The Dictionary of Lost Words : A Novel (2020)

by Williams, Pip

‘What was she doing under there?’ he asked.

  ‘Whatever children do under tables, I suppose,’ said Mr Sweatman, and his smile met mine.

  Da leaned towards me. ‘Let Dr Murray know that the new assistant has arrived, Esme.’

  I ran across the garden to the kitchen, and Mrs Ballard walked with me to the dining room.

  Dr Murray sat at one end of the large table, Mrs Murray at the other. There was room for all eleven of their children in between, but three had flown the coop, Lizzie said. The rest were spread along each side of the table, the biggest at Dr Murray’s end, the littlest in high chairs near their mother. I stood dumb as they finished saying grace, then Elsie and Rosfrith waved and I waved back, my message suddenly less important.

  ‘Our new assistant?’ Dr Murray said over his spectacles when he saw me lurking.

  I nodded, and he rose. The rest of the Murrays began to eat.

  In the Scriptorium, Da was explaining something to Mr Crane, who turned when he heard us come in.

  ‘Dr Murray, sir. An honour to join your team,’ he said, holding out his hand and bowing slightly.

  Dr Murray cleared his throat. It sounded a bit like a grunt. He shook Mr Crane’s hand. ‘It’s not for everyone,’ he said. ‘Takes a certain … diligence. Are you diligent, Mr Crane?’

  ‘Of course, sir,’ he said.

  Dr Murray nodded then returned to the house to finish lunch.

  Da continued with his tour. Whenever he told Mr Crane something about the way the slips were sorted, Mr Crane would nod and say, ‘Quite straightforward.’

  ‘The slips are sent in by volunteers all over the world,’ I said, when Da was showing him how the pigeon-holes were ordered.

  Mr Crane looked down at me, frowned a little but made no response. I stepped back a fraction.

  Mr Sweatman put a hand on my shoulder. ‘I came across a slip from Australia once,’ he said. ‘That’s about as far away from England as you can get.’

  When Dr Murray returned from lunch to give Mr Crane his instructions, I didn’t sit and listen.

  ‘Will he be here for a little while or forever?’ I whispered to Da.

  ‘For the duration,’ he said. ‘So, probably forever.’

  I crawled beneath the sorting table, and a few minutes later an unfamiliar pair of shoes joined those I knew so well.

  Mr Crane’s shoes were old, like Da’s, but they hadn’t been polished in a while. I watched as they tried to settle. He crossed his right leg over his left, then his left over his right. Eventually, he wrapped his ankles around the front legs of his chair, and it looked as though his shoes were trying to hide from me.

  Just before Lizzie was to take me back to school, a whole pile of slips fell beside Mr Crane’s chair. I heard Da say that some of the C bundles had become ‘unwieldy with the weight of possibility’. He made that little noise he made when he thought he was being funny.

  Mr Crane didn’t laugh. ‘They were poorly tied,’ he said, bending to sweep up as many slips as he could in a single movement. His fingers closed into a fist around them, and I saw the slips crushed. I let out a little gasp, and it made him bump his head on the underside of the table.

  ‘Alright there, Mr Crane?’ asked Mr Maling.

  ‘Surely the girl is too big to be under there.’

  ‘It’s just until she returns to school,’ said Mr Sweatman.

  When my breathing settled, and the Scriptorium returned to its regular shuffle and hum, I searched the shadows under the sorting table. Two slips still rested beside Mr Worrall’s tidy shoes, as if they knew they would be safe from some careless tread. I picked them up and had a sudden memory of the trunk beneath Lizzie’s bed. I couldn’t bring myself to return them to Mr Crane.

  When I saw Lizzie hovering at the door, I emerged beside Da’s chair.

  ‘That time already?’ he said, but I had a feeling he’d been watching the clock.

  I put the exercise book in my satchel and joined Lizzie in the garden.

  ‘Can I put something in the trunk before going back to school?’

  It had been a long time since I’d put anything in the trunk, but Lizzie took no more than a moment to understand. ‘I’ve often wondered if you’d find anything else to put in it.’

  The slips weren’t the only words that found their way into the trunk.

  On the floor of Da’s wardrobe were two wooden boxes. I found them when we were playing hide-and-seek. The sharp corner of one stuck painfully into my back as I pushed myself into the furthest corner. I opened it.

  It was too dark among Da’s coats and Lily’s musty dresses to see what was inside, but my hand stroked the edges of what felt like envelopes. Then there was a clomping on the stairs, and Da sang ‘Fee Fi Fo Fum’. I closed the lid and shuffled towards the centre of the wardrobe. Light flooded in, and I jumped out into his arms.

  Later that night, when I should have been asleep, I wasn’t. Da was still downstairs correcting proofs, so I sneaked out of bed and tip-toed across the landing to his bedroom. ‘Open Sesame,’ I whispered, and pulled on the wardrobe doors.

  I reached in and brought out each box. I sat with them beneath Da’s window, the dusky evening light still good enough to see by. They were almost the same – pale wood with brass corners – but one box was polished, the other dull. I pulled the polished box closer and caressed the honeyed wood. A hundred envelopes, thick and thin, pressed against each other in the order they were sent. His plain white against her blue. They mostly alternated, though sometimes there were two or three white in a row, as if Da had a lot to say about something that Lily had lost interest in. If I read the letters first to last they would tell a story of their courtship, but I knew it was a story with a sad ending. I closed the box without opening a single one.

  The other box was also full of letters, but none were from Lily. They were from different people and were tied in bundles with string. The biggest bundle was from Ditte. I slid the latest letter from beneath the string and read it. It was mostly about the Dictionary; about the C words that never seemed to end, and how the Press Delegates kept asking Dr Murray to work more quickly because the Dictionary was costing too much. But the last bit was about me.

  Ada Murray tells me James has the children sorting slips. She painted quite a picture of them huddled around the dining table late into the night, barely visible under a mountain of paper. She even ventured to say that she thought this may have been his motive for a big brood all along. Thank goodness for her sense and good humour. I do believe the Dictionary might have faltered without it.

  You must tell Esme to stay well-hidden when she’s in the Scrippy or she will be Dr Murray’s next recruit. I daresay she’s bright enough, and I wonder if she would, in fact, be willing.

  Yours,

  Edith

  I put both boxes back in the wardrobe then I tip-toed across the landing. The letter was still in my hand.

  The next day, Lizzie watched as I opened the trunk. I pulled Ditte’s letter from my pocket and placed it on top of the slips that covered the bottom.

  ‘You’re collecting a lot of secrets,’ she said, her hand finding the cross beneath her clothes.

  ‘It’s about me,’ I said.

  ‘Discarded or neglected?’ She’d insisted on rules.

  I thought about it. ‘Forgotten,’ I said.

  I returned to the wardrobe again and again to read Ditte’s letters – there was always something about me; some answer to a query of Da’s. It was as if I were a word and the letters were slips that helped define me. If I read them all, I thought, maybe I would make more sense.

  But I could never bring myself to read the letters in the polished box. I liked to look at them, to run my hand across their spines and feel them flutter past. They were together in that box, my mother and my father, and when sleep was about to catch me, I sometimes imagined I could hear their muffled voices. One night I sneaked into Da’s room and crawled like a hunting cat into the wardrobe. I wanted to catch them
unawares. But when I lifted the lid of their polished box, they went quiet. A terrible loneliness shadowed me back to bed and kept me from sleeping.

  The next morning, I was too tired for school. Da took me to Sunnyside, and I spent the morning beneath the sorting table with blank slips and coloured pencils. I wrote my name in different colours on ten different slips.

  When I opened the polished box later that night, I nestled each slip between a white envelope and a blue. We were together now, all three of us. I wouldn’t miss a thing.

  The trunk beneath Lizzie’s bed began to feel the weight of all the letters and words.

  ‘No shells or stones. Nothing pretty,’ Lizzie said when I opened it one afternoon. ‘Why do you collect all this paper, Essymay?’

  ‘It’s not the paper I’m collecting, Lizzie; it’s the words.’

  ‘But what’s so important about these words?’ she asked.

  I didn’t know, exactly. It was more feeling than thought. Some words were just like baby birds fallen from the nest. With others, I felt as though I’d come across a clue: I knew it was important, but I wasn’t sure why. Ditte’s letters were the same, like parts of a jigsaw that might one day fit together to explain something Da didn’t know how to say – something Lily might have.

  I didn’t know how to say any of this, so I asked, ‘Why do you do needlepoint, Lizzie?’

  She was quiet for a very long time. She folded her washing and changed the sheets on her bed.

  I stopped waiting for an answer and went back to reading a letter from Ditte to Da. Have you considered what to do when Esme outgrows St Barnabas? she asked. I thought about my head popping through the chimney of the schoolroom and my arms extending out the windows on both sides.

  ‘I guess I like to keep me hands busy,’ Lizzie said. For a moment I forgot what I’d asked. ‘And it proves I exist,’ she added.

  ‘But that’s silly. Of course you exist.’

  She stopped making the bed and looked at me with such seriousness I put down Ditte’s letter.

  ‘I clean, I help with the cooking, I set the fires. Everything I do gets eaten or dirtied or burned – at the end of a day there’s no proof I’ve been here at all.’ She paused, kneeled down beside me and stroked the embroidery on the edge of my skirt. It hid the repair she’d made when I tore it on brambles.

  ‘Me needlework will always be here,’ she said. ‘I see this and I feel … well, I don’t know the word. Like I’ll always be here.’

  ‘Permanent,’ I said. ‘And the rest of the time?’

  ‘I feel like a dandelion just before the wind blows.’

  The Scriptorium always went quiet for a while over summer. ‘There’s more to life than words,’ Da said once, when I asked where everyone went, but I didn’t think he meant it. We sometimes went to Scotland to visit my aunt, but we were always back at Sunnyside before all the other assistants. I loved waiting beneath the sorting table for each pair of shoes to return. When Dr Murray came in, he would always ask Da if he’d forgotten to bring me home, and Da would always pretend he had. Then Dr Murray would look beneath the sorting table and wink at me.

  At the end of the summer of the year I turned eleven, Mr Mitchell’s feet failed to appear, and Dr Murray came into the Scriptorium saying very little. I waited to see a green-socked ankle crossed over a pale blue, but there was a gap where Mr Mitchell usually sat. The other feet seemed limp, and even though Mr Sweatman’s shoes tapped up and down, they were tuneless.

  ‘When will Mr Mitchell come back?’ I asked Da. He took a long time to answer.

  ‘He fell, Essy. While climbing a mountain. He won’t be back.’

  I thought of his odd socks and the coloured pencils he’d given me. I’d used them until there was nothing left to hold, and that was years before. My world beneath the sorting table felt less comfortable.

  When the year turned, the sorting table seemed to have shrunk. I crawled beneath it one afternoon and hit my head when I crawled out.

  ‘Look at the state of your dress,’ Lizzie said when she collected me for afternoon tea. It was patterned with smudges and dust. She beat off what she could, ‘It ain’t ladylike to crawl about the Scrippy, Essymay. I don’t know why your father lets you.’

  ‘Because I’m not a lady,’ I said.

  ‘You ain’t a cat, either.’

  When I returned to the Scriptorium, I navigated the perimeter. I trailed my funny fingers over shelves and books and collected little wads of dust. I wouldn’t mind being a cat, I thought.

  Mr Sweatman winked at me as I passed near him.

  Mr Maling said, ‘Kiel vi fartas, Esme?’

  I said, ‘I’m well, thank you, Mr Maling.’

  He looked at me and raised his eyebrows. ‘And in Esperanto you would say?’

  I had to think. ‘Mi fartas bone, dankon.’

  He smiled and nodded. ‘Bona.’

  Mr Crane took a deep breath to let everyone know I was a disturbance.

  I considered slinking beneath the sorting table, but didn’t. It was a grown-up decision, and I felt a sulk take hold as if someone other than me had made it. Instead, I found a space between two shelves and shuffled awkwardly into place, disturbing cobwebs and dust and two lost slips.

  They’d been hidden beneath the shelf on my right. I picked up one and then the other. C words, only recently lost. I tucked them away then looked over to the sorting table. Mr Crane sat closest, and there was another word by his chair. I wondered if he even cared.

  ‘She’s light-fingered,’ I heard Mr Crane say to Dr Murray. Dr Murray turned my way, and a chill spread through me. I thought I might turn to stone. He returned to his high desk and picked up a proof. Then he walked over to Da.

  Dr Murray tried to make it look as though they were talking about the words, but neither looked at the proof. When Dr Murray had moved away, Da looked along the length of the sorting table to the gap between the shelves. He caught my eye and signalled towards the Scriptorium door.

  When we were standing under the ash, Da held out his hand. I just looked at it. He said my name louder than he’d ever said it before. Then he made me turn out my pockets.

  The word was flimsy and uninteresting, but I liked the quotation. When I put it in his hand, Da looked at it as if he didn’t know what it was. As if he didn’t know what he should do with it. I saw his lips move around the word and the sentence that contained it.

  COUNT

  ‘I count you for a fool.’ – Tennyson, 1859

  For a very long time he said nothing. We stood there in the cold as if we were playing a game of statues and neither of us wanted to be the first to move. Then he put the slip in his trouser pocket and steered me towards the kitchen.

  ‘Lizzie, would it be alright if Esme spent the rest of the afternoon in your room?’ Da asked, closing the door behind him to keep in the heat of the range.

  Lizzie put down the potato she was peeling and wiped her hands on her apron. ‘ ’Course, Mr Nicoll. Esme is always welcome.’

  ‘She’s not to be entertained, Lizzie. She’s to sit and think about her behaviour. I’d rather you didn’t keep her company.’

  ‘As you wish, Mr Nicoll,’ said Lizzie, though neither she nor Da seemed able to look each other in the eye.

  Alone upstairs and sitting against Lizzie’s bed, I reached into the sleeve of my dress and pulled out the other word, counted. Whoever wrote it had beautiful handwriting. A lady, I was sure, and not just because the quotation was from Byron. The words were all curves and long limbs.

  I reached under Lizzie’s bed and pulled out the trunk. I always expected it to feel heavier, but it slid across the floorboards without effort. Inside, slips covered the bottom like a carpet of autumn leaves, and Ditte’s letters rested among them.

  It wasn’t fair that I was in trouble when Mr Crane had been so careless. The words were duplicates, I was sure – common words that many volunteers would have sent in. I put both hands in the trunk and felt the slips shift through
my fingers. I’d saved them all, just as Da thought he was saving the others by putting them in the Dictionary. My words came from nooks and crannies and from the discard basket in the centre of the sorting table.

  My trunk is like the Dictionary, I thought. Except it’s full of words that have been lost or neglected. I had an idea. I wanted to ask Lizzie for a pencil but knew she wouldn’t disobey Da. I looked around her room, wondering where she would keep them.

  Without her in it, Lizzie’s room felt unfamiliar – as if it might not belong to her. I got off the floor and went to the wardrobe. It was a relief to see her old winter coat with the top button that didn’t quite match the others. She had three pinnies and two dresses; her Sunday best, once shamrock-green, was now paled like summer grass. I brushed it with my hand and saw strips of shamrock where Lizzie had let out the seams. When I opened her drawers, all I could see were underthings, an extra set of bed linen, two shawls and a small wooden box. I knew what was in the box. Just the other day, Mrs Ballard had decided it was time I knew about monthlies, and so Lizzie had shown me the rags and the belt that she kept in there. I hoped never to see them again, so I left the box closed and shut the wardrobe door.

  There was no chest with games. There were no shelves with books. The little table beside her bed held a swatch of embroidery and the photograph of her mother in its simple wooden frame. I peered at it: a plain young woman in an ordinary hat and ordinary clothes, holding a simple bouquet of flowers. Lizzie looked just like her. Behind the frame was the hat pin I’d found in the trunk.

  I kneeled down and peered under the bed. At one end were Lizzie’s winter boots; at the other, her chamber-pot and sewing box. My trunk lived right in the middle, its resting place marked by an absence of dust. There was nothing else. No pencils. Of course.

  I looked at the trunk, still open on the floor, the latest word lying face-up on all the others. Then I looked at the hat pin on Lizzie’s bedside table and remembered how sharp it was.

  The Dictionary of Lost Words. It took me all afternoon to scratch it inside the lid of the trunk. My hands ached from the effort. When it was done, Lizzie’s hat pin lay bent out of shape on the floor, the beads as bright as the day I’d found it.