‘“A roseate blush with soft suffusion”,’ Dr Rochfort-Smith said, ‘“divulged her gentle mind’s confusion.”’
The songbird was an absurd orange colour. Much of Dr Rochfort-Smith’s consulting room was orange, to the extent that Winceworth might compile a list:
Dr Rochfort-Smith’s Consulting Room
(the orange complexities thereof):
amber, apricot, auburn, aurelian, brass, cantaloupe, carrot, cinnabar, citric, coccinate, copper, coral, embered, flammid, fulvous, gilt, ginger, Glenlivet-dear-god, hennaed, hessonite, honeyed, laharacish, marigold, marmaladled, mimolette, ochraceous, orang-utan, oriele, paprikash, pumpkin, rubedinous, ruddy, rufulous, russet, rusty, saffron, sandy, sanguine, spessartite, tangerine, tawny, tigrine, Titian, topazine, vermilion, Votyak, xanthosiderite—
Orange wall-hangings, orange satin throws, the array of bright orange walnut sapwood pieces of furniture, the orange songbird. In contrast to all this, Rochfort-Smith always wore a particularly lichenous cut of tweed. Perhaps it was the headache, but in this fourth elocution session Winceworth thought this suit clashed against the room’s decor with a new and particular energetic violence.
When Winceworth had first entered the room, the bird trialled some chirrups and then progressed to a trilling burr. As the clock hiccupped something about the passage of time and Dr Rochfort-Smith began his solemn incantation about soft suffusion, the bird decided its talents would be better spent in the percussive arts rather than just simple arietta and began slamming its body against the wire of its cage.
The doctor inclined his head and waited. Winceworth closed his eyes, marshalled his resolve and repeated the phrase back to the room. Every syllable took the effort of a poorly thought-through lie.
‘“A ro—”’
CLANG, went the birdcage.
‘“—with—”’
CLANG
‘“—divulged?—”’
tingINGting
TING TING-TLINGting
tingTLINGtlllingling
The slamming, the screeching, yesterday’s whisky excesses: the headache bit across the length of Winceworth’s skull and rocked him back, defeated, into the recesses of his chair.
Winceworth’s lisp was the official reason for his time with Dr Rochfort-Smith. He had not booked these sessions and was quite opposed to the idea of them for the very good reason that his lisp was completely manufactured. Since childhood and throughout his youth and certainly for the five years that he had been working at Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary, Peter Winceworth had concocted, affected and perfected a fake speech impediment.
He was not sure that he had developed the lisp for any reason other than sheer boredom. There was perhaps a childish, childlike idea that it made him endearing, and from an early age the act of altering his speech in this way made people respond to him with a greater gentleness. As far as he knew, which is as far as he cared, the deceit hurt nobody. Simple pleasures, small comforts.
Occasionally in private Winceworth repeated his name in his shaving mirror just to check that the lisping habit had not become ingrained.
‘“Roseate”!’ urged the doctor.
‘“Roseate”,’ Winceworth said. His tongue flicked the back of his teeth.
While Winceworth’s mother found his boyhood lisp endearing, his father found it ridiculous. This made child-Winceworth even more resolved to keep up the pretence. A great-uncle on the paternal side had spoken in a similar way and family legend revolved around this forebear’s sudden shyness when The Times swapped the long, medial ∫ form to s on its pages so that his gruff declarations of ‘finfulneff!’ and ‘forrowful!’ over the breakfast table could no longer be excused as simply too-quick reading. In truth, this family legend was made up by Winceworth to scatter into conversations when pauses were too awkward for him to bear. Winceworth lied easily when there was no clear harm in doing so. Once his school years were completed, with accusations and repercussions of perceived effeminacy duly weathered on the sports pitches and in detention, Winceworth considered leaving the lisp behind him with the chalkboards and the textbooks. Out of habit, however, and perhaps nervousness, he accidentally let slip a nethethary during an interview for a minor proofreading role at Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary.
The editor’s eyes had softened with an unmistakable sympathy. The lisp persisted and Winceworth gained meaningful employment.
The lisp became a more pressing issue when Winceworth’s job at Swansby’s focused on the letter S. Day in, day out he shuffled powder-blue index cards covered with S-led words across his desk, headwords and lemmas all sibilance and precise hissing. The same editor who had been so well disposed to Winceworth’s non-impediment at the time of interview summoned him from his desk and explained, gently, that rather than a Christmas bonus this year Winceworth would be enrolled in a series of classes with one of the premier elocutionists in Europe.
‘As we enter the Ryptage–Significant volume,’ Prof. Gerolf Swansby had said, placing a hand on Winceworth’s shoulder. He was close enough for Winceworth to detect his breath – a strange mix of citrus zest and Fribourg & Treyer’s finest tobacco. ‘I thought it might be a good time to address the matter – you know, as you go on working as an ambassador for our great Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary.’
‘Ambassador, sir?’
Swansby replied after a pause, trying to look kind. ‘Exactly.’ The hand on Winceworth’s shoulder tightened a degree.
The lisp was so much a part of Winceworth’s identity and presence at Swansby’s that this offer was difficult to refute or dismiss. Sessions with Dr Rochfort-Smith were duly scheduled at considerable cost to the company’s pocketbooks, and so it was that January’s Winceworth sat back in an orange armchair, battling a headache and feigning a lisp to a doctor for the fourth week in a row.
Dr Rochfort-Smith’s methods of tutelage proved curious but not wholly unenjoyable. This was due in part to the added cat-and-mouse element, Winceworth having to hide his perfectly standard diction and evade detection. Their last appointment featured pebbles inserted into his mouth while he read passages from Dr Rochfort-Smith’s Coverdale translation of the Bible. Another involved a kind of puppet show whereby the active musculature of a speaking mouth was demonstrated using a silk, larger-than-life-size model of the human tongue. Winceworth was informed that this tongue had been made by the absent Mrs Rochfort-Smith. Although surely a woman of many talents, at the time it occurred to Winceworth that tongue manufacture was perhaps not one of her greatest. Some of the silk’s stitching was too obvious and a few wisps of stuffing escaped in sad papillae at its seams. With the bundle safely clamped between the jaws of a pair of vulcanised rubber dentures, Winceworth had watched for a good half-hour as Dr Rochfort-Smith revealed the ways by which one’s enunciation might be improved.
Presumably primed and ready for its next exhibition, today the tongue was hanging unwaggingly from its nail by the door.
Dr Rochfort-Smith held a tuning fork in both of his hands. ‘Your pitch,’ the doctor said, ‘is adequate and tone assured. But, I wonder: “roseate”, once more?’
Maybe the doctor was fully aware the lisp was false: if you waste my time, I shall peep-twang my way through yours. This was Winceworth’s only rational explanation for the tuning forks. It was doubtful that their resonance could be heard over the songbird, anyway. He had no idea how Dr Rochfort-Smith stood this sound – for his part, Winceworth’s headache set about trying to wring liquid or pluck a particular note from his optic nerve. Blood thudded in his ears, pons pons pons, and Dr Rochfort-Smith suddenly had either far too many teeth or too small a mouth. A squint might clarify things, Winceworth thought. A thorough, concerted winching of the eyes might portion the world into tolerable slices. He did not want to appear rude. Gently does it, steady, the Buffs – he need only lower his brows by a fraction and bend his forehead into the subtlest of corrugations so that his squint would pass as mere attentiveness.
; Dr Rochfort-Smith’s tuning forks struck again and Winceworth’s face buckled.
There really should be a specific word associated with the effects of drinking an excess of alcohol. The headaches, the seething sense of paranoia – language seemed the poorer for not having one. Winceworth decided he would bring this up with one of his editors.
Whisky was the cause of his morning’s horrors, and on this point Winceworth was sure, but the preceding night’s wines, eaux-de-vie and spirits no doubt contributed. Some of the blame must also lie in not having eaten sufficiently prior to the birthday party. Winceworth remembered buying some chestnuts from a barrow. He could not swear that he had dined on anything more than this, and on reflection he suspected that the chestnuts may have been boiled to look plumper before roasting. Bad chestnuts, enough drink to fell a buffalo – Winceworth had returned this paltry meal onto the frost-glazed early-morning pavement somewhere near the Royal Opera House. Memories coalesced and glistened with new brightness. A lady had dropped her lorgnette into the mess and, profuse with brandied bliss, Winceworth had scooped up the eyeglasses in order to return them. The lady had reeled away from him, aghast.
Winceworth rediscovered this lorgnette still nestled in his coat pocket as he hurried from bed to Dr Rochfort-Smith’s rooms. One of the lenses had a small asterisk shatter across it.
Winceworth dipped his hand into his trouser pocket while Dr Rochfort-Smith spoke. There he experienced one of the most exotic disappointments possible – his fingers closed, firmly, around an uneaten slice of birthday cake.
‘Are you all right, Mr Winceworth?’
The patient coughed. ‘It is rather – ah, only that it is rather warm today, I think,’ he said.
‘I do not think so,’ said the doctor, looking at his fire.
‘A trifle close, perhaps,’ Winceworth said. He made sure to emphasise the false wasp-wing buzz of the lisp. He added an extra heartfelt sorry too to compound the effect, and across the room the songbird looked disgusted.
Dr Rochfort-Smith made a scribble in an orange notebook. ‘Never lose heart, Mr Winceworth. You are in good company – after all, Moses lisped, God lisped.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Yes!’ Dr Rochfort-Smith spread his arms. ‘And it would be remiss not to pass on my congratulations: there have been some definite improvements in your diction these few weeks.’
Winceworth dabbed his upper lip with a sleeve. He noticed there was cake icing on his thumb and he folded his hands into his lap. On his way to the doctor’s rooms he had mistakenly walked through a spiderweb – that horrible feeling of being snagged, caught by an unseen force, had stayed with him all morning. ‘That is heartening to hear, thank you.’
‘And now,’ Rochfort-Smith went on, bringing the tuning forks back down to his knees, ‘with your chin slightly relaxed: “‘Zounds!’ shouted Ezra as he seized the amazed Zeno’s ears.”’
It was never entirely clear to Winceworth whether these phrases were standard tests or just borne of Dr Rochfort-Smith’s own invention. After their first meeting Winceworth had been sent home with instructions to repeat Silly Susan sitting on the seashore stringing seashells and seaweeds, softly singing or listening in silence to the sirens’ songs. From chit-chat during the session Winceworth gleaned that ‘Susan’ was the absent Mrs Rochfort-Smith’s name. Her sepia portrait hung above the doctor’s fireplace like a crinolined gnat in amber, memorialised as if she were dead. Dr Rochfort-Smith described the absent Susan as suffering from some mysterious, debilitating illness for a good many years, currently sequestered to a sanatorium in the Alps for the sake of her health. A number of her letters littered the doctor’s desk, detailing the tonic of Alpine air and new-fangled Müesli breakfasts. Poor Susan with the sirens. Winceworth had not felt entirely comfortable invoking the doctor’s ailing wife in such a winsome setting as a sibilant fantasy beach, whether softly singing or listening in silence to the sirens’ songs. After the fortieth repetition, he found that he could inject a real impassioned emphasis on the word silly.
Winceworth became ever more certain that rather than reporting the detheption to Thwansby’s or upbraiding his patient on the waste of his valuable time, Dr Rochfort-Smith had devised ridiculous vocal exercises to see how far his patient would be prepared to carry on the charade. Winceworth was sure that the blasted songbird definitely knew he was lying, possibly by using the same instincts animals are said to use when sensing ghosts or storms before they hit.
This new abuse of amazed Zeno and his ears, however, was impossible to attempt without laughing. Winceworth’s face, head nor stomach lining could not manage that today. He hazarded for a distraction.
‘Did you – sorry, did you say God lisped?’ he asked.
Clearly anticipating the question, the doctor leapt to his desk. ‘I refer you to the Coverdale! I have marked the very place in Isaiah, Chapter twenty-eight, I think—’
Winceworth tried to crumble some of last night’s rediscovered birthday cake into the fabric under the cushion of his seat. The songbird noticed and began banging the bars of the cage.
‘Yes, and, elsewhere, Moses, did you know,’ continued the doctor, ‘yes, Moses too! All to be found in Exodus.’ Dr Rochfort-Smith closed his eyes. ‘“But Moses said unto the Lord: ‘Oh, my Lord, I am a man that is not eloquent, from yesterday and heretofore and since the time that thou hast spoken unto thy servant: for I have a slow speech, and a slow tongue.’”’
‘I had no idea I was in such elect company,’ Winceworth said once he was sure the doctor had finished.
The Coverdale shut and the doctor’s face grew sorrowful. ‘It was through hissing that sin entered into this world –’ Winceworth stopped crumbling the birthday cake and stiffened in his chair – ‘and it is perhaps more beneficial to consider your affliction as nothing more than a reminder of this.’
CLANG, went the birdcage.
The doctor brought his hands together sharply. ‘It is nothing that cannot be remedied, however. So, now, if you would: “‘Zounds!’ shouted Ezra—”’
Winceworth had managed some dialogue, some repetition, and he had not been sick onto his own shoes: he should be proud, he remembered thinking, as the blood drained from his head and his eyes swam.
‘And so must end our penultimate session,’ the doctor said. He dusted his hands on his knees.
‘No more tongues and pebbles? No more Zeno?’ Winceworth dragged the heel of his hand through his hair.
‘I will see how many more Zenos can join our final encounter next week.’
Dr Rochfort-Smith’s next client was already waiting in the corridor, a young girl of about seven years whose mother wittered hello!s and good morning!s. The girl shrank from Dr Rochfort-Smith’s attempted swipe at a headpat. Winceworth recognised her from previous weeks when, curious, he had queried the child’s reason for visiting the practice. Apparently the girl suffered some kind of idioglossia and entirely refused to speak in anyone’s presence. She could read and write to an exceptional standard but was entirely mute when in company. Dr Rochfort-Smith explained that her parents overheard her speaking a language of her own devising when she was alone. When asked whether there had been any progress during his tutelage, the doctor would not be explicit but said they had established through the use of paper, pen and orange crayons that the girl believed she was speaking to an imaginary tiger. This tiger accompanied the girl everywhere and was called Mr Grumps.
That morning, both patients locked eyes as they passed on the threshold of Dr Rochfort-Smith’s door. Presumably Mr Grumps was in the corridor even as the girl and her mother were ushered into the doctor’s rooms. Winceworth pictured Mr Grumps regarding the songbird in the doctor’s study with invisible, ravenous zeal. Winceworth shot the girl a small conspiratorial smile.
The child regarded him with puzzled politeness. Then her face darkened and she released a clear, snarling growl.
Pons pons pons
Peter Winceworth collected his hat and made his
way rather quickly down the stairs and into the street.
C is for crypsis (n.)
My task for the day was to look over David Swansby’s efforts at digitising the text of Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary. It was his dream to honour the family name and the scope and vision of his forefather editors by updating the unfinished dictionary and putting it all online for free. He spoke of this as a noble project, for the betterment of humanity, and as a way of securing the Swansby legacy as something accomplished and celebrated rather than a noble damp squib.
Privately, I looked up the entry for hubris (n.).
In order that he might achieve his vision, much of Swansby’s meagre finances were being ploughed into the digitisation of the dictionary and updating its definitions. The first, last and only physical edition of the incomplete Swansby’s had come out in the 1930s using the huge archive of abandoned notes and proofs made in the previous decades, so this was no small task. In our discussions, David made it very clear that he would not be adding new words to this archive, as this did not seem in keeping with the Swansby spirit: rather, he wanted to make sure that the words that had been defined were updated for a current audience.
The Liar's Dictionary Page 3
