The Dictionary of Lost Words : A Novel (2020)

by Williams, Pip

  Little Clarendon was just around the corner from the Press and always crowded with people. Leaving my bike near the window of a tea shop, I took a table inside, waited for the waitress to bring me a pot of tea, then took the proofs from my satchel. There were seven double pages: three from Da, three from Mr Dankworth and one from Ditte. Ditte’s was creased from its confinement in an ordinary envelope, but just like the others it was winged with comments and new entries written in her familiar hand. Dr Murray had made additional notes against hers, agreeing or disagreeing – his opinion would always be the final edit.

  The correction I was looking for was one of Da’s, an additional entry pinned to the proof’s edge. There was a ruler-straight line through every word and Mr Dankworth had rewritten it. When? I wondered. And did Da know? I unpinned it from the proof.

  I checked the pockets of my skirt and was pleased to find a small number of blank slips and the stub of a pencil. Like the skirt, neither had been used in a long while. I took a slip and rewrote the entry exactly as Da had composed it, then I pinned it where the original had been. I looked carefully at the rest of Da’s proofs and found two, three, four other occasions when Mr Dankworth had interfered.

  I began to rewrite Da’s original edits, my confidence increasing with every word, but when I came to the last, my hand froze. It was an entry for mother. The proof already gave the first meaning as A female parent, but to this Mr Dankworth had added, A woman who has given birth to a child.

  I left it.

  Lizzie looked up from where she was kneading dough at the kitchen table.

  ‘There’s a troubled face if ever I saw one,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve made three mistakes this morning,’ I said. ‘He makes me so nervous.’ I slumped into a chair.

  ‘Let me guess. Mr Sweatman? Mr Maling? Or could it be that you’re talking about Mr Dankworth?’

  Lizzie had been hearing versions of this complaint since we’d returned home from Shropshire a year before. I’d been escaping to her kitchen as often as I could. Usually she would work around me, but if there was a letter from Mrs Lloyd she’d brew a fresh pot and place a plate of biscuits, morning-baked, between us as I read aloud. She was recreating her Shropshire mornings, and I was always careful not to insert myself between her and her friend. I’d read carefully, without comment or pause, and when I was done I would take a pen and paper from the kitchen drawer and wait for Lizzie to compose her response. My dearest Natasha, she would always start.

  Today there was no letter and there were no biscuits. I took a sandwich from the plate on the kitchen table. ‘He watches me,’ I said, taking a bite.

  Lizzie looked up with raised eyebrows.

  ‘Not in that way. Definitely not in that way. He can’t say good morning, but he has no trouble telling me where I’ve gone wrong with grammar or style. This morning he told me I’d taken liberties with a variant meaning of psychotic. In his opinion, females are prone to overstatement, and for that reason should not be employed where precision is needed.’

  ‘Had you taken liberties?’ she teased.

  ‘It would never occur to me,’ I replied, smiling.

  Lizzie kept kneading.

  ‘When I came back from lunch yesterday, he’d left a copy of Hart’s Rules on my desk. He’d pinned notes to my edits with the page numbers I should refer to in order to improve my corrections.’

  ‘Are Hart’s Rules important?’

  ‘They’re mainly for compositors and readers at the Press, but they help to make sure that everyone working on the Dictionary is writing in the same way, using the same spelling.’

  ‘You mean there are different ways of writing and spelling?’

  ‘I know it sounds like codswallop but there are, and the smallest thing can cause the biggest arguments.’

  Lizzie smiled. ‘And what would the Rules say about codswallop?’

  ‘Nothing; it’s not a valid word.’

  ‘But you’ve written it on a slip. I remember you doing it, right here at this table.’

  ‘That’s because it’s an excellent word.’

  ‘Did it help? Him giving you the Rules?’

  ‘No. It just makes me question myself at every turn. Things I knew for sure are suddenly confusing. I’m working more slowly and making more errors than ever.’

  Lizzie shaped the dough and put it in a tin, then she dusted it with flour. She was assured in this, as she was with everything that needed doing in the kitchen. Since her last fall, Mrs Ballard only came in to cook Sunday roast and write the lists for the weekly orders. Lizzie did everything else, though there were fewer Murrays to feed as the children were all grown and most had left. An occasional maid came most days to help in the house.

  ‘Will you come with me to the market on Saturday?’ Lizzie asked carefully. ‘Old Mabel’s been asking after you.’

  Mabel. I hadn’t seen her since … The thought wouldn’t configure itself. Since what? Since I’d asked for her help? Since I’d gone to Ditte’s? Since Her. This was what happened every time I thought about my last visit to Mabel. It marked a moment in time, and thinking about it caused me to think of Her. I wondered how Sarah and Philip might have celebrated Her first birthday. What gift they would give Her for Christmas. I imagined Her walking and wished I’d heard Her first word.

  ‘She has a word for you,’ Lizzie said, and I looked up, startled. For a moment I wasn’t sure who she was talking about. ‘Says she’s been saving it. I wouldn’t ask, but I don’t reckon Mabel’s long for this place.’

  I rose early and dressed with unnecessary care. I was nervous about seeing Mabel. Ashamed it had taken me so long. When the morning post fell through the slot in the door, I was glad for the distraction. It was one of Tilda’s sporadic postcards. The picture on the front was of the Houses of Parliament in Westminster.

  November 2nd, 1908

  My dear Esme,

  You told me once that you wished our slogan was ‘Words not Deeds’ instead of ‘Deeds not Words’, and I laughed at your naivety. So, when I heard about Muriel Matters chaining herself to the grille in the Ladies’ Gallery in the House of Commons, I could not help but think of you.

  It was an ingenious act of attention seeking (I’m sure Mrs Pankhurst wishes she had thought of it), but it will be her words that move minds. She is the first woman to speak in the House of Commons, and her words were intelligent and eloquently spoken. Hansard may not record them, but the newspapers have. She is Australian, apparently. Perhaps it is the right to speak in her own Parliament that gives her the confidence to speak in ours.

  ‘We have sat behind this insulting grille for too long,’ she said. ‘It is time that the women of England were given a voice in legislation which affects them as much as it affects men. We demand the vote.’

  ‘Here, here!’ we must all shout.

  With fondness,

  Tilda

  Australia, I thought. She will be able to vote. I put the postcard in my pocket and hoped the thought of Her having a better life on the other side of the world would protect me from regret.

  Lizzie and I paused amid the morning crowd jostling in front of the fruit stall.

  ‘I have a long list,’ said Lizzie. ‘I’ll join you soon.’

  She left, but for a moment I stayed where I was. I could see Mabel’s stall, pathetic in its poverty, its lack of custom. Mrs Stiles’ flower-filled buckets were a cruel contrast.

  I approached, and Mabel acknowledged me with a bob of her head, as if she’d only seen me the day before. She was skeletal in her rags, and her voice was an echo of itself. What breath she had gurgled in her chest, damp and dangerous. When I leaned in to hear what she had to say, her decay was overpowering. All that was left on her crate were a few broken things and three whittled sticks. One I recognised from the last time I’d seen her, almost a year before. It was the head of a crone, finely carved.

  I picked it up. ‘Is this you, Mabel?’

  ‘In better days,’ she whispered.
r />   The other two sticks were poor attempts at carving, made by hands that could barely hold a knife. I picked them up and turned them round and felt all the grief of knowing they were her last.

  ‘Still a penny?’

  A cough wracked her and she spat into a rag. ‘Not worth a penny,’ she managed to say.

  I took three coins from my purse and put them on the crate.

  ‘Lizzie says you have a word for me.’

  She nodded. As I reached for my slips and pencil, she reached into the folds of her clothes. Mabel brought out a fistful of paper slips and put them on the crate between us. Then she turned her face up to mine and made a sound that made me think she was going to spit again. But it was a laugh, and her rheumy eyes were smiling.

  ‘She ’elped,’ Mabel said looking over at Mrs Stiles, who was straightening her flower buckets. ‘Told ’er I’d shut me gob whenever there was ladies sniffin’ ’round ’er flowers. Better for business, I told ’er. She ’ad to agree.’ Again, her drowning laugh.

  I picked up the slips, crushed and grubby from where they’d been stored. They were the right size, with the contents more or less as I would write them.

  ‘When?’ I asked.

  ‘When you went away. Thought you’d need cheerin’ on yer return. Whatever ’appened.’ She reached into her clothes again. ‘I saved this for you, too.’

  Another carving, exquisite in its detail. Familiar.

  ‘Taliesin,’ Mabel said. ‘Merlin. Me ’ands gave up after that.’

  I took more coins from my purse.

  ‘Na, lass,’ Mabel said, waving the coins away. ‘A gift.’

  I had been avoiding Mabel, but now the state of her, this kindness and the reason for it, ambushed me. I felt paralysed, unable to raise a defence against memory. Like a vessel, I filled with sadness until I could no longer hold it, and it spilled, soaking my face.

  ‘I ’eard you got the morbs,’ Mabel said, refusing to look away. ‘Only natural.’

  Lizzie was there then, at my side, a pocket handkerchief in her hand, an arm around my shoulders. ‘Mabel will be alright,’ she said, misunderstanding. ‘Won’t you, Mabel?’

  Mabel held my gaze a moment longer, then brought her hand to her chin and struck the thinker’s pose. After a moment, she said, ‘Nah, I don’t reckon I will.’ And as if to emphasise her point, the last word turned into a phlegmy cough so violent I thought it would shake her bones loose. It was enough to bring me back to myself.

  ‘Enough joking,’ Lizzie said, her hand gentle on Mabel’s back.

  When Mabel’s coughing stopped and my tears dried, I asked, ‘Morbs, Mabel? What does it mean?’

  ‘It’s a sadness that comes and goes,’ she said, pausing for breath. ‘I get the morbs, you get the morbs, even Miss Lizzie ’ere gets the morbs, though she’d never let on. A woman’s lot, I reckon.’

  ‘It must derive from morbid,’ I said to myself as I began to write out the slip.

  ‘I reckon it derives from grief,’ said Mabel. ‘From what we’ve lost and what we’ve never ’ad and never will. As I said, a woman’s lot. It should be in your dictionary. It’s too common not to be understood.’

  Lizzie and I left the covered market, each with our own thoughts. Mabel’s state had been a shock.

  ‘Where does she live?’ I was ashamed I’d never thought about it before.

  ‘Workhouse Infirmary on Cowley Road,’ said Lizzie. ‘A wretched place full of wretched people.’

  ‘You’ve been?’

  ‘Took her there myself. Found her sleeping on the street, a pile of rags draped across that crate of hers. Thought she was dead.’

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Keep buying her whittling and writing down her words. You can’t change what is.’

  ‘Do you really believe that, Lizzie?’

  She looked at me, wary of the question.

  ‘Surely things could change if enough people wanted them to,’ I continued. I told her about Muriel Matters speaking in Parliament.

  ‘I can’t see nothing changing for the likes of Mabel. All that ruckus the suffragettes make, it isn’t for women like her and me. It’s for ladies with means, and such ladies will always want someone else to scrub their floors and empty their pots.’ There was an edge to her voice I’d rarely heard. ‘If they get the vote, I’ll still be Mrs Murray’s bondmaid.’

  Bondmaid. If I hadn’t found it and explained what it meant would Lizzie see herself differently?

  ‘Yet it sounds as though you’d change things, if you could,’ I said.

  Lizzie shrugged, then paused to put down her bags. She rubbed her hands where the handles had left red grooves. My own bag was lighter, but I did the same.

  ‘You know,’ she said, when we were on our way again, ‘Mabel thinks her words will end up in the Dictionary, with her name against them. I heard her bragging to Mrs Stiles, and I didn’t have the heart to right her.’

  ‘Why does she think that?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t she? You never told her otherwise.’

  Our pace was slow, and despite the cold day, a trickle of sweat ran down the side of Lizzie’s face. I thought about all the words I’d collected from Mabel and from Lizzie and from other women: women who gutted fish or cut cloth or cleaned the ladies’ public convenience on Magdalen Street. They spoke their minds in words that suited them, and were reverent as I wrote their words on slips. These slips were precious to me, and I hid them in the trunk to keep them safe. But from what? Did I fear they would be scrutinised and found deficient? Or were those fears I had for myself?

  I never dreamed the givers had any hopes for their words beyond my slips, but it was suddenly clear that no one but me would ever read them. The women’s names, so carefully written, would never be set in type. Their words and their names would be lost as soon as I began to forget them.

  My Dictionary of Lost Words was no better than the grille in the Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons: it hid what should be seen and silenced what should be heard. When Mabel was gone and I was gone, the trunk would be no more than a coffin.

  Later, in Lizzie’s room, I opened the trunk and nestled Mabel’s words among Mr Dankworth’s clandestine corrections. I was surprised by how many I had collected.

  Since discovering Mr Dankworth’s unauthorised corrections, I’d made a habit of checking proofs before delivering them to Mr Hart, though I only unpinned the corrections if I thought they added nothing to the original edit.

  I began watching him. I watched him searching the shelves for slips or books, conferring with Dr Murray or sitting down at the sorting table to ask one of the other assistants a question. I saw him tilting his gaze towards their work, but I never saw him mark it with his pencil. Then, one morning, Mr Dankworth arrived early at the Scriptorium as I was finishing my cup of tea with Lizzie. Da had joined Dr Murray for an early meeting with the other editors at the Old Ashmolean.

  I saw Mr Dankworth go into the Scriptorium and begin riffling through the edited proofs waiting in the basket by the door. ‘Lizzie, look,’ I said, and she came to the kitchen window. We watched as Mr Dankworth removed a proof from the pile and took a pencil from his breast pocket.

  ‘So, you’re not the only one with Scrippy secrets,’ said Lizzie.

  I’d decided to keep Mr Dankworth’s secret – despite myself, I liked him a little more because of it.

  Now I looked into the trunk and saw Mabel’s words resting against Mr Dankworth’s neat hand. She’d like that, I thought. He wouldn’t. I read random slips, his and hers. Not quite, he’d written on a top-slip I recognised as one of Mr Sweatman’s – it seemed Dr Murray’s were the only edits that escaped his fastidious attentions. Mr Dankworth had drawn a line through the definition and rewritten it, no more accurately in my mind, though two words shorter. I’d rewritten Mr Sweatman’s original and pocketed Mr Dankworth’s correction. It was such a contrast to Mabel’s poorly spelled and childishly written slips. Their production had obviously been an
effort for Mrs Stiles, making the favour all the more generous.

  I re-read the meaning I’d written for morbs. Not quite, I thought. Mabel wasn’t morbid and nor was I. Sad, yes, but not always. I took a pencil from my pocket and made the correction.

  MORBS

  A temporary sadness.

  ‘I get the morbs, you get the morbs, even Miss Lizzie ’ere gets the morbs … A woman’s lot, I reckon.’

  Mabel O’Shaughnessy, 1908

  I put the slip in the trunk and rested Taliesin on top.

  The following Saturday, I joined Lizzie again for her trip to the Covered Market. As always, it was crowded, but we pushed through.

  ‘Dead.’ Mrs Stiles called from her stall when she saw us coming. ‘Carted her off yesterday.’

  Mrs Stiles momentarily looked me in the eye, then bent to arrange a bucket of carnations. Lizzie and I turned to look for Mabel.

  ‘She’d stopped coughing, you see. Blessed silence, I thought. But then it was a bit too quiet.’ She paused in her arranging and took a deep breath that stretched the fabric across her bent back. She stood to face us. ‘Poor love. She’d been dead for hours.’ Mrs Stiles looked from me to Lizzie and back again, her hands smoothing down her apron again and again, her mouth tight around the slightest quiver. ‘I should have noticed sooner.’

  The space that Mabel had occupied was already gone; the neighbouring stalls had expanded to fill it. I stood there for a minute or an hour, I don’t know which, and struggled to imagine how Mabel and her crate of whittled sticks had ever fit there. No one who passed seemed to notice her absence.

  When Mr Dankworth moved to the sorting table, it felt as though a too-tight corset had finally been unhooked. It was Elsie who made it happen.

  ‘You know, Esme,’ she said one morning, when I tried to suggest a particular word might need a more skilled eye than mine, ‘everyone who contributes copy to the Dictionary will leave a trace of themselves, no matter how uniform Father, or Mr Dankworth, would like it to be. Try to take Mr Dankworth’s comments as suggestion, not dictum.’