The Dictionary of Lost Words(116)

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 women 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.