“By the way, old boy,” he said. “I hear that little beggar of mine shot at you yesterday. I told him I’d take the catapult away if he does it again.”
“I think he was a little upset at not going to the execution,” said Winston.
“Ah, well—what I mean to say, shows the right spirit, doesn’t it? All they think about is the Spies, and the war, of course. D’you know what that little girl of mine did last Saturday? She got two other girls to go with her, slipped off from the hike, and spent the whole afternoon following a strange man. They kept on his tail for two hours, right through the woods, and then, when they got into Amersham, handed him over to the patrols.”
“What did they do that for?” said Winston. Parsons went on:
“My kid made sure he was some kind of enemy agent. She spotted he was wearing a funny kind of shoes—said she’d never seen anyone wearing shoes like that before. So the chances were he was a foreigner. Pretty smart, eh?”
“What happened to the man?” said Winston.
“Ah, that I couldn’t say, of course. But I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if—” Parsons made the motion of aiming a rifle, and clicked his tongue for the explosion.
“Good,” said Syme, without looking up.
“Of course we can’t afford to take chances,” agreed Winston.
“What I mean to say, there is a war on,” said Parsons.
As though in confirmation of this, a trumpet call sounded from the telescreen just above their heads.
“Comrades!” cried an eager youthful voice. “Attention, comrades! We have glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production! All over Oceania this morning there were spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life. Here are—”
Winston looked round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue overalls. On the far side of the room, sitting at a table alone, a small man was drinking a cup of coffee. How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal—tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree—existed and even predominated. Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people were small, dark, and ill-favoured. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the Party.
The announcement from the Ministry of Plenty ended. Parsons took his pipe out of his mouth.
“The Ministry of Plenty’s certainly done a good job this year,” he said with a knowing shake of his head. “By the way, Smith old boy, I suppose you haven’t got any razor blades you can let me have?”
“Not one,” said Winston. “I’ve been using the same blade for six weeks myself.”
“Ah, well—just thought I’d ask you, old boy.”
“Sorry,” said Winston.
For some reason Winston suddenly found himself thinking of Mrs Parsons. Within two years those children would be denouncing her to the Thought Police. Mrs Parsons would be vaporized. Syme would be vaporized. Winston would be vaporized. O’Brien would be vaporized. Parsons, on the other hand, would never be vaporized. And the girl with dark hair, the girl from the Fiction Department—she would never be vaporized either.
At this moment he noticed that a girl at the next table was looking at him. It was the girl with dark hair. The instant she caught his eye she looked away again.
The sweat started out on Winston’s backbone. Terror went through him. Why was she watching him? Why did she keep following him about?
The girl had turned her back on him again. Perhaps it was coincidence that she had sat so close to him two days running. His cigarette had gone out, and he laid it carefully on the edge of the table. He would finish smoking it after work, if he could keep the tobacco in it.
“Did I ever tell you, old boy,” said Parsons, “about the time when my children set fire to the old market-woman’s skirt because they saw her wrapping up sausages in a poster of B.B.? Sneaked up behind her and set fire to it with a box of matches. Burned her quite badly, I believe.”
At this moment the telescreen let out a whistle.
It was the signal to return to work. All three men got up and made their way to the lifts. The remaining tobacco fell out of Winston’s cigarette.
Chapter 6
Winston was writing in his diary:
It was three years ago. It was on a dark evening, in a narrow side-street near one of the big railway stations. She was standing near a doorway in the wall, under a street lamp that hardly gave any light. She had a young face, painted very thick. It was really the paint that appealed to me, the whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright red lips. Party women never paint their faces. There was nobody else in the street, and no telescreens. She said two dollars. I—
For the moment it was too difficult to go on. He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against them. He wanted to shout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the wall, to kick over the table, and throw the inkpot through the window.
Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you could turn into some visible symptom.
He drew his breath and went on writing:
I went with her through the doorway and across a backyard into a basement kitchen. There was a bed against the wall, and a lamp on the table, turned down very low. She—
He would have liked to spit. Simultaneously with the woman in the basement kitchen he thought of Katharine, his wife. Winston was married—had been married: probably he still was married, so far as he knew his wife was not dead.
When he had gone with that woman it had been his first lapse in two years or thereabouts. Consorting with prostitutes was forbidden, of course, but it was one of those rules that you could occasionally break. It was dangerous, but it was not a life-and-death matter. To be caught with a prostitute might mean five years in a forced labour camp: not more, if you had committed no other offence. And it was easy enough, provided that you could avoid being caught in the act.
The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. All marriages between Party members had to be approved by a committee appointed for the purpose, and permission was always refused if the couple seemed physically attracted to one another. The only recognized purpose of marriage was to make children for the service of the Party.
He thought again of Katharine. It must be nine, ten—nearly eleven years since they had parted. It was curious how seldom he thought of her. They had only been together for about fifteen months.
Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight, with splendid movements. She had a bold face, a face that one might have called noble until one discovered that there was as nearly as possible nothing behind it. Very early in her married life he had decided that she had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered. Yet he could have endured living with her if it had not been for just one thing—sex.
As soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen. To embrace her was like embracing a wooden image. And what was strange was that even when she was clasping him against her he had the feeling that she was simultaneously pushing him away with all her strength. They must, Katharine said, produce a child if they could. So the performance continued to happen, once a week quite regularly. But luckily no child appeared, and in the end she agreed to give up trying, and soon afterwards they parted.
Winston sighed. He picked up his pen again and wrote:
She