his breath and went on writing:

I went with her through the doorway and across a backyard into a
basement kitchen. There was a bed against the wall, and a lamp on the
table, turned down very low. She--

His teeth were set on edge. He would have liked to spit.
Simultaneously with the woman in the basement kitchen he thought of
Katharine, his wife. Winston was married -- had been married, at any rate:
probably he still was married, so far as he knew his wife was not dead. He
seemed to breathe again the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an
odour compounded of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but
nevertheless alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used scent, or
could be imagined as doing so. Only the proles used scent. In his mind the
smell of it was inextricably mixed up with fornication.
When he had gone with that woman it had been his first lapse in two
years or thereabouts. Consorting with prostitutes was forbidden, of course,
but it was one of those rules that you could occasionally nerve yourself to
break. It was dangerous, but it was not a life-and-death matter. To be
caught with a prostitute might mean five years in a forced-labour camp: not
more, if you had committed no other offence. And it was easy enough,
provided that you could avoid being caught in the act. The poorer quarters
swarmed with women who were ready to sell themselves. Some could even be
purchased for a bottle of gi