'What was she like, your wife?' said Julia.
'She was--do you know the Newspeak word GOODTHINKFUL?
Meaning naturally orthodox, incapable of thinking a bad thought?'
'No, I didn't know the word, but I know the kind of person, right enough.'
He began telling her the story of his married life, but curiously enough she appeared to know the essential parts of it already.
She described to him, almost as though she had seen or felt it, the stiffening of Katharine's body as soon as he touched her, the way in which she still seemed to be pushing him from her with all her strength, even when her arms were clasped tightly round him.
With Julia he felt no difficulty in talking about such things: Katharine, in any case, had long ceased to be a painful memory and became merely a distasteful one.
'I could have stood it if it hadn't been for one thing,' he said. He told her about the frigid little ceremony that Katharine had forced him to go through on the same night every week. 'She hated it, but nothing would make her stop doing it.
She used to call it--but you'll never guess.'
'Our duty to the Party,' said Julia promptly.
'How did you know that?'
'I've been at school too, dear.
Sex talks once a month for the over-sixteens.
And in the Youth Movement.
They rub it into you for years.
I dare say it works in a lot of cases.
But of course you can never tell; people are such hypocrites.'
She began to enlarge upon the subject.
With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality.
As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness.
Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism.
It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible.
What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship.
The way she put it was:
'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything.
They can't bear you to feel like that.
They want you to be bursting with energy all the time.
All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour.
If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?'
That was very true, he thought.
There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy.
For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force?
The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account.
They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood.
The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way.
The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations.
The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police.
It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.
Abruptly his mind went back to Katharine.
Katharine would unquestionably have denounced him to the Thought Police if she had not happened to be too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of his opinions.
But what really recalled her to him at this moment was the stifling heat of the afternoon, which had brought the sweat out on his forehead.
He began telling Julia of something that had happened, or rather had failed to happen, on another sweltering summer afternoon, eleven years ago.
It was three or four months after they were married.
They had lost their way on a community hike somewhere in Kent.
They had only lagged behind the others for a couple of minutes, but they took a wrong turning, and presently found themselves pulled up short by the edge of an old chalk quarry.
It was a sheer drop of ten or twenty metres, with boulders at the bottom.
There was nobody of whom they could ask the way.
As soon as she realized that they were lost Katharine became very uneasy.
To be away from the noisy mob of hikers even for a moment gave her a feeling of wrong-doing.
She wanted to hurry back by the way they had come and start searching in the other direction.