1

We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes
and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball
nets were still in place, though the nets were gone. A balcony ran around the room, for the
spectators, and I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot
through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-skirted as
I knew from pictures, later in mini-skirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-streaked hair.
Dances would have been held here; the music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sound, style upon
style, an undercurrent of drums, a forlorn wail, garlands made of tissue-paper flowers, cardboard
devils, a revolving ball of mirrors, powdering the dancers with a snow of light. […]
We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability? It was in the air;
and it was still in the air, an afterthought, as we tried to sleep, in the army cots that had been set
up in rows, with spaces between so we could not talk. We had flannelette sheets, like children’s,
and army-issue blankets, old ones that still said U.S. We folded our clothes neatly and laid them
on the stools at the ends of the beds. The lights were turned down but not out. Aunt Sara and
Aunt Elizabeth patrolled; they had electric cattle prods slung on thongs from their leather belts.
No guns though, even they could not be trusted with guns. Guns were for the guards, specially
picked from the Angels. The guards weren’t allowed inside the building except when called, and
we weren’t allowed out, except for our walks, twice daily, two by two around the football field
which was enclosed now by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. The Angels stood outside
it with their backs on us. They were objects of fear to us, but of something else as well. If only
they would look. If only we could talk to them. Something could be exchanged, we thought, some
deal made, some trade-off, we still had our bodies. That was our fantasy.
We learned to whisper almost without sound. […] We learned to lip-read, our heads flat on
the beds, turned sideways, watching each other’s mouths. In this way we exchanged names, from
bed to bed:
Alma. Janine. Dolores. Moira. June.

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 1985.

 2

Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille. Onto each was dumped swiftly the
regulation lunch — a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew, a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a
mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one saccharine tablet.
'There's a table over there, under that telescreen,' said Syme. 'Let's pick up a gin on the way.'
The gin was served out to them in handleless china mugs. They threaded their way across the
crowded room and unpacked their trays onto the metal-topped table, on one corner of which
someone had left a pool of stew, a filthy liquid mess that had the appearance of vomit. Winston
took up his mug of gin, paused for an instant to collect his nerve, and gulped the oily-tasting stuff
down. When he had winked the tears out of his eyes he suddenly discovered that he was hungry.
He began swallowing spoonfuls of the stew, which, in among its general sloppiness, had cubes of
spongy pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation of meat. Neither of them spoke again till
they had emptied their pannikins. From the table at Winston's left, a little behind his back, someone
was talking rapidly and continuously, a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck, which
pierced the general uproar of the room.
'How is the Dictionary getting on?' said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise.
'Slowly,' said Syme. 'I'm on the adjectives. It's fascinating.'
He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside,
took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, and leaned across the
table so as to be able to speak without shouting.
'The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said. 'We're getting the language into its final
shape — the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with
it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is
inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words — scores of them, hundreds of
them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain
a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.'
George ORWELL, Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949).
 3

There is one window high up – you cannot see out of it. My bed had doors but they have
been taken away. There is not much else in the room. Her bed, a black press, the table in the
middle and two black chairs carved with fruit and flowers. They have high backs and no arms. The
dressing-room is very small, the room next to this one is hung with tapestry. Looking at the tapestry
one day I recognized my mother dressed in an evening gown but with bare feet. She looked away
from me, over my head just as she used to do. I wouldn’t tell Grace this. Her name oughtn’t to be
Grace. Names matter, like when he wouldn’t call me Antoinette, and I saw Antoinette drifting out
of the window with her scents, her pretty clothes and her looking-glass.
There is no looking-glass here and I don’t know what I am like now. I remember watching
myself brush my hair and how my eyes looked back at me. The girl I saw was myself yet not quite
myself. Long ago when I was a child and very lonely I tried to kiss her. But the glass was between
us – hard, cold and misted over with my breath. Now they have taken everything away. What am
I doing in this place and who am I?
The door of the tapestry room is kept locked. It leads, I know, into a passage. That is where
Grace stands and talks to another woman whom I have never seen. Her name is Leah. I listen but
I cannot understand what they say.
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966.
 4

The staircase itself is a steep spiral. To pass the time while descending it, a photographic Belsey
family gallery has been hung on the walls, following each turn that you make. The children come
first in black and white: podgy and dimpled, haloed with curls. They seem always to be tumbling
towards the viewer and over each other, folding on their sausage legs. Frowning Jerome, holding
baby Zora, wondering what she is. Zora cradling tiny wrinkled Levi with the crazed, proprietorial
look of a woman who steals children from hospital wards. School portraits, graduations, swimming
pools, restaurants, gardens and vacation shots follow, monitoring physical development,
confirming character. After the children come four generations of the Simmondses‘ maternal line.
These are placed in triumphant, deliberate sequence: Kiki‘s great-great-grandmother, a house-
slave; great-grandmother, a maid; and then her grandmother, a nurse. It was nurse Lily who
inherited this whole house from a benevolent white doctor with whom she had worked closely for
twenty years, back in Florida. An inheritance on this scale changes everything for a poor family in
America: it makes them middle class. And 83 Langham is a fine middle-class house, larger even
than it looks on the outside, with a small pool out back, unheated and missing many of its white
tiles, like a British smile.
Zadie Smith, On Beauty, Hamish Hamilton, 2005.
 5

I succumbed to the flattery of a man who wasn’t there, and in that moment of weakness I said
yes. I’ll be glad to read the work, I said, and do whatever I can to help. Sophie smiled at this —
whether from happiness or disappointment I could never tell — and then stood up from the sofa
and carried the baby into the next room. She stopped in front of a tall oak cupboard, unlatched the
door, and let it swing open on its hinges. There you are, she said. There were boxes and binders
and folders and notebooks cramming the shelves — more things than I would have thought
possible. I remember laughing with embarrassment and making some feeble joke. Then, all
business, we discussed the best way for me to carry the manuscripts out of the apartment,
eventually deciding on two large suitcases. It took the better part of an hour, but in the end we
managed to squeeze everything in. Clearly, I said, it was going to take me some time to sift through
all the material. Sophie told me not to worry, and then she apologized for burdening me with such
a job. I said that I understood, that there was no way she could have refused to carry out Fanshawe’s
request. It was all very dramatic, and at the same time gruesome, almost comical. The beautiful
Sophie delicately put the baby down on the floor, gave me a great hug of thanks, and then kissed
me on the cheek.

Paul Auster, The Locked Room (from The New York Trilogy), 1986.
 6

She said this quite softly, and because people were still shouting, she was more or less drowned
out. But I heard her clearly enough. ‘You get terrible accidents sometimes.’ What accidents?
Where? But no one picked her up on it, and we went back to discussing our poem.
There were other little incidents like that, and before long I came to see Miss Lucy as being not
quite like the other guardians. It’s even possible I began to realise, right back then, the nature of
her worries and frustrations. But that’s probably going too far; chances are, at the time, I noticed
all these things without knowing what on earth to make of them. And if these incidents now seem
full of significance and all of a piece, it’s probably because I’m looking at them in the light of what
came later – particularly what happened that day at the pavilion while we were sheltering from the
downpour.
We were fifteen by then, already into our last year at Hailsham. We’d been in the pavilion getting
ready for a game of rounders. The boys were going through a phase of ‘enjoying’ rounders in order
to flirt with us, so there were over thirty of us that afternoon. The downpour had started while we
were changing, and we found ourselves gathering on the veranda – which was sheltered by the
pavilion roof – while we waited for it to stop. But the rain kept going, and when the last of us had
emerged, the veranda was pretty crowded, with everyone milling around restlessly. I remember
Laura was demonstrating to me an especially disgusting way of blowing your nose for when you
really wanted to put off a boy.
Miss Lucy was the only guardian present. She was leaning over the rail at the front, peering into
the rain like she was trying to see right across the playing field. I was watching her as carefully as
ever in those days, and even as I was laughing at Laura, I was stealing glances at Miss Lucy’s back.
I remember wondering if there wasn’t something a bit odd about her posture, the way her head
was bent down just a little too far so she looked like a crouching animal waiting to pounce.
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 2005.
 7

Jean visited the Grand Canyon in November. The north rim was closed, and the snowploughs
had been out chivvying the road from Williams to the south rim. She booked into the lodge at the
Canyon’s edge; it was early evening. She did not hurry with her unpacking, and even went to the
hotel gift shop before looking at the Canyon itself. Not putting off the pleasure, but the reverse;
for Jean expected disappointment. At the last minute, she had even considered rescripting her
Seven Wonders and visiting the Golden Gate Bridge instead.
A foot of snow lay on the ground and the sun, almost level with the horizon, had thrown a firm-
wristed sweep of orange across the mountains opposite. The sun’s kingdom began exactly at the
snowline: above, the orange mountain crests had orange snow beneath indolent orange clouds;
drop below the line and everything changed into dry browns and buffs and umbers, while far, far
down, some murky greens enclosed a trickle of silver – like a lurex thread in a dull tweed suit. Jean
gripped the frosty guard-rail and was glad to be alone, glad that what she saw didn’t have to be
translated into words, to be reported, discussed, annotated. The extravagant fish-eye view was
bigger, deeper, wider, grander, savager, more beautiful and frightening than she had thought
possible; but even this alignment of excited adjectives failed her. Rachel, Gregory’s most combative
girlfriend, had told her before she set off, “Yeah, it’s like coming all the time.” No doubt she’d
been trying to shock, and these remembered words were indeed shocking; but only in their
inadequacy.

Julian BARNES, Staring at the Sun, 1986.

 8

What was a cricket match, what was a supper, without songs? A chill settled on our wine-warmed
spirits and there was no more wine to thaw it. It was early: the evening stretched ahead, an unending
blank. Would no one volunteer to fill the gap? Lord Trimingham’s ill matched eyes, which always
had the gleam of authority behind them, roved round the room and were avoided as sedulously as
if they had been an auctioneer’s; certainly I kept mine fixed on the table-cloth, for Marcus knew
that I could play the piano a little. But suddenly, when everyone seemed to be rooted in their places,
immovably, never to rise, never to look up, as long as an accompanist was being sought for, there
was a movement, a flutter to the vertical, almost as if a standard was being raised; and before the
relaxation of relief had had time to ease our stiffened bodies, Marian had walked swiftly down the
hall, and was seated at the piano stool. How lovely she looked in her Gainsborough-blue dress
between the candles! From there, as from a throne, she looked down at us. Amused and a little
mocking, as though to say: I’ve done my part, now you do yours.

L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between,1953.

 9

From where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad.

Look at him: seated primly on the hotel lobby’s plush round sofa, blue suit and white shirt, legs
knee-crossed so that one polished loafer hangs free of its heel. The pose of a young man. His slim
shadow is, in fact, still that of his younger self, but at nearly fifty he is like those bronze statues in
public parks that, despite one lucky knee rubbed raw by schoolchildren, discolor beautifully until
they match the trees. So has Arthur Less, once pink and gold with youth, faded like the sofa he sits
on, tapping one finger on his knee and staring at the grandfather clock. The long patrician nose
perennially burned by the sun (even in cloudy New York October). The washed-out blond hair too
long on the top, too short on the sides – portrait of his grandfather. Those same watery blue eyes.
Listen: you might hear anxiety ticking, ticking, ticking away as he stares at that clock, which
unfortunately is not ticking itself. It stopped fifteen years ago. Arthur Less is not aware of this; he
still believes, at his ripe age, that escorts for literary events arrive on time and bellboys reliably wind
the lobby clocks. He wears no watch; his faith is fast. It is mere coincidence that the clock stopped
at half past six, almost exactly the hour when he is to be taken to tonight’s event. The poor man
does not know it, but the time is already quarter to seven.
Andrew Sean Greer, Less, 2017.
 10

An outward-bound mail-boat had come in that afternoon, and the big dining-room of the hotel
was more than half full of people with a-hundred-pounds-round-the-world tickets in their pockets.
There were married couples looking domesticated and bored with each other in the midst of their
travels; there were small parties and large parties, and lone individuals dining solemnly or feasting
boisterously, but all thinking, conversing, joking, or scowling as was their wont at home; and just
as intelligently receptive of new impressions as their trunks upstairs. Henceforth they would be
labelled as having passed through this and that place, and so would be their luggage. They would
cherish this distinction of their persons, and preserve the gummed tickets on their portmanteaus
as documentary evidence, as the only permanent trace of their improving enterprise. The dark-
faced servants tripped without noise over the vast and polished floor; now and then a girl's laugh
would be heard, as innocent and empty as her mind, or, in a sudden hush of crockery, a few words
in an affected drawl from some wit embroidering for the benefit of a grinning tableful the last
funny story of shipboard scandal. Two nomadic old maids, dressed up to kill, worked
acrimoniously through the bill of fare, whispering to each other with faded lips, wooden-faced and
bizarre, like two sumptuous scarecrows. A little wine opened Jim's heart and loosened his tongue.
His appetite was good, too, I noticed.
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, 1900.
 11

One night in the bedroom, Matthew asked: ‘Susan, I don’t want to interfere – don’t think that,
please – but are you sure you are well?’
She was brushing her hair at the mirror. She made two more strokes on either side of her head,
before she replied: ‘Yes, dear, I am sure I am well.’
He was lying on his back, his big blond head on his hands, his elbows angled up and
partconcealing his face. He said: ‘Then Susan, I have to ask you this question, though you must
understand, I’m not putting any sort of pressure on you.’ (Susan heard the word pressure with
dismay, because this was inevitable, of course she could not go on like this.) ‘Are things going to
go on like this?’
‘Well,’ she said, going vague and bright and idiotic again, so as to escape: ‘Well, I don’t see why
not.’
He was jerking his elbows up and down, in annoyance or in pain, and, looking at him, she saw
he had got thin, even gaunt; and restless angry movements were not what she remembered of him.
He said: ‘Do you want a divorce, is that it?’
At this, Susan only with the greatest difficulty stopped herself from laughing: she could hear the
bright bubbling laughter she would have emitted, had she let herself. He could only mean one
thing: she had a lover, and that was why she spent her days in London, as lost to him as if she had
vanished to another continent.
Then the small panic set in again: she understood that he hoped she did have a lover, he was
begging her to say so, because otherwise it would be too terrifying.

Doris Lessing, To Room Nineteen. 1978.

 12

It was a night of violent but erratic storm, the wind varying in intensity and even in direction
from hour to hour. At ten o’clock it was little more than a sobbing obbligato among the elms. An
hour later it suddenly reached a crescendo of fury. The great elms around Nightingale House
cracked and groaned under the onslaught, while the wind screamed among them like the
cachinnation of devils. Along the deserted paths, the banks of dead leaves, still heavy with rain,
shifted sluggishly then broke apart into drifts and rose in wild swirls like demented insects, to glue
themselves against the black barks of the trees. In the operating theatre at the top of the hospital
Mr Courtney-Briggs demonstrated his imperturbability in the face of crisis by muttering to his
attendant registrar that it was a wild night before bending his head again to the satisfying
contemplation of an intriguing surgical problem which throbbed between the retracted lips of the
wound. Below him in the silent and dimly lit wards the patients muttered and turned in their sleep
as if conscious of the tumult outside. The radiographer, who had been called from home to take
urgent X-rays of Mr Courtney-Briggs’s patient, replaced the covers on the apparatus, switched out
the lights and wondered whether her small car would hold the road. The night nurses moved
silently among their patients testing the windows, drawing the curtains more closely as if to keep
out some threatening and alien force. The porter on duty in the main gate lodge shifted uneasily in
his chair then rose cramped to his feet and put a couple more chunks of coal on the fire. The little
house seemed to shake with every gust of wind.
But shortly before midnight the storm abated, as if sensing the approach of the witching hour,
the dead of night when the pulse of man beats slowest and the dying patient slips most easily into
the last oblivion. There was an eerie silence for about five minutes, succeeded by a soft rhythmic
moaning as the wind swooped and sighed among the trees as if exhausted by its own fury.

P.D. James, Shroud for a Nightingale, 1971.