The Dictionary of Lost Words : A Novel (2020) Read online

  It wasn’t a cure for the mood that had descended on me, but it was welcome. ‘Oh, Elsie, thank you.’

  She nodded, pleased. I waited for her usual questions.

  ‘A new play will be starting at New Theatre tonight,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will you be going?’

  I had been getting an envelope every Friday for six years, and every Friday Elsie would enquire about what treat I would buy myself. It had always been something to brighten our house, but since meeting Tilda my answer had barely wavered: I would take myself to the theatre. ‘What is so fascinating about Much Ado About Nothing?’ she’d asked once. Bill came to mind, his thigh against mine in the darkness beyond the stage, our eyes on Tilda.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll be going to the theatre tonight,’ I said.

  She regarded me for a moment. Her dark eyes seemed sympathetic.

  ‘Plenty of time. I read it was popular in London, and they’re expecting a long season.’

  But I couldn’t imagine another troupe or another play, and the thought of sitting in the stalls with someone other than Bill brought me close to tears.

  ‘Must get on,’ Elsie said, touching my shoulder briefly before walking away.

  When she was gone, I looked at the proofs she had given me. It was the first page of the next fascicle, and a slip was pinned to the edge with an additional example for misbode.

  Dr Murray’s scrawled instructions were to edit the page to make it fit. I recalled the word coming out of an envelope years before; a lady’s neat script and a line from Chaucer. Da and I had played with it for a week. This new sentence made me pause. Her misboding sorrow for his absence has almost made her frantic.

  I missed them. It was as if they had written a play and constructed the set, and whenever I was with them I had a part to perform. I fell into it so easily: a secondary character, someone ordinary against whom the leads could shine. Now that they had packed up and left, I felt I had forgotten my lines.

  But did Bill’s absence make me frantic?

  He’d given me something I’d wanted since the first time he took my hand. It wasn’t love; nothing like it. It was knowledge. Bill took words I’d written on slips and turned them into places on my body. He introduced me to sensations that no fine sentence could come close to defining. Near its end, I’d heard the pleasure of it exhaled on my breath, felt my back arch and my neck stretch to expose its pulse. It was a surrender, but not to him. Like an alchemist, Bill had turned Mabel’s vulgarities and Tilda’s practicalities into something beautiful. I was grateful, but I was not in love.

  It was Tilda I missed the most; her absence that left a misboding sorrow. She had ideas I wanted to understand and she said things I could not. She cared more for what mattered and less for what didn’t. When I was with her I felt I might do something extraordinary. With her gone, I feared I never would.

  ‘Poorly again, Essy?’ Lizzie asked, when I came into the kitchen for a glass of water. ‘You’re looking a bit pale, that’s for sure.’

  Mrs Ballard was checking the Christmas pudding she’d made a few months earlier and drizzling over some brandy. She looked at me through narrowed eyes, and a frown deepened the lines of her face. Lizzie poured me some water from the jug on the kitchen table, then went to the pantry and brought out a packet of digestives.

  ‘Shop-bought biscuits, Mrs B!’ I said. ‘Did you know these were lurking in your pantry?’

  She blinked, and her face relaxed. ‘Dr Murray insists on McVitie’s. Reminds him of Scotland, he says.’

  Lizzie passed me a biscuit. ‘It’ll settle your stomach,’ she said.

  Food was the last thing I wanted, but Lizzie insisted. I sat at the kitchen table and nibbled at the biscuit while Mrs Ballard and Lizzie busied themselves around me. They got little done. When Lizzie wiped down the range for the third time, I finally asked if something was wrong.

  ‘No, no, pet,’ Mrs Ballard was quick to say. ‘I’m sure everything will be alright.’ But the frown returned to her face.

  ‘Esme,’ Lizzie said, finally putting down her cloth. ‘Will you come upstairs a minute?’

  I looked at Mrs Ballard, who nodded for me to follow Lizzie. Something was wrong, and for a moment I thought I might be sick. I took a deep breath and it passed, then I followed Lizzie up the stairs to her room.

  We sat on her bed. She looked at her hands, uncomfortable in her lap. It was me who reached out and took them in mine. She had bad news, I thought. She was ill, or maybe all my talk of choices had caused her to seek a better position. Before she said a word, my eyes had welled.

  ‘Do you know how far gone you are?’ Lizzie said.

  I stared at her, trying to match the words to something I might understand.

  She tried again. ‘How long have you been …’ she looked at my stomach and then met my eyes, ‘… expecting?’

  I understood her then. I pulled my hands from hers and stood up.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Lizzie,’ I said. ‘It’s not possible.’

  ‘Oh, Essymay, you silly duffer.’ She stood to take my hands again. ‘You didn’t know?’

  I shook my head. ‘How can you?’

  ‘Ma was always in the family way. It was all I knew before I came here. The sickness of it should be over soon,’ she said.

  I looked at her like she was mad. ‘I can’t have a baby, Lizzie.’

  Expect. Expectant. Expecting.

  It means to wait. For an invitation, a person, an event. But never for a baby. Not a single quotation in D to E mentioned a baby. Lizzie calculated that I’d been ‘expecting’ for ten weeks, but I’d been oblivious.

  The next day, I stayed in bed instead of joining Da for breakfast. A headache, I told him, and he agreed that I looked pale. As soon as he left for the Scriptorium, I went to his room and stood in front of Lily’s mirror.

  I was a little pale, yes, but in my nightdress I could see no change. I loosened the ribbon around my neck and let the nightdress fall to the floor. I remembered Bill tracing his finger from my head to my toes. Naming every part of me. My gaze retraced his path; gooseflesh rose as it had each time we’d been together. I stopped at my belly, at the hint of roundness that could easily be a big meal or wind or the heaviness before my monthly bleed. But it was none of those things, and the body I had so recently learned to read was suddenly incomprehensible.

  I pulled the nightdress back up and tied the ribbon tight. I returned to bed and pulled the covers up to my neck. I lay there for hours, barely moving, not wanting to feel what might be going on inside me.

  I was waiting, but not for a baby. I was waiting for a solution.

  I slept badly that night. In the morning, I felt worse for the lack of sleep, but I insisted on going to the Scriptorium. I kept a packet of McVitie’s in my desk and nibbled them through the morning post and while sorting slips. I tried to improve on the top-slip meanings suggested by volunteers, but nothing better would come to mind.

  I looked over to the sorting table. Da sat where he had always sat, as did Mr Sweatman and Mr Maling. Mr Yockney sat where Mr Mitchell used to, and I suddenly wondered what kind of shoes he wore and whether his socks matched. Would another child be welcomed beneath the sorting table? Or would new assistants complain and chastise and accuse? Da coughed, brought out his handkerchief and blew his nose. He had a cold, that was all, but I suddenly realised that he was older, greyer, fleshier. Would he have the energy to be mother and father, grandmother and grandfather? Would it be fair to ask it of him?

  At lunchtime, I joined Mrs Ballard and Lizzie in the kitchen and suffered their anxiety.

  ‘You must tell your father, Essymay. And Bill should be made to do the right thing,’ Lizzie said.

  ‘I won’t be telling Bill,’ I said. Lizzie stared at me, her face full of fear.

  ‘At least write to Miss Thompson. She’ll help you tell your father. She’ll know what to do,’ suggested Mrs Ballard.

  ‘There’s time ye
t,’ I said, not knowing if there was or there wasn’t. Lizzie and Mrs Ballard looked at each other but said nothing more. The kitchen became unbearably silent. When Lizzie asked if I’d be going with her to the Covered Market on Saturday, I said I would.

  The market was crowded. It was a relief. I hovered beside Lizzie as she went from stall to stall, testing the firmness of one fruit, the give of another. The banter was familiar and reassuring; no one made a point of asking how I felt or of telling me I looked pale.

  Eventually, we made our way to Mabel’s stall. It had been weeks since I’d seen her. She looked smaller, the unnatural curve of her back more pronounced. As we got closer I could see that she was whittling. Closer still, and the movement of her hands was mesmerising, their dexterity a contradiction to her wretched body.

  Mabel was so absorbed that she didn’t notice we were standing by her stall until Lizzie put an orange on the crate in front of her. Her craggy face barely registered the gift, but she put down the knife and whisked the orange into the folds of her rags. Then she picked up her knife and resumed her whittling.

  ‘You’ll like this, when it’s done,’ she said, looking at me.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Lizzie.

  Mabel turned to Lizzie for a moment and passed her the figure.

  ‘It’s Taliesin the bard. Or maybe Merlin the wizard. I reckon Miss Words-Worth ’ere will like it for ’er da.’ She looked back to me, expecting praise for her wordplay. I gave a wan smile.

  ‘It must be one or the other,’ said Lizzie.

  ‘One and the same,’ said Mabel, her eyes shifting over me and narrowing slightly. ‘Just the name keeps changin’. ’

  Lizzie handed back the whittling, and Mabel took it without looking away from my face. I shifted uncomfortably and she leaned forward.

  ‘Yer showin’, ’ she whispered. ‘In yer face. If you took off that coat, I reckon I’d see it.’

  The shouts of stallholders, the clatter of carts, the competing conversations; all the sounds of the market were sucked into a single piercing note. Instinct made me look around, made me do up the undone buttons of my coat.

  Mabel smiled and sat back. She was pleased with herself. I began to shake.

  Until that moment, my anxiety had been all about telling Da. I hadn’t thought about what anyone else might think, or what the consequences of them knowing might be. I looked around and felt like some small creature with nowhere to run.

  ‘Ain’t ’eard of no wedding,’ Mabel said.

  ‘Enough, Mabel,’ Lizzie whispered.

  Their words cut through the ringing in my ears, and the sounds of the market came flooding back. There was a moment of relief when I realised that nobody seemed to have noticed. But it didn’t last. I had to lean on Mabel’s crate to stop from falling.

  ‘Don’t worry, lass,’ Mabel said. ‘Got a few weeks yet. Most people don’t notice what they don’t expect to see.’

  Lizzie spoke for me, a measure of my fear apparent in her voice. ‘But if you can tell, Mabel …’

  ‘Ain’t no one ’ere with my particular – what should I call it – expertise.’

  ‘You have children?’ I could barely hear my own voice ask the question.

  Mabel laughed, her blackened gums ugly and mocking. ‘I ain’t so stupid as that,’ she said. Then she lowered her voice even more. ‘There are ways not to ’ave ’em.’

  Lizzie coughed and started picking up various objects on Mabel’s table, showing me one and then another and asking if I liked them. Her voice was louder than it needed to be.

  Mabel held my gaze. Then, in a voice that carried to the flower stall and beyond, she said, ‘What can I interest you in, lass?’

  I played along, picking up the unfinished figure of Taliesin and turning it over in my shaking hand. I barely saw it.

  ‘One of me best, that one. But it ain’t quite done,’ Mabel said, reaching for it. ‘Reckon I’ll ’ave it finished after lunch, if you want to come back.’

  ‘Time to go, Esme.’ Lizzie took my arm.

  ‘I’ll keep it tucked away so no one else buys it,’ Mabel said as we turned to leave.

  I nodded. Mabel nodded back. Then Lizzie and I left the market without finishing the shopping.

  ‘Will you come in for tea?’ Lizzie asked when we got to Sunnyside. The senior assistants all worked a half-day on Saturday, and I’d often kept Lizzie company in the kitchen while I waited for Da.

  ‘Not today, Lizzie. I thought I’d go home and hang a few decorations as a surprise for Da.’

  When I got home, I climbed the stairs to Da’s room and again stood in front of Lily’s mirror. It wasn’t my belly that Mabel had noticed; it was my face. I peered into the glass, trying to see what she had seen, but the face that stared back was as it had always been.

  How was that possible? It must have changed year to year, and yet I could not see it. I looked away from the mirror then glanced back quickly, trying to catch a glimpse of myself as a stranger might. I saw a woman’s face, older than I expected, her eyes wide and brown and frightened. But I saw nothing that told me she was pregnant.

  I went back downstairs and wrote Da a note. I was dress shopping, it said. I’d be home around three with pastries for afternoon tea.

  I cycled back to the Covered Market. When I arrived, I was out of breath – more than usual. A familiar boy came to where I stood and offered to lean my bicycle against the nearest wall. He’d keep an eye on it, he said. His mother nodded from her stall, and I nodded back. Did she see something in my face? Is that why she told her boy to help? I looked in at the market – the clamour only added to the chaos in my head.

  As I walked among the shops and stalls, I felt I was drawing every eye. I needed to act normally. I went from one stall to another, recalling Tilda and the others as they practised backstage; the rehearsal was never as convincing as the performance. I wondered if I was convincing anyone.

  By the time I arrived at Mabel’s stall, my basket was full. I handed her an apple.

  ‘You need to eat more fruit, Mabel,’ I said. ‘Keep the catarrh out of your chest.’

  She exaggerated her rotten smile so I could see the deficit of teeth. ‘I ain’t eaten an apple since I was a lass ’bout your age,’ she said.

  I put the apple back in my basket and pulled out a ripe pear. She took it and pressed her thumb into the flesh. If she rejected it, there would be a bruise by the time I got it home.

  But she didn’t reject it. ‘A treat indeed,’ she said, wrapping her gums around it and letting the juice run down her chin. She wiped it with the back of a rag-wrapped hand, removing days of grime from one small area of skin.

  ‘Mabel,’ I began, but the words wouldn’t come.

  Mabel’s cracked lips softened as they sucked on the flesh of the pear. I felt myself flush, and the nausea I thought was over returned in a sickening wave that made me lean against the edge of Mabel’s crate.

  ‘That Lizzie won’t approve of what yer plannin’, ’ she said, her voice low.

  It was a truth I’d been arguing with for days. Lizzie refused to hear me when I said I couldn’t have a child. The plainer my words, the more she would handle the crucifix around her neck. Like her faith, it was always there, hidden and quiet and personal. But in the past week, she hung onto it like it was the only thing keeping her from Hell.

  It judged me, that crucifix, and I hated it. I imagined it twisting my words and whispering its translation in her ear. We were in some kind of tug of war, with Lizzie in the middle. It was not a contest I wanted to lose.

  ‘I reckon Mrs Smyth might still be in the trade,’ Mabel whispered, while picking up random objects as if to show me their worth. ‘She was an apprentice, so to speak, when I was in need. Be an old hag and good at it by now, I’d wager.’

  A trembling began in my hands and worked its way along my limbs until my body was shivering with it.

  ‘Breathe normal, lass,’ Mabel said, holding my gaze with hers.

  I held o
nto the crate and tried to stop taking the air in gulps, but the shivering continued.

  ‘You got yer pencil and one of them slips?’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Take ’em out of yer pocket.’

  I shook my head. It didn’t make sense.

  Mabel leaned forward. ‘Do it,’ she said, then a little louder, ‘I just gave you a word and you’ll forget it if you don’t write it down.’

  I reached into my pocket for a slip and a pencil. By the time I was poised to write, the trembling had subsided.

  ‘Trade,’ Mabel said, leaning back a little but not taking her eyes off my face.

  I wrote trade in the top-left corner. Below that I wrote Mrs Smyth might still be in the trade.

  ‘You feelin’ better now?’ Mabel asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘Fear ’ates the ordinary,’ she said. ‘When yer feared, you need to think ordinary thoughts, do ordinary things. You ’ear me? The fear’ll back off, for a time at least.’

  I nodded again and looked at the slip. Trade was such a common word.

  ‘Where did you say Mrs Smyth lived?’ I asked.

  Mabel told me, and I wrote it on the bottom of the slip.

  Before I left, Mabel retrieved something from within the many folds of cloth that kept her warm. ‘For you,’ she said, handing me a disc of pale wood into which she’d carved a shamrock. ‘Thanks for the pear.’

  I folded the slip around it and put it in my pocket.

  It was an ordinary terraced house with identical terraced houses either side. A Christmas wreath still hung on the door. I checked the address again then looked along the length of the street. It was empty. I knocked.

  The woman who answered the door might have been old, but she was straight-backed and well-dressed and could almost look me in the eye. I assumed I had the wrong house after all and began to stammer an apology, but she cut in.

  ‘Lovely to see you, my dear,’ she said, rather loudly. ‘How is your mother?’