down
beside him, the tang of his sweat almost defeating the tinny smell of stew,
and kept up a stream of talk about the preparations for Hate Week. He was
particularly enthusiastic about a papier-mache model of Big Brother's head,
two metres wide, which was being made for the occasion by his daughter's
troop of Spies. The irritating thing was that in the racket of voices
Winston could hardly hear what Parsons was saying, and was constantly
having to ask for some fatuous remark to be repeated. Just once he caught a
glimpse of the girl, at a table with two other girls at the far end of the
room. She appeared not to have seen him, and he did not look in that
direction again.
The afternoon was more bearable. Immediately after lunch there arrived
a delicate, difficult piece of work which would take several hours and
necessitated putting everything else aside. It consisted in falsifying a
series of production reports of two years ago, in such a way as to cast
discredit on a prominent member of the Inner Party, who was now under a
cloud. This was the kind of thing that Winston was good at, and for more
than two hours he succeeded in shutting the girl out of his mind
altogether. Then the memory of her face came back, and with it a raging,
intolerable desire to be alone. Until he could be alone it was impossible
to think this new development out. To