1 1984
others like her there might be in the younger generation
people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution,
knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something
unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority
but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.
They did not discuss the possibility of getting married.
It was too remote to be worth thinking about. No imagin-
able committee would ever sanction such a marriage even
if Katharine, Winston’s wife, could somehow have been got
rid of. It was hopeless even as a daydream.
‘What was she like, your wife?’ said Julia.
‘She was—do you know the Newspeak word GOOD-
THINKFUL? Meaning naturally orthodox, incapable of
thinking a bad thought?’
‘No, I didn’t know the word, but I know the kind of per-
son, right enough.’
He began telling her the story of his married life, but cu-
riously enough she appeared to know the essential parts of
it already. She described to him, almost as though she had
seen or felt it, the stiffening of Katharine’s body as soon
as he touched her, the way in which she still seemed to be
pushing him from her with all her strength, even when her
arms were clasped tightly round him. With Julia he felt no
difficulty in talking about such things: Katharine, in any
case, had long ceased to be a painful memory and became
merely a distasteful one.
‘I could have stood it if it hadn’t been for one thing,’ he
said. He told her about the frigid little ceremony that Kath-
arine had forced him to go through on the same night every