The Dictionary of Lost Words(41)

‘Can you put it in a sentence?’ I urged.

Tilda looked at the slip, then at me. ‘You’re quite serious, aren’t you?’ she said.

Heat flushed my cheeks. I imagined the slip through her eyes, the futility of it. How odd I must have seemed.

‘Give ’er a sentence,’ Mabel urged.

Tilda waited for me to look up. ‘On one condition,’ she said, smiling with anticipated satisfaction. ‘We’re putting on a production of A Doll’s House at New Theatre. You must come to the matinee this afternoon and join us after, for tea.’

‘She will, she will. Now give ’er a sentence.’

Tilda took a lungful of air and straightened. Her gaze fell just beyond my shoulder and she delivered her sentence with a working-class accent I’d not detected before. ‘A coin for the dollymop will keep your lap warm.’

‘That’s experience talkin’ if you ask me,’ Mabel said, laughing.

‘No one asked you, Mabel,’ I said. I wrote the sentence in the middle of the slip.

‘Is it the same as prostitute?’ I asked Tilda.

‘I suppose. Though a dollymop is more opportunistic and far less experienced.’

Tilda watched as I fashioned a definition.

‘That sums it up perfectly,’ she said.

‘Your last name?’ My pencil hovered.

‘Taylor.’

Mabel tapped her whittling knife on the crate to get our attention. ‘Read it to me, then.’

I looked around at all the market goers.

Tilda held out her hand for the slip. ‘I promise not to project.’

I gave it to her.





DOLLYMOP


A woman who is paid for sexual favours on an occasional basis.

‘A coin for the dollymop will keep your lap warm.’

Tilda Taylor, 1906

A good word, I thought, as I put the slip back in my pocket. And a good source.

‘I must get on.’ Tilda said. ‘Costume call in an hour.’ She reached into her purse and pulled out a program.

‘I play Nora,’ she said. ‘Curtain goes up at two.’



When Da came home from the Scriptorium, I had lunch ready: pork pies from the market and boiled green beans. A fresh vase of flowers was on the kitchen table.

‘I’ve been invited to the matinee of A Doll’s House at New Theatre,’ I said when we were eating.

Da looked up, surprised but smiling. ‘Oh? And who has invited you?’

‘Someone I met at the Covered Market.’ Da’s smile turned to a frown, and I quickly continued. ‘A woman. An actress. She’s in the play. Would you like to join me?’

‘Today?’

‘I’m happy to go alone.’

He looked relieved. ‘I was quite looking forward to an afternoon with the newspapers.’

After lunch, I walked down Walton Street towards town. At the Press, a crowd of people at the end of their working week spilled through the archway, the long afternoon ahead animating their conversations. Most headed the way I had just come, back to their homes in Jericho, but small groups of men and a few young couples started walking towards the centre of Oxford. I followed and wondered if any would be going to New Theatre.

On George Street, the small caravan of people I’d been walking behind peeled off to pubs and tea shops. None entered the theatre.

I was early, but the emptiness of the theatre was still a surprise. It looked bigger than I remembered it. There were seats for hundreds of people, but there were barely thirty there. I struggled to decide where to sit.

Tilda came from behind the curtain and trotted up the carpeted stair to where I stood. ‘Bill said he saw the most striking woman come into the theatre and I knew it would be you.’ Tilda took my hand and pulled me towards the front row, where a single person sat.

‘Bill, you were right. This is Esme.’

Bill stood and made a little theatrical bow.

‘Esme, this is my brother, Bill. You must sit with him in the front row, so I can see you. Obviously, you will be lost in the crowd if you sit anywhere else.’ Tilda kissed her brother on the cheek and left us.

‘When you sit in the front you can imagine the theatre is full and that you have the best seats to a sold-out show,’ said Bill when we were both seated.

‘Is that something you have to do often?’

‘Not usually, but it’s been useful for this show.’

It was easy sitting there with Bill, though I knew I should probably feel uncomfortable. He lacked the formality that I was used to in the men who came and went from the Scriptorium. He was more town than gown, of course, but there was something else about him I couldn’t articulate. Bill was younger than Tilda by ten years, he said, which made him twenty-two. Just two years younger than me. He was tall enough to look me in the eye, and had Tilda’s fine nose and full lips, but they were hidden among a riot of freckles. He shared his sister’s green eyes, but not her honeyed hair: Bill’s was darker, like treacle.

I listened to him talk while we waited for the play to start. He talked mostly about Tilda. She’d cared for him when no one else would, he told me. Did they have no parents? I asked.

‘No. Not dead, though,’ Bill said. ‘Just absent. So I follow her wherever the theatre calls her.’ Then the lights went down and the curtain went up.