The Liar's Dictionary

by Eley Williams

  Winceworth often had cause to remember a textbook from his school days filled with grammar exercises and tables. One page required students to rank the following verbs according to their pace: jaunt, stride, amble, lumber, strut, patrol, plod, prance, run, saunter, shamble, stroll and traipse. Winceworth swept by the band once more. He jaunted marcia moderato. He strode allegro, he ambled adagietto. He caught the eye of the waiter and signalled for another whisky. Everyone was laughing and toasting, blurs of sleeves revealing bands of naked skin and teeth bared. He lumbered larghissimo, he strutted ad andantino, he patrolled moderato. There must have been two hundred people in the room by now and they all seemed to be having quite a time of it. He plodded grave, he pranced vivacissimo.

  Perhaps the hope that he might trickle out through the door once a necessary hour of social grace had been observed remained a possibility. He decided to stand behind one particularly lush potted plant in order to evade the further attentions of the serving staff and Frasham. Here count down the minutes in the relative safety of the potted plant’s leaves. It was a huge plant, as tall as a lexicographer and with large flat drooping leaves. He did not want it to appear as if he was sidling. He had spent the day in the office defining this verb, and was keenly aware that to sidle can convey a certain sinister intent if one happens to be observed. It pleased him that sidle (v.) could slide into slide (v.) – the surreptitious becoming the graceful. It was just a question of bearing, and perhaps the same reason that Frasham seemed more charismatic than he. Winceworth thought a good trick to counter any accusations of sidling might involve bouncing slightly at the knees and keeping elbows close to the body. So it was that Winceworth, now obsessed with the fact he was one of humanity’s natural sidlers, slid bouncingly into what he might at his most thesaurusial choose to call the potted plant’s arboreal verdancy without disturbing a single leaf.

  He sidled straight into a young woman already hiding there.

  The woman was crouching slightly and caught in the act of eating a slice of birthday cake. They stared at one another – both of their eyebrows went up at the same time and tilted into identical angles of surprise. Their expressions changed simultaneously: their eyebrows were at once a grave accent, then acute, then circumflex ò ó ô signifying shock then furtiveness and then an attempt at nonchalance. She deposited her cake into a beaded purse without breaking eye contact and then set her shoulders, and Winceworth, drunk enough to interpret this as an invitation to dictate proceedings, cleared his throat.

  ‘—’ he said. He considered and then continued, whispering, ‘I beg your pardon. I had not realised this plant was taken.’

  She was dressed in dove-grey stuff with pearls as big as eyes or frogspawn, no, something nicer, it doesn’t always have to be approximate, they were large pearls around her neck. Her neck was very white. Why was he staring at her neck? He had forgotten to lisp. Winceworth’s head snapped back to the crowd visible through the potted plant, but not before he noticed the three leaves bending against her hair as she stepped back a pace under the plant’s shadow. He shook his head to force concentration.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ the young woman was saying. ‘This plant has the distinct benefit of coming fully recommended.’ She held her hand towards Winceworth. ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ Their expressions changed from distrust to shared, good-humoured conspiracy: ō õ. Winceworth, quietly and implausibly and in a frankly impractical way, suspected he had fallen in love.

  ‘I’m not sure the good doctor was invited.’ He drew closer into the plant and brought his heels together.

  ‘In which case,’ she said, ‘one might say some people have all the luck.’

  ‘You do not want to be here either?’ He wondered whether he was standing upright properly and tried to rearrange his spine.

  ‘I could not possibly comment.’ She adjusted her gaze so that it mirrored his own, directed back out into the room. ‘I suppose you’re staging an escape too?’

  The plant’s trunk had a label nailed into it bearing the name of its species. The label was slightly askew and he realigned it with a thumbnail. The room seemed to be chanting rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.

  ‘Hardly that,’ he said. ‘I’m a desk man.’ He trialled another glance at her face and found it puzzled. ‘Rather than a man of the field, that is,’ he clarified, poorly. ‘Unlike Terence. Mr Frasham, I mean. I am sorry, have we met?’

  Leaves rattled around them. The label on the plant read DO NOT TOUCH.

  ‘I do not believe so,’ said the woman. ‘Have you travelled fifteen hundred miles?’

  ‘Not this evening.’ Two men walked past their plant discussing politics, loud enough for Winceworth to gather they were using parliamentary terms incorrectly. From this angle, Winceworth could see that one of the band’s musicians had concealed a hipflask in his viola case. ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘have you dropped anything?’ Her eyes were brown and one of them had a curious green notch in it. Why was he looking in her eyes? At her eyes. He felt that if he did not look at her he could not be blamed for whatever rubbish he was saying. ‘I only asked in case you were in here –’ and he gestured at the leaves surrounding them – ‘for any specific reason. If you had dropped something, for example, I might assist you in retrieving it.’

  ‘I am not at my best during busy social occasions,’ the woman said, or words to that effect, bluntly but gently. ‘But I do know a good vantage point when I see it. I am enjoying watching people from here,’ she said. She lowered her voice still further. ‘Manet’s scene through a Rousseau jungle. And for the most part it allows me to avoid small talk.’

  ‘You must continue to do so,’ Winceworth said. He withdrew and raised a glass between them, promising himself to look up any draft Manet and Rousseau biographical entries in Swansby’s at the first opportunity. ‘Hiding behind plants is the closest I get to intrepid, but I can do so quietly.’

  ‘Let us intrepede together, then.’

  He considered intrepede. This was the longest sustained conversation he had kept for months. He considered starting every day by drinking whisky or whiskey and maybe everything would always seem this cogent and easy. ‘What have you observed so far?’

  ‘A great many things.’ The young woman appeared to have perked up and nodded towards the scene before them. ‘The migratory patterns being made, the watering holes being chosen, the different calls used within different groups. I had, in fact, been watching you until quite recently.’

  ‘Nothing untoward, I hope.’ He felt his cheeks.

  ‘You will forgive me –’ she said (perhaps she is drunk too) – ‘I concluded half an hour ago that you are a very good negotiator of meaningless paths.’

  Winceworth detected a slight accent on the way she pronounced the letter t in negotiator. He tried to place it.

  He said, attempting charm, ‘I suppose we all are, in our own small way.’ He pressed the whisky glass again to his lips – somehow, he missed his mouth but his wrist kept going, propelling the glass all the way up to his eye. For a second, glimpsed through the angled glass, her dress appeared as if stained yellow. He kept the glass there for long enough for the Glenlivet fumes to make his eyes burn.

  She did not take her eyes from the room. ‘That man over there has been doing the same perambulations as you for the past hour but in the opposite direction – you went clockwise, while he is quite widdershins.’

  Widdershins immediately became Winceworth’s favourite word in the whole world.

  ‘And that woman—’ the young lady pointed, and Winceworth followed her finger – ‘no, not her, that one, with the prominent bump on the back of her head, like her pons is trying to escape out of her skull—’

  ‘Pons?’

  ‘Wearing the curry-coloured hat. She has been pivoting on alternate feet every seven minutes. And Glossop –’ she indicated the man by the door – ‘why, he has not moved at all.’

  ‘You know Glossop?’ Winceworth asked. ‘Well. Well! Glossop is fame
d for his –’ Winceworth took another gulp of whisky and considered his phrasing – ‘his stolid permanence.’

  ‘I should be making a spotters’ guide. Where would you rather be right now? I wonder?’

  The question threw Winceworth off balance and he blurted the truth before he understood where it came from: ‘Sennen Cove.’

  Her face registered a crease of confusion. ‘I’m not sure I know—’

  ‘It’s in Cornwall. Near Land’s End – never been, myself, but I once saw a picture of it in a newspaper clipping. It had the caption,’ and Winceworth affected a slightly different voice for quotation, rolling his eyes back involuntarily with the small effort of memory, ‘“Sennen Cove boasts one of the loveliest stretches of sand in the country”. Lots of tales of mermaids and smugglers. I could have a little whitewashed cottage.’

  ‘You could,’ the woman said.

  ‘Shipwrecks too, of course – a place filled with ghosts. Sorry, am I wittering? I’m wittering. Thank you for asking. I’ve looked it up since, Sennen: I confess, now I think on it, I became quite fixated for some while on a fantasy of upping sticks and living there.’

  Winceworth had never disclosed these dreams or thoughts to anyone before, but he realised the words and truth of this daydream, this desire, were always on the cusp of being said. He had not known how close to the surface of every waking thought this daydream lurked, ready to spring out.

  He went on: ‘There’s a rock formation nearby called “Dr Syntax” and another called “Dr Johnson’s Head” on account of its peculiar silhouette – isn’t that marvellous? Or tedious.’

  ‘Marvellous,’ the woman emphasised. She repeated it in case Winceworth could not hear her over the band. ‘What a pleasure to learn these things.’

  Usually, Winceworth would be sure he was being mocked by such a sentence, but tonight he believed that perhaps all these thoughts were worth the sharing. ‘Marvellous. I hope I am not boring you, I’m so sorry. Since reading about the place I haven’t been able to get the idea of escaping all this—’ Winceworth took in the whole room, the whole capital, his whole life in a sweep of his arm, ‘and making my way there.’

  The woman beamed at him. ‘You should do it,’ she said. ‘Escape.’

  Winceworth let his shoulder sag. ‘Thank you. That would be—’ He sighed. ‘I could keep bees.’

  ‘You could learn chess,’ she offered.

  ‘Keep bees, learn chess. Peacefulness on my own little underlooked stretch of the world.’

  ‘But wouldn’t you miss all your lexicographicking? I assume you are here with the rest of the Swansby lot?’

  The woman laughed at the expression he made. The sound thrilled him, and he found himself screwing his face even tighter for the sake of her delight. ‘I think I’d rather disappear entirely and stop pretending I know what’s best for language.’

  ‘I like your candour, sir.’

  Winceworth blushed, coughed, but words were tumbling out faster than the rhythm of normal speech, almost a splutter, the uncorrected proofs of sentences. He was acutely aware that his words might be coming out as a mess. He saw it all, how easily it could go: his vowels tangling in the air and sibilants snagging on his lips, garbles treacling in the corners of his mouth.

  The woman locked eyes with him and Winceworth trailed off: the unformed words got caught in her eyelashes or in the shadowed notches on the edge of her iris. He opened his mouth to attempt a regroup, or an apology, or anything resembling another sentence to reel out into the space between them, ready to apologise for over-speaking or speaking out of turn.

  ‘So what is it that stops you?’ she asked, cutting through his unravelling thoughts. ‘What keeps you from the shipwrecks and the bees?’

  ‘No funds for it.’ He did not say it wistfully, because already the daydream was dissipating, and the sense that he had prattled became more important than the thoughts themselves. ‘It is no matter. Just something nice to dwell upon.’

  ‘How much would you need?’ the woman asked. ‘How many countless riches to have the life you want?’

  Winceworth played along, and made a show of calculating on his fingers. ‘For a small cottage, a beehive and a chessboard? Throw in some new clothes perhaps, and maybe a bottle of whatever best champagne is doing the rounds—’

  ‘It wouldn’t do to die of thirst even though you are so close to the most lovely of beaches.’

  ‘Call it six hundred and ninety-nine pounds exactly,’ Winceworth said, and he twirled his hand, ‘with maybe a shilling or two spare for the train.’

  ‘A bargain,’ she said, and they touched their glasses. They shared the smile of strangers who felt no longer strange. They looked out once more at the figures at the party.

  ‘You are not going to ask where my dreams would take me?’ she asked after a while, and Winceworth almost yelped his apology.

  ‘What where and how would you—?’

  But before he could get his mouth around his question, Frasham and his bully’s bloodhound nose for awkward situations chose that moment to notice the top of Winceworth’s head peeping from the leaves of the shared potted plant. Winceworth raised his glass to his face again, but it was too late – Frasham was striding towards them.

  ‘Winceworth!’ he cried, ‘Stop scaring the cobwebs and speak to me properly.’

  Neither Winceworth nor his companion moved.

  ‘Discovered, alas,’ she murmured.

  ‘I could always just ignore him,’ he replied, not entirely joking and not entirely undesperately.

  ‘Winceworth, old man!’

  It was not worth reminding Frasham that greetings had already passed between them and Winceworth admitted defeat.

  ‘Frasham.’ Winceworth emerged. ‘A joy.’ He was enfolded into the host’s broad chest. A shirt button bruised his eyelid.

  ‘Taking in the local flora and fauna, I see,’ Frasham said. He seemed as if he too had been enjoying the waiters’ attentions. Frasham motioned to the young lady emerging on Winceworth’s arm from the plant. ‘Sophia, has he bored you so much you’re trying to blend in with the props?’

  Sophia! Winceworth’s new favourite name.

  Her gloved hand tightened on Winceworth’s sleeve in what he decided was a show of camaraderie. ‘We have travelled,’ she said, ‘from the very depths of the wildest woods together. We are now closer than siblings.’ Winceworth swallowed and tried to focus.

  ‘The old dog.’ Frasham eyed Winceworth appreciatively. ‘And has Peter explained how we know each other, I wonder?’

  ‘He has not yet had the opportunity.’

  ‘Winceworth’s the one I was telling you about,’ Frasham said, and his voice raised somewhat. ‘The man with the lisp working on the letter S!’

  Winceworth wondered whether his blush would scorch through the fabric of his shirt.

  ‘How precious,’ squealed one of the party attendants eavesdropping nearby. Winceworth recognised him vaguely from the desks at Swansby’s, a scholar of oral linguistics. Winceworth couldn’t for the life of him remember the man’s name. For some reason this man was wearing a fez and turning glassy eyes from Winceworth to Frasham with sloppy bonhomie. ‘But,’ continued the man, ‘Terence, you simply must tell us all more about your Siberian adventure.’

  Frasham grinned. Winceworth wondered how difficult it might be to club someone over the head with a 400-pound potted plant. ‘It was quite extraordinary,’ he heard Frasham say. ‘And, at the same time, often completely preposterous. I mean! Watching some Cossack in a suit fracturing his tear ducts pronouncing czar tsar or sdzar in any fourteen hundred different ways, and poor Glossop scribbling it all down.’

  Winceworth helped himself to another drink from a tray swung by his elbow. He smiled but his mouth felt stiff, snappable. He believed that he could hear every tiny movement of bone in his jaw in syrupy clacking sounds. There was small gratification that his shrub-mate looked absolutely bored by this turn in the conversation.

  S
omeone across the room produced a balalaika, an instrument that Frasham had apparently mastered on his travels, and this gave him cause to peel away from their little circle and resume a position on the club-room’s sofa. He played a version of ‘The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery’ without looking at the instrument’s strings, fluttering his eyelashes at Glossop. The old rogue. Good old Terence.

  Winceworth nosed his whisky.

  He considered leading Sophia back to their plant and explaining – how might one set down the phonetics of a hiccup? – that this lisp nonsense was far behind him. It became, befuddledly, crucial that Sophia not only be made to understand that he wanted to apologise, but that he was a Good Sort. He could not play the balalaika but he had other talents. He could spin the etymology of the word hello from its earliest roots.

  Frasham was by now miming to a delighted crowd the way in which he had wrestled the walrus in the famous photograph received by the office. Lamplight caught his hair, clinking off his teeth and making gold chevrons in the fabric of his suit. He was singing again.

  ‘A dreadful, handsome show-off, is he not?’ murmured Sophia. They watched Frasham turn his head upward and serenade the ceiling, his throat was exposed. Winceworth could not help but think that Dr Rochfort-Smith, connoisseur of mouths and mouthparts, would probably call Frasham’s throat a perfect specimen.

  Þrotobolla is the Old English word for a man’s Adam’s apple, Winceworth wanted to say. It means throat-ball – no poetry there, just etymological pragmatism. The jutting shape of the letter Þ enacting the jutting swell of the gullet. He blinked at Sophia in front of him and she momentarily doubled in his vision.

  What was I saying? Winceworth thought. Ignore what Terence said about my lisp, Sophia. Do not think about my tongue as a buzzing, fat proboscis like that of a fly. Do not think of my tongue at all. I am more than that.

  A fresh whisky was held out to Winceworth. The hand offering it had extremely freckled fingers and bloodless nails. The knuckles formed a row of white Ms spelling out a mumble along the cusp of the fist. Let me tell you about the etymology of the word hello, Winceworth thought, taking the drink. I cannot sing and I cannot be handsome, but I can perhaps charm you with a fascination with the particulars rather than the general, that’s my talent. This tendency to drift off and delight with small details, the transformative power of proper attention paid to small things.