Nineteen eighty-four - 10

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.
'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

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!

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 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 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.


Chapter 5

Syme had vanished. A morning came, and he was missing from work: a few
thoughtless people commented on his absence. On the next day nobody
mentioned him. On the third day Winston went into the vestibule of the
Records Department to look at the notice-board. One of the notices carried
a printed list of the members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had
been one. It looked almost exactly as it had looked before--nothing had
been crossed out--but it was one name shorter. It was enough. Syme had
ceased to exist: he had never existed.
The weather was baking hot. In the labyrinthine Ministry the windowless,
air-conditioned rooms kept their normal temperature, but outside the
pavements scorched one's feet and the stench of the Tubes at the rush hours
was a horror. The preparations for Hate Week were in full swing, and the
staffs of all the Ministries were working overtime. Processions, meetings,
military parades, lectures, waxworks, displays, film shows, telescreen
programmes all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies
built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs
faked. Julia's unit in the Fiction Department had been taken off the
production of novels and was rushing out a series of atrocity pamphlets.
Winston, in addition to his regular work, spent long periods every day in
going through back files of 'The Times' and altering and embellishing news
items which were to be quoted in speeches. Late at night, when crowds of
rowdy proles roamed the streets, the town had a curiously febrile air. The
rocket bombs crashed oftener than ever, and sometimes in the far distance
there were enormous explosions which no one could explain and about which
there were wild rumours.
The new tune which was to be the theme-song of Hate Week (the Hate Song,
it was called) had already been composed and was being endlessly plugged
on the telescreens. It had a savage, barking rhythm which could not exactly
be called music, but resembled the beating of a drum. Roared out by
hundreds of voices to the tramp of marching feet, it was terrifying. The
proles had taken a fancy to it, and in the midnight streets it competed
with the still-popular 'It was only a hopeless fancy'. The Parsons children
played it at all hours of the night and day, unbearably, on a comb and a
piece of toilet paper. Winston's evenings were fuller than ever. Squads of
volunteers, organized by Parsons, were preparing the street for Hate Week,
stitching banners, painting posters, erecting flagstaffs on the roofs, and
perilously slinging wires across the street for the reception of streamers.
Parsons boasted that Victory Mansions alone would display four hundred
metres of bunting. He was in his native element and as happy as a lark.
The heat and the manual work had even given him a pretext for reverting
to shorts and an open shirt in the evenings. He was everywhere at once,
pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering, improvising, jollying everyone along
with comradely exhortations and giving out from every fold of his body what
seemed an inexhaustible supply of acrid-smelling sweat.
A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London. It had no caption,
and represented simply the monstrous figure of a Eurasian soldier, three
or four metres high, striding forward with expressionless Mongolian face
and enormous boots, a submachine gun pointed from his hip. From whatever
angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the
foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you. The thing had been
plastered on every blank space on every wall, even outnumbering the
portraits of Big Brother. The proles, normally apathetic about the war,
were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism.
As though to harmonize with the general mood, the rocket bombs had been
killing larger numbers of people than usual. One fell on a crowded film
theatre in Stepney, burying several hundred victims among the ruins. The
whole population of the neighbourhood turned out for a long, trailing
funeral which went on for hours and was in effect an indignation meeting.
Another bomb fell on a piece of waste ground which was used as a playground
and several dozen children were blown to pieces. There were further angry
demonstrations, Goldstein was burned in effigy, hundreds of copies of the
poster of the Eurasian soldier were torn down and added to the flames, and
a number of shops were looted in the turmoil; then a rumour flew round
that spies were directing the rocket bombs by means of wireless waves, and
an old couple who were suspected of being of foreign extraction had their
house set on fire and perished of suffocation.
In the room over Mr Charrington's shop, when they could get there, Julia
and Winston lay side by side on a stripped bed under the open window,
naked for the sake of coolness. The rat had never come back, but the bugs
had multiplied hideously in the heat. It did not seem to matter. Dirty or
clean, the room was paradise. As soon as they arrived they would sprinkle
everything with pepper bought on the black market, tear off their clothes,
and make love with sweating bodies, then fall asleep and wake to find that
the bugs had rallied and were massing for the counter-attack.
Four, five, six--seven times they met during the month of June. Winston
had dropped his habit of drinking gin at all hours. He seemed to have lost
the need for it. He had grown fatter, his varicose ulcer had subsided,
leaving only a brown stain on the skin above his ankle, his fits of
coughing in the early morning had stopped. The process of life had ceased
to be intolerable, he had no longer any impulse to make faces at the
telescreen or shout curses at the top of his voice. Now that they had a
secure hiding-place, almost a home, it did not even seem a hardship that
they could only meet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time.
What mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist. To know