[AC]

of the crowd, it would be safe to talk for a
quarter of an hour and arrange another meeting.
'And now I must go,' she said as soon as he had mastered his
instructions. 'I'm due back at nineteen-thirty. I've got to put in two
hours for the Junior Anti-Sex League, handing out leaflets, or something.
Isn't it bloody? Give me a brush-down, would you? Have I got any twigs in
my hair? Are you sure? Then good-bye, my love, good-bye!'
She flung herself into his arms, kissed him almost violently, and a
moment later pushed her way through the saplings and disappeared into the
wood with very little noise. Even now he had not found out her surname or
her address. However, it made no difference, for it was inconceivable that
they could ever meet indoors or exchange any kind of written communication.
As it happened, they never went back to the clearing in the wood.
During the month of May there was only one further occasion on which they
actually succeeded in making love. That was in another hidlng-place known
to Julia, the belfry of a ruinous church in an almost-deserted stretch of
country where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier. It was a good
hiding-place when once you got there, but the getting there was very
dangerous. For the rest they could meet only in the streets, in a different
place every evening and never for more than half an hour at a time. In the
street it was usually possible to talk, after a fashion. As they drifted
down the crowded pavements, not quite abreast and never looking at one
another, they carried on a curious, intermittent conversation which flicked
on and off like the beams of a lighthouse, suddenly nipped into silence by
the approach of a Party uniform or the proximity of a telescreen, then
taken up again minutes later in the mid