voice as before, with lips barely moving, a mere murmur
easily drowned by the din of voices and the rumbling of the trucks.
'Can you hear me?'
'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 kilometres 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 post, 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-labour c
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