1984 - Planet eBook

stones were wet as though they had just been washed, andhe had the feeling that the sky had been washed too, so freshand pale was the blue between the chimney-pots. Tirelesslythe woman marched to and fro, corking and uncorkingherself, singing and falling silent, and pegging out more diapers,and more and yet more. He wondered whether shetook in washing for a living or was merely the slave of twentyor thirty grandchildren. Julia had come across to his side;together they gazed down with a sort of fascination at thesturdy figure below. As he looked at the woman in her characteristicattitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line,her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck himfor the first time that she was beautiful. It had never beforeoccurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown upto monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened,roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like anover-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and afterall, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like ablock of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relationto the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Whyshould the fruit be held inferior to the flower?‘She’s beautiful,’ he murmured.‘She’s a metre across the hips, easily,’ said Julia.‘That is her style of beauty,’ said Winston.He held Julia’s supple waist easily encircled by his arm.From the hip to the knee her flank was against his. Out oftheir bodies no child would ever come. That was the onething they could never do. Only by word of mouth, frommind to mind, could they pass on the secret. The woman