The Dictionary of Lost Words(11)

Dr Murray cleared his throat. It sounded a bit like a grunt. He shook Mr Crane’s hand. ‘It’s not for everyone,’ he said. ‘Takes a certain … diligence. Are you diligent, Mr Crane?’

‘Of course, sir,’ he said.

Dr Murray nodded then returned to the house to finish lunch.

Da continued with his tour. Whenever he told Mr Crane something about the way the slips were sorted, Mr Crane would nod and say, ‘Quite straightforward.’

‘The slips are sent in by volunteers all over the world,’ I said, when Da was showing him how the pigeon-holes were ordered.

Mr Crane looked down at me, frowned a little but made no response. I stepped back a fraction.

Mr Sweatman put a hand on my shoulder. ‘I came across a slip from Australia once,’ he said. ‘That’s about as far away from England as you can get.’

When Dr Murray returned from lunch to give Mr Crane his instructions, I didn’t sit and listen.

‘Will he be here for a little while or forever?’ I whispered to Da.

‘For the duration,’ he said. ‘So, probably forever.’

I crawled beneath the sorting table, and a few minutes later an unfamiliar pair of shoes joined those I knew so well.

Mr Crane’s shoes were old, like Da’s, but they hadn’t been polished in a while. I watched as they tried to settle. He crossed his right leg over his left, then his left over his right. Eventually, he wrapped his ankles around the front legs of his chair, and it looked as though his shoes were trying to hide from me.

Just before Lizzie was to take me back to school, a whole pile of slips fell beside Mr Crane’s chair. I heard Da say that some of the C bundles had become ‘unwieldy with the weight of possibility’. He made that little noise he made when he thought he was being funny.

Mr Crane didn’t laugh. ‘They were poorly tied,’ he said, bending to sweep up as many slips as he could in a single movement. His fingers closed into a fist around them, and I saw the slips crushed. I let out a little gasp, and it made him bump his head on the underside of the table.

‘Alright there, Mr Crane?’ asked Mr Maling.

‘Surely the girl is too big to be under there.’

‘It’s just until she returns to school,’ said Mr Sweatman.

When my breathing settled, and the Scriptorium returned to its regular shuffle and hum, I searched the shadows under the sorting table. Two slips still rested beside Mr Worrall’s tidy shoes, as if they knew they would be safe from some careless tread. I picked them up and had a sudden memory of the trunk beneath Lizzie’s bed. I couldn’t bring myself to return them to Mr Crane.

When I saw Lizzie hovering at the door, I emerged beside Da’s chair.

‘That time already?’ he said, but I had a feeling he’d been watching the clock.

I put the exercise book in my satchel and joined Lizzie in the garden.

‘Can I put something in the trunk before going back to school?’

It had been a long time since I’d put anything in the trunk, but Lizzie took no more than a moment to understand. ‘I’ve often wondered if you’d find anything else to put in it.’



The slips weren’t the only words that found their way into the trunk.

On the floor of Da’s wardrobe were two wooden boxes. I found them when we were playing hide-and-seek. The sharp corner of one stuck painfully into my back as I pushed myself into the furthest corner. I opened it.

It was too dark among Da’s coats and Lily’s musty dresses to see what was inside, but my hand stroked the edges of what felt like envelopes. Then there was a clomping on the stairs, and Da sang ‘Fee Fi Fo Fum’. I closed the lid and shuffled towards the centre of the wardrobe. Light flooded in, and I jumped out into his arms.

Later that night, when I should have been asleep, I wasn’t. Da was still downstairs correcting proofs, so I sneaked out of bed and tip-toed across the landing to his bedroom. ‘Open Sesame,’ I whispered, and pulled on the wardrobe doors.

I reached in and brought out each box. I sat with them beneath Da’s window, the dusky evening light still good enough to see by. They were almost the same – pale wood with brass corners – but one box was polished, the other dull. I pulled the polished box closer and caressed the honeyed wood. A hundred envelopes, thick and thin, pressed against each other in the order they were sent. His plain white against her blue. They mostly alternated, though sometimes there were two or three white in a row, as if Da had a lot to say about something that Lily had lost interest in. If I read the letters first to last they would tell a story of their courtship, but I knew it was a story with a sad ending. I closed the box without opening a single one.

The other box was also full of letters, but none were from Lily. They were from different people and were tied in bundles with string. The biggest bundle was from Ditte. I slid the latest letter from beneath the string and read it. It was mostly about the Dictionary; about the C words that never seemed to end, and how the Press Delegates kept asking Dr Murray to work more quickly because the Dictionary was costing too much. But the last bit was about me.

Ada Murray tells me James has the children sorting slips. She painted quite a picture of them huddled around the dining table late into the night, barely visible under a mountain of paper. She even ventured to say that she thought this may have been his motive for a big brood all along. Thank goodness for her sense and good humour. I do believe the Dictionary might have faltered without it.