The Dictionary of Lost Words(117)
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.
Was that what the mess on the floor was? Evidence of a curious mind? Fragments of frustration? An effort to understand and explain? Were Meg’s longings akin to Esme’s, and was that what it meant to be a daughter?
By the time her dad knocked at the door, Meg had stopped sobbing. Something was trying to emerge from her grief – to complicate it or simplify it, she did not know.