The Dictionary of Lost Words : A Novel (2020)

by Williams, Pip

  I dressed quickly and walked in near darkness to Sunnyside.

  Lizzie was up to her elbows in suds when I came into the kitchen. The bench was crowded with breakfast things: dirty bowls and teacups; plates with crumbs of toast.

  ‘The range is blazing,’ she said. ‘Go warm yourself while I finish the dishes.’

  ‘Where’s the girl who normally comes in the morning?’ I asked. There had been a few, and the name of the current one escaped me.

  ‘Gone. At least the war’s good for some people: the factories pay more than the Murrays ever could.’

  I removed my coat and took up a tea towel. ‘Any chance Mrs Ballard could come out of retirement?’

  ‘She struggles to get out of her chair these days,’ said Lizzie.

  I cut a thick slice of bread and spread it with jam.‘I made an extra loaf,’ said Lizzie. ‘Take it with you when you leave tonight.’

  ‘You really don’t need to do that,’ I said, licking jam from my fingers.

  ‘You’re in the Scrippy dawn to dusk and no maid – I really don’t know why you let the maid go. Someone needs to look after you.’

  When I was warm to my bones and my stomach was full, I walked across the garden to the Scriptorium. I was grateful to find it empty. No one would arrive for an hour at least.

  It had barely changed since I’d hidden beneath the sorting table, and for a moment I could imagine my world with Da in it and no war. I trailed my fingers along the shelves; it was a way of remembering.

  I sat at my desk and listened to the hush. There was a whisper from the hole in the wall, and I raised my hand to feel the breath of cold air. It was sharp, almost painful, and I thought about those native peoples who mark their skin at moments in life that define them. Words would be inscribed upon me. But which words?

  There was a clang against the Scriptorium wall, and the whispering stopped. I pulled my hand back from the hole and looked through. It was Gareth.

  He propped his bicycle and straightened, checked inside his satchel and closed it with care. I had spied him a hundred times and come to love how he ushered the words back and forth as if they were fragile and precious.

  But I was nervous. I checked myself. Curls had sprung from my bun, and I tucked them back. I pinched my cheeks and bit my lips. I sat with my back uncomfortably straight, expecting Gareth to come through the Scriptorium door. I was afraid of what he might say.

  He didn’t come. I bent to my work and let the curls fall loose.

  A quarter-hour passed before I heard the Scriptorium door open.

  ‘Does Dr Murray know you’re here from sparrow’s?’ he asked.

  ‘I like the solitude,’ I replied, searching his face for some clue to his frame of mind. ‘But I’m glad for the interruption. I heard you arrive; what took you so long?’

  ‘I thought I’d find you in the kitchen, with Lizzie. I couldn’t say no when she offered me tea.’

  ‘She likes you.’

  ‘I like her.’

  I looked at Gareth’s satchel, supported by his hand. ‘It’s a bit early to be delivering proofs.’

  He didn’t answer immediately. Instead he gazed at me as if recalling my confession. I looked down.

  ‘No proofs. Just an invitation for a picnic lunch,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be another beautiful day.’

  I could only nod.

  ‘I’ll be back at midday, then.’ He smiled.

  ‘Alright,’ I said.

  When he left, I took a shuddering breath and leaned my head against the wall. Light from the hole fell across the old scars on my hand. When Gareth approached the back of the Scriptorium to retrieve his bicycle, the light dimmed then brightened. Dimmed again. Morse code, I thought, but I couldn’t read it. I felt the weight of his body as he leaned against the iron wall, heard the metal hum through my skull. Did he know how close he was to me? He stayed there a long while.

  Just before midday I was sitting at the kitchen table with Lizzie.

  ‘Let me fix that hair of yours,’ she said.

  ‘There’s no point. It always finds a way of escaping.’

  ‘When you do it, it does.’ She stood behind me and rearranged the pins. When she was done, I shook my head. The curls stayed put.

  Through the kitchen window, we saw Gareth. He strode across the garden towards us, his satchel slung over his shoulder, a picnic basket in one hand. Lizzie jumped up to open the door and usher him in.

  Gareth nodded at Lizzie and smiled wide. ‘Lizzie,’ he said.

  ‘Gareth,’ she replied. Her smile a mirror image.

  There were whole sentences behind that greeting that I couldn’t fathom. Gareth put his picnic basket on the kitchen table, and Lizzie bent to the range to remove a flan she had been warming. She placed it in the bottom of the basket and covered it with a cloth. Then she filled a flask with tea and handed it to Gareth along with a small jar of milk.

  ‘Do you have a rug?’ she asked him.

  ‘I do,’ he said.

  She took her wool shawl off the back of a chair. ‘It might be warm for December, but you’ll still need this over your coat,’ she said, handing it to me.

  I took it, bemused by the pleasure this picnic was giving Lizzie. ‘Would you like to join us?’ I asked.

  She laughed. ‘Oh, no. Too much to do.’

  Gareth lifted the basket off the table. ‘Shall we go?’

  I gave him my hand and he led me out of the kitchen.

  We walked to Castle Mill Stream and along the towpath to Walton Bridge.

  ‘Hard to believe winter has started,’ Gareth said as he spread the rug and put the flan in the centre. Steam rose.

  He smoothed the spot where he wanted me to sit, then took the flask from the basket and poured tea into a mug. He added just the right amount of milk and dropped in one lump of sugar. I cupped my hands around it and sipped. It was just as I liked it. We said nothing.

  Gareth finished his tea and poured some more. His hand moved unconsciously to the satchel that lay beside him. When his mug was empty, he took time putting it back in the basket, as if it were made of crystal rather than tin. His hands were shaking, ever so slightly.

  When his mug was safely in the basket, he took a deep breath and turned to face me. A smile moved gently across his face. Without looking away, he took my mug and put it less carefully on the grass. Then he held both my hands in his.

  He pressed my fingers to his lips, and the warmth of his breath sent a shiver through me. My whole body wanted to be pressed against him, but my mind was content to look over the features of his face; to memorise every line on his forehead, his dark brows and long lashes, blue eyes like a summer sky at dusk. There was grey at his temples, and I longed to see it spread, over years, through the dark mop of his hair.

  I don’t know how long we sat like that, but I felt his eyes roam my face as mine roamed his. Nothing obscured us, no polite gestures clung. We were naked.

  When our eyes finally met, it was as if we had journeyed together and come home more familiar. He released me and reached for the satchel. A subtle tremor made his fingers clumsy with the buckles. If I hadn’t been sure before, I knew then what the satchel held.

  But it was not what I expected.

  He pulled out a parcel. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with string: the signature wrapping of the Press. It was the dimensions of a ream of paper, though thinner.

  ‘For you,’ he said, offering the parcel.

  ‘Not proofs, surely.’

  ‘Proof, of sorts,’ he said.

  I released the bow and the thick paper fell away.

  It was a beautiful object, leather-bound and gold-lettered. It must have cost Gareth a month’s wages. Women’s Words and Their Meanings was embossed on the green leather in the same typeface used for the Dictionary volumes. I opened to the first page where the title was repeated. Below that, Edited by Esme Nicoll.

  It was a thin volume, and the type was larger than that of Dr Murray’s dictio
nary – two columns on each page instead of three. I turned to the letter C and let my finger trace the familiar shapes of the words, each one a woman’s voice. Some smooth and genteel, others, like Mabel’s, gravelly and coated in phlegm. Then I came to it, one of the first words I ever wrote on a slip. To see it in print was exhilarating. The limerick fluttered across my lips.

  Was it more obscene to say it, to write it, or to set it in type? On the breath it could be taken by a breeze or crowded out by chatter; it could be misheard or ignored. On the page it was a real thing. It had been caught and pinned to a board, its letters spread in a particular way so that anyone who saw it would know what it was.

  ‘What must you have thought of me!’ I said.

  ‘I was glad to finally know what it meant,’ he said, his earnest face collapsing into a grin.

  I kept turning the pages.

  ‘It took a year, Es. And every day that I held a slip with your handwriting, I came to know you better. I fell in love with you word by word. I’ve always loved the shape and feel of them, the infinite pairings. But you showed me their limitations, and their potential.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘A few slips at a time, and I was always careful to put them back just where I’d found them. Half the Press were in on it by the end. I wanted a hand in every part of it, not just the typesetting. I chose the paper and worked the press. I cut the pages, and the women in the bindery fell over themselves to show me how to put it all together.’

  ‘I bet they did.’ I smiled.

  ‘Fred Sweatman was my lookout at the Scrippy, but none of it would have been possible without Lizzie. She knows your every move and all your hiding places. Don’t be cross with her for giving them away.’

  I thought about the shoebox in my desk and the trunk under Lizzie’s bed. My Dictionary of Lost Words. She was its custodian, I realised. And she’d wanted the words to be found.

  ‘I could never be cross with Lizzie,’ I said.

  Gareth took my hands again. The tremor in his was gone. ‘I had to choose,’ he said. ‘Between a ring and the words.’

  I looked at my dictionary, traced the title with my fingers and heard the words on my breath. I imagined a ring on my hand and was glad for its absence. I wondered how it was possible to feel so much. I had no capacity for more.

  No more words passed between us. He didn’t ask, and I didn’t answer, but I felt those moments like the rhythm of a poem. They were the preface to everything that would come after, and already I was plotting it out. I held his face, felt it differently against the skin of each hand, then brought it near. His lips were warm against mine, the taste of tea still pleasant on his tongue. His hand on the small of my back asked nothing, but I leaned in, wanting him to feel the shape of me. The flan cooled and remained uneaten.

  ‘Where is it, then?’ asked Lizzie when I came into the kitchen.

  We both looked at my hand, as unadorned as it always had been.

  ‘Is there anything you don’t know, Lizzie Lester?’

  ‘A whole lot, but I know he loves you and you love him, and I thought I’d find a ring on that finger when you came back from your picnic.’

  I took the thin volume from my own satchel and put it on the kitchen table in front of her. ‘He gave me something far more precious than a ring.’

  Smiling, she wiped her hands on her apron, then checked them before touching the leather. ‘I knew the words would win you, all bound and beautiful. I told him as much when he showed me. Then he showed me where my own name was printed and made me a cup of tea while I blubbered.’ Tears sprang again and she wiped them quickly away. ‘But he never said he had no ring.’

  She pushed the volume back towards me. I wrapped it in the brown paper and tied the string. ‘Can I pop upstairs, Lizzie?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re going to hide it away!’

  ‘Not forever. But I’m not ready to share it.’

  ‘You are a funny one, Essymay.’

  If Gareth would fit, I’d have locked him in my trunk and hidden the key. But it was too late for that. Mr Hart and Dr Murray had been writing letters for months to get him into officers’ training.

  Officers’ training finished on the 4th of May. We were to be married on the 5th, a Wednesday. Dr Murray gave everyone in the Scriptorium two paid hours to wish us well.

  I slept in Lizzie’s room the night before, and in the morning she dressed me in a simple cream frock with a double skirt and high lace collar. She’d embroidered leaves around the cuffs and hems, and added tiny glass beads here and there, ‘so when the sun shines on you it will look like morning dew’.

  Dr Murray was unwell, but he offered to accompany me to St Barnabas in a cab. At the last minute, I declined. The sun was shining, and I knew Gareth would be walking from the Press with Mr Hart and Mr Sweatman. I hadn’t seen Gareth for the three months of his officers’ training, and I liked the thought of bumping into him as our routes converged on Canal Street.

  Mrs Murray took three hasty photographs of me under the ash tree, one with Dr Murray, one with Ditte, and one with Elsie and Rosfrith. As she was packing the camera away, I asked if she would take one more.

  Lizzie hovered by the kitchen door, awkward in her new dress. I waved her over. She shook her head.

  ‘Lizzie,’ I called. ‘You must. It’s my wedding day.’

  She came, her head slightly bowed against all the eyes turned towards her. When she stood beside me, I saw her mother’s pin, brilliant against the dull green of her felt hat.

  ‘Turn this way a little, Lizzie,’ I said. I wanted the camera to catch the pin. I would give her the photograph as a gift.

  Gareth wore his officer’s uniform for the wedding. He stood taller than I remembered, and I wondered if it were an illusion or the benefit of being released from the work of typesetting. He was handsome, and I was as beautiful as I had ever been. These were our first impressions as we approached St Barnabas from different ends of the street.

  Inside, I stood with Gareth in front of the vicar. Mr Hart stood to Gareth’s left; Ditte stood to my right. Four rows of pews were occupied by Dictionary and Press staff, with Dr and Mrs Murray, Mr Sweatman, Beth and Lizzie in the front. There might have been more, but Gareth’s closest friends from the Press were in France, and Tilda had joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment. Her matron at St Bartholomew’s in London would not give her leave to come.

  I have no memory of what was said. I can’t recall the face of the vicar. I must have spent a long while looking into the bouquet that Lizzie had gathered for me, because its delicate white flowers and strong scent stayed with me. Lily of the valley. When Ditte reached to take them so that Gareth could put his ring on my finger, I refused to let them go.

  We came out of the church and were caught in a downpour of rice thrown by a small group of women from the Press bindery. Then I saw the choir of printers and compositors, apron-clad. Gareth and I stood, delighted, holding each other’s arms as they sang ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon’.

  Rosfrith took a photograph. For a terrible moment, I imagined us frozen on a mantelpiece, Gareth remaining ageless; me old and wrapped in shawls, sitting alone by a fire.

  We walked in procession through the streets of Jericho. When we got to Walton Street, the bindery women and the printers’ choir returned to the Press, and some of Mr Bradley’s and Mr Craigie’s staff walked back towards the Old Ashmolean. The rest of us continued to Sunnyside, where we had sandwiches and cake beneath the ash. It reminded me of all the afternoon teas we’d had over the years to celebrate the completion of a letter or the publication of a volume. When Mrs Murray helped Dr Murray into the house, we took it as a sign that everyone’s two hours were up. Mr Bradley and Eleanor returned to the Old Ashmolean; Mr Hart led the way back to the Press. Ditte and Beth walked Mrs Ballard into the kitchen, and Rosfrith and Elsie insisted on helping Lizzie with the cleaning up. Of the Scriptorium men, Mr Sweatman was the last to return to work. He shook Gareth’s hand and to
ok mine to kiss it.

  ‘How proud and happy your father would have been,’ he said, and I held his gaze, knowing the memory of Da was stronger when it was shared.

  We stood at the front door of Da’s house. My house. As if waiting to be let in. There was some confusion about who should open it.

  ‘It’s our house now, Gareth,’ I said.

  He smiled. ‘That may be so, but I don’t have a key.’

  ‘Oh, of course.’ I leaned down and took the key from under a pot. I held it out. ‘There you are.’

  He looked at it. ‘Well, I don’t think you should give it up that easily. It’s not a dowry.’

  Before I could reply, he bent down and picked me up.

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘you open the door, and we’ll cross the threshold together. Make it quick though, Es. If you don’t mind.’

  The house was filled with lily of the valley, and every room was spotless. The range was warming the kitchen against a cool evening, and our dinner was slowly cooking.

  ‘You’re lucky to have Lizzie, you know,’ Gareth said, putting me down.

  ‘I do know. I also know I’m lucky to have you.’ Without discussion, I took Gareth’s hand and led him up the stairs.

  I opened the door to Da’s old room. The bed had a new coverlet, quilted and detailed with Lizzie’s delicate stitches. I’d never slept there, and now I was glad of it. It was our bridal bed.

  We weren’t shy about our bodies, but we guarded what we knew, and what we didn’t. When a memory of Bill came unbidden, I was horrified. I remembered his finger tracing the parting of my hair and continuing down my face and the length of my body, making excursions along the way. ‘Nose,’ he had whispered close to my ear. ‘Lips, neck, breast, belly button …’

  I shivered, and Gareth pulled back a little. I took his hand and kissed his palm. Then I guided his fingers down the length of my body, making excursions along the way.

  ‘Mount of Venus,’ I said, when we reached the soft tangle of hair.