'The next day she reappeared. Her arm was out of the sling
and she had a band of sticking-plaster round her wrist. The
relief of seeing her was so great that he could not resist
staring directly at her for several seconds. On the following
day he very nearly succeeded in speaking to her. When he came
into the canteen she was sitting at a table well out from the
wall, and was quite alone. It was early, and the place was not
very full. The queue edged forward till Winston was almost at
the counter, then was held up for two minutes because someone
in front was complaining that he had not received his tablet of
saccharine. But the girl was still alone when Winston secured
his tray and began to make for her table. He walked casually
towards her, his eyes searching for a place at some table
beyond her. She was perhaps three metres away from him. Another
two seconds would do it. Then a voice behind him called,
'Smith!' He pretended not to hear. 'Smith !' repeated the
voice, more loudly. It was no use. He turned round. A
blond-headed, silly-faced young man named Wilsher, whom he
barely knew, was inviting him with a smile to a vacant place at
his table. It was not safe to refuse. After having been
recognized, he could not go and sit at a table with an
unattended girl. It was too noticeable. He sat down with a
friendly smile. The silly blond face beamed into his. Winston
had a hallucination of himself smashing a pick-axe right into
the middle of it. The girl's table filled up a few minutes
later.
But she must have seen him coming towards her, and perhaps
she would take the hint. Next day he took care to arrive early.
Surely enough, she was at a table in about the same place, and
again alone. The person immediately ahead of him in the queue
was a small, swiftly-moving, beetle-like man with a flat face
and tiny, suspicious eyes. As Winston turned away from the
counter with his tray, he saw that the little man was making
straight for the girl's table. His hopes sank again. There was
a vacant place at a table further away, but something in the
little man's appearance suggested that he would be sufficiently
attentive to his own comfort to choose the emptiest table. With
ice at his heart Winston followed. It was no use unless he
could get the girl alone. At this moment there was a tremendous
crash. The little man was sprawling on all fours, his tray had
gone flying, two streams of soup and coffee were flowing across
the floor. He started to his feet with a malignant glance at
Winston, whom he evidently suspected of having tripped him up.
But it was all right. Five seconds later, with a thundering
heart, Winston was sitting at the girl's table.
He did not look at her. He unpacked his tray and promptly
began eating. It was all-important to speak at once, before
anyone else came, but now a terrible fear had taken possession
of him. A week had gone by since she had first approached him.
She would have changed her mind, she must have changed her
mind! It was impossible that this affair should end
successfully; such things did not happen in real life. He might
have flinched altogether from speaking if at this moment he had
not seen Ampleforth, the hairy-eared poet, wandering limply
round the room with a tray, looking for a place to sit down. In
his vague way Ampleforth was attached to Winston, and would
certainly sit down at his table if he caught sight of him.
There was perhaps a minute in which to act. Both Winston and
the girl were eating steadily. The stuff they were eating was a
thin stew, actually a soup, of haricot beans. In a low murmur
Winston began speaking. Neither of them looked up; steadily
they spooned the watery stuff into their mouths, and between
spoonfuls exchanged the few necessary words in low
expressionless voices.
'What time do you leave work?'
'Eighteen-thirty.'
'Where can we meet?'
'Victory Square, near the monument.
'It's full of telescreens.'
'It doesn't matter if there's a crowd.'
'Any signal?'
'No. Don't come up to me until you see me among a lot of
people. And don't look at me. Just keep somewhere near me.'
'What time?'
'Nineteen hours.'
'All right.'
Ampleforth failed to see Winston and sat down at another
table. They did not speak again, and, so far as it was possible
for two people sitting on opposite sides of the same table,
they did not look at one another. The girl finished her lunch
quickly and made off, while Winston stayed to smoke a
cigarette.
Winston was in Victory Square before the appointed time.
He wandered round the base of the enormous fluted column, at
the top of which Big Brother's statue gazed southward towards
the skies where he had vanquished the Eurasian aeroplanes (the
Eastasian aeroplanes, it had been, a few years ago) in the
Battle of Airstrip One. In the street in front of it there was
a statue of a man on horseback which was supposed to represent
Oliver Cromwell. At five minutes past the hour the girl had
still not appeared. Again the terrible fear seized upon
Winston. She was not coming, she had changed her mind! He
walked slowly up to the north side of the square and got a sort
of pale-coloured pleasure from identifying St Martin's Church,
whose bells, when it had bells, had chimed 'You owe me three
farthings.' Then he saw the girl standing at the base of the
monument, reading or pretending to read a poster which ran
spirally up the column. It was not safe to go near her until
some more people had accumulated. There were telescreens all
round the pediment. But at this moment there was a din of
shouting and a zoom of heavy vehicles from somewhere to the
left. Suddenly everyone seemed to be running across the square.
The girl nipped nimbly round the lions at the base of the
monument and joined in the rush. Winston followed. As he ran,
he gathered from some shouted remarks that a convoy of Eurasian
prisoners was passing.
Already a dense mass of people was blocking the south side
of the square. Winston, at normal times the kind of person who
gravitates to the outer edge of any kind of scrimmage, shoved,
butted, squirmed his way forward into the heart of the crowd.
Soon he was within arm's length of the girl, but the way was
blocked by an enormous prole and an almost equally enormous
woman, presumably his wife, who seemed to form an impenetrable
wall of flesh. Winston wriggled himself sideways, and with a
violent lunge managed to drive his shoulder between them. For a
moment it felt as though his entrails were being ground to pulp
between the two muscular hips, then he had broken through,
sweating a little. He was next to the girl. They were shoulder
to shoulder, both staring fixedly in front of them.
A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed with
sub-machine guns standing upright in each corner, was passing
slowly down the street. In the trucks little yellow men in
shabby greenish uniforms were squatting, jammed close together.
Their sad, Mongolian faces gazed out over the sides of the
trucks utterly incurious. Occasionally when a truck jolted
there was a clankclank of metal: all the prisoners were wearing
leg-irons. Truckload after truck-load of the sad faces passed.
Winston knew they were there but he saw them only
intermittently. The girl's shoulder, and her arm right down to
the elbow, were pressed against his. Her cheek was almost near
enough for him to feel its warmth. She had immediately taken
charge of the situation, just as she had done in the canteen.
She began speaking in the same expressionless voice as before,
with lips barely moving, a mere murmur easily drowned by the
din of voices and the rumbling of the trucks.
'Can you hear me?'
'Yes.'
'Can you get Sunday afternoon off?'
'Yes.'
'Then listen carefully. You'll have to remember this. Go
to Paddington Station-'
With a sort of military precision that astonished him, she
outlined the route that he was to follow. A half-hour railway
journey; turn left outside the station; two kilometres along
the road: a gate with the top bar missing; a path across a
field; a grass-grown lane; a track between bushes; a dead tree
with moss on it. It was as though she had a map inside her
head. 'Can you remember all that?' she murmured finally.
'Yes.'
'You turn left, then right, then left again. And the
gate's got no top bar.'
'Yes. What time?'
'About fifteen. You may have to wait. I'll get there by
another way. Are you sure you remember everything?'
'Yes.'
'Then get away from me as quick as you can.'
She need not have told him that. But for the moment they
could not extricate themselves from the crowd. The trucks were
still filing post, the people still insatiably gaping. At the
start there had been a few boos and hisses, but it came only
from the Party members among the crowd, and had soon stopped.
The prevailing emotion was simply curiosity. Foreigners,
whether from Eurasia or from Eastasia, were a kind of strange
animal. One literally never saw them except in the guise of
prisoners, and even as prisoners one never got more than a
momentary glimpse of them. Nor did one know what became of
them, apart from the few who were hanged as war-criminals: te
others simply vanished, presumably into forced-labour camps.
The round Mogol faces had given way to faces of a more European
type, dirty, bearded and exhausted. From over scrubby
cheekbones eyes looked into Winston's, sometimes with strange
intensity, and flashed away again. The convoy was drawing to an
end. In the last truck he could see an aged man, his face a
mass of grizzled hair, standing upright with wrists crossed in
front of him, as though he were used to having them bound
together. It was almost time for Winston and the girl to part.
But at the last moment, while the crowd still hemmed them in,
her hand felt for his and gave it a fleeting squeeze.
It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a
long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time
to learn every detail of her hand. He explored the long
fingers, the shapely nails, the work-hardened palm with its row
of callouses, the smooth flesh under the wrist. Merely from
feeling it he would have known it by sight. In the same instant
it occurred to him that he did not know what colour the girl's
eyes were. They were probably brown, but people with dark hair
sometimes had blue eyes. To turn his head and look at her would
have been inconceivable folly. With hands locked together,
invisible among the press of bodies, they stared steadily in
front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of
the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of nests of
hair.
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