She glared at me. ‘It’s not my fault!’ I said.
‘What the hell is an alembic for starters? I guess a beaker?’ She groaned again, more intensely than before. ‘Is that a pun. Don’t answer that – and! once you’ve processed that, woah pelican as a third noun: “a pronged instrument used for extracting teeth.”’
‘The English language’s rich tapestry,’ I said. ‘You’d hope that the context would help you work out which one you needed at any given time.’
‘Surely one of those is made up,’ she protested.
I waggled my phone at her apologetically. ‘I’ve cross-checked while you’ve been talking,’ I said, ‘and they look legit.’ I showed her images of historical prongs and flasks.
Pip leaned over and faux-angrily gave me a high-five. It was the most alived (adj.) thing that had ever sounded in this office in my whole three-year internship. ‘So that’s at least one down, the rest of language to go.’
Pip pelicanned again, gulping down words and annoyance. ‘Nothing like knowledge to make you feel thick. Up next: pelike.’
‘Pelike checks out.’
‘Once you start knowing there are made-up things in here,’ Pip said, launching the index card across the room, ‘this whole dictionary is just a – I don’t know what to call it.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘An index of paranoia.’
I had texted Pip about the concept of mountweazels after my meeting with David. More to complain than anything else. She had compared it to customers who came into the coffee shop and asked for some outrageously confident mangling of coffee terms and expected to be taken seriously. A grandêe wet latte-frap all-foam half-soy with soft-hedge, to leave, please. Pip added that the word for the cardboard sleeves that go around the takeaway coffee cups is zarf. I sent her a shocked emoji.
I brought this up now we were together in person. ‘There’s a word I would have been sure didn’t exist.’
‘That’s their official name,’ Pip said.
‘It doesn’t feel official if no one knows it.’
‘Well, you know it and you’ll never forget it. Like my official name is Philippa.’ She made a face.
‘A wonderful name.’
‘It means lover of horses. Can you imagine.’
‘I refuse to. And Pip suits you better,’ I said. She leant over the desk and kissed me on the cheek with a small tough squeak.
Another half-hour of flipping through the index cards, and she sat back. ‘I’ve looked up all the swear words I can think of and I’ve learned loads about things beginning with J.’
I rubbed my eyes. ‘There might be a way of being a bit more systematic.’
‘What words would you put in?’ Pip asked. I’m not sure she was listening. I’m not sure that I blamed her. ‘Are there things you’ve always wished there might be a word for? Put better grammar into that sentence,’ she added. ‘My head’s fried.’
‘I was happy when precariat gained some traction,’ I said. ‘That filled a niche.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Pip said, ‘But combining words feels like cheating. Portmanteauing. Portman-toe. God, there should be a word for when words make no sense.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said.
Pip aimed an index card at my head.
‘Is a picture of the guy emerging?’ Pip asked. ‘I mean, from the kind of stuff he’s been inserting: do you get a sense he had any special interests? I just read a really long entry all about chess and I suspect whoever wrote it took that hobby very seriously.’
‘Learn anything new?’ I said absently. I held two index cards up to the window, staring at the handwriting in hope of a clue.
Pip rolled her shoulders as she read aloud. ‘“In the fourteenth century, a variation of the game was developed, characterised by the fact each pawn was delegated a particular purpose.”’
‘Sounds lovely,’ I said, tapping away at my phone.
‘It goes on. If I am reading the handwriting correctly “Ivan the Terrible died while playing chess, as depicted in a painting by Konstantin Makovsky.” Why on earth would anyone think that was a relevant detail to put in an article about chess?’
‘The internet seems to think that’s entirely true.’
Pip drummed her hands. ‘Whoever wrote this must have been bored. I bet there are words all about elaborate boredom in there that he’s cooked up just to pass the time.’ I waved at the Swansby volumes in front of me as if to indicate that she should be my guest. ‘What about – what were the ones that David found? One about walking through cobwebs, and something about a donkey burning?’
‘The smell of a donkey burning,’ I corrected.
‘Got to be into something, I suppose.’
Somewhere above us came a distinct scuttling in the ceiling. A piece of plaster floated down and landed square in the coffee Pip had brought me. It was a flake the shape of Hy-Brasil.
‘This place is falling apart,’ Pip said. ‘Is that rats above us?’
‘I can’t imagine David will do anything about it if it is. I don’t think he really manages to cope with how much it must cost just to keep the place running as it stands: I doubt he’s going to spring for speculative mousetraps.’
‘Maybe it’s ghosts,’ Pip said cheerfully.
‘They can pay rent like the rest of us.’
Pip returned to the desk. ‘Chess, chess-apple, chess-board, chessdom, chessel – I resent alphabetical order,’ she said.
‘Welcome to my world. What’s a chessel?’
‘It says here that it’s a vat of cheese.’
‘Nice.’
‘Dictionaries should arrange everything by nouns, then verbs, then moods, then – geographically. I don’t know. Shut up.’
‘I didn’t—’
‘I was talking to the ratghost.’ We were possibly being driven word-mad by this point in proceedings.
‘I had a professor,’ I said, massaging my temples, ‘who once told me that rats were the first archivists – ripping strips of paper from early books and manuscripts and taking them away to their nests.’
‘Do rats live in nests? Dreys?’
‘That’s squirrels,’ I said, uncertainly.
‘Squirrel a better verb than rat,’ said Pip. ‘It’s a shame that cat with the awful name can’t do anything about whatever it is up there. Everyone slacking at their jobs!’
Some more moments of reading.
‘You once told me that the office cat is descended from a load of office cats,’ Pip said.
‘That’s what I’ve been led to believe.’ I was becoming a little annoyed by her interruptions: it was difficult to concentrate with someone unused to the need for brain-crimping silence when intensively word-sieving. ‘Masses of them. Chowders.’
‘You mean clowders.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘If there were so many cats about, I wonder whether that might have inspired him,’ Pip said. ‘Say what you see and all that. Define what you know.’
I gave her a thumbs-up, unconvinced, and returned to my pile of index cards.
N is for nab (v.)
Immediately post-pelican, and leaving the scene in the capable hands of a park-keeper, Sophia took Winceworth’s arm and sallied forth beyond the park’s gates. ‘I demand, in the words of Hippocrates, to be fed eclairs and served hot tea before the day proves all too much.’
Winceworth at once forgot any local knowledge and his brain pitched with dither. Sophia did not seem to notice – as he stuttered and glared at their surroundings and every point on the compass, she took the time to fuss over the blood on her sleeves. She picked up her stride and before Winceworth knew what was happening they were browsing nearby streets and market stalls for shawls. He was unused to shopping quite so casually, and hung back as she made easy conversation with the retailer, touching textures of fabrics with her fingertips and nodding with interest as they extolled different cloths’ virtues and characteristics. A new shawl duly acquired, Sophia pro
mptly announced that she would now like to visit a stationer’s. Her arm looped through his, and before long Winceworth was walking just off Pall Mall with a bottle of Pelikan-brand India ink and a new silver fountain pen in his pocket just above his heart.
‘You mustn’t feel so uncomfortable accepting gifts!’ Sophia said, laughing at his twisting and squirming shoulders. ‘Especially since you sacrificed your Swansby pen for such a noble cause. It is only right that I replace it.’
He suggested that he really should be returning to work. In doing so he suffered a small coughing fit as if his body rebelled against his getting any words out at all. Sophia pulled her new shawl more snugly about her to obscure the more obvious daubings of pelican-blood. ‘The dictionary can spare you just one more hour. Besides,’ and she quickened her pace. ‘After a shock it is often good for the constitution for one to sit somewhere quiet.’
Winceworth thought of his desk in the Scrivenery, flanked by Appleton and Bielefeld.
‘To drink something hot and to eat something sweet,’ Sophia said.
The image of the paperwork strewn across his desk. ‘I wouldn’t dare oppose your medical advice, given the previous patient, no. Not without some kind of suit of armour.’ He mimed the gait of a spar-chested pelican with the martyred dignity of a waddling St Sebastian.
‘I have simply no idea what you might mean,’ Sophia said. ‘And, do you know, I think you should probably explain it to me, at length, somewhere warm?’
He felt the arm tense gently beneath his.
The Café l’Amphigouri was Sophia’s selection, picked at whim down a side street some way towards Whitehall. Despite its proximity to Swansby House, Winceworth was unfamiliar with the place or must have overlooked it whenever he passed it on his walks through town, discounting it as a destination not meant for him. The tablecloths were as thick as royal icing and the bowl of sugar came with a pair of ornate silver tongs. The café’s owner applied some baking powder to the cut above Sophia’s eyebrow as they were seated. They were placed by the window and soon a spread of tiny cakes, buns and dessert forks was laid before them.
‘Back home,’ Sophia said, turning a plate to examine a delicate layered confection, ‘we would call this a Napoleon cake.’
‘Looks nothing like the man,’ Winceworth said, playing with an eclair on his plate with his fork.
‘Very good,’ Sophia said, and he beamed. She tapped the side of the cake with her fork, counting the strata of cream and thin sheets of pastry. She removed a wisp of icing sugar from the corner of her mouth with a fingertip. Winceworth leaned forward in his chair in order that he might have the best chance of catching her words, but whatever thought she might have been framing seemed to leave her within the same instant. She raised her teacup to her lips instead, leaving Winceworth confronted with a face eclipsed by floral china. The base of her teacup bore the manufacturer’s hand-painted name: HAVILAND & Co., Limoges.
He wanted to commit the whole scene to memory as accurately as possible. Every detail of the tearoom was laden with significance now that Sophia was a part of it. From the angle of shadows amongst the curtains to the number of faceted cubes within the sugar bowl. The arrangement of the chairs and the postures of the other diners suddenly seemed of critical importance. The exact pitch of the bell as they passed through the door was a crucial fact to be treasured and privately indexed away.
Perhaps all encyclopaedic lexicographers experience love like this, Winceworth thought – as a completist might, a hoarder of incidence-as-fact. It was not that he even particularly liked the details: he wanted to dash the teacup to the ground for coming between them – damn you, blasted furnaces of Limoges! – but he wished he could identify the blue, twist-leafed flower that patterned its porcelain. If he knew the flower’s name he would run to the nearest florist and fill his lodgings with armfuls of the stuff, plug his rooms to the rafters with posies, bouquets and tussie-mussies of it. He wanted to glut on every detail, block out any not-tearoom scented light that dared to come anywhere near him ever again.
Sophia was still concentrating on the cake.
‘All these layers, you see, meant to symbolise the Grande Armée. And this —’ she raked the cake’s surface and crumbs kicked back against her fork – ‘this represents the Russian snow that stalled the French advance, helping to defeat the little Corsican’s troops before reaching Moscow.’
‘Pelican surgery, military history expressed through cakes – you are quite the dissector.’
‘What would you call it?’ Sophia asked. ‘This type of cake?’
Winceworth tried to usher some poetry. He failed. ‘A variant on the custard slice.’
Sophia nodded, sympathetically, and cut herself a portion.
Winceworth felt so unused to this gentleness, this back and forth. It all felt a complete nonsense. He would not have been surprised if a Mad Hatter joined them from another table or if a Carollian dormouse appeared over the lip of the sugar bowl and started talking about mousetraps, memory and muchness. That, or the other diners had hidden their haloes and stowed their angelic harps. He was worried he might forget how to use cutlery correctly.
‘A certain pragmatism to custard slice,’ Sophia said. ‘Is that the term for it? When a word just sits there, entirely fitting but somehow flat?’ She glanced out of the window at the passing Whitehall traffic. Winceworth recognised the way she flicked her eyes from passer-by to passer-by at random. He did that too when he was trying to find the right word for something, to coax the word forward from a forgotten part of his mind. When she spoke again she did so slowly, carefully. ‘When a word has pragmatism mixed with stolidity mixed with bathos mixed with clunk: what is that called?’
Me, Winceworth felt moved to say. He felt drunk. Was she drunk? This was awful. This was lovely. What was she talking about, and had he started this? Was this what conversation should be, or could have been, all along? Conversation as meaningless and wonderful, and terrible.
‘So, tell me all about your work,’ Sophia said. ‘Have you always loved language?’
‘Do you mind if I do not?’ Winceworth said. ‘You will excuse me: I am not good at talking about myself.’
Sophia raised her eyebrows. ‘I appreciate that in a person.’
‘I’d much rather talk about you,’ he said.
‘Nothing I can tell you,’ came the reply, which made no sense at all but Winceworth concentrated very hard on his cake and tried to look pleased with this answer. She looked pleased to have given it. Winceworth hoped he hadn’t somehow allowed an impasse.
‘And secretly, between you and me, I am glad to not have to hear much more about Swansby’s. Do you know how many names I had to memorise for the party last night? I ended up having arranged them in my head alphabetically: A is for anxious Appleton, B for bloviating Bielefeld, C is for the curious Cottingham twins.’ Sophia counted down on her fingers. ‘I believe I have a space left for E, but then there’s Frasham of course, followed everywhere by that strange little gurgle of a man Glossop—’
‘This is quite scandalous,’ Winceworth said, enthralled.
‘I should not defame the good dictionary. All power to its eventual publication. Do you play chess?’ Sophia asked, helping herself to a canelé.
‘No, but I would like to try.’ Conversation as meaningful and entirely wonderful precisely because it means nothing except to the two people involved. Terrible because of the pressure to fill the silence with a special type of nothing-ing – a kind of everything-nothing – and make it seem artless all the while?
Sophia smiled at him. ‘I would like to teach you! Do you know, I had a dream about you in your little longed-for Cornish cottage.’ Winceworth’s fork twanged weirdly off his plate. ‘I was visiting you and we were playing chess.’
‘That sounds – that would be—’ he began, but she cut across him.
‘You would love the vocabulary of chess too, I think,’ she said. ‘Have you heard of zugzwang?’
‘Zugz
wang,’ Winceworth repeated, unlispingly. If she liked it, it would be his new favourite word.
‘Wonderful, isn’t it? It is the situation where a player is obliged to make a move to one’s own disadvantage. Great word, horrible feeling, like being caught in a lie.’
love (v.), to fill a void with icing sugar and healing weeds, or with glib little shared lies
‘I profess to know little of chess,’ he said.
‘There are many excellent phrases to be had there.’
‘Much more than check or stalemate and I would be out of my depth.’
‘I have much to teach you,’ she said. ‘It all changes with the fashions, of course. For a time, did you know players would announce gardez when the queen was under attack? Or en prise. But the warning is no longer customary. That’s chivalry for you.’
Winceworth wanted to tell Sophia that the fear of seeming like an idiot had cured his headache. He just wanted to say that in this moment he aspired to be a fearful idiot for the rest of his life, and that he wished his life to be such meaningless moments, over and over, for ever.
The window next to them was hit with an awful bang. Winceworth, his fight-and flight-and freeze-responses engaged all at once, gripped the table and all the silverware clattered.
Terence Clovis Frasham waved from the street outside, his cane raised as he rapped on the windowpane once more. He was smiling with all of his teeth.
Sophia gave a start and then a smile settled across her face.
‘What an extraordinary coincidence,’ she said.
Frasham entered the café with great strides all abluster, making the tiny bell spring on its gantry above the door. He waved the owner away and placed his hat on their table, barely missing Winceworth’s plate.
‘Sophia!’ He dipped his face to kiss the air above her ear. Winceworth looked away. Frasham was too big for the tearoom, too well-formed. Pulling a chair from another table, the other lexicographer sat down with his legs apart. He pressed the fingers of one hand in and across his fine red moustache as if framing a yawn or loosening his face. This was a mannerism Winceworth had forgotten. He found it indefinably repulsive. ‘And Winceworth too! Why, man, you should be at work! Tea, cake, a man’s wife-to-be – you devil!’
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