When they met in the church tower the gaps in their
fragmentary conversation were filled up. It was a blazing
afternoon. The air in the little square chamber above the bells
was hot and stagnant, and smelt overpoweringly of pigeon dung.
They sat talking for hours on the dusty, twig- littered floor,
one or other of them getting up from time to time to cast a
glance through the arrowslits and make sure that no one was
coming.
Julia was twenty-six years old. She lived in a hostel with
thirty other girls ('Always in the stink of women! How I hate
women!' she said parenthetically), and she worked, as he had
guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction
Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in
running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor. She
was 'not clever', but was fond of using her hands and felt at
home with machinery. She could describe the whole process of
composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the
Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite
Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She
'didn't much care for reading,' she said. Books were just a
commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
She had no memories of anything before the early sixties
and the only person she had ever known who talked frequently of
the days before the Revolution was a grandfather who had
disappeared when she was eight. At school she had been captain
of the hockey team and had won the gymnastics trophy two years
running. She had been a troop-leader in the Spies and a branch
secretary in the Youth League before joining the Junior
Anti-Sex League. She had always borne an excellent character.
She had even (an infallibIe mark of good reputation) been
picked out to work in Pornosec, the sub- section of the Fiction
Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution
among the proles. It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who
worked in it, she remarked. There she had remained for a year,
helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like
Spanking Stories or One Night in a Girls'
School, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who
were under the impression that they were buying something
illegal.
'What are these books like?' said Winston curiously.
'Oh, ghastly rubbish. They're boring, really. They only
have six plots, but they swap them round a bit. Of course I was
only on the kaleidoscopes. I was never in the Rewrite Squad.
I'm not literary, dear -- not even enough for that.'
He learned with astonishment that all the workers in
Pornosec, except the heads of the departments, were girls. The
theory was that men, whose sex instincts were less controllable
than those of women, were in greater danger of being corrupted
by the filth they handled.
'They don't even like having married women there,' she
added. Girls are always supposed to be so pure. Here's one who
isn't, anyway.
She had had her first love-affair when she was sixteen,
with a Party member of sixty who later committed suicide to
avoid arrest. 'And a good job too,' said Julia, 'otherwise
they'd have had my name out of him when he confessed.' Since
then there had been various others. Life as she saw it was
quite simple. You wanted a good time; 'they', meaning the
Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as
best you couId. She seemed to think it just as natural that
'they' should want to rob you of your pleasures as that you
should want to avoid being caught. She hated the Party, and
said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism
of it. Except where it touched upon her own life she had no
interest in Party doctrine. He noticed that she never used
Newspeak words except the ones that had passed into everyday
use. She had never heard of the Brotherhood, and refused to
believe in its existence. Any kind of organized revolt against
the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as
stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive
all the same. He wondered vaguely how many others like her
there might be in the younger generation people who had grown
up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else,
accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not
rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a
rabbit dodges a dog.
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
curiousIy 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 stiffening 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 merely a distasteful
one.
'I could have stood it if it hadn't been for one thing,'
he said. He toId 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 never tell; peopIe 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 simpIy 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 needed 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 parenthood. 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
systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy
on them and report 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 intimately.
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 happened, or rather had failed to happen,
on another sweltering summer 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 metres, 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 wrong- doing. 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 colours, 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 colours?'
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 microphone was very small,
and even if there was a microphone it would only pick up
sounds. It was the hottest sleepiest hour of the afternoon. 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, 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 understand 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 contradicted him when he said anything of this kind. She
would not accept 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 construct 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.
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