The Dictionary of Lost Words : A Novel (2020)

by Williams, Pip

  A week later, I overheard her commenting that it was hard to access some of the shelves with Mr Dankworth’s desk in such close proximity. That afternoon, Dr Murray had a word with Mr Dankworth, and when I came in the next day Mr Dankworth was sitting at the sorting table opposite Mr Sweatman, a border of stacked books set up between them.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Sweatman, Mr Dankworth,’ I said.

  A smile from one, a nod from the other. Mr Dankworth still couldn’t look me in the eye. Already his desk had been removed, and mine was just visible beyond one of the shelves.

  I sat and lifted the lid. The paper that lined the inside was curling at the edges, but the roses were as yellow as they’d always been. As I ran my fingers over the flowers, I counted back the years to the first time I’d sat at the desk. Was it nine years or ten? So much had happened, and yet I hadn’t moved an inch.

  ‘Well, that looks familiar,’ said Elsie. ‘I remember pasting it on. A long time ago now.’

  For a moment we were both silent, as if Elsie too was suddenly aware of time moving past her. I’d never thought much about her life beyond the Scriptorium, or Rosfrith’s. They had grown out of their perfect plaits and become their father’s helpers. I envied them, as I always had, but now I wondered if this was what they had hoped for, or whether it was just what they had accepted.

  ‘How are your studies going, Elsie?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve finished. Sat my exams last June.’ Her face was bright with the pride of it.

  ‘Oh, congratulations!’ I said. Remembering that She had turned one last June. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘No graduation, of course. No degree. But it’s satisfying to know I would have achieved both if I wore trousers.’

  ‘But you can have it conferred somewhere else, can’t you?’

  ‘Oh, yes, but there’s no hurry. I’m not going anywhere.’ She looked down at the proofs in her hand as if trying to remember what they were. Then she held them out. ‘From Father. A quick proofread. He wants them at the Press tomorrow morning.’

  I took the proofs. ‘Of course.’ I looked towards the space where Mr Dankworth’s desk had been. ‘And thank you.’

  ‘A small thing.’

  ‘That all depends on your perspective.’

  She nodded, then made her way past the sorting table to Dr Murray’s desk and the pile of letters awaiting her drafted replies.

  The lid of my desk was still open. Everything I needed to do my work was there: notepaper, blank slips, pencils, pens. Hart’s Rules. Beneath Hart’s Rules were things I didn’t require to do my work: a letter from Ditte, postcards from Tilda, blank slips made from pretty paper, and a novel. When I picked it up, three slips fell out. Seeing Mabel’s name made my eyes well up. It was enough to bring on the morbs, I thought. And then I smiled.

  Each slip had the same word but a variation on the meaning. I remembered the shock of hearing it, then Mabel’s delight and the racing of my heart when I first wrote it down. Cunt was as old as the hills, Mabel had said, but it wasn’t in the Dictionary. I’d checked.

  The slips for C had been boxed up, but words for a supplement were stored in the shelves closest to my desk. Dr Murray had started collecting them as soon as the fascicle for ‘A to Ant’ was published. ‘Dr Murray has already anticipated that the English language will evolve faster than we can define it,’ Da told me. ‘When the Dictionary is finally published, we’ll go back to A and fill in the gaps.’

  The pigeon-holes were almost full of slips for supplementary words. They were meticulously ordered, and it didn’t take me long to find the thick pile of slips with quotations from books dating back to 1325. The word was as old as Mabel had said it was. If Dr Murray’s formula had been applied, it would certainly have been included in the thick volume behind his desk.

  I looked at the top-slip. Instead of the usual information, there was a note in Dr Murray’s hand saying simply, Exclude. Obscene. Below that, someone had transcribed a series of comments, presumably from correspondence. It looked like Elsie Murray’s handwriting, but I couldn’t be sure:

  ‘The thing itself is not obscene!’

  – James Dixon

  ‘A thoroughly old word with a very ancient history.’

  – Robinson Ellis

  ‘The mere fact of its being used in a vulgar way does not ban it from the English language.’

  – John Hamilton

  I looked at the top-slip again; there was no definition. I put the slips back in their place and returned to my desk. On a blank slip, I wrote:

  CUNT

  1. Slang for vagina.

  2. An insult based on the premise that a woman’s vagina is vulgar.

  I gathered Mabel’s words into a small pile and pinned my definitions to it. Then I rummaged around for other slips. There was a handful, all meant for the trunk under Lizzie’s bed, but hastily hidden at one time or another, then half-forgotten. I gathered them up and put them between the pages of the novel for safekeeping.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon on the proofs Elsie had given me, every now and then looking up to watch her. She moved about the Scriptorium in her diligent way, always ready to do her father’s bidding. Had they argued about the word? Or had she found it missing and then searched for reasons why? Did Dr Murray even know she’d transcribed the arguments for the word’s inclusion on his top-slip, or that she’d included it with supplementary words? No, of course not. She lived between the lines of the Dictionary as much as I did.

  ‘Ready to go?’ Da said.

  I was surprised to realise how late it was. ‘I’d like to finish this proof,’ I said. ‘Then I’ll pop in on Lizzie. You go ahead.’

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ Lizzie said, coming into her room and seeing me on the floor, bent over the trunk. ‘You look like you’re bobbing for apples.’

  ‘Can you smell it, Lizzie?’

  ‘I certainly can,’ she said. ‘I’ve often wondered if something might have crawled in and died.’

  ‘It doesn’t smell bad, it smells of … well, I don’t really know how to describe it.’ I bent forward again, hoping the smell would identify itself.

  ‘It smells like something that should’ve got a regular airing has been locked away too long,’ said Lizzie.

  Then I realised. My trunk was beginning to smell like the old slips in the Scriptorium.

  Lizzie removed her apron. It was splattered with roasting juices, and she was changing it for a clean one just as Mrs Ballard used to do before she took a roast to table. As if evidence of their toil was offensive. Before Lizzie could put on her clean apron, I had her in a hug.

  ‘You’re exactly right.’

  She extracted herself and held me at arm’s length. ‘You’d think after all these years I’d understand you, Essymay, but I got no clue what you’re talking about.’

  ‘These words,’ I said, reaching into the trunk and pulling out a handful. ‘They weren’t given to me to hide away. They need an airing. They should be read, shared, understood. Rejected, maybe, but given a chance. Just like all the words in the Scriptorium.’

  Lizzie laughed and put the clean apron over her head. ‘You thinking of making a dictionary of your own, then?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m thinking, Lizzie. A dictionary of women’s words. Words they use and words that refer to them. Words that won’t make it into Dr Murray’s dictionary. What do you think?’

  Her face fell. ‘You can’t. Some of them isn’t fit.’

  I couldn’t help smiling. Lizzie would be delighted if cunt disappeared from the English language.

  ‘You have more in common with Dr Murray than you could ever know.’

  ‘But what’s the point?’ she said, picking a slip out of the trunk and looking at it. ‘Half the people who say these words will never be able to read them.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ I said, heaving the trunk onto her bed. ‘But their words are important.’

  We looked at the mess of slips inside the trunk.
I remembered all the times I’d searched the volumes and the pigeon-holes for just the right word to explain what I was feeling, experiencing. So often, the words chosen by the men of the Dictionary had been inadequate.

  ‘Dr Murray’s dictionary leaves things out, Lizzie. Sometimes a word, sometimes a meaning. If it isn’t written down, it doesn’t even get considered.’ I placed Mabel’s first slips in a pile on the bed. ‘Wouldn’t it be good if the words these women use were treated the same as any other?’

  I started sifting through slips and papers in the trunk, pulling out women’s words and putting them to one side. Some words began to pile up, with different quotations from different women. I had no idea I’d collected so many.

  Lizzie reached under her bed and pulled out her sewing basket. ‘You’ll be needing these if you’re going to keep all that in order.’ She put her pincushion in front of me; it was hedgehog-full.

  When I’d finished sorting all the words in the trunk it was dark outside. Both of us had sore fingers from pinning slips together.

  ‘Keep it,’ Lizzie said, when I handed back the pincushion. ‘For new words.’

  There was a tiny hole in the wall of the Scriptorium, just above my desk. I’d noticed it when the chill of the previous winter had pricked the back of my hand like a needle. I’d tried to block it with a ball of paper, but the paper kept falling out. Then I realised I had a view: I caught fragments of people as they smoked their cigarettes; of Da and Mr Balk as they packed their pipes and exchanged Dictionary gossip. Gossipiania, I always thought, when titbits found my ear. An entry had been written for the word, but it was struck through in the final proof. I recognised all the assistants from what I could see of their clothes, and I had the uncanny feeling I was under the sorting table again.

  The slight shaft of light had been moving across my page like a sundial, so I noticed when it disappeared. There was the clang of a bicycle being propped against the Scriptorium, and I leaned towards the hole. I saw unfamiliar trousers and an unfamiliar shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Ink-stained fingers unbuckled an ink-stained satchel. The fingers were long, but the thumb spread oddly at the end. The man was checking the contents, as I would check the contents of my own satchel just before going through the gates of the Press. I tilted my gaze upward, a slightly awkward manoeuvre, in an attempt to see his face. It wasn’t possible.

  I pulled back from the hole and leaned a little to my right so I would have a view of the Scriptorium door.

  He stood on the threshold. Tall and lean. Clean-shaven. Dark hair, curling. He saw me peering around the bookshelf and smiled. I was too far away to see his eyes, but I knew them to be evening blue, almost violet.

  I’d forgotten his name, even though I remembered him telling it to me once, the first time I delivered words to the Press. I was barely more than a girl, and he’d been kind.

  Since then, I’d only seen him from a distance when I went searching for Mr Hart in the Press. The compositor always stood at a bench at the far end of the composing room, practically obscured by the tray that held all the type. He would sometimes look up when I came through the door. He would always smile, but he’d never waved me over. I’d never known him to come to Sunnyside.

  The only other person in the Scriptorium, besides me, was Mr Dankworth. I watched his head jerk up, attentive to who had come in. He took a second to make his judgement.

  ‘Yes?’ he said, in the tone he reserved for men with dirty fingernails. My fist closed tightly around my pencil.

  ‘I have Dr Murray’s proofs. Si to simple.’

  ‘I’ll take them,’ said Mr Dankworth, holding out his hand but not getting up.

  ‘And you are?’ the compositor asked.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘The Controller would like to know who takes receipt of the proofs, if it isn’t Dr Murray himself.’

  Mr Dankworth rose from the sorting table and approached the compositor. ‘You can tell the Controller that Mr Dankworth took receipt of the proofs.’ He took the pages before they were proffered.

  In my place at the back of the room, I held my breath, irritation and embarrassment rising. I wanted to intervene, to welcome the compositor into the Scriptorium, but without his name I would look foolish.

  ‘I’ll be sure to do that, Mr Dankworth,’ the compositor said, looking Mr Dankworth square in the face. ‘My name is Gareth, by the way. It’s a pleasure to meet you.’ He held out his ink-stained hand, but Mr Dankworth just stared at it and rubbed his own hand up and down on the side of his trousers. Gareth lowered his arm and offered a slight nod instead. He glanced quickly to where I sat, then turned and left the Scriptorium.

  I took a blank slip from my desk and wrote:

  GARETH

  Compositor.

  I was standing just inside the door of the Scriptorium, reading an article in the Oxford Chronicle while Dr Murray finished off some correspondence he wanted me to take to Mr Bradley.

  It was a small piece, buried in the middle pages.

  Three suffragettes, arrested after a rooftop protest against Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, have been forcibly fed in Winson Green Gaol after several days on hunger strike. The women were gaoled for civil disobedience and criminal damage after throwing tiles at police from the roof of Bingley Hall in Birmingham, where Mr Asquith was holding a public budget meeting. Women were barred from attending.

  My throat began to constrict. ‘How do you force-feed a grown woman?’ I said, to no one in particular. I skimmed the column of words, but there was no explanation of the procedure, and the women weren’t named. I thought of Tilda. Her last postcard had been from Birmingham, where, she’d written, women were willing to do more than just sign petitions.

  ‘Something for Mr Hart at the Press,’ said Dr Murray, startling me. ‘But visit the Old Ashmolean first; Mr Bradley is waiting on this.’ He handed me a letter with Bradley written on the envelope along with the first proofs for the letter T.

  The Old Ashmolean was as grand as the Scriptorium was humble. It was stone instead of tin, and the entrance was flanked by the busts of men who had achieved something – I don’t know what. When I’d first seen them, I’d felt small and out of place, but after a while they’d encouraged a defiant ambition, and I’d imagined walking into that place and taking my seat at the Editor’s desk. But if women could be barred from a public budget meeting, I had no right to that ambition. I thought about Tilda, her hunger for the fight. And I thought about the women who had gone to gaol. Could I starve myself, I wondered? If I thought it would help me become an editor?

  I climbed the stairs to large double doors that opened into the Dictionary Room. It was airy and light, with stone walls and a high ceiling held up by Grecian stone pillars. The Dictionary deserved this space, and when I first saw it I’d wondered why Mr Bradley and Mr Craigie had been given the honour of occupying it instead of Dr Murray. ‘He is a martyr to the Dictionary,’ Da said, when I asked. ‘The Scrippy suits him perfectly.’

  I looked around the vast room, trying to work out which assistants were behind the mess of papers that covered every table. Eleanor Bradley looked above her parapet of books and waved.

  She cleared some papers off a chair, and I sat down. ‘I have a letter for your father,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, good. He’s hoping for Dr Murray’s agreement on a question that he and Mr Craigie have been discussing.’

  ‘Discussing?’ I raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Well, they are polite, but each is hoping for a nod in their direction from the chief.’ She looked at the envelope in my hand. ‘Pa will be glad to have it resolved one way or another.’

  ‘Is it about a particular word?’

  ‘A whole language.’ Eleanor leaned in, her wire-framed eyes huge with the gossip. She spoke quietly: ‘Mr Craigie is wanting to take another trip to Scandinavia. Apparently, he’s thrown his support behind a campaign to recognise Frisian.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it.’

  ‘I
t’s Germanic.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, remembering a one-way conversation I’d had with Mr Craigie at the picnic for O and P. The subject of the Icelandic language had animated him for over an hour.

  ‘Pa thinks it’s outside the scope of an editor of our English dictionary. He fears R will never be completed if Mr Craigie keeps pursuing other goals.’

  ‘If that’s his argument, I’m sure he’ll have Dr Murray’s support,’ I said.

  I stood up to go, then hesitated. ‘Eleanor, have you read about the suffragettes in gaol in Birmingham? They’re being force-fed.’

  She coloured and clenched her jaw. ‘I have,’ she said. ‘It’s shameful. Like the Dictionary, the vote seems inevitable. Why we have to suffer so much and for so long I cannot fathom.’

  ‘Do you think we will live to enjoy it?’ I asked.

  She smiled. ‘On that question, I am more optimistic than Pa and Sir James. I am sure we will.’

  I wasn’t so sure, but before I could say any more, Mr Bradley approached.

  I peddled as fast as I could between the Old Ashmolean and Walton Street. It wasn’t so much the darkening sky that spurred me on as my fears for Tilda and women like her – and fears for all of us if their efforts should fail. The exertion didn’t quiet my worries.

  When I arrived at the Press, I shoved my bicycle between two others, angry that there was never enough room to park it easily. I strode across the quad, scowling at the men and searching the women’s faces; if they knew about the force-feeding, it didn’t show. I wondered how many of them felt as useless as I did.

  Instead of going to Mr Hart’s office, I walked to the composing room. The slip with the compositor’s name was in my pocket. I took it out and looked it over, though there was no need for a reminder. By the time I reached the room my steps had slowed.

  Gareth was setting type. He didn’t look up as I came in, but I didn’t feel like waiting for an invitation. I took a deep breath and began to walk between the benches of type.