again,because we shan't be needing it.Look here."

She fell on her knees,threw open the bag,and tumbled out some spanners and a screwdriver that filled the top part of it.Un-derneath was a number of neat paper packets.The first packet that she passed to Winston had a strange and yet vaguely familiar feel-ing.It was filled with some kind of heavy,sandlike stuff which yiel-ded wherever you touched it.

"It isn't sugar?"he said.

"Real sugar.Not saccharine,sugar.And here's a loaf of bread—proper white bread,not our bloody stuff—and a little pot of jam. And here's a tin of milk—but look! This is the one I'm really proud of.I had to wrap a bit of sacking round it,because—"

But she did not need to tell him why she had wrapped it up. The smell was already filling the room,a rich hot smell which seemed like an emanation from his early childhood,but which one did occasionally meet with even now,blowing down a passageway before a door slammed,or diffusing itself mysteriously in a crowded street,sniffed for an instant and then lost again.

"It's coffee,"he murmured,"real coffee."

"It's Inner Party coffee.There's a whole kilo here,"she said.

"How did you manage to get hold of all these things?"

"It's all Inner Party stuff.There's nothing those swine don't have,nothing.But of course waiters and servants and people pinch things,and—look,I got a little packet of tea as well."

Winston had squatted down beside her.He tore open a corner of the packet.

"It's real tea.Not blackberry leaves."

"There's been a lot of tea about lately.They've captured Ind-i a,or something,"she said vaguely."But listen,dear.I want you to turn your back on me for three minutes.Go and sit on the other side of the bed.Don't go too near the window.And don't turn round till I tell you."

Winston gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain.Down in the yard the red-armed woman was still marching to and fro be-tween the washtub and the line.She took two more pegs out of her mouth and sang with deep feeling:

"They sye that time 'eals all things,

They sye you can always forget;

But the smiles an'the tears acrorss the years

They twist my 'eartstrings yet!"

She knew the whole drivelling song by heart,it seemed.Her voice floated upward with the sweet summer air,very tuneful,charged with a sort of happy melancholy.One had the feeling that she would have been perfectly content if the June evening had been endless and the supply of clothes inexhaustible,to remain there for a thou-sand years,pegging out diapers and singing rubbish.It struck him as a curious fact that he had never heard a member of the Party sing-ing alone and spontaneously.It would even have seemed slightly un-orthodox,a dangerous eccentricity,like talking to oneself.Perhaps it was only when people were somewhere near the starvation level that they had anything to sing about.

"You can turn round now,"said Julia.

He turned round,and for a second almost failed to recognize her.What he had actually expected was to see her naked.But she was not naked.The transformation that had happened was much more surprising than that.She had painted her face.

She must have slipped into some shop in the proletarian quar-ters and bought herself a complete set of makeup materials.Her lips were deeply reddened,her cheeks rouged,her nose powdered;there was even a touch of something under the eyes to make them brigh-ter.It was not very skilfully done,but Winston's standards in such matters were not high.He had never before seen or imagined a woman of the Party with cosmetics on her face.The improvement in her appearance was startling.With just a few dabs of color in the right places she had become not only very much prettier,but,above all,far more feminine.Her short hair and boyish overalls merely added to the effect.As he took her in his arms a wave of synthetic violets flooded his nostrils.He remembered the half-darkness of a basement kitchen,and a woman's cavernous mouth.It was the very same scent that she had used;but at the moment it did not seem to matter.

"Scent too!"he said.

"Yes,dear,scent too.And do you know what I'm going to do next? I'm going to get hold of a real woman's frock from some-where and wear it instead of these bloody trousers.I'll wear silk stockings and high-heeled shoes! In this room I'm going to be a woman,not a Party comrade."

They flung their clothes off and climbed into the huge mahoga-ny bed.It was the first time that he had stripped himself naked in her presence.Until now he had been too much ashamed of his pale and meager body,with the varicose veins standing out on his calves and the discoloured patch over his ankle.There were no sheets,but the blanket they lay on was threadbare and smooth,and the size and springiness of the bed astonished both of them."It's sure to be full of bugs,but who cares?"said Julia.One never saw a double bed nowadays except in the homes of the proles.Winston had occasion-ally slept in one in his boyhood;Julia had never been in one before, so far as she could remember.

Presently they fell asleep for a little while.When Winston woke up the hands of the clock had crept round to nearly nine.He did not stir,because Julia was sleeping with her head in the crook of his arm.Most of her makeup had transferred itself to his own face or the bolster,but a light stain of rouge still brought out the beauty of her cheekbone.A yellow ray from the sinking sun fell across the foot of the bed and lighted up the fireplace,where the water in the pan was boiling fast.Down in the yard the woman had stopped sing-ing,but the faint shouts of children floated in from the street.He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a nor-mal experience to lie in bed like this,in the cool of a summer eve-ning,a man and a woman with no clothes on,making love when they chose,talking of what they chose,not feeling any compulsion to get up,simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds out-side.Surely there could never have been a time when that seemed ordinary.Julia woke up,rubbed her eyes,and raised herself on her elbow to look at the oilstove.

"Half that water's boiled away,"she said."I'll get up and make some coffee in another moment.We've got an hour.What time do they cut the lights off at your flats?"

"Twenty-three-thirty."

"It's twenty-three at the hostel.But you have to get in earlier than that,because—Hi! Get out,you filthy brute!"

She suddenly twisted herself over in the bed,seized a shoe from the floor,and sent it hurtling into the corner with a boyish j erk of her arm,exactly as he had seen her fling the dictionary at Goldstein,that morning during the Two Minutes Hate.

"What was it?"he said in surprise.

"A rat.I saw him stick his beastly nose out of the wainscoting. There's a hole down there.I gave him a good fright,anyway."

"Rats!"murmured Winston."In this room!"

"They're all over the place,"said Julia indifferently as she lay down again."We've even got them in the kitchen at the hostel. Some parts of London are swarming with them.Did you know they attack children? Yes,they do.In some of these streets a woman daren't leave a baby alone for two minutes.It's the great huge brown ones that do it.And the nasty thing is that the brutes al-ways—"

"Don't go on!"said Winston,with his eyes tightly shut.

"Dearest! You've gone quite pale.What's the matter?Do they make you feel sick?"

"Of all horrors in the world—a rat!"

She pressed herself against him and wound her limbs round him,as though to reassure him with the warmth of her body.He did not reopen his eyes immediately.For several moments he had had the feeling of being back in a nightmare which had recurred from time to time throughout his life.It was always very much the same. He was standing in front of a wall of darkness,and on the other side of it there was something unendurable,something too dreadful to be faced.In the dream his deepest feeling was always one of self-deception,because he did in fact know what was behind the wall of darkness.With a deadly effort,like wrenching a piece out of his own brain,he could even have dragged the thing into the open.He al-ways woke up without discovering what it was,but somehow it was connected with what Julia had been saying when he cut her short.

"I'm sorry,"he said,"it's nothing.I don't like rats,that's all."

"Don't worry,dear,we're not going to have the filthy brutes in here.I'll stuff the hole with a bit of sacking before we go.And next time we come here I'll bring some plaster and bung it up properly."