He had worked at Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary long enough to acquire a kind of muscle memory. He steered his body from the front door to the coat rack then up to his desk in the central Scrivenery hall on the first floor, knowing the precise momentum at which to swing an arm to most efficiently catch and release the stair-rail. Winceworth’s were not the only feet on the stairs and the pons pons pons of soft paws on stone steps joined his pace – one of the many cats that Prof. Gerolf Swansby allowed to roam the press and keep mice away from paper documents accompanied him up to the Scrivenery hall. This mouser was big and yellow and Winceworth reached down to scratch behind its ear. It turned its face away with a chirp. Maybe it too had a headache. Cat headaches were probably sleeker affairs.
On the walk from Dr Rochfort-Smith’s rooms to Swansby House Winceworth had returned to vexing over why no word had been coined for the specific type of headache he was suffering. The bitter meanness of its fillip, the sludgy electric sense of guilt coupled with its existence as physical retribution for time spent in one’s cups. A certain lack of memory, as if pain was crowding it out. You drink too much and this headache was the result – the world was surely in the market for such an affliction to bear a name? And if no word did exist, could it be named after him as an autoeponym? Stricken by a ghastly case of the Winceworths. I am sorry I cannot come into work today, I’ve a Winceworth like you wouldn’t believe. This could be his legacy, the way his name might yet echo down the generations. He made a mental chit to see whether the word already existed in slang or dialect words – perhaps something bracing and earthy from Dorset with gruff fricatives and flat, thudding vowels.
The squeak of soles on parquetry met Winceworth and cat as they reached the corridor adjacent to the Scrivenery. Decorum, in architecture, is the suitability of a building, and the several parts and ornaments thereof, to its station and occasion. Swansby House’s central, circular, shelf-lined Scrivenery was a bright, vast room with high windows and whitewashed stuccoed dome. A bookish bullring with the acoustics of a basilica. Even on a dull January day, sunshine lanced down upon the Swansby workers below, light curdling the dust in the air whenever it rose from disturbed old papers. There must have been at least fifty desks in the room, all regularly spaced and facing the entrance. Light glinted from the flat blades of paper knives in flashed blurs.
The majority of the sounds of the Scrivenery were dedicated to paper – the sibilance of documents slid across desktop, the slightly more stuttered shuffling of leaves arranged into order or the khuhhkunk-ffppp of a book removed from its purchase on the shelves lining the large airy room. It is a lexicographer’s impulse to categorise these things. All this was a welcome, cathedral-like calm compared to the orange oriole nightmare of Dr Rochfort-Smith’s office, let alone the braying scheme and flux of Birdcage Walk and London’s many other streets. The general noise was low; the peeling back of pages, the plopping of cats from desk to floor and the occasional sniff or sneeze were the highlights as lexicographers moved quietly from their desks to the ranked pigeonholes of index cards set into the walls of the domed Scrivenery hall. These pigeonholes were arranged alphabetically in huge towering labelled wooden shelves all around the perimeter of the room.
Pigeonholes – depending on whether it was a good or bad day at Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary, informally this manner of shelving was referred to by the lexicographers as either the dovecote or the cloacae. Winceworth’s desk was amongst the S-words.
He slunk into his seat with his head still a-clanging. Notions of slinking seemed to characterise even his most fluid gestures. Just as the lisp descended over his tongue as he entered the building, so too his shoulders shot unnaturally high once sat at his desk. Winceworth intuitively moved to pick up his Swansby standard-issue pen. It was not in its usual place. He looked at his hands as though trying to remember what possible use they could be.
Conversation in the Scrivenery took place in muttered tones. All was conducted at the level of murmur, grumble or croon apart from rare moments of particular inspiration or when grievous error and frustration were realised. Generally this was frowned upon but, after all, even the most slapdash of lexicographers is only human and Winceworth was certainly guilty of such eruptions. Misspellings and grammatical up-slips snagged his eyeline and produced a physical reaction. A sprightly tsk usually released some of the tension. Perhaps all readers experience this feeling – a well-crafted sentence runs through the reading mind as a rope runs through hands but when that sentence contains errors or distracting ambiguities, eccentric syntax or bleurghs of vocabulary or grammar, its progress is stalled or coarsened. Compare the textured skeins of these two examples:
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The jumx quickfoot browned oevr the, dogly laze.
Surely a tsk might be excused in the latter case.
The colleague occupying the desk next to Winceworth was not a tsker. Whenever Bielefeld encountered an error or disruption on a page, a kind of whinnying, sniffing gag tore from his throat. It was quite distressing and often made Winceworth start. Bielefeld’s eyes would widen, his hands would draw up on either side of his neatly whiskered cheeks and a small, high, vocalised peal would ring through the air. The noise was animal in nature but also not unlike the sound of a finger being pulled across a wine glass. It made cats and lexicographers turn their heads. The moment would then pass and calm returned to his face as Bielefeld scored a line through the error or retraced his steps on the page, carrying on as if nothing had happened.
The peace in Swansby’s Press was rent by these squawks quite regularly and nobody other than Winceworth seemed to mind.
Shoutsnorting colleague Bielefeld was already scribbling away at the desk on Winceworth’s left. Bielefeld was shaped like a carafe. On Winceworth’s right sat Appleton, shaped like a cafetière. All three exchanged the normal noises of pleasantry.
Winceworth’s desk was littered with yesterday’s blue index cards and scrunched pieces of paper, ready for work even if he was not. He wished he had thought to clear his desk. Clear desk, clear mind. There must be a word for that, too – when your environment is arranged so as to inspire calm and rational industry. It would be indulgent to come up with such a word. But – if he did – perhaps a sprinkling of classical Latin, the cool of its marble statuary in its vowels and cadences. Yes, maybe bring in something of quiescent, quiescens, present participle of quiescere, ‘to come to rest, to be quiet’. As he ordered his space, he considered the composition of a new word as if he was concocting a recipe. Could borrow from quiescens-stock, then, but add to it the steadying influence of ‘elbow room’ or ‘ease’ implied by something like Old French eise, aise cognate with Provençal ais, Italian agio, ‘relieve from burdened or laborious duties’ then stir in, what? – something foraged from an Alpine stroll along to the cooling tributaries of fresh through fersh, ‘unsalted; pure; sweet; eager’ via Old English fersc, ‘of water’, itself transposed from Proto-Germanic friskaz. A neat enlivening spritz of etymology to this new word. So: his desk might be freasquiscent and ready for work?
A hand patted Winceworth’s shoulder and he fully jumped in his chair.
‘Quite the party last night, hah!’
Winceworth looked from the hand to the face peering at him. While working at Swansby’s, he had made a conscious effort not to make a taxonomy of his fellow workers. Even a private cataloguing (Bielefeld: carafe; Appleton: cafetière) seemed unfair, dehumanising even, but so many figures just slipped into set types. Without wanting to stereotype or acknowledge cliché, therefore, Winceworth knew that the person blinking breezily down at him was an Anglo-Saxon scholar. This specific species within the Swansby’s stable of lexicographers all seemed to be half-composed of clouds. White clouds on top of their heads and white clouds on their chins – their eyes were cloudy and their breath was somehow warmer and heavier than anyone else’s when they leaned in too close to speak. They always did lean in too close as if
nudged forward by an unseen crosswind, and seemed to take up a lot of room whenever they moved, always choosing to walk in the centre of a corridor or channel between desks rather than stepping to one side. It was a gentle filling of space, not an aggressive one. The Anglo-Saxon scholars wafted rather than surged or marched.
They spoke softly with lumpy, lilting vowels. This one was no exception.
‘The party,’ Winceworth repeated. ‘Last night? Yes, quite a party, that party.’
The cloud nodded, smiled, puffed away.
The content and extent of Winceworth’s conversations within the domed hall generally fell into certain patterns. For example, the puff-bearded genius behind Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary, Prof. Gerolf Swansby, always said, ‘Good morning, Winceworth!’ when he passed Winceworth’s desk before lunch. Always the same intonation and word order. There was a boy, Edmund, employed to distribute packets of letters and documents. Whenever he came by, his wicker barrow wheedling a note beneath the breath of its wheel, Edmund’s cry of ‘There’s your lot!’ always prompted a ‘Let’s see what we have here then!’ The same inflection each time, the same pitch and register and volume.
On the rare occasion that a colleague approached Winceworth’s desk to comment on the weather or the cricket score or some minor matter of politics, they never seemed to come to him with queries. No one ever spoke to him expecting to receive a certain, specific answer.
Winceworth wondered how they all stereotyped him. A piece of the furniture. A lisping feature of decorum.
Edmund the barrow boy was approaching now, and sure enough—
‘There’s your lot!’ came the call as papers and letters smacked onto Winceworth’s desk. He jumped again, despite himself, at the impact.
‘Ah! Let’s see—’ The words sprang automatically to his lips. His eyes moved to the back of the departing cloud. ‘See what—’ he continued, and his voice had a distinct waver to it, still faintly whiskied from the night before.
The boy was already moving on to the next desk and reaching into the basket for Appleton’s papers.
‘There’s your lot!’ said the boy to Appleton.
‘Thank you ever so much,’ Winceworth mouthed to no one in particular.
‘Thank you ever so much!’ said the lexicographer, taking up the papers.
The system for the day was simple: Winceworth received various words, and sources for their definitions, from the public each day, which he would sift and assess and annotate. When he was ready to draft a final definition for a word, he would write it with his regulation Swansby pen on one of the powder-blue index cards stacked in front of him. These cards would be collected by Edmund at the end of every day and he would slot them in the alphabeticised pigeonholes lining the Scrivenery. There, the words were ready to be added to the Dictionary proofs.
Appleton caught his eye. ‘Did you make it home last night, Winceworth? You look a little grey about the gills.’
‘Yes. Yes, wasn’t it?’ Winceworth said. As expected, Appleton completely ignored him.
‘Must say, my head was quite the belfry first thing. Who knew selling rhubarb jam would keep Frasham’s family in quite such a fine line of cognacs?’
‘Wasn’t it,’ said Winceworth again. And then, once more, grist for the mill, ‘Yes?’
‘Still,’ said Appleton. He dug his paper knife into the envelopes strewn across his desk. ‘Good to meet the happy couple at last.’
Winceworth blinked. A memory of the previous evening surfaced.
Bielefeld chipped in, ‘Frasham mentioned her in his letters back, had he not?’
Appleton’s head angled towards Frasham’s empty desk, the only one on the Scrivenery floor apparently free from paper and index cards. Instead it was feathered along the fringes with pinned photographs and mementoes sent back from his travels.
‘No, he didn’t,’ Winceworth said. ‘Not once.’
‘And so good to have Terence back in the country, too, where we can keep an eye on him,’ said Appleton.
‘Entirely awful,’ Winceworth said.
‘Been too long, far too long; wondering about him and his silent Glossop shadow trudging across God knows where doing God knows what.’
‘Aubergine,’ Winceworth contributed.
Appleton’s expression didn’t flicker. ‘But yesterday was far too busy to get a proper word with him; I shall have to grab him by the sleeve the next time he dares show his face around the door. Did you see him with the balalaika: what a thing! Wonderful man. But!’ Appleton stretched and wiggled his shoulders. ‘To the task in hand!’ He met Winceworth’s gaze again. Winceworth smiled blankly. ‘Did you say anything, just then?’
‘No?’
‘Just so,’ said Appleton. He had the courtesy to frown.
Khuhhkunk-ffppp. The sound of a book removed from a nearby shelf.
‘Quite the looker, wasn’t she?’ came Bielefeld’s voice from Winceworth’s other side.
‘What’s that?’ said Appleton, and he bent forward so that he could see across Winceworth’s desk. In this posture Winceworth could not help but notice that Appleton’s eye was very close to a number of pencils arranged in a pewter cup in front of him.
‘The fiancée: what’s-her-name,’ Bielefeld urged. ‘Did you manage to speak to her?’
‘I did not,’ said Appleton.
‘I did not,’ grieved Bielefeld.
‘I did,’ said Winceworth, but nobody paid him any mind. He was still staring at the pencils and their proximity to Appleton’s eye. One pencil in particular was just a matter of millimetres away.
‘I did not have the pleasure of speaking with her either. Very haughty, I thought.’ A rare female voice came from a desk behind them – one of the twin Cottingham sisters who worked at the dictionary. Winceworth knew that one of the sisters was an expert on Norse philology, the other an authority on the Goidelic branch of the Celtic languages, and they were identical but for the fact that one had entirely black hair and the other’s hair was entirely white. This was not a natural quirk, but one achieved through various dyes and oils, applied in order that some sense of individuality might be established. Indeed, the darker Miss Cottingham had once, unbidden, explained at length that she was convinced a commixture of rum and castor oil should be rubbed into the roots of one’s hair at night to promote growth and a healthy gloss. Perhaps because of this regime, the collar of her chemise was often stained as if with rust.
Winceworth had a theory – either nobody on the Swansby staff knew the twins’ individual Christian names or they did not care. During his five years at Swansby House, he had not once been introduced to either of the twins separately and he had not been confident enough to enquire. In his head he called them the Condiments whenever he had cause to speak to them, one being pepper-headed, the other salt.
There was a vile limerick about them scratched into the tiles in the bathrooms in the Scrivenery, the rhyme scheme of which used the word Ossianic with particular inventiveness.
Bielefeld and Appleton swivelled in their seats at the voice of the Cottingham, craning their necks. Half an inch closer and this action would have had Appleton’s eye out, Winceworth thought. He daydreamed a little. He imagined the eye plucked out and flicked directly into post boy Edmund’s wicker basket as he snaked between their desks.
‘Does she even speak English?’ Bielefeld pressed, and the Cottingham twin with the white hair came over to their desks, shrugging.
‘Who can say?’
‘Who can get a word in edgeways with Frasham?’ Appleton supplied, and all but Winceworth laughed a light, frank and tender laugh.
‘Hah hah hah,’ said Winceworth, very slowly and deliberately half a second after their titters had finished. Another Anglo-Saxon cloud scurried between their desks and Bielefeld pretended to be busy with some small chits on his freasquiscent desk. He put them in a pile, disordered them, then put them in a line again, miming an approximation of work.
‘I heard that she is
related to the Tsar somehow,’ the Miss Cottingham continued.
Winceworth turned in his seat as Bielefeld and Appleton both said, ‘No!’ and ‘No?’
‘Not a daughter or a niece or anything,’ said the Condiment. ‘But perched somewhere in that family tree.’
‘You are pulling my leg,’ Appleton said.
‘If the tree’s big enough, I’m probably related to the Tsar too,’ scoffed Bielefeld.
‘And the Préfet of Timbuctoo,’ agreed Miss Cottingham, and they all laughed again.
‘But, you know, I really wouldn’t be surprised,’ said Bielefeld. ‘Frasham seems to move in all types of circles. A tsarina in our midst, imagine.’
‘I think Frasham mentioned she was from Irkutsk?’ the gossiping Appleton went on.
‘Yes, I’ve just been updating our entry for Irkutsk,’ Bielefeld said. ‘I thought it might come in handy if I was permitted to talk with her.’ Winceworth waited for the inevitable one-upmanship of trivia that Swansby researchers could never bear to not perform. ‘Did you know its coat of arms shows a beaver-like animal holding a sable-fox skin? Due to a mistranslation of the word babr, which in the local dialect meant a Siberian tiger! Babr became bobr, meaning beaver. Quite extraordinary.’
Stifling a yawn, Winceworth thought about his morning and tigerish imaginary Mr Grumps while Bielefeld and Appleton twirled back to their desks with eyebrows raised in appreciative silence. Winceworth picked up the topmost envelope in front of him and shook its letter free. He scanned the page. Its lettering was in a looping, brown ink with lots of underlining.
… enclosed, as directed, evidence of a number of words beginning with the letter S … One particularly arresting example from a recipe given to me by the Very Reverend … Although quite why the sultanas would be complemented by two-day-old rind in such a way remains entirely …
The Liar's Dictionary Page 5
