The Dictionary of Lost Words(15)

‘They’s just words, Esme.’ Lizzie held out her hand to pull me up off the floor. She made me sit on the bed beside her. I sat rigid.

‘All I had of me mother was that photograph,’ she said. ‘She’s not smiling, and I reckoned that life always weighed heavy on her, even before all us children came along. But then you found the pin.’ She twirled it and the beads became a blur of colour. ‘I don’t know much about her for sure, but it helps me to imagine her happy, knowing something beautiful came to her.’

I thought of the photographs of Lily all around my house, the clothes that still hung in Da’s wardrobe, the blue envelopes. I thought of the story Ditte told me every birthday. My mother was like a word with a thousand slips. Lizzie’s mother was like a word with only two, barely enough to be counted. And I had treated one as if it were superfluous to need.

The trunk was still open, and I looked at the words carved into it. Then I looked at the pin, so fine against Lizzie’s rough hand, despite its bandy leg. We both needed proof of who we were.

‘I’ll fix it,’ I said, and I reached out, thinking I could straighten it by sheer force of will. Lizzie let me take it and watched as I tried.

‘Good enough,’ she said, when I finally gave up. ‘And the sharpening stone might work on the point.’

The balloon in my chest burst, and a flood of emotion escaped. Tears and sniffling and a fractured apology: ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’

‘I know you are, me little cabbage.’ Lizzie held me until the blubbering stopped, stroked my hair and rocked me, as she had when I was small, though I had almost outgrown her. When it was over, she returned the pin to its place in front of the picture of her mother. I kneeled on the hard floor to close the trunk. My fingers brushed the lettering, rough and untidy. But permanent. The Dictionary of Lost Words.



Mr Crane was leaving early. When he saw me sitting under the ash, he gave neither a word nor a smile. I watched him stride towards his bicycle, shove his satchel around to his back and swing one leg over the saddle. He didn’t notice when a bundle of slips fell to the ground behind him. I didn’t call out.

There were ten slips pinned together. I put them between the pages of the book I’d been reading and returned to the ash.

Distrustful was written on the top-slip in Mr Crane’s untidy hand. He had defined it as Full of or marked by distrust in oneself or others; wanting in confidence, diffident; doubtful, suspicious, incredulous. I didn’t know what incredulous meant and shuffled through the slips for a sense of it. My discomfort grew with each quotation. Distrustfull miscreants fight till the last gaspe, wrote Shakespeare.

But I had rescued them, from the evening wind and morning dew. I had rescued them from Mr Crane’s negligence. It was he who could not be trusted.

I separated one of the slips from the others. A quotation but no author, no book title or date. It would be discarded. I folded it and put it in my shoe.

The rest of the slips went back inside my book, and when the bells of Oxford rang out five o’clock I went to join Da in the Scriptorium.

He was alone at the sorting table, a proof in front of him, slips and books spread all around. He was bent to the page, oblivious to my presence.

I fingered the pages of the book in my pocket and removed the Distrustful slips. When I reached the sorting table, I added them to the disorder of Mr Crane’s workspace.

‘What is she doing?’ Mr Crane stood in the doorway of the Scriptorium, his features hard to make out against the afternoon light, but his slightly stooped frame and thin voice unmistakable.

Da looked up, startled, then saw the slips under my hand.

Mr Crane strode over and reached out as if to slap my hand away, but seemed to flinch at its deformity. ‘This really won’t do,’ he said, turning to Da.

‘I found them,’ I said to Mr Crane, but he wouldn’t look at me. ‘I found them near the fence where you lean your bicycle. They fell out of your satchel.’ I looked to Da. ‘I was putting them back.’

‘With all due respect, Harry, she shouldn’t be in here.’

‘I was putting them back,’ I said, but it was as if I couldn’t be heard or seen; neither of them responded. Neither of them looked at me.

Da took a deep breath and released it with a barely noticeable shake of his head.

‘Leave this to me,’ he said to Mr Crane.

‘Of course,’ said Mr Crane, then he took up the pile of slips that had fallen from his satchel.

When he had gone, Da removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

‘Da?’

He returned his glasses to their usual place and looked at me. Then he pushed his chair back from the sorting table and patted his knee for me to sit.

‘You’re almost too big,’ he said, trying to smile.

‘He did drop them; I saw him.’

‘I believe you, Essy.’

‘Then why didn’t you say anything?’

He sighed. ‘It’s too complicated to explain.’

‘Is there a word for it?’ I asked.

‘A word?’

‘For why you didn’t say anything. I could look it up.’

He smiled then. ‘Diplomacy springs to mind. Compromise, mollify.’

‘I like mollify.’

Together we searched the pigeon-holes.