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"Yes."
"Can you get Sunday afternoon off?"
"Yes."
"Then listen carefully. You'll have to remember this. Go to Paddington Station—"
With a sort of military precision that astonished him, she outlined the route that he was to follow. A
half-hour railway journey; turn left outside the station; two kilometers along the road; a gate with the
top bar missing; a path across a field; a grass-grown lane; a track between bushes; a dead tree with
moss on it. It was as though she had a map inside her head. "Can you remember all that?" she
murmured finally.
"Yes."
"You turn left, then right, then left again. And the gate's got no top bar."
"Yes. What time?"
"About fifteen. You may have to wait. I'll get there by another way. Are you sure you remember
everything?"
"Yes."
"Then get away from me as quick as you can."
She need not have told him that. But for the moment they could not extricate themselves from the
crowd. The trucks were still filing past, the people still insatiably gaping. At the start there had been
a few boos and hisses, but it came only from the Party members among the crowd, and had soon
stopped. The prevailing emotion was simply curiosity. Foreigners, whether from Eurasia or from
Eastasia, were a kind of strange animal. One literally never saw them except in the guise of prisoners,
and even as prisoners one never got more than a momentary glimpse of them. Nor did one know what
became of them, apart from the few who were hanged as war criminals; the others simply vanished,
presumably into forced-labor camps. The round Mongol faces had given way to faces of a more
European type, dirty, bearded, and exhausted. From over scrubby cheekbones eyes looked into
Winston's, sometimes with strange intensity, and flashed away again. The convoy was drawing to an
end. In the last truck he could see an aged man, his face a mass of grizzled hair, standing upright with
wrists crossed in front of him, as though he were used to having them bound together. It was almost
time for Winston and the girl to part. But at the last moment, while the crowd still hemmed them in,
her hand felt for his and gave it a fleeting squeeze.
It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped
together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand. He explored the long fingers, the shapely
nails, the work-hardened palm with its row of calluses, the smooth flesh under the wrist. Merely from