ATDTDA (16): Actually enjoying his solitude, 431-433 #2

[Paul Nightingale]

Returning to the rest of the crew he has to successfully deal with
temptation; the Lindsay that ends this section is the one we find familiar,
"[shaking] his head at the tableau of chemical debauchery before him" (433).
However, "[f]or a terrible moment", he fails to recognise "his real fellow
crewmen", whom he seems to remember as somehow different, ie not partaking
of said "chemical debauchery". There is perhaps an overlap with the
Candlebrow scenes here: the group taking the waters appears "a ghost-Unit,
from some Abode he wished never to visit", and 'normality' is somehow akin
to "the early boys'-book innocence" that experience, and "the corrupt
embrace of the Trespassers", had previously threatened (418).

Consider the ambiguity surrounding "the fatal word" he isn't allowed even to
think, let alone say (top of 432). The context indicates "wife"; the writing
indicates the intrusion of the Chums' narrator with the censorship of what
appears to be 'damnation', ie some kind of unspecified punishment for
transgression (echoed at the end of the section, bottom of 433, when
Lindsay's "seventeen-syllable all-purpose threat" cannot be described). This
rupture comes when, travelling alone with no distractions, no need to police
the activities of others, and therefore no need to police his own activities
or even thoughts, Lindsay speculates about light "[striking] in a particular
way the hair, and thereby delay[ing] the execution of a politically
dangerous wife" (432). This is more than "the word he had been forbidden ...
even to subvocalise", given that the wife in question, considered guilty,
has escaped punishment, for the time being. One can infer that her political
crime is that of seduction, provoking/stimulating/inspiring the "abnormal
desire" that must be repressed.