'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.
x x x
Winston looked round the shabby little room above Mr
Charrington's shop. Beside the window the enormous bed was made
up, with ragged blankets and a coverless bolster. The
old-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was ticking 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 seventeen-twenty: it was nineteen- twenty really.
She was coming at nineteen-thirty.
Folly, folly, his heart kept saying: conscious,
gratuitous, suicidal 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 paperweight mirrored by the
surface of the gateleg table. As he had foreseen, 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 occasionally. 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 back yard, 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 clothes line,
pegging out a series of square white things which Winston
recognized as babies' diapers. Whenever her mouth was not
corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful
contralto:
It was only an 'opeless fancy.
It passed like an Ipril 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 instrument 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 somewhere 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 entailed were
throwing extra work on to 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
beforehand 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 paler than usual.
'It's all off,' she murmured as soon as she judged 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 times, 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 Ministry. He started forward to take her in his
arms, but she disengaged herself rather hurriedly, partly
because she was still holding the tool-bag.
'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.
Underneath were a number of neat paper packets. The first
packet that she passed to Winston had a strange and yet vaguely
familiar feeling. It was filled with some kind of heavy,
sand-like stuff which yielded 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
passage-way 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
India, 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 between 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 'eart-strings yet!
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