His life had become like this: an alternating round of drifting sleep followed by periods of lucidity in which he was able to rework the novel decisively, filling the margins with changes, sometimes adding whole new pages. He would wake in the middle of the night and happily read or work, then find himself sleeping half the day under the full glare of sunlight – something he was capable of doing for the first time in his life.
This morning, although wide awake, he found it impossible to concentrate. He needed a wash and a shave, and had had enough of the disgusting bedpan; he resolved to get up and use a proper bathroom, which the doctor had finally given him permission to do. He hadn’t been out of his room for weeks, his greatest exertion being to sit in the bedside chair and read the newspapers. Pyjamas were still rationed after all these years, and the ones he had on, which had been endlessly patched by Avril, now sported a variety of buttons; the pants were held up by an ill-matching length of cord. Carefully he bent down to put on his well-worn slippers, and noticed the slowness and stiffness of his movements.
Shuffling out of his room, he made the short distance to the bathroom, pushed the swing-door open with moderate difficulty and entered the space, which was cooler for its tiled floor and profusion of metal and porcelain fittings. The cubicle he wanted, which offered greater privacy, was at the end. Making his way towards it, he noticed that someone else was in the room, and moving towards him slowly. He then realised he had left on his new reading glasses, and after a few moments registered that he was in fact approaching a full-length mirror.
He stopped and removed the spectacles. The image ahead frightened him, for it was almost unrecognisable as himself. A once tall figure, now bowed and stooping, stood shakily and looked directly at him through watery eyes, scanning him up and down. There was sweat on the man’s forehead, from which skin was flaking off. A streak of obscenely grey hair ran across the top of his scalp. He had never had more than the odd grey hair before – neither for that matter had Eileen – and he raised his hand to touch it. Could it be his own? It certainly hadn’t been there a few weeks before. He tugged gently and was shocked when a tuft of it came out easily in his hand, like a ball of fluff plucked from the surface of an old blanket; disgusted, he dropped it and watched it waft to the floor.
He looked back to the mirror. From his gaunt face, scarred around the mouth from the recent blistering, protruded the only part of him that had been improved: his teeth. Perhaps the most horrible thing of all was the emaciation of his body, parts of which poked through his thin pyjamas at sharp angles, making him look like one of those anatomy class skeletons they had once dressed in the master’s gown and mortar at school. He could make out that his knees were wider than his thighs, and, further up, that his stomach – now pumped up after his recent refill – protruded well beyond the caved-in barrel of his chest. It struck him that, in his prime, he could have snapped this new version of himself in two with little effort.
Here, then, stood the body of what looked like a sixty-year-old man suffering from some malignant disease. He found it hard to believe that this scarecrow was having the same thoughts that were now running through his own mind. He was just a month or two shy of his forty-fifth birthday. How long he had left to live he didn’t know, but he knew now with certainty that time was running out.
He returned to bed and threw himself into amending the typescript. As with any book, it was only when you were well through it that you knew what it was really about. There was so much he had yet to get clear in his mind. For whom was he writing it? The future, certainly; he’d known that from the start. But whose future? He turned to the page where Winston started his diary.
April 4th, 1980.
He now felt unsure about the date. Too far into the future and it would be science fiction, like Wells’ stories, and of literary interest only; too close to today and it would be dismissed as propaganda. It wasn’t so simple, this business of communicating with the future; a possible future, as opposed to a fantastic one, had to be pitched carefully.
He had originally planned for Winston, who had been born in 1940 – the year of the battle of Airstrip One and the seizure of power by Ingsoc – to be thirty-nine or forty years old at the novel’s opening. It was the age he had been when he conceived of it – the age at which one was still young enough to have hope for the future, but realistic enough to accept that one’s fate was already largely settled. But now 1980 seemed too close. It was just thirty-two years into the future, and he could remember that far back – when he was still at Eton – as if it were yesterday. It wasn’t far enough.
He roused himself, sat up straighter, picked up the biro and changed it:
April 4th, 1982.
That sounded better. But no sooner had he written the new date than a sense of complete helplessness overcame him. The date meant nothing. He had lost his train of thought. Perhaps the treatment hadn’t just tired him out but had made something happen inside his head; sometimes it felt like there was a large patch of emptiness, as though a piece had been taken out of his brain.
Defeated, he looked at the framed picture of his son in Islington, taken when the boy was just two years old. For some months now they had stopped Richard from seeing him, as a precautionary measure, and before that he’d had to push the boy away when he tried to climb on the bed and show him his toys, including the children’s typewriter he had got for Christmas.
What sort of life, he wondered, could the boy look forward to? Certainly a better life than those living under Stalin’s gaze could ever expect. Britain may have ended the war more measured and regimented than before, but there were no torture cellars, no rubber truncheons, no goose-stepping political armies stamping on people’s faces, no June purges, no holding camps full of desperate, fearful refugees, no mass graves. In Britain, basic freedoms seemed safe for now, but their survival had been a close-run thing. How long, he wondered, could they last?
He looked at Richard’s photograph again. Would the boy, who like Winston Smith was born in 1944, know what freedom meant when he too turned forty? Would Richard’s generation know how their parents had taken a passably human world and turned it into a nightmare? Would they recognise the danger signs if ever they returned?
Orwell picked up the biro again. His mind hovered for a moment around the doubtful date on the page, before he scratched over it:
April 4th, 1984.
6
The MV Lochiel, 28 July 1948. The green and treeless hills rose up on either side of the dark waters of the Western Isles. He had never been on the ferry on a day so calm; instead of pitching and rolling its way forward, the ship seemed to be sucked onwards by some silent force moving beneath the sea’s surface. The weather was so warm and the wind so slight that he sat on the deck, enjoying the unusual sensations.
Dick had finally let him leave, but with strict orders not to exert himself. Work sparely, he had told him; even if the bacilli were now dormant, his lungs were terribly scarred, the blood veins exposed and brittle, and only time and relaxation could heal them. He would follow the advice, he decided, as it offered his best hope. Convalesce or die: Dick could hardly have been clearer. But Dick had said a lot more than that. He had told him to keep somewhere dry and warm, somewhere near a hospital, somewhere like Glasgow, where Dick himself could monitor his progress. The surgeon may as well have stamped ‘ANYWHERE BUT JURA’ across his discharge letter. But there was only so far he was willing to submit.
He scanned the draft of the novel, which was held together by a tarnished bulldog clip. The clean typescript he had taken with him to the hospital nearly eight months before was now a ragged collection of different sizes and types of paper, some lined, some not, covered in deletions and additions. This, he thought, was all he had to show for two years of work, and indeed every serious thought he had had since Spain. It would be too easy to blame the mess that lay before him on his illness, though he was certain that with more energy he could have done a proper job of it. He could re
move the bulldog clip, fling the pages overboard and start again, but he knew he wouldn’t. Every book was the product of its time – not just its era, but the days and the circumstances in which it was physically created; it had to reflect that or not get written at all. Afterwards, a writer always looked back, thinking what could have been done better, but always knowing that once the book was set in type and cast in metal, it was unalterable.
He put the manuscript back into his briefcase and pulled out the letter from Warburg which had arrived just as he was leaving Hairmyres. He had feared opening it, suspecting another missive of the ‘where is it?’ type.
Dear George
This is to tell you that the literary world simply can’t get enough of your writing. I have just received news that some fifty Japanese publishers bid for the translation rights for Animal Farm, which topped the list for publishing interest from seventy-five titles the Americans submitted to them. Unfortunately, the yen is blocked, so you can only access the money by heading to Japan. Perhaps a trip one spring in cherry blossom time might be practicable for you, if and when the world clears up.
Michael Kennard reported to me how well you looked. I was of course especially pleased to learn that you have done quite a substantial amount of revision on the new novel. From our point of view, and I should say also from your point of view, a revision of this is far and away the most important single undertaking to which you could apply yourself when the vitality is there. It should not be put aside for reviews or miscellaneous work, however tempting, and I am certain that sooner rather than later it will bring in more money than you could expect from any other activity. If you do succeed in finishing the revision by the end of the year this would be pretty satisfactory, and we should publish in the autumn of 1949, but it really is rather important from the point of view of your literary career to get it done by the end of the year, and indeed earlier if at all possible.
He knew publishers well enough to see the subtle subterfuge of flattery and urgency, yet Warburg had a point. Until this moment of the homeward journey, Dick’s parting words had been ringing in his ears. He had resolved that the book would have to wait; he could finish it slowly and still get it done, instead of trying to knock it off by Christmas as planned. The amount of work required to get it right was frightful. It might take a year, but it would be better for it. But here he was, the toast of the literary world. It was the moment to strike; he was certain.
An iron grate lifted somewhere in his mind, and Dick’s careful instructions were dropped down to some fiery place and forgotten.
*
Jura, September 1948. His biro gave out. He pushed harder, hoping to get the ink to flow, but succeeded only in scratching empty trenches between the lines of the typescript and the cheap paper. He threw the hated instrument down on the desk in disgust, then poked about in a shoebox for a fountain pen. As he sucked a nib to get the grease off, he looked out the window, seeing the remains of the flattened henhouse, which hadn’t lasted even one serious storm. To the rear of the farmhouse stood a broken truck, and inside the barn a motorbike that no longer started, meaning that he was almost completely cut off. It had been a fine late summer, but the autumn weather had been filthy, and it had been a week since he’d been in the garden. Even pulling up a weed robbed him of energy, and the colder weather had made going outside impossible.
He looked down at the desktop to see Warburg’s latest letter, which had arrived that morning. ‘Not having heard from your remote fastness for many weeks, I hope it means you have been making steady progress …’ A wave of pain shot through his chest but the spasm soon passed. Along with the worsening pains, his temperature had returned.
He reached for an enamelled metal cup – glasses would never have survived the trip, given the island’s rough roads – and the bottle of brandy next to it, poured his daily ration, a double, and knocked it back in one gulp. The immediate burning sensation in his stomach quickly gave way to a cheerfulness that put him in the right frame of mind for the day’s most important task.
Keeping on his dressing-gown, he slipped into bed, carrying the much-altered typescript with him. It felt somehow safer to work there. The horizons of his world were narrowing as the daylight shortened. Including the revisions he had done at Hairmyres, he was two-thirds through.
Now, working in bed, he couldn’t remember any beginnings or ends to his prolonged writing sessions. He drifted in and out of sleep, succumbing mid-thought, then picking it up again upon awakening. One moment he might be grappling with a particularly thorny question involving the story, and in another it might be something minor and obvious, but which his weakened mind found frustratingly difficult to resolve, like whether to include commas before or after parentheses. Then, before fully resolving either, he was dreaming or thinking, his body tired but his mind still working at full screws. The thoughts were seemingly unconnected. He was playing games as a child with his mother and Avril; at prep being flogged by the headmistress’s cruel husband, Sambo; in a dank room with an ancient, hideous prostitute whose years were concealed by layers of make-up; watching the rocket bombs falling on the East End; and once again strolling across the Golden Country, the sun at his back.
One dream stuck in his mind. He had been walking in almost total darkness – it must have been in Barcelona after his final return from the front – when he felt a voluptuousness press against his arm. It was Eileen. She looked younger and full-figured, her thick brown hair sticking out in waves from under a fetching black beret, and her painted red lips beckoning him to kiss her. The dream was like a delirium, with a weird, hallucinatory quality, possibly caused by the painkilling drugs he was taking. He sniffed her to make sure it wasn’t a dream; she had put on perfume, and he had an overwhelming desire to take her to his hideaway in the ruined church and make love to her on the ground. Yet despite her loveliness, which reminded him of why he had immediately wanted to marry her, she had the unmistakeable look of someone living under a regime of terror: the edgy sideward glance, the controlled facial expressions, the determination to be invisible.
She had taken a foolish risk and followed him. In the black of night, they may have gone unnoticed, or been taken for any other amorous Spanish couple, but the problem would come if they were stopped by the patrols: ‘Comrades, your papers …’ For this reason, they could talk only in a whisper.
‘I’ve broken my first rule, not to take risks,’ she said, as she tugged him into a shadowed doorway and kissed him hard on the lips. He felt warm tears on his cheeks. Then, as quickly as she had appeared, she disappeared, whether into the night or from his consciousness, he couldn’t tell. Although she hadn’t said it directly, he could sense what she intended to say, knowing he would figure it out the way lovers do: ‘I betrayed you and I’m sorry,’ but also: ‘I love you.’ He found himself running down the street in search of her, but she had vanished.
The intensity of the dream woke him, and he felt himself floating up to the surface of a pool, all the while trying to sink back down into the depths of unconsciousness. Tears welled in his eyes. At that moment he loved her more than ever before. He finally understood the risk she had taken. In going back to the Hotel Continental, she had acted as a decoy to make the communists believe he was still at the front. They could easily have arrested her and maybe even tortured her; after all, her administrative knowledge made her more valuable to them than he could ever have been. It was a protective act, a gesture that was futile – and yet because of its futility gloriously human. The book. He had to finish it, as an act of fidelity.
With an effort, he picked up the pen that had dropped to the floor when he had fallen asleep, and began writing a version of the encounter into the story. He had found this sort of thing happening again and again as his mind slipped between the parallel grooves created by fever, drugs and sleep. It was as if time was so precious now that not even his unconscious moments could be wasted.
Upon finishing the scene, he read it over. Immediately
he saw that the accretion of these deliriums was ruining his story. He crossed the scene out and cursed the time he had wasted on it. Flicking back through the manuscript, he could see that what had started as a naturalistic novel had descended gradually into a hallucinatory nightmare. Everything he had added since entering the hospital seemed infused with a savage, unhinged quality that made his earlier storyline seem almost schoolboy-like. Winston’s shocking physical and mental deterioration, Room 101 with its caged rats, the ticking metronomes and the luminous eyes into which Winston swam like a porpoise under the influence of drugs, the vast corridors of the Ministry of Love down which he rolled, confessing his crimes and implicating everyone he knew … It had all become so dark that his mind was overtaken by doubts.
Could he continue? He devised another way of seeing his predicament, although somewhere beneath his conscious mind he knew it to be a form of rationalisation: the faster he finished the book, the sooner he could get himself to the sanatorium, where his best chance of survival lay. Or he could drop it all now, he supposed. He could ask Rees to drive him off the island to hospital the next morning, there being a ferry at eight a.m. But the temptation quickly faded. Once in hospital, he knew all writing would end – Dick would see to that. And what if he never recovered? Without the book, he would be just another minor author who died young, leaving a legacy easily overlooked, no matter the success of Animal Farm. Unfinished, his book – now a series of scrawls unintelligible to anyone but himself – would be reduced to ashes, and he to dust, a lonely ghost uttering a truth nobody would ever hear.
*
Early November. He screwed the lid back on the pen and dropped both it and the heavy manuscript onto the floor. The pen rolled across the sloping boards until it was arrested by the lip of the rug. The revisions were finished. His mind was now prepared for the sanatorium. There was just one thing left to do: type the third and final draft. No other person could understand it in its present form, and a typist working alone, even the most professional, would surely be too tempted to muck with the many neologisms. A skilled stenographer under his eye could type the final draft in a fortnight, he guessed; Warburg should be able to find him someone suitable.
The Last Man in Europe Page 19
