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 thousand years, pegging
out diapers and singing rubbish. It struck him as a curious
fact that he had never heard a member of the Party singing
alone and spontaneously. It would even have seemed slightly
unorthodox, 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
quarters and bought herself a complete set of make-up
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 brighter. 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 colour 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 remem bered 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
somewhere 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
mahogany 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 meagre 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 occasionally 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 make-up 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 singing,
but the faint shouts of children floated in from the street. He
wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a
normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a
summer evening, 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 outside. 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 jerk 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 always-'
'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 always 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.'
Already the black instant of panic was half-forgotten.
Feeling slightly ashamed of himself, he sat up against the
bedhead. Julia got out of bed, pulled on her overalls, and made
the coffee. The smell that rose from the saucepan was so
powerful and exciting that they shut the window lest anybody
outside should notice it and become inquisitive. What was even
better than the taste of the coffee was the silky texture given
to it by the sugar, a thing Winston had almost forgotten after
years of saccharine. With one hand in her pocket and a piece of
bread and jam in the other, Julia wandered about the room,
glancing indifferently at the bookcase, pointing out the best
way of repairing the gateleg table, plumping herself down in
the ragged arm-chair to see if it was comfortable, and
examining the absurd twelve-hour clock with a sort of tolerant
amusement. She brought the glass paperweight over to the bed to
have a look at it in a better light. He took it out of her
hand, fascinated, as always, by the soft, rainwatery appearance
of the glass.
'What is it, do you think?' said Julia.
'I don't think it's anything-I mean, I don't think it was
ever put to any use. That's what I like about it. It's a little
chunk of history that they've forgotten to alter. It's a
message from a hundred years ago, if one knew how to read it.'
'And that picture over there' -- she nodded at the
engraving on the opposite wall-'would that be a hundred years
old?'
'More. Two hundred, I dare say. One can't tell. It's
impossible to discover the age of anything nowadays.'
She went over to look at it. 'Here's where that brute
stuck his nose out,' she said, kicking the wainscoting
immediately below the picture. 'What is this place? I've seen
it before somewhere.'
'It's a church, or at least it used to be. St Clement
Danes its name was.' The fragment of rhyme that Mr Charrington
had taught him came back into his head, and he added
half-nostalgically: "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St
Clement's!"
To his astonishment she capped the line:
'You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's,
When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey -- '
'I can't remember how it goes on after that. But anyway I
remember it ends up, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
here comes a chopper to chop off your head!"
It was like the two halves of a countersign. But there
must be another line after 'the bells of Old Bailey'. Perhaps
it could be dug out of Mr Charrington's memory, if he were
suitably prompted.
'Who taught you that?' he said.
'My grandfather. He used to say it to me when I was a
little girl. He was vaporized when I was eight -- at any rate,
he disappeared. I wonder what a lemon was,' she added
inconsequently. 'I've seen oranges. They're a kind of round
yellow fruit with a thick skin.'
'I can remember lemons,' said Winston. 'They were quite
common in the fifties. They were so sour that it set your teeth
on edge even to smell them.'
'I bet that picture's got bugs behind it,' said Julia.
'I'll take it down and give it a good clean some day. I suppose
it's almost time we were leaving. I must start washing this
paint off. What a bore! I'll get the lipstick off your face
afterwards.'
Winston did not get up for a few minutes more. The room
was darkening. He turned over towards the light and lay gazing
into the glass paperweight. The inexhaustibly interesting thing
was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass
itself. There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost as
transparent as air. It was as though the surface of the glass
had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its
atmosphere complete. He had the feeling that he could get
inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the
mahogany bed and the gateleg table, and the clock and the steel
engraving and the paperweight itself. The paperweight was the
room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own,
fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.
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