The Liar's Dictionary

by Eley Williams

  ‘He mentioned meeting me?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘He did.’ Frasham in the dark of the basement yesterday, the sweat on his brow, Miss Cottingham hiding behind the unused presses, their giggles in the dark. Winceworth examined his sleeve.

  ‘Shall we return to the stairwell?’ Sophia asked. ‘I’m not sure this leads anywhere interesting.’

  Winceworth let her take his arm and they doubled back on themselves. ‘Perhaps Frasham mentioned to you how my trip in Barking panned out?’

  ‘He did not. Anything of interest?’

  The strange terrible colour that defied definition.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Language never sleeps, I suppose,’ said Sophia, and she laughed. It was a tight, high laugh and one that Winceworth recognised. He could compile a whole dictionary of fake laughs. This one sounded like a feint he used when anxiety greased the mouth and sprained the throat – when he laughed like this it was to mask a voice that might otherwise break with emotion. As they walked, he watched her look up at the ceiling as if to compose herself.

  ‘Miss Slivkovna—’

  ‘That is not my name,’ Sophia said, and again her tone was bright. As if this was an inconsequential fact. Winceworth halted. As she continued, however, he was compelled to scurry forward to keep pace at her side.

  ‘I do beg your pardon,’ he said.

  ‘The fault is mine.’

  Pons pons pons. ‘You do not mean – I am addressing Mrs Terence Clovis Frasham?’

  Sophia’s real laugh flourished in the corridor and it was her turn to stop walking. She laughed in his face openly with guileless, true human joy.

  ‘Not that, no! Strike that from the books!’

  Winceworth cluttered.

  ‘Dear God, you poor man, no!’ Sophia wiped a mirth-borne tear from the side of her face. ‘Ah, you’ll excuse me.’

  Winceworth waited.

  ‘I am not used to giving my real name to anyone –’ She broke off to stroke a Tits-cat sleeping by her feet – ‘I’m afraid you caught me at a moment of improvisation when I introduced myself.’

  ‘Unless I am mistaken,’ said Winceworth, who was not, ‘it was Frasham who introduced you by that name.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Sophia’s laugh fluted upwards. ‘A commendable eye for details, of course. I’m sure you’re right. We are a good team, Terence and I – I do well to follow his lead in such things sometimes. Running with the line he has supplied, maybe elaborating on it a little. But I see I have upset you,’ she said, frankly and with an apologetic moue, ‘and I am sorry to have not told you the truth.’ She straightened and smiled, looking easier about the eyes. ‘Names after all, little peshka, should not matter so much.’

  ‘I would not trust Frasham as far as I could throw him,’ Winceworth said.

  ‘No,’ Sophia said, and she withdrew her arm from his.

  ‘And perhaps – you’ll forgive me – perhaps I understand more about him, of him, than you might already know.’

  ‘I think I know most things. I know most things about many subjects, or many things about most subjects – whichever sounds better.’

  Concision and decisiveness were more necessary than breath. ‘I saw him yesterday,’ Winceworth said. ‘Yesterday, last evening—’

  ‘In particular,’ said Sophia, and they turned a corner at the head of the stairs, ‘I imagine that you saw him in company?’

  A cat headbutted Winceworth’s ankle.

  ‘And,’ Sophia continued, ‘perhaps he was in a state of some unparticular undress? Oh, peshka,’ she said and touched his forearm, ‘you do look worried.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. Then, louder, ‘This does not matter to you?’

  ‘Very little matters to me.’ She squeezed his arm. She looked concerned only by his concern. ‘Indiscretion, infidelity—’ The thought seemed to leave her even as she spoke it, as if she found the subject entirely boring. She studied his face. Just five minutes before he would have given anything for such proximity to her, scrutiny from her. ‘It doesn’t particularly interest me, I suppose,’ she said. ‘If I may be candid with you, Mr Winceworth.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  ‘I am very aware of the way Terence likes to comport himself.’ She made a face. ‘But, really, will you listen to me – indiscretion, comport. So few days on this island and already I am so at home with using your obscure euphemisms.’

  ‘Comport, consort—’

  ‘Cavort, contort.’ She joined in as one enjoying a word game, glad to be egged on. ‘You have your secrets too, I think?’ Winceworth said nothing and Sophia paused, then raised her gaze to the heavens. ‘You think me cruel for saying so. You are hurt.’

  ‘It is not for me to say.’ Winceworth let her finish another entirely winning laugh. He set his jaw. ‘Frasham is an idiot.’

  ‘The very definition of an idiot,’ Sophia said. ‘He is a useful idiot, however. And quite sweet: he said he would make sure Swansby’s puts an emphasis on Russia in the entry on chess just for me, which I think as close to a love-gift as an encyclopaedic article can get.’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘In truth,’ said Sophia, and she deflated to see any game was not in the offing, ‘it was to make sure that you received an invitation to the party this evening. I can promise you it will be a more lively event than the one at which we first met.’

  ‘You know about this evening?’

  ‘You are speaking to the one who organised it.’

  Sophia Unslivkovna enjoyed Winceworth’s incredulity, gently joshing him with an elbow. ‘Terence said that you would be too delicate for it or find it distasteful, but I just know you’ll enjoy it. Loosen those limbs. What could a lexicographer enjoy more than the explicit? Now, no need for such a serious determined little face, Peter.’

  Peter the prude. Peter the lisping prissy prig. The shock of hearing his name from her lips did not flip the room upside down or cause his heart to explode with a strange new colour. Winceworth moved his arm away. ‘I am afraid I have plans this evening.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Sophia. ‘You are a terrible liar and I would like you to come. I command it.’

  ‘Command?’

  Sophia rolled her eyes. ‘I do not just describe the invitation but also prescribe it. Come! Relax! A bit of sport amongst some statues and whathaveyou.’

  ‘It is the whathaveyou that makes this ghastly,’ Winceworth said.

  ‘Ghastly, oh, dear God,’ said Sophia. ‘I am quite serious that it will be worth your while.’

  ‘It is – unseemly—’ Winceworth said, but he muttered it and she did not seem to be brooking his answers.

  ‘I don’t mean worth your while because of – heavens, whatever it is that frightens you so – muckiness and daubing your fingers with debauchery—’

  ‘Please do not mock me, Sophia,’ Winceworth said, and he tried to face her down.

  ‘I would not dare,’ Sophia said. ‘I am sorry.’

  She leaned forward and kissed him, softly, x on the cheek.

  ‘There is a password you have to say this evening, to get in,’ she said. ‘Terence was laughing earlier at the thought of you being stranded at the door, lisping guesses at shibboleths. Say you will be there,’ she said.

  Winceworth did not move. She approached as if to whisper in his ear, but he turned his head and stepped back a little. She laughed, then, a full clear laugh, and then she took her leave, descending the stairs just as the staff of Swansby House entered. They doffed their hats to her each in turn as they pooled in through the door.

  She glanced up the stairs to meet his eye, but Winceworth was no longer to be seen.

  Y is for yes (exclam.)

  I could mention some of the nouns, verbs and adjectives of the aftermath. I could select the best of all of these or select the ones that seem most obvious or most relevant to me, or the ones that are generally agreed upon as the most useful, appreciable, evocative. I could also take t
he time to arrange an account of what happened there on the Westminster pavement as Swansby House shrouded in smoke in front of us, and express it using an order that is cogent and coherent and concise. That would be a responsible thing to do.

  Simply put is best put.

  So what happened? Fire engines added their sirens to the yawp of Swansby House’s alarm. That’s something I remember very clearly, as well as the lines of people gathered outside – the second time today! – where they all stood rubbing their faces or covering their mouths and taking photographs of the building. Everyone looked shocked, baffled, curious. They scattered back a few paces and drew aside as Pip, David and I barrelled out of the burning building. We landed together in a spluttering heap at the bottom of the stone steps.

  ‘Give them some air!’ I heard. ‘Give them some room!’

  Maybe it was a firefighter or a member of this crowd that helped the three of us to our feet and away from the shadow of Swansby House. We were scooped and propped up next to some bollards across the road, and I remember someone checking Pip over. Apparently I was repeating her name as if looking for her even though she was close enough for me to look down and see her hand in mine. Someone else was administering to me, a man with a kind voice and a uniform that had lots of holsters and belt loops. I kept my eyes trained over his shoulder, watching Pip.

  She caught my eye. She looked pale, with red-rimmed eyes and grey smudges across her forehead.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asked. Her voice was hoarse, and she repeated the question so that it was a little clearer, calling it across to me despite us being so close together.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. It was an odd wheeze in the crisp and crisping air.

  Pip waited a little, then she said, ‘I’m fine too,’ over the medic’s shoulder.

  She was. She is. Pip is fine. All the important facts.

  So, what happened?

  If I piece it together with hindsight, David must have been looked after by another paramedic nearby, someone who probably took the time to ask him questions while pointing up at the building. Pip recalls seeing David nodding to the medic as if in conversation but it struck her he did not seem to be really listening. David had got hold of Tits: the cat was nestled in his arms beneath his woollen jumper and I could tell from the movement beneath the fabric that Tits had set about palpitating David’s shirt-front with his paws. If I knew Tits at all, he was probably crooning and purring. This is a detail that will not make the police reports, nor the newspaper columns nor the trivia books that list the evening’s events in their pages, but as I watched David Swansby watching his empire burn to the ground, I saw two furry ears and the top of Tits’s head appear up his collar. Momentarily Swansby’s final editor stood there chimerically two-headed, some greasy residue from the fire stamped in a mask of soot across his eyes.

  I remember one of my hands was in Pip’s and that with the other I was gripping the dossier of false entries close to my chest.

  But, what happened?

  Onlookers stepped up their oohs and ahhs as a snicking burst of glass came from above. As a group we all instinctively ducked and looked up: in Swansby House, flames were visible from the window of the room where Pip and I had been working just minutes before. Dictionary as accelerant. Red and orange tongues lanced into the evening sky. Two tourists took a picture of it.

  ‘Is there anybody else in there?’ someone asked me and surely I shook my head. Pip tells me that at this point she had shifted her eyes to David Swansby. He was watching the blaze with the crowd and absently patting the cat’s head at his neck. He had the look of a man embarrassed that he could not go down with his ship, she said.

  Later, Pip explained exactly what she saw when she ran into David upstairs in the dusty, smoky rooms above my office. She had noticed at once that there was a mobile phone kicked aside or dropped by his shoes, its screen still bright with use, and as she rounded the threshold of the room she had found David frantically trying to extinguish a small blue fire springing from a parcel in his hands. We now know that this was a bomb with a timer. David had messed up setting this timer – ‘I’m a words man, no good with numbers!’ he later joked on the stand, getting not one laugh from the galleries – and had ended up igniting the incendiary prematurely. He admitted this fact in court with a sad defeated shrug.

  Pip said she recognised the smell at once, the dull sour tang of electrics fusing and melting.

  ‘He looked aghast,’ Pip told me, using a word that sat ungainly and uncomfortable in her mouth. On the evening of the fire she recounted to police officers as precisely as possible what she had seen, then repeated this to different officers at the station, and then again months after that she used the same words in court, wearing a blazer she only ever used for weddings, funerals and job interviews. Each time she chose her words carefully and tried not to get emotional as she imparted, divulged, disclosed the truth whole truth and nothing but the etcs of what she had seen, spelling out the scene as best she could remember. Yet even as I heard it, even as she asked me to check her account for errors or slip-ups, doubting herself, somehow I would not fully let myself believe the truth of what had happened for months. It is hard to shift from one way of understanding the world.

  It was certainly impossible to ignore aspects of the facts, however, thanks to the frenzy of press reports and online articles. It began the very night of the fire, with editorials speculating what had happened in the Sad Final Days of Erstwhile Great British Institution Swansby’s Dictionary. There, my quiet, boring days at Swansby’s were suddenly transformed into something far more operatic and formidable. I noticed that every picture printed of David Swansby during this time was edited ever-so slightly before it was published, its filters or colour saturation twiddled infinitesimally so that any discernible cragginess of the editor’s face, any hint of a scowl or glower, became supremely emphasised. At the time of the fire I remember him standing mildly and blankly by the SW1H kerbside, looking up at Swansby House and cradling his cat. He might have been humming on a promenade, he seemed that calm. The pictures of him that were snapped that evening and appeared in newsprint, however, had an undeniable air of Vincent Price or Christopher Lee to them.

  I noticed also that a number of photographs from that evening had been assiduously photoshopped before they were published so that the cat’s ears were removed from the neckline of his jumper. The inexplicable streamlined, the not-relevant smoothed away so that it was not too distracting.

  But, what exactly happened?

  One could turn to published accounts. The story in the press ran thus: heir to a depleted, now-derisory and undeserved fortune and with his family name and its legacy in tatters, David Swansby had been driven mad with financial instability and embarrassment at his folly of a dictionary. All of the spurious and gossipy tabloid accounts of what took place that night prove quite a fun read if you lay the pages out and sift through the fictions. Words like dastardly, bungled, diddle, dodge and hoax crop up with particular prevalence. I remember that one headline even had a spin on some kind of NOT-SO HARMLESS DRUDGERY pun, above a picture of David sitting in a police car looking baffled. The story ran for about a week that Swansby’s Dictionary – a ‘national treasure’ (SEE ALSO: eccentric, laughable, barely tolerated) – had run into such economic hardship and existed with such a skeleton staff that its final editor had tried to pull off an insurance fraud of epic, combustible proportions.

  According to these reports and much like Swansby’s infamous editorial probity, the plan had been overly complicated and disarmingly, quaintly ludicrous. David Swansby posed as a hoax bomber and made various threats against the dictionary. He wanted the building gutted, razed and useless so that a big insurance cheque could wangle his way – blame being laid at the feet of anonymous misguided fruitcakes. No harm in that, surely!, and the Swansby name would not be left a laughing stock. In complete tatters, yes, but with some bruised and noble honour attached to it. This way, the narrative ran, the dictio
nary would not simply dwindle away in the public consciousness as was his greatest fear. Go out with a bang. It appeared that he hoped to get away with it all. He thought he would be recognised as the presiding, grieving steward who was there to the last when the dictionary’s once-bright light was so violently snuffed out.

  Can’t buy that kind of publicity.

  Of course, I was also called in to have my say and put things into my own words and explain what my experiences at Swansby’s had been. Did I ever suspect David was behind the bomb threats? Do you think this was his plan all along, or was it a hoax that backfired? How could he hide in plain sight? And Pip was asked similar questions too, where the tone was accusatory rather than exploratory – she wasn’t supposed to be in the building, had no authority there: what was her story? But the second that David Swansby confessed, these interviews melted away from our lives.

  Pip and I read the reports with incredulity, intrigue. People who barely knew us took the time to remind themselves of our numbers. Whereas before the fire, mention of Swansby’s Dictionary might elicit conversations about unfinished grand projects and the Lost Generation, now they all began with a nod and a wink about insurance. I did my best to dispel this whenever journalists got in contact or I overheard conversations in Pip’s café, but it was a new, tasty, excellent fact. It was stated as such in the dictionary’s Wikipedia page on the evening of the fire, and that part of the article became the largest section with the most citations. The rest of the dictionary’s history has been eclipsed.

  To my knowledge, no papers ever made any mention of mountweazels, nor Swansby’s Dictionary as something contaminated by false words. I hope David thinks of that as a triumph or at least some small consolation.

  For years later, every time I read about it – what should it be called: the case? Episode? What word fits the bill? – I felt myself become a tangle of question marks. I could not help but scour each and every article to see whether I was mentioned. Not once. No one cares about a hired anonymous amanuensis when such a blundering cartoon villain is at the centre of a story. I could have been a nice footnote, I suppose, or cast sympathetically as the naïve patsy in a devious, dog’s dinner of a plan. My fielding of these ‘threats’ on the phone was all part of the scheme, of course. My existence meant that David could provide ample evidence to any insurance brokers that there had been foul play.