They had only been together for about fifteen months.
The Party did not permit divorce, but it rather encouraged separation in cases where there were no children.
Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight, with splendid movements.
She had a bold, aquiline 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--though perhaps it was only that he knew her more intimately than he knew most people--that she had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered.
She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her.
'The human sound-track' he nicknamed her in his own mind.
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 jointed 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.
The rigidity of her muscles managed to convey that impression.
She would lie there with shut eyes, neither resisting nor co-operating but SUBMITTING.
It was extraordinarily embarrassing, and, after a while, horrible.
But even then he could have borne living with her if it had been agreed that they should remain celibate.
But curiously enough it was Katharine who refused this.
They must, she said, produce a child if they could.
So the performance continued to happen, once a week quite regularly, whenever it was not impossible.
She even used to remind him of it in the morning, as something which had to be done that evening and which must not be forgotten.
She had two names for it.
One was 'making a baby', and the other was 'our duty to the Party' (yes, she had actually used that phrase).
Quite soon he grew to have a feeling of positive dread when the appointed day came round.
But luckily no child appeared, and in the end she agreed to give up trying, and soon afterwards they parted.
Winston sighed inaudibly.
He picked up his pen again and wrote:
She threw herself down on the bed, and at once, without any kind of preliminary in the most coarse, horrible way you can imagine, pulled up her skirt.
I----
He saw himself standing there in the dim lamplight, with the smell of bugs and cheap scent in his nostrils, and in his heart a feeling of defeat and resentment which even at that moment was mixed up with the thought of Katharine's white body, frozen for ever by the hypnotic power of the Party.
Why did it always have to be like this?
Why could he not have a woman of his own instead of these filthy scuffles at intervals of years?
But a real love affair was an almost unthinkable event.
The women of the Party were all alike.
Chastity was as deep ingrained in them as Party loyalty.
By careful early conditioning, by games and cold water, by the rubbish that was dinned into them at school and in the Spies and the Youth League, by lectures, parades, songs, slogans, and martial music, the natural feeling had been driven out of them.
His reason told him that there must be exceptions, but his heart did not believe it.
They were all impregnable, as the Party intended that they should be.
And what he wanted, more even than to be loved, was to break down that wall of virtue, even if it were only once in his whole life.
The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion.
Desire was thoughtcrime.
Even to have awakened Katharine, if he could have achieved it, would have been like a seduction, although she was his wife.
But the rest of the story had got to be written down.
He wrote:
I turned up the lamp.
When I saw her in the light----
After the darkness the feeble light of the paraffin lamp had seemed very bright.
For the first time he could see the woman properly.
He had taken a step towards her and then halted, full of lust and terror.
He was painfully conscious of the risk he had taken in coming here.
It was perfectly possible that the patrols would catch him on the way out: for that matter they might be waiting outside the door at this moment.
If he went away without even doing what he had come here to do----!