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. It was more
than a month distant, but the enormous, complex preparations that
it entailed were throwing extra work on to everybody. Finally both
of them managed to secure a free afternoon on the same day. They
had agreed to go back to the clearing in the wood. On the evening
beforehand they met briefly in the street. As usual, Winston hardly
looked at Julia as they drifted towards one another in the crowd,
but from the short glance he gave her it seemed to him that she
was paler than usual.
‘It’s all off,’ she murmured as soon as she judged it safe to
speak. ‘Tomorrow, I mean.’
‘What?’
‘Tomorrow afternoon. I can’t come.’
‘Why not?’
‘Oh, the usual reason. It’s started early this time.’
For a moment he was violently angry. During the month that
he had known her the nature of his desire for her had changed. At
the beginning there had been little true sensuality in it. Their first
love-making had been simply an act of the will. But after the
second time it was different. The smell of her hair, the taste of her
mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or
into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but felt that he had a right to.
When she said that she could not come, he had the feeling that she
was cheating him. But just at this moment the crowd pressed them
together and their hands accidentally met. She gave the tips of his
fingers a quick squeeze that seemed to invite not desire but
affection. It struck him that when one lived with a woman this
particular disappointment must be a normal, recurring event; and a
deep tenderness, such as he had not felt for her before, suddenly
took hold of him. He wished that they were a married couple of ten
years’ standing. He wished that he were walking through the
streets with her just as they were doing now but openly and
without fear, talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends for the
household. He wished above all that they had some place where
they could be alone together without feeling the obligation to make
love every time they met. It was not actually at that moment, but at
some time on the following day, that the idea of renting Mr
Charrington’s room had occurred to him. When he suggested it to
Julia she had agreed with unexpected readiness. Both of them
knew that it was lunacy. It was as though they were intentionally
stepping nearer to their graves. As he sat waiting on the edge of the
bed he thought again of the cellars of the Ministry of Love. It was
curious how that predestined horror moved in and out of one’s
consciousness. There it lay, fixed in future times, preceding death
as surely as 99 precedes 100. One could not avoid it, but one could
perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a
conscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten the interval before it
happened.
At this moment there was a quick step on the stairs. Julia
burst into the room. She was carrying a tool-bag of coarse brown
canvas, such as he had sometimes seen her carrying to and fro at the Ministry. He started forward to take her in his arms, but she
disengaged herself rather hurriedly, partly because she was still
holding the tool-bag.
‘Half a second,’ she said. ‘Just let me show you what I’ve
brought. Did you bring some of that filthy Victory Coffee? I
thought you would. You can chuck it away again, because we shan’t
be needing it. Look here.’
She fell on her knees, threw open the bag, and tumbled out
some spanners and a screwdriver that filled the top part of it.
Underneath were a number of neat paper packets. The first packet
that she passed to Winston had a strange and yet vaguely familiar
feeling. It was filled with some kind of heavy, sand-like stuff which
yielded wherever you touched it.
‘It isn’t sugar?’ he said.
‘Real sugar. Not saccharine, sugar. And here’s a loaf of bread —
proper white bread, not our bloody stuff — and a little pot of jam.
And here’s a tin of milk — but look! This is the one I’m really proud
of. I had to wrap a bit of sacking round it, because ——’
But she did not need to tell him why she had wrapped it up.
The smell was already filling the room, a rich hot smell which
seemed like an emanation from his early childhood, but which one
did occasionally meet with even now, blowing down a passage-way
before a door slammed, or diffusing itself mysteriously in a
crowded street, sniffed for an instant and then lost again.
‘It’s coffee,’ he murmured, ‘real coffee.’
‘It’s Inner Party coffee. There’s a whole kilo here,’ she said.
‘How did you manage to get hold of all these things?’
‘It’s all Inner Party stuff. There’s nothing those swine don’t
have, nothing. But of course waiters and servants and people pinch things, and — look, I got a little packet of tea as well.’
Winston had squatted down beside her. He tore open a corner
of the packet.
‘It’s real tea. Not blackberry leaves.’
‘There’s been a lot of tea about lately. They’ve captured India,
or something,’ she said vaguely. ‘But listen, dear. I want you to turn
your back on me for three minutes. Go and sit on the other side of
the bed. Don’t go too near the window. And don’t turn round till I
tell you.’
Winston gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain. Down
in the yard the red-armed woman was still marching to and fro
between the washtub and the line. She took two more pegs out of
her mouth and sang with deep feeling:

They sye that time ’eals all things,
They sye you can always forget;
But the smiles an’ the tears acrorss the years
They twist my ’eart-strings yet!

She knew the whole drivelling song by heart, it seemed. Her voice
floated upward with the sweet summer air, very tuneful, charged
with a sort of happy melancholy. One had the feeling that she
would have been perfectly content, if the June evening had been
endless and the supply of clothes inexhaustible, to remain there for
a thousand years, pegging out diapers and singing rubbish. It
struck him as a curious fact that he had never heard a member of
the Party singing alone and spontaneously. It would even have
seemed slightly unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, like talking
to oneself. Perhaps it was only when people were somewhere near
the starvation level that they had anything to sing about.
‘You can turn round now,’ said Julia.

He turned round, and for a second almost failed to recognize
her. What he had actually expected was to see her naked. But she
was not naked. The transformation that had happened was much
more surprising than that. She had painted her face.
She must have slipped into some shop in the proletarian
quarters and bought herself a complete set of make-up materials.
Her lips were deeply reddened, her cheeks rouged, her nose
powdered; there was even a touch of something under the eyes to
make them brighter. It was not very skilfully done, but Winston’s
standards in such matters were not high. He had never before seen
or imagined a woman of the Party with cosmetics on her face. The
improvement in her appearance was startling. With just a few dabs
of colour in the right places she had become not only very much
prettier, but, above all, far more feminine. Her short hair and
boyish overalls merely added to the effect. As he took her in his
arms a wave of synthetic violets flooded his nostrils. He
remembered the half-darkness of a basement kitchen, and a
woman’s cavernous mouth. It was the very same scent that she had
used; but at the moment it did not seem to matter.
‘Scent too!’ he said.
‘Yes, dear, scent too. And do you know what I’m going to do
next? I’m going to get hold of a real woman’s frock from
somewhere and wear it instead of these bloody trousers. I’ll wear
silk stockings and high-heeled shoes! In this room I’m going to be
a woman, not a Party comrade.’
They flung their clothes off and climbed into the huge
mahogany bed. It was the first time that he had stripped himself
naked in her presence. Until now he had been too much ashamed
of his pale and meagre body, with the varicose veins standing out
on his calves and the discoloured patch over his ankle. There were no sheets, but the blanket they lay on was threadbare and smooth,
and the size and springiness of the bed astonished both of them.
‘It’s sure to be full of bugs, but who cares?’ said Julia. One never
saw a double bed nowadays, except in the homes of the proles.
Winston had occasionally slept in one in his boyhood: Julia had
never been in one before, so far as she could remember.
Presently they fell asleep for a little while. When Winston
woke up the hands of the clock had crept round to nearly nine. He
did not stir, because Julia was sleeping with her head in the crook
of his arm. Most of her make-up had transferred itself to his own
face or the bolster, but a light stain of rouge still brought out the
beauty of her cheekbone. A yellow ray from the sinking sun fell
across the foot of the bed and lighted up the fireplace, where the
water in the pan was boiling fast. Down in the yard the woman had
stopped singing, but the faint shouts of children floated in from the
street. He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had
been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a
summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making
love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any
compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful
sounds outside. Surely there could never have been a time when
that seemed ordinary? Julia woke up, rubbed her eyes, and raised
herself on her elbow to look at the oilstove.
‘Half that water’s boiled away,’ she said. ‘I’ll get up and make
some coffee in another moment. We’ve got an hour. What time do
they cut the lights off at your flats?’
‘Twenty-three thirty.’
‘It’s twenty-three at the hostel. But you have to get in earlier
than that, because — Hi! Get out, you filthy brute!’
She suddenly twisted herself over in the bed, seized a shoe from the floor, and sent it hurtling into the corner with a boyish
jerk of her arm, exactly as he had seen her fling the dictionary at
Goldstein, that morning during the Two Minutes Hate.
‘What was it?’ he said in surprise.
‘A rat. I saw him stick his beastly nose out of the wainscoting.
There’s a hole down there. I gave him a good fright, anyway.’
‘Rats!’ murmured Winston. ‘In this room!’
‘They’re all over the place,’ said Julia indifferently as she lay
down again. ‘We’ve even got them in the kitchen at the hostel.
Some parts of London are swarming with them. Did you know they
attack children? Yes, they do. In some of these streets a woman
daren’t leave a baby alone for two minutes. It’s the great huge
brown ones that do it. And the nasty thing is that the brutes always
——’
‘DON’T GO ON!’ said Winston, with his eyes tightly shut.
‘Dearest! You’ve gone quite pale. What’s the matter? Do they
make you feel sick?’
‘Of all horrors in the world — a rat!’
She pressed herself against him and wound her limbs round
him, as though to reassure him with the warmth of her body. He
did not reopen his eyes immediately. For several moments he had
had the feeling of being back in a nightmare which had recurred
from time to time throughout his life. It was always very much the
same. He was standing in front of a wall of darkness, and on the
other side of it there was something unendurable, something too
dreadful to be faced. In the dream his deepest feeling was always
one of self-deception, because he did in fact know what was behind
the wall of darkness. With a deadly effort, like wrenching a piece
out of his own brain, he could even have dragged the thing into the open. He always woke up without discovering what it was: but
somehow it was connected with what Julia had been saying when
he cut her short.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘it’s nothing. I don’t like rats, that’s all.’
‘Don’t worry, dear, we’re not going to have the filthy brutes in
here. I’ll stuff the hole with a bit of sacking before we go. And next
time we come here I’ll bring some plaster and bung it up properly.’
Already the black instant of panic was half-forgotten. Feeling
slightly ashamed of himself, he sat up against the bedhead. Julia
got out of bed, pulled on her overalls, and made the coffee. The
smell that rose from the saucepan was so powerful and exciting
that they shut the window lest anybody outside should notice it
and become inquisitive. What was even better than the taste of the
coffee was the silky texture given to it by the sugar, a thing
Winston had almost forgotten after years of saccharine. With one
hand in her pocket and a piece of bread and jam in the other, Julia
wandered about the room, glancing indifferently at the bookcase,
pointing out the best way of repairing the gateleg table, plumping
herself down in the ragged arm-chair to see if it was comfortable,
and examining the absurd twelve-hour clock with a sort of tolerant
amusement. She brought the glass paperweight over to the bed to
have a look at it in a better light. He took it out of her hand,
fascinated, as always, by the soft, rainwatery appearance of the
glass.
‘What is it, do you think?’ said Julia.
‘I don’t think it’s anything — I mean, I don’t think it was ever
put to any use. That’s what I like about it. It’s a little chunk of
history that they’ve forgotten to alter. It’s a message from a
hundred years ago, if one knew how to read it.’
‘And that picture over there’— she nodded at the engraving on the opposite wall —‘would that be a hundred years old?’
‘More. Two hundred, I dare say. One can’t tell. It’s impossible
to discover the age of anything nowadays.’
She went over to look at it. ‘Here’s where that brute stuck his
nose out,’ she said, kicking the wainscoting immediately below the
picture. ‘What is this place? I’ve seen it before somewhere.’
‘It’s a church, or at least it used to be. St Clement Danes its
name was.’ The fragment of rhyme that Mr Charrington had taught
him came back into his head, and he added half-nostalgically:
“Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement’s!”
To his astonishment she capped the line:

‘You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St
Martin’s,
When will you pay me? say the bells of Old
Bailey ——’

‘I can’t remember how it goes on after that. But anyway I
remember it ends up, “Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
here comes a chopper to chop off your head!”’
It was like the two halves of a countersign. But there must be
another line after ‘the bells of Old Bailey’. Perhaps it could be dug
out of Mr Charrington’s memory, if he were suitably prompted.
‘Who taught you that?’ he said.
‘My grandfather. He used to say it to me when I was a little
girl. He was vaporized when I was eight — at any rate, he
disappeared. I wonder what a lemon was,’ she added
inconsequently. ‘I’ve seen oranges. They’re a kind of round yellow
fruit with a thick skin.’
‘I can remember lemons,’ said Winston. ‘They were quite common in the fifties. They were so sour that it set your teeth on
edge even to smell them.’
‘I bet that picture’s got bugs behind it,’ said Julia. ‘I’ll take it
down and give it a good clean some day. I suppose it’s almost time
we were leaving. I must start washing this paint off. What a bore!
I’ll get the lipstick off your face afterwards.’
Winston did not get up for a few minutes more. The room was
darkening. He turned over towards the light and lay gazing into the
glass paperweight. The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the
fragment of coral but the interior of the glass itself. There was such
a depth of it, and yet it was almost as transparent as air. It was as
though the surface of the glass had been the arch of the sky,
enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere complete. He had the
feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it,
along with the mahogany bed and the gateleg table, and the clock
and the steel engraving and the paperweight itself. The
paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia’s life
and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.