Don't you enjoy being alive?
Don't you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I'm real, I'm solid, I'm alive!
Don't you like THIS?'
She twisted herself round and pressed her bosom against him.
He could feel her breasts, ripe yet firm, through her overalls.
Her body seemed to be pouring some of its youth and vigour into his.
'Yes, I like that,' he said.
'Then stop talking about dying.
And now listen, dear, we've got to fix up about the next time we meet.
We may as well go back to the place in the wood.
We've given it a good long rest.
But you must get there by a different way this time.
I've got it all planned out.
You take the train--but look, I'll draw it out for you.'
And in her practical way she scraped together a small square of dust, and with a twig from a pigeon's nest began drawing a map on the floor.
Chapter 4
Winston looked round the shabby little room above Mr Charrington's shop.
Beside the window the enormous bed was made up, with ragged blankets and a coverless bolster.
The old-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantelpiece.
In the corner, on the gateleg table, the glass paperweight which he had bought on his last visit gleamed softly out of the half-darkness.
In the fender was a battered tin oilstove, a saucepan, and two cups, provided by Mr Charrington.
Winston lit the burner and set a pan of water to boil.
He had brought an envelope full of Victory Coffee and some saccharine tablets.
The clock's hands said seventeen-twenty: it was nineteen-twenty really.
She was coming at nineteen-thirty.
Folly, folly, his heart kept saying: conscious, gratuitous, suicidal folly.
Of all the crimes that a Party member could commit, this one was the least possible to conceal.
Actually the idea had first floated into his head in the form of a vision, of the glass paperweight mirrored by the surface of the gateleg table.
As he had foreseen, Mr Charrington had made no difficulty about letting the room.
He was obviously glad of the few dollars that it would bring him.
Nor did he seem shocked or become offensively knowing when it was made clear that Winston wanted the room for the purpose of a love-affair.
Instead he looked into the middle distance and spoke in generalities, with so delicate an air as to give the impression that he had become partly invisible.
Privacy, he said, was a very valuable thing.
Everyone wanted a place where they could be alone occasionally.
And when they had such a place, it was only common courtesy in anyone else who knew of it to keep his knowledge to himself.
He even, seeming almost to fade out of existence as he did so, added that there were two entries to the house, one of them through the back yard, which gave on an alley.
Under the window somebody was singing.
Winston peeped out, secure in the protection of the muslin curtain.
The June sun was still high in the sky, and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line, pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as babies' diapers.
Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful contralto: It was only an 'opeless fancy. It passed like an Ipril dye, But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred! They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!
The tune had been haunting London for weeks past.
It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department.
The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator.
But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound.
He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.
Folly, folly, folly! he thought again.
It was inconceivable that they could frequent this place for more than a few weeks without being caught.
But the temptation of having a hiding-place that was truly their own, indoors and near at hand, had been too much for both of them.
For some time after their visit to the church belfry it had been impossible to arrange meetings.
Working hours had been drastically increased in anticipation of Hate Week.