But at this moment Winston noticed some tufts of loosestrife growing in the cracks of the cliff beneath them.
One tuft was of two colours, magenta and brick-red, apparently growing on the same root.
He had never seen anything of the kind before, and he called to Katharine to come and look at it.
'Look, Katharine!
Look at those flowers.
That clump down near the bottom.
Do you see they're two different colours?'
She had already turned to go, but she did rather fretfully come back for a moment.
She even leaned out over the cliff face to see where he was pointing.
He was standing a little behind her, and he put his hand on her waist to steady her.
At this moment it suddenly occurred to him how completely alone they were.
There was not a human creature anywhere, not a leaf stirring, not even a bird awake.
In a place like this the danger that there would be a hidden microphone was very small, and even if there was a microphone it would only pick up sounds.
It was the hottest sleepiest hour of the afternoon.
The sun blazed down upon them, the sweat tickled his face.
And the thought struck him...
'Why didn't you give her a good shove?' said Julia.
'I would have.'
'Yes, dear, you would have.
I would, if I'd been the same person then as I am now.
Or perhaps I would--I'm not certain.'
'Are you sorry you didn't?'
'Yes.
On the whole I'm sorry I didn't.'
They were sitting side by side on the dusty floor.
He pulled her closer against him.
Her head rested on his shoulder, the pleasant smell of her hair conquering the pigeon dung.
She was very young, he thought, she still expected something from life, she did not understand that to push an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing.
'Actually it would have made no difference,' he said.
'Then why are you sorry you didn't do it?'
'Only because I prefer a positive to a negative.
In this game that we're playing, we can't win.
Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.'
He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent.
She always contradicted him when he said anything of this kind.
She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated.
In a way she realized that she herself was doomed, that sooner or later the Thought Police would catch her and kill her, but with another part of her mind she believed that it was somehow possible to construct a secret world in which you could live as you chose.
All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness.
She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse.
'We are the dead,' he said.
'We're not dead yet,' said Julia prosaically.
'Not physically.
Six months, a year--five years, conceivably.
I am afraid of death.
You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am.
Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can.
But it makes very little difference.
So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.'
'Oh, rubbish!
Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton?