But it was necessary to act quickly.
If they could get control of the whole of Africa, if they had airfields and submarine bases at the Cape, it would cut Oceania in two.
It might mean anything: defeat, breakdown, the redivision of the world, the destruction of the Party!
He drew a deep breath.
An extraordinary medley of feeling--but it was not a medley, exactly; rather it was successive layers of feeling, in which one could not say which layer was undermost--struggled inside him.
The spasm passed.
He put the white knight back in its place, but for the moment he could not settle down to serious study of the chess problem.
His thoughts wandered again.
Almost unconsciously he traced with his finger in the dust on the table:
2+2=5
'They can't get inside you,' she had said.
But they could get inside you.
'What happens to you here is FOR EVER,' O'Brien had said.
That was a true word.
There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover.
Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.
He had seen her; he had even spoken to her.
There was no danger in it.
He knew as though instinctively that they now took almost no interest in his doings.
He could have arranged to meet her a second time if either of them had wanted to.
Actually it was by chance that they had met.
It was in the Park, on a vile, biting day in March, when the earth was like iron and all the grass seemed dead and there was not a bud anywhere except a few crocuses which had pushed themselves up to be dismembered by the wind.
He was hurrying along with frozen hands and watering eyes when he saw her not ten metres away from him.
It struck him at once that she had changed in some ill-defined way.
They almost passed one another without a sign, then he turned and followed her, not very eagerly.
He knew that there was no danger, nobody would take any interest in him.
She did not speak.
She walked obliquely away across the grass as though trying to get rid of him, then seemed to resign herself to having him at her side.
Presently they were in among a clump of ragged leafless shrubs, useless either for concealment or as protection from the wind.
They halted.
It was vilely cold.
The wind whistled through the twigs and fretted the occasional, dirty-looking crocuses.
He put his arm round her waist.
There was no telescreen, but there must be hidden microphones: besides, they could be seen.
It did not matter, nothing mattered.
They could have lain down on the ground and done THAT if they had wanted to.
His flesh froze with horror at the thought of it.
She made no response whatever to the clasp of his arm; she did not even try to disengage herself.
He knew now what had changed in her.
Her face was sallower, and there was a long scar, partly hidden by the hair, across her forehead and temple; but that was not the change.
It was that her waist had grown thicker, and, in a surprising way, had stiffened.
He remembered how once, after the explosion of a rocket bomb, he had helped to drag a corpse out of some ruins, and had been astonished not only by the incredible weight of the thing, but by its rigidity and awkwardness to handle, which made it seem more like stone than flesh.
Her body felt like that.
It occurred to him that the texture of her skin would be quite different from what it had once been.
He did not attempt to kiss her, nor did they speak.
As they walked back across the grass, she looked directly at him for the first time.
It was only a momentary glance, full of contempt and dislike.
He wondered whether it was a dislike that came purely out of the past or whether it was inspired also by his bloated face and the water that the wind kept squeezing from his eyes.
They sat down on two iron chairs, side by side but not too close together.
He saw that she was about to speak.