1984 - Planet eBook

oom were meant to be lived in. There was a strip of carpeton the floor, a picture or two on the walls, and a deep,slatternly arm-chair drawn up to the fireplace. An old-fashionedglass clock with a twelve-hour face was ticking awayon the mantelpiece. Under the window, and occupyingnearly a quarter of the room, was an enormous bed withthe mattress still on it.‘We lived here till my wife died,’ said the old man halfapologetically. ‘I’m selling the furniture off by little andlittle. Now that’s a beautiful mahogany bed, or at least itwould be if you could get the bugs out of it. But I dare sayyou’d find it a little bit cumbersome.’He was holdlng the lamp high up, so as to illuminate thewhole room, and in the warm dim light the place lookedcuriously inviting. The thought flitted through Winston’smind that it would probably be quite easy to rent the roomfor a few dollars a week, if he dared to take the risk. It was awild, impossible notion, to be abandoned as soon as thoughtof; but the room had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia, asort of ancestral memory. It seemed to him that he knewexactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this, in an armchairbeside an open fire with your feet in the fender and akettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobodywatching you, no voice pursuing you, no sound except thesinging of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.‘There’s no telescreen!’ he could not help murmuring.‘Ah,’ said the old man, ‘I never had one of those things.Too expensive. And I never seemed to feel the need of it,somehow. Now that’s a nice gateleg table in the corner there.