The Dictionary of Lost Words(51)

It wasn’t a cure for the mood that had descended on me, but it was welcome. ‘Oh, Elsie, thank you.’

She nodded, pleased. I waited for her usual questions.

‘A new play will be starting at New Theatre tonight,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Will you be going?’

I had been getting an envelope every Friday for six years, and every Friday Elsie would enquire about what treat I would buy myself. It had always been something to brighten our house, but since meeting Tilda my answer had barely wavered: I would take myself to the theatre. ‘What is so fascinating about Much Ado About Nothing?’ she’d asked once. Bill came to mind, his thigh against mine in the darkness beyond the stage, our eyes on Tilda.

‘I don’t think I’ll be going to the theatre tonight,’ I said.

She regarded me for a moment. Her dark eyes seemed sympathetic.

‘Plenty of time. I read it was popular in London, and they’re expecting a long season.’

But I couldn’t imagine another troupe or another play, and the thought of sitting in the stalls with someone other than Bill brought me close to tears.

‘Must get on,’ Elsie said, touching my shoulder briefly before walking away.

When she was gone, I looked at the proofs she had given me. It was the first page of the next fascicle, and a slip was pinned to the edge with an additional example for misbode.

Dr Murray’s scrawled instructions were to edit the page to make it fit. I recalled the word coming out of an envelope years before; a lady’s neat script and a line from Chaucer. Da and I had played with it for a week. This new sentence made me pause. Her misboding sorrow for his absence has almost made her frantic.

I missed them. It was as if they had written a play and constructed the set, and whenever I was with them I had a part to perform. I fell into it so easily: a secondary character, someone ordinary against whom the leads could shine. Now that they had packed up and left, I felt I had forgotten my lines.

But did Bill’s absence make me frantic?

He’d given me something I’d wanted since the first time he took my hand. It wasn’t love; nothing like it. It was knowledge. Bill took words I’d written on slips and turned them into places on my body. He introduced me to sensations that no fine sentence could come close to defining. Near its end, I’d heard the pleasure of it exhaled on my breath, felt my back arch and my neck stretch to expose its pulse. It was a surrender, but not to him. Like an alchemist, Bill had turned Mabel’s vulgarities and Tilda’s practicalities into something beautiful. I was grateful, but I was not in love.

It was Tilda I missed the most; her absence that left a misboding sorrow. She had ideas I wanted to understand and she said things I could not. She cared more for what mattered and less for what didn’t. When I was with her I felt I might do something extraordinary. With her gone, I feared I never would.



‘Poorly again, Essy?’ Lizzie asked, when I came into the kitchen for a glass of water. ‘You’re looking a bit pale, that’s for sure.’

Mrs Ballard was checking the Christmas pudding she’d made a few months earlier and drizzling over some brandy. She looked at me through narrowed eyes, and a frown deepened the lines of her face. Lizzie poured me some water from the jug on the kitchen table, then went to the pantry and brought out a packet of digestives.

‘Shop-bought biscuits, Mrs B!’ I said. ‘Did you know these were lurking in your pantry?’

She blinked, and her face relaxed. ‘Dr Murray insists on McVitie’s. Reminds him of Scotland, he says.’

Lizzie passed me a biscuit. ‘It’ll settle your stomach,’ she said.

Food was the last thing I wanted, but Lizzie insisted. I sat at the kitchen table and nibbled at the biscuit while Mrs Ballard and Lizzie busied themselves around me. They got little done. When Lizzie wiped down the range for the third time, I finally asked if something was wrong.

‘No, no, pet,’ Mrs Ballard was quick to say. ‘I’m sure everything will be alright.’ But the frown returned to her face.

‘Esme,’ Lizzie said, finally putting down her cloth. ‘Will you come upstairs a minute?’

I looked at Mrs Ballard, who nodded for me to follow Lizzie. Something was wrong, and for a moment I thought I might be sick. I took a deep breath and it passed, then I followed Lizzie up the stairs to her room.

We sat on her bed. She looked at her hands, uncomfortable in her lap. It was me who reached out and took them in mine. She had bad news, I thought. She was ill, or maybe all my talk of choices had caused her to seek a better position. Before she said a word, my eyes had welled.

‘Do you know how far gone you are?’ Lizzie said.

I stared at her, trying to match the words to something I might understand.

She tried again. ‘How long have you been …’ she looked at my stomach and then met my eyes, ‘… expecting?’

I understood her then. I pulled my hands from hers and stood up.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Lizzie,’ I said. ‘It’s not possible.’

‘Oh, Essymay, you silly duffer.’ She stood to take my hands again. ‘You didn’t know?’

I shook my head. ‘How can you?’

‘Ma was always in the family way. It was all I knew before I came here. The sickness of it should be over soon,’ she said.