The Dictionary of Lost Words : A Novel (2020)

by Williams, Pip

  October 1st, 1915, Loos

  My Darling Es,

  It has been three days. Is that possible? It feels like more. They were endless. We were to be kept back for a day to rest and then we weren’t. We were already exhausted, but we had to keep on fighting. Is that what we were doing?

  Mostly we were dying.

  I’ve not slept. I can’t think straight, but I know I must write to you, Es. Es. Es. Es. Es. Es. Essy. Esme. I’ve always loved how Lizzie calls you Essymay. I’ve wanted to call you that myself; it’s been there, on the tip of my tongue. But it’s hers. It’s everything you were before I met you. Is that why I love it?

  Forgive me. I’m desperate to lie down, rest my head against your belly. I want to hear your heart beating. I rested my head against the chest of my orderly and heard nothing. Why would I? His legs had been blown off. His legs that had done everything I asked of them were no longer attached to his body.

  I lost seven of my men, Es. For some, the weeks before this battle were the best they had ever had. Three might be fathers by the time the flesh has fallen from their bones.

  I write this, my darling Es, because you say your imagination conjures images that words can’t come close to, and you would rather know the truth. I find it is a great relief to write without filter, and it is the closest I can get to resting against your breast and weeping. I am so grateful. But you have not imagined the distress you will feel. My account will seep into your dreams, and it will be me lying in the mud, my eyes like glass, bits of me blown away. Every morning you will wake in fear of what might be, and it will shadow you through the day.

  I am spent, my darling Es. There is a buzzing in my ears and images in my mind that get clearer and more grotesque whenever I close my eyes. It is the gauntlet I must run if I am ever to sleep. I would be a coward to share this with you.

  When the battle is over, I will tear this up and start again with a more tolerable arrangement of words. But right now, having arranged them exactly as I need to, I feel unburdened. When my lids close, I will be spared the worst, and it will be an image of you that ushers me to sleep.

  Eternal Love,

  Gareth

  I folded the letter and put my slip within it. I turned the pages of Brooke’s book until I found ‘The Dead’. I read the first few lines in silence.

  ‘All this is ended.’ I said to the empty house. I could read no further.

  I closed the poem around our final words. Stood. Walked up the stairs to the bathroom. I put Gareth’s comb back on the sink. I was leaving; it made no sense at all. But nothing did.

  I released the latch and the lid sprang back, The Dictionary of Lost Words etched on its inside. The trunk was bulging, but there was room enough.

  On top was our dictionary. I opened to the title page.

  Women’s Words and Their Meanings

  Edited by Esme Nicoll

  I placed Gareth’s Rupert Brooke beside it.

  I held the soldiers’ grotesque sentences, written in Gareth’s hand. I didn’t put them in the trunk. He did not mean for me to lock them away.

  I could hear no sound from the kitchen and knew Lizzie must be waiting, not wanting to rush me. But she would be worried about the time. The train for Southampton was due at noon.

  I took the telegram from my pocket and placed it on top of Women’s Words. The paper was butcher’s brown and sickly against the beautiful green of the leather. Half the message was typed: Regret to inform you that … An efficiency when the message was so often the same. The rest was handwritten. The telegraph clerk who transcribed the message had added Deeply, before Regret.

  I closed the trunk.

  August 15th, 1928

  Dear Miss Megan Brooks,

  My name is Edith Thompson. Your parents may have spoken of me. Sarah, your late mother, was one of my dearest friends and one of the few people willing to accompany me on what she amusingly referred to as my ‘history rambles’ (it was never clear whether the ‘rambling’ referred to the walking or my commentary – it amused her to keep me guessing). When you all sailed for Australia, I found her hard to replace, but I delighted in her letters, which reliably shared news of you, her garden and your local politics, all three of which she was justly proud. How I miss her wit and practical advice.

  I am sending this letter and its accompanying trunk care of your father, for reasons that will soon make themselves plain. I wanted to be sure you could somehow be made ready to receive the contents of both. How one can be made ready, I am not entirely sure, but a father might know, and of all fathers yours is surely one of the wisest.

  The trunk belonged to another dear friend of mine. Her name was Esme Owen née Nicoll. I am aware that you have always known you were adopted, but perhaps you have not known all of the details. I think the story I have to tell will bring on some strong emotions. I am sorry. But I would feel a greater sorrow never to share it.

  My dear Megan. Twenty-one years ago, Esme gave you life, but she was in no position to sustain it. These are always delicate circumstances, but your mother and father spent a lot of time with Esme in the months before you were born. It was obvious to me that they grew to love and admire her, as I have loved and admired her. When the time came, your mother was there for Esme in a way that I could not be. It was the most natural thing for her to be in the birthing room, and for a month she sat by Esme’s bed, and you, beautiful child, became the bond between them.

  It pains me to write these next words. The truth of them will be a sadness I do not think I will recover from. Esme passed away on the morning of July 2nd of this year, 1928. She was just 46 years old.

  The details seem ordinary – she was struck by a lorry on Westminster Bridge. But nothing about Esme was ordinary. She had gone up to London for the passing of the Equal Franchise Act, not to join the chanters and banner holders but to record what it meant to the people on the edge of the crowd. This is what she did, you see: she noticed who was missing from the official records and gave them an opportunity to speak. She wrote a weekly column in her local newspaper – ‘Lost Words’, it was called – and each week, she would talk to the ordinary, the illiterate, the forgotten, in order to understand what big events meant to them. On July 2nd, Esme was talking to a woman selling flowers on Westminster Bridge when the crowd forced her onto the road.

  I feel I should tell you something more of her, besides her death. Our last meeting, I think, is as good an anecdote as any.

  I had been invited to sit in the balcony of Goldsmith’s Hall, where a dinner was to be held to mark the final publication of the Oxford English Dictionary. I was accompanied by Rosfrith Murray and Eleanor Bradley, editors’ daughters who’d dedicated their lives to their fathers’ work. There was some to-do about our presence, owing to our sex, but it was thought only right that, even though we could not dine with the men, we should at least be allowed to witness the speeches. The Prime Minster, Stanley Baldwin, spoke wonderfully, thanking the editors and the staff, but he did not look up to the balcony. The Dictionary was an enterprise I had been involved with from the publication of the first words in 1884 to the publication of the last. I am told that few in that room could claim such a long allegiance. Rosfrith and Eleanor too had given the Dictionary decades of their lives. As had Esme.

  She told me, not long ago, that she had always been a bondmaid to the Dictionary. It owned her, she said. Even after she left, it defined her. Still, despite these shackles, she was not afforded even a balcony view.

  The men ate saumon souilli with sauce hollandaise, and for dessert they had mousse glassée favorite. They drank 1907 Chateau Margaux. We were given the proceedings, and the menu was included – an unintended cruelty, I’m sure.

  We were famished when it was all over, but Esme had travelled up from Southampton to meet us, and when we left Goldsmith’s Hall there she was with a hamper of food. It was warm, so we caught a cab down to the Thames and sat under a lamp with our picnic, enjoying a celebration of our own. ‘To the wom
en of the Dictionary,’ Esme said, and we raised our glasses.

  I was not aware of the trunk until after the funeral, when her friend, Lizzie Lester, suggested it should be sent to you. She pulled the battered old thing from under her bed and explained what I would find if I opened it. That poor girl was bereft. But when I assured her that I would send the trunk to you as soon as possible, she was calmed.

  The trunk sat at the end of my bed for a week, unopened. When my tears for Esme had dried, I had no need to explore its contents. For me, Esme is like a favourite word that I understand in a particular way and have no desire to understand differently.

  The trunk is yours, Megan. To open, or to leave closed. Whichever you choose, please know that it will be my pleasure to answer questions about Esme, if you have any. She called me Ditte, by the way. I will miss answering to it and would be glad to be called by that name again, should you care to write.

  With love and great sympathy,

  Ditte Thompson

  Meg sat with the trunk so long that all the light went out of the room. Ditte’s letter lay beside it. Read and reread. One page was creased from when Meg had screwed it up in a rage. Moments later, she’d smoothed it flat again.

  Her father knocked at the door, a light, tentative knock. He offered her tea, and she refused. He knocked again and enquired about her state of mind. Quite alright, she said, though she was quite sure she wasn’t. When the hall clock chimed eight, some kind of spell was broken. Meg got up from the chair she’d been sitting in for the past four hours and turned on a lamp. She opened the door to the sitting room and called to her father.

  ‘I’d like that tea now, Dad,’ she said. ‘With a couple of biscuits, if you don’t mind.’

  After placing the tray beside her, he poured the tea into her mum’s favourite china cup. He added a slice of lemon, kissed her on the forehead and left the room. There was no mention that dinner had gone cold.

  It was three years since the cup had been warmed with tea. Meg held it like her mum had done: cupped in both hands with the handle pointing forward, all in an effort to avoid the small chip on the rim where one would normally sip. The gesture blurred the edges of Meg’s being, and she imagined her elegant fingers as her mother’s fleshy ones, callouses softening under the heat, a hint of earth under the fingernails. Her mother’s short, heavy legs had been a better fit for the armchair than Meg’s long limbs, but Meg had taken to sitting there. Although the day had been hot, she shivered, as her mother often would, when she came in from her garden to share tea.

  What would she have made of the trunk? Meg thought. Would she have told her to open it or to keep it shut? It sat on the chaise longue, where it had been all afternoon. Meg looked at it again and thought it had become strangely familiar. ‘In your own time,’ her mum would have said.

  Meg finished her tea and eased herself out of the old armchair. She sat on the chaise longue next to the trunk. The latch clicked open with no effort at all, and the lid sprang back.

  The Dictionary of Lost Words had been clumsily carved into the inside of the lid. It was a child’s hand, and Meg suddenly realised that the contents were not just that of a woman who had given up her baby, but of a girl who never dreamed that one day she would have to.

  A telegram, a slender leather-bound volume with Women’s Words and Their Meanings embossed on the cover, letters, and loose bits and pieces – a few suffrage pamphlets, theatre programs and newspaper clippings. There were three sketches of a woman, naked. She was looking out a window in the first, the swell of her belly just visible. In the third her hands and gaze embraced the baby that must have been stirring.

  But mostly there were small bits of paper, no bigger than postcards. Some were pinned together, others loose. There was a shoebox full of them, sorted into alphabetical order with small cards between each letter, like a library catalogue drawer. Each slip of paper had a word written at the top, and a sentence below. Sometimes there was the name of a book, but most just had a woman’s name, sometimes a man’s.

  Morning light streamed through the bay window, warming Meg’s cheek. She woke with a start. Her back ached from the hours she had slept on the chaise longue. Another scorcher, she thought, the trunk and its contents submerged like a dream. But Women’s Words was open on her lap, and her skin felt tight where tears had dried. Under the glare of the Adelaide sun, Esme’s words, in all their forms, lay scattered across the floor, exposed and real.

  Meg began to sort them. She gathered Ditte’s letters and placed them in one pile, Tilda’s postcards in another. Suffrage pamphlets and news clippings had a pile of their own. There was a program for Much Ado about Nothing and a handful of ticket stubs that she put with other bits and pieces to form a pile of miscellany.

  The slips in the shoebox were almost all written in a single hand. When she checked, they each had an entry in Women’s Words. She left them as they were and turned to the rest. There were so many, a hundred or more, each unique in script and content. There were ordinary words and words she’d never heard of. Some of the quotations were so old she could make no sense of them at all. But she read each one.

  They were a uniform size, more or less, and most seemed made for no other purpose. But some had been fashioned from whatever was to hand: there were slips cut from ledgers or exercise books; from the pages of novels or pamphlets, a word circled and the sentence underlined. One word had been written on the back of a shopping list, the sender presumably having already bought her three pints of milk, box of soda, lard, two pounds of flour, cochineal, and McVitie’s digestives. Did she bake a cake before sitting down to scribe the sentence that perfectly represented one sense of the word beat? The quotation was from the women’s pages of a parish church newsletter, dated 1874. The shopping list, no longer necessary, was the perfect size and shape. Meg imagined a woman, not wealthy, not poor, sitting at her kitchen table, the newsletter in front of her, a pot of tea at her elbow, the wait for the cake to rise a welcome pause in her day. And then a child, rushing in, nostrils full of the treat ahead, hovering until it was time to blow out the candles.

  A cheer went up from the park across the road, and Meg was brought back to herself and to Esme. The familiar sound of bat on ball, frequent polite clapping and the occasional excitement of a wicket reminded her it was Saturday morning, that she was in the heat of an Adelaide summer and nowhere near the damp and chilly climate of these words and their champions. She felt stiff, dishevelled. She got up and looked out towards the players. It was like any other Saturday, and yet it wasn’t.

  Another cheer went up, but Meg turned away from the window and walked over to the bookshelf. It contained all twelve volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary. They were on a low shelf, so they would be easy to reach, though when she was small Meg could barely lift them. Her parents had been collecting them for as long as she could remember, the last only arriving a week earlier.

  Meg pulled V to Z from its position at the end of the shelf and opened to the first page. She could smell its newness, feel the spine resist as she opened it. Published 1928.

  Only months before, it did not exist. Only months before, Esme did.

  Meg went to the other end of the shelf and traced her finger over the gold lettering of Volume I, A and B. The spine was creased from opening, the edge at the top damaged from her childish hands levering it out of its place. This time, Meg was careful as she took it from the shelf. The weight of it was always a surprise. She took it to her mother’s armchair and rested it in her lap. Then she opened to the title page.

  A new English Dictionary

  on Historical Principles

  Edited by James A. H. Murray

  Volume 1. A and B

  Oxford:

  At the Clarendon Press

  1888

  Forty years earlier. Esme would have been six years old.

  Meg picked up the slip for beat and read the quotation.

  ‘Beat until the sugar is well combined and the mixture pales.’ />
  She turned the pages of the Dictionary until she found the word. Beat had fifty-nine different senses across ten columns. Violence characterised so many of them. She ran her finger down the columns until she came to a definition that suited the slip. Four quotations, about beating eggs. The quotation on her slip wasn’t there.

  Meg placed A and B on the floor beside the trunk. She opened the shoebox and riffled through it.

  LIE-CHILD

  ‘To keep a lie-child condemns her and it. I’ll fetch a wet-nurse.’

  Mrs Mead, midwife, 1907

  Esme’s handwriting was already familiar. Meg retrieved Volume VI of the Dictionary and found the corresponding page. Lie-child was missing completely, but Meg understood what it meant. She returned to Volume I and turned to bastard.

  Begotten and born out of wedlock.

  Illegitimate, unrecognised, unauthorised.

  Not genuine; counterfeit, spurious; debased, adulterated, corrupt.

  Meg slammed the volume shut. She rose from the floor, but her legs were shaking. She felt fragile, suddenly unfamiliar to herself. She collapsed into the armchair and began to sob. Bastard had two columns, yet what it meant for her had not been captured by a single quotation.

  Meg missed her mum, missed all her words and gestures, which she knew would have made sense of the mess that covered the floor of the sitting room. She buried her face in the fabric of the chair and smelled her mum’s hair, the familiar scent of Pears Soap, which she’d always used to wash it. And which Meg still used. Deeper sobs. Was that what it meant to be a daughter? To have hair that smelled of your mother’s? To use the same soap? Or was it a shared passion, a shared frustration? Meg had never wanted to kneel in the dirt and plant bulbs like her mum; she longed to be considered – not with kindness, but with curiosity, with regard for her thoughts, with respect for her words.