[~Tony~]

quite near at
hand. Suddenly he became aware of Julia's face a few centimetres from his
own, deathly white, as white as chalk. Even her lips were white. She was
dead! He clasped her against him and found that he was kissing a live warm
face. But there was some powdery stuff that got in the way of his lips.
Both of their faces were thickly coated with plaster.
There were evenings when they reached their rendezvous and then had to
walk past one another without a sign, because a patrol had just come round
the corner or a helicopter was hovering overhead. Even if it had been less
dangerous, it would still have been difficult to find time to meet.
Winston's working week was sixty hours, Julia's was even longer, and their
free days varied according to the pressure of work and did not often
coincide. Julia, in any case, seldom had an evening completely free. She
spent an astonishing amount of time in attending lectures and
demonstrations, distributing literature for the junior Anti-Sex League,
preparing banners for Hate Week, making collections for the savings
campaign, and such-like activities. It paid, she said, it was camouflage.
If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones. She even induced
Winston to mortgage yet another of his evenings by enrolling himself for
the part-time munition work which was done voluntarily by zealous Party
members. So, one evening every week, Winston spent four hours of paralysing
boredom, screwing together small bits of metal which were probably parts of
bomb fuses, in a draughty, ill-lit workshop where the knocking of hammers
mingled drearily with the music of the telescreens.
When they met in the church tower the gaps in their fragmentary
conversation were filled up. It was a blazing afternoo