He might have flinched altogether from speaking if at this moment he had not seen Ampleforth, the hairy-eared poet, wandering limply round the room with a tray, looking for a place to sit down.
In his vague way Ampleforth was attached to Winston, and would certainly sit down at his table if he caught sight of him.
There was perhaps a minute in which to act.
Both Winston and the girl were eating steadily.
The stuff they were eating was a thin stew, actually a soup, of haricot beans.
In a low murmur Winston began speaking.
Neither of them looked up; steadily they spooned the watery stuff into their mouths, and between spoonfuls exchanged the few necessary words in low expressionless voices.
'What time do you leave work?'
'Eighteen-thirty.'
'Where can we meet?'
'Victory Square, near the monument.'
'It's full of telescreens.'
'It doesn't matter if there's a crowd.'
'Any signal?'
'No.
Don't come up to me until you see me among a lot of people.
And don't look at me.
Just keep somewhere near me.'
'What time?'
'Nineteen hours.'
'All right.'
Ampleforth failed to see Winston and sat down at another table.
They did not speak again, and, so far as it was possible for two people sitting on opposite sides of the same table, they did not look at one another.
The girl finished her lunch quickly and made off, while Winston stayed to smoke a cigarette.
Winston was in Victory Square before the appointed time.
He wandered round the base of the enormous fluted column, at the top of which Big Brother's statue gazed southward towards the skies where he had vanquished the Eurasian aeroplanes (the Eastasian aeroplanes, it had been, a few years ago) in the Battle of Airstrip One.
In the street in front of it there was a statue of a man on horseback which was supposed to represent Oliver Cromwell.
At five minutes past the hour the girl had still not appeared.
Again the terrible fear seized upon Winston.
She was not coming, she had changed her mind!
He walked slowly up to the north side of the square and got a sort of pale-coloured pleasure from identifying St Martin's Church, whose bells, when it had bells, had chimed
'You owe me three farthings.'
Then he saw the girl standing at the base of the monument, reading or pretending to read a poster which ran spirally up the column.
It was not safe to go near her until some more people had accumulated.
There were telescreens all round the pediment.
But at this moment there was a din of shouting and a zoom of heavy vehicles from somewhere to the left.
Suddenly everyone seemed to be running across the square.
The girl nipped nimbly round the lions at the base of the monument and joined in the rush.
Winston followed.
As he ran, he gathered from some shouted remarks that a convoy of Eurasian prisoners was passing.
Already a dense mass of people was blocking the south side of the square.
Winston, at normal times the kind of person who gravitates to the outer edge of any kind of scrimmage, shoved, butted, squirmed his way forward into the heart of the crowd.
Soon he was within arm's length of the girl, but the way was blocked by an enormous prole and an almost equally enormous woman, presumably his wife, who seemed to form an impenetrable wall of flesh.
Winston wriggled himself sideways, and with a violent lunge managed to drive his shoulder between them.
For a moment it felt as though his entrails were being ground to pulp between the two muscular hips, then he had broken through, sweating a little.
He was next to the girl.
They were shoulder to shoulder, both staring fixedly in front of them.
A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed with sub-machine guns standing upright in each corner, was passing slowly down the street.
In the trucks little yellow men in shabby greenish uniforms were squatting, jammed close together.
Their sad, Mongolian faces gazed out over the sides of the trucks utterly incurious.