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

  I stared at her, confused, but she kept the smile on her face and took my arm to draw me into the house.

  ‘Keeping up appearances,’ she said when the door was closed. ‘The neighbours are all busy-bodies.’ She looked at me then, like Mabel had, searched my face and glanced down the length of my body. ‘I assume you wouldn’t want them all knowing your business.’

  I couldn’t find the words for a reply, and Mrs Smyth didn’t seem to require one. She took my coat and hung it on a coat stand by the door, then she walked down the narrow hall, and I followed. She ushered me into a small sitting room, walls lined with books, a fire burning low in the hearth. I could see where she’d been sitting before I knocked: a velvet sofa, midnight blue with large, soft cushions of various patterns scattered across the back. It was big enough for two, but only at one end was the velvet worn and the seat depressed from years of being favoured. A book was splayed open on the table beside it, the spine strained. As Mrs Smyth stoked the fire, I moved closer to the book. In Mary’s Reign, by Baroness Orczy. I’d bought it years before, from Blackwell’s bookshop. For a moment I forgot why I was there and regretted the disturbance I had caused.

  ‘I like to read,’ Mrs Smyth said, when she caught me looking at the book. ‘Do you like to read?’

  I nodded, but my mouth was too dry to speak. She went to her sideboard and poured a glass of water.

  ‘Take a sip, don’t gulp it,’ she said, handing it to me. I did as she instructed.

  ‘Good,’ she said, taking the glass from me. ‘Now, may I ask who recommended me?’

  ‘Mabel O’Shaughnessy,’ I whispered.

  ‘You can speak up,’ she said. ‘No one can hear us in here.’

  ‘Mabel O’Shaughnessy,’ I said again.

  Mrs Smyth did not immediately recognise Mabel’s name, and it was little help to describe the way she looked. But when I told her what I knew of her past, and mentioned her Irish lilt, Mrs Smyth began to nod.

  ‘She was a repeat customer,’ she said, unsmiling. ‘A stall in the Covered Market, you say?’

  I nodded, looked down at my feet. The floor of the sitting room was covered in a richly patterned carpet.

  ‘I didn’t think she’d survive the game,’ she said.

  I looked up. ‘The game?’

  ‘Clearly it’s not why you’re here.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I get two types of women knocking on my door,’ she said. ‘Those who get around too much and those who get around too little.’ She looked me up and down, took in every article of clothing. ‘You are the latter.’

  ‘And the game?’ I asked again, my hand going to my pocket to check I had a slip and pencil.

  ‘The game is whoring,’ she said, as if nothing worse than whist or draughts had crossed her lips. ‘There are players, like any game, though the dice are always loaded. When you lose you end up in gaol, the cemetery or here.’

  She put her hand on my belly, and I jumped. When she began digging her fingers in, I tried to move away.

  ‘Stay still,’ she said, putting one hand in the small of my back so she could get purchase with the other. ‘Mrs Warren’s profession, some call it, because of the play by Bernard Shaw. Do you like the theatre?’ she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I was invited to the opening night of that one. Whores aren’t the only women who find their way to my door. I get my fair share of actresses too.’ She stopped prodding and took a step back.

  ‘I’m not …’

  ‘I can see that you’re neither a whore nor an actress,’ she said.

  Then we stood there, silent. She was thinking, weighing something up. Finally, she let out a long breath.

  ‘It’s quickening,’ she said.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Quickening is the fluttering in your belly which means the baby has decided to stay.’

  I stared at her.

  ‘It means you’ve come to me too late.’

  Thank God, I thought.

  GAME

  Prostitution.

  ‘The game is whoring. There are players, like any game, though the dice are always loaded.’

  Mrs Smyth, 1907

  QUICKENING

  Stirrings of life.

  ‘Quickening is the fluttering in your belly which means the baby has decided to stay.’

  Mrs Smyth, 1907

  Sunnyside was quiet when I walked my bicycle through the gates. The afternoon was getting on; it was dusky and the Scriptorium was dark. Everyone had gone home. I could see Lizzie through the kitchen window, and I watched her for a while. She moved back and forth between the range and the table, no doubt preparing dinner for the Murrays. Once, when I was little, she told me she didn’t much like cooking.

  ‘What do you like?’ I’d asked.

  ‘I like sewing and I like looking after you, Essymay.’

  I was shivering. I leaned the bicycle against the ash and walked towards the kitchen.

  Inside, I stood on the threshold, the door closed behind me, the heat of the range warming my face. But the shivering didn’t stop.

  Lizzie looked at me. Her hand hovered at her chest. She had questions she didn’t ask.

  The shivering got worse, and she was there. Her thick arms around me, guiding me to a chair. She put a cup in my hands; it was almost too hot, but not quite. She told me to drink. I drank.

  ‘I couldn’t have done it,’ I said, looking up into her face. She held me against her belly and stroked my hair.

  When she spoke, she was slow and careful, as if I were a stray cat she was afraid would run off before it could be helped. ‘He seemed like a nice enough man, that Bill. You could tell him,’ she said.

  She held me a little tighter as she said it, and I didn’t move away. I’d thought about it. I’d imagined it. In my heart I was certain that Bill would do the right thing if he knew. That Tilda would make sure of it. I spoke as slowly and carefully as Lizzie just had.

  ‘I don’t love him, though. And I don’t want to be married.’

  She stiffened slightly, and I felt her take a breath. Then she pulled a chair close to mine and sat opposite me, our hands clasped.

  ‘Every woman wants to be married, Essymay.’

  ‘If that’s true, then why isn’t Ditte married, or her sister? Why not Elsie or Rosfrith or Eleanor Bradley? Why not you?’

  ‘Not all women get the chance. And some … well, some are just brought up with too many books and too many ideas, and they can’t settle to it.’

  ‘I don’t think I could settle to it, Lizzie.’

  ‘You’d get used to it.’

  ‘But I don’t want to get used to it.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want things to stay as they are. I want to keep sorting words and understanding what they mean. I want to get better at it and be given more responsibility, and I want to keep earning my own money. I feel as though I’ve only begun to understand who I am. Being a wife or a mother just doesn’t fit.’ It all came out in a rush and ended in sobbing.

  By the time the sobbing stopped I knew what I had to do. I asked Lizzie to find some notepaper and a pen. I would write to Ditte.

  February 11th, 1907

  My dear, dear Esme,

  Of course you must come, and I will help arrange what must be arranged. But there is the question of your father, and of the way things might look. I will come to Oxford this Friday. I will arrive at 11.30am and would like you to meet me at the station. We will go straight to the Queens Lane Coffee House – it’s a long way from Jericho, and we’re unlikely to bump into anyone we know. Leave Lizzie to her duties at Sunnyside, but assure her that we three shall speak before I leave.

  Your situation is not as rare as you might think. Many a young lady of means or education has found herself similarly inconvenienced. It is the oldest dilemma in history – the Virgin Mary, indeed! (Please don’t read this aloud to Lizzie, I know she would not approve.) But you see my point. Y
ou are in good company, though that is unlikely to soothe you. I’m just grateful you had the good sense to confide in me before you had a chance to consider alternative solutions. From down that alley many a young lady has not returned.

  I have a proposition for you, Esme. If you are going to come and live with Beth and me, I would like you to be my research assistant. My History of England is in need of updating, and I have been contemplating a biography of my grandfather for some years. He was a parliamentarian, you know. A very interesting man, with ideas before his time – I daresay your friend Tilda would have liked him very much. I will, of course, require your services at the earliest convenience. We can discuss the details when we have tea on Friday.

  Do you understand me, Esme? You will be doing me a great service, and when the work is done, you will return to Oxford and continue with your role in the Scriptorium. Your path, whatever you want it to be, need not be diverted.

  I will put all that is relevant in a letter to Dr Murray, and I am confident he will consider my offer an opportunity that will only increase your value to him on your return.

  Now, to your father. I have written to tell him of my trip, using ‘nag’ as my excuse (if the current quotations are our guide to its meaning, then it will be recorded that women are the only perpetrators of this particular form of harassment). My plan at this stage is to arrange to see Harry at home, prime him for the news, calm his worst fears (which will all be for your current and future welfare) and make it clear we have it all in hand. Then you must tell him everything – within reason. He is a good man, Esme. He is not a prude or a zealot or a conservative, but he is a father and he loves you very much. You must remember that he wakes every day to a photograph of you in your infant smock. This news will be a shock. He will need time and understanding, and perhaps the opportunity to rant and rave. Allow him this.

  Beyond that, there are other things we must discuss, but I think it best to leave them until we sit across from each other with a good pot of tea between us.

  So, I will see you this Friday, 11.30am. Don’t be late.

  Yours,

  Ditte

  It was raining – not heavily, but the people walking up and down High Street were opening umbrellas and turning their collars up against the damp. I watched them as Ditte talked. She was scripting the lies and half-truths that would make my absence from the Scriptorium reasonable.

  We drank two large pots of tea at the coffee house. When we came out onto the street, the rain had stopped and a weak sun was shining on the damp pavement. I blinked away the glare.

  Two weeks later, Da stood with me on the platform waiting for the train that would take me towards Bath. I thought about every conversation we had had since Ditte emerged from our sitting room and gave me the nod to go in and speak with him. We had said so little. Gestures and sighs had punctuated our interactions. He had touched my face and held my funny fingers whenever words failed him. I knew how much he wished that Lily was there and how he thought that if she had been, things would be different. I knew he thought he had failed me, rather than me failing him. But he said none of it, and so I could only return his affection with a touch of my own.

  When the train came, he carried my trunk into the second-class carriage and settled me in a seat by the door. He might have said something then, but there were three others already seated around me. He kissed my forehead and stepped out into the corridor, but he didn’t leave immediately. He smiled a sad smile, and I suddenly realised that I would come home completely changed; that contrary to what Ditte had promised, my path, whatever it was, had already been diverted. I stood up then and wrapped my arms around him. He held me until the whistle blew.

  Beth was to meet me off the train at Bath, but when I scanned the platform, there was no sign. I disembarked and waited where the porter had left my trunk.

  A woman waved. She was taller, slimmer and far more fashionable than Ditte, but there was something similar in the shape of her nose. I smiled as she approached.

  ‘It’s criminal that this is the first time I’ve met you,’ she said, taking me in an unexpected hug that nearly toppled me.

  ‘Of course, I know all about you,’ Beth said when we were seated in the back of the cab.

  I flushed and looked down at my lap.

  ‘Oh, not just that,’ she said, as if that was trivial. ‘You are Edith’s favourite topic of conversation, and I never tire of hearing about you.’ She leaned in. ‘You must forgive us, Esme. We are a couple of spinsters without a dog; we must discuss something.’

  Ditte and Beth lived between Bath Station and Royal Victoria Park, so the cab ride was short. We stopped in front of a three-storey terraced house, identical in every way to the terraced houses that stretched left and right. Beth saw me staring up at the attic windows.

  ‘It was left to us,’ she said, ‘so we’d never have to marry. It’s far too big, of course, but we have a lot of guests, and a woman comes every morning to clean. Mrs Travis insists we keep the rooms on the top floor closed. Saves on dusting, she says. She has very little aptitude for dusting, so we’ve agreed.’

  All those rooms, I thought. I would have dusted my own if they’d invited me when I was fourteen.

  Beth was younger than Ditte and her opposite in almost every way, yet there seemed to be no tension or argument between them. I’d always thought that Ditte was like the trunk of a great tree: anchored securely to what she knew to be true. After just a few days in Bath, I began to think of Beth as the canopy. In mind and body, she responded to whatever forces came her way. Despite her fifty years she shimmered, and I was mesmerised.

  I had a week’s grace – ‘to settle in,’ Beth said – then she began inviting visitors for afternoon tea. ‘We can’t talk about you all of the time,’ she teased.

  On the day our first visitors were due to arrive, the sisters called me downstairs to lay a tray in preparation. ‘Mrs Travis is an ordinary housekeeper,’ Ditte said, as she transferred the cake from a cooling rack to a plate, ‘but her Madeira is unrivalled.’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll stay in my room,’ I said.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Beth, coming into the kitchen. ‘It will play out perfectly. We will talk about Edith’s revision of her English history and then her employment of you will make perfect sense to everyone.’ She leaned in and said in a conspiratorial tone, ‘You are not without a reputation of your own, you know.’

  My hand went to my belly, still hidden, and I blushed scarlet. Beth made no effort to calm my fears.

  ‘Don’t tease her, Beth,’ said Ditte.

  ‘But it’s so easy,’ she said, smiling. ‘You have a reputation, Esme, as a natural scholar. According to Dr Murray you are the equal of any Oxford graduate. He is particularly fond of telling the story of you camping all day beneath the sorting table. He claims his lenience has allowed the development of a particular affinity for words.’

  Horror turned to gratitude, and the heat stayed in my face.

  ‘He would not approve of me telling you this, of course,’ said Beth. ‘Praise dulls the intellect, in his opinion.’

  There was a knock at the door.

  ‘Always on time,’ Beth said to Ditte. Then she turned to me. ‘Just keep your hand from hovering above your belly and no one will notice a thing.’

  Three gentlemen. All scholars, all residing in Somerset when they weren’t expected to teach. Professor Leyton Chisholm was an Historian at the University of Wales and a contemporary of the sisters. He was so comfortable in their company that he helped himself to cake without it being offered and sat unasked in the most comfortable chair. Mr Philip Brooks was also a friend, but not old enough to take such liberties. He had to stoop to avoid hitting his head on the doorway, and Beth made a game of standing on tip-toe to kiss him on the cheek. Mr Brooks taught geology at University College, Bristol, as did Mr Shaw-Smith, the youngest of the three. He was a stranger to the sisters but had come along at the insistence of Mr Brooks. His youthful face was eager but
could not yet support a beard. He stumbled through the introductions.

  ‘In time you will get used to us, Mr Shaw-Smith,’ said Beth, and I wondered if she was referring to us three, or to the whole of womankind.

  When the men were seated, Ditte and I arranged ourselves at either end of the settee. Beth poured the tea and nodded for me to pass the cake. When everyone was served and compliments about the Madeira had been given, I sat back and waited for Beth to ask some provocative question that would give the men their cue. I expected gentlemen’s anecdotes and hubris, intellectual disagreements argued on ever-diminishing points of logic. I expected the occasional entreaty for an opinion (out of courtesy), and I was already anticipating my disappointment at the automatic taming of language that would be observed due to the fact we three wore skirts.

  But that was not how the afternoon proceeded. These gentlemen had come to listen, to test their ideas and be persuaded otherwise – not by each other, but by the sisters. The men’s gaze fell comfortably on Beth, following her as she moved to turn on a lamp, watching her hands as she checked the level in the teapot and poured them each another cup. When she spoke, they leaned in, asked her to clarify, took it in turns to play with her ideas and combine them with their own. They argued with her, inviting her to defend her position. She often smiled before delivering a withering rebuke for sloppy reasoning. If they came around to her way of thinking, which they often did, it was never to be polite. I was astonished.

  Ditte spoke far less, but she frequently bent towards Professor Chisholm to quietly discuss some point the younger men were debating with Beth. When Ditte was asked for her opinion, the company would fall silent. On points of history, she was clearly the authority, and her words were treated with a respect I had only ever seen given to Dr Murray.

  ‘It is that exact question that Edith intends to explore in the revision of her History,’ said Beth at one point. ‘Which is why we have invited Esme to stay for a while. She is to be Edith’s research assistant.’

  ‘Isn’t that your job, Beth?’ said Professor Chisholm.