Anna Funder

Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life

Wifedom

Eileen was the embodiment of the 'fundamental decency' of human beings Orwell treasured. Over his career he came to realise this was the single most important quality that could save us from mindless capitulation to power gone wrong — to the structures that oppress us while selling themselves on keeping us 'safe'. It was a quality he would have liked to have had.

She turns around, takes a deep breath. Her eye runs along the bookshelf till it meets McNair's copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf. Even though it's in French as Mon Combat, it would not look good for them in a Stalinist raid. As she takes it down, a slimmer thing, almost a pamphlet, falls out: Stalin's 'Measures for Liquidating Trotskyists and Other Double Dealers'. That wouldn't look good either. She makes a pile on the desk of materials about the fascism they're fighting, which could now be used to make them look like fascists. She lives, she thinks, in a zone of dangerous irony, if there is such a place.

Sometimes, as I sign books for people after an event, I channel the novelist Richard Ford. I once heard him explain why he feels he is always, inevitably, a disappointment to readers when they meet him. I put my best self into my work,' he said, opening out his hands, 'and I am not my best work.'

To my mind, a person is not their work, just where it came from. To want the two to be the same, on pain of 'cancellation', is a new kind of tyranny. And from there, no art comes.

He laughs. She knows editing is a thrill to him, the dangerous pleasure of having someone see you more clearly than you can.

This work of boiling glass and vats of fruit over a flame under a tin roof is like something from a fairy tale, the master upstairs coughing, trying to spin gold from ink. Possibly this boiling vat is just a distraction from what is happening between them.

Three years ago they set this teeming life in motion. Every garden bed built up and trench dug, every flower and fruit seeded was a down payment on a dream. Back then, their arguments were couched in laughter; they were on the same side of the wheelbarrow/trench/shovel/sink/axe. Their disagreements had seemed to be about the trivialities of how to live — dressing for dinner ('at the cottage??' she'd exclaimed), decanting marmalade for the table. But now she sees that those wrangles were really about who would do the work: who would gift the other time.

Now, she's on a triple shift, working by day at the Ministry; doing all the housework, shopping and cooking; and editing and typing his work in the hours that are left. She left no complaints -a good friend of hers later said - she seemed 'unruffled' by their 'gypsy lifestyle'. Perhaps she considers the triple load to be the price of the choice she made to link her life to a writer, in the hope that the satisfactions of his work will satisfy her too. Perhaps, even, she sees what he will never say, which is that his output requires the work of two.

Orwell confides in the poet Paul Potts, who is now reduced to selling handwritten poems in Soho pubs for drinks, 'hawking his words like stolen meat'.

At his request she dyes his military greatcoat black, to demilitarise it (it doesn't work). She accidentally shrinks his wool beret from the Home Guard when she's dyeing that too - he doesn't care; puts it on his head like a burnt pancake, grabs a Burmese sword from the wall and does 'a kind of waltz'.

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