Keep the Aspidistra Flying (35 page)

‘No, it isn’t. Anyway we aren’t going to have that aspidistra.’

‘Yes, we are.’

‘We are
not
, Gordon!’

‘Yes.’

‘No!’

‘Yes!’

‘
No!
’

She did not understand him. She thought he was merely being perverse. They grew heated, and, according to their habit, quarrelled violently. It was their first quarrel as man and wife. Half an hour later they went out to the florist’s to order the aspidistra.

But when they were half-way down the first flight of
stairs Rosemary stopped short and clutched the banister. Her lips parted; she looked very queer for a moment. She pressed a hand against her middle.

‘Oh, Gordon!’

‘What?’

‘I felt it move!’

‘Felt what move?’

‘The baby. I felt it move inside me.’

‘You did?’

A strange, almost terrible feeling, a sort of warm convulsion, stirred in his entrails. For a moment he felt as though he were sexually joined to her, but joined in some subtle way that he had never imagined. He had paused a step or two below her. He fell on his knees, pressed his ear to her belly and listened.

‘I can’t hear anything,’ he said at last.

‘Of course not, silly! Not for months yet.’

‘But I shall be able to hear it later on, shan’t I?’

‘I think so.
You
can hear it at seven months,
I
can feel it at four. I think that’s how it is.’

‘But it did really move? You’re sure? You really felt it move?’

‘Oh, yes. It moved.’

For a long time he remained kneeling there, his head pressed against the softness of her belly. She clasped her hands behind his head and pulled it closer. He could hear nothing, only the blood drumming in his own ear. But she could not have been mistaken. Somewhere in there, in the safe, warm, cushioned darkness, it was alive and stirring.

Well, once again things were happening in the Comstock family.

THE END

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First published by Victor Gollancz 1936
Uniform Edition published by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1954
Published in Penguin Books 1962
This edition first published by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd
in the Complete Works of George Orwell series 1987
Published in Penguin Books with a new Note on the Text 1989

Copyright 1936 by Eric Blair
This edition copyright © the Estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell, 1987
Note on the Text copyright © Peter Davison, 1989
All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
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ISBN: 978-0-14-191391-9