The Dictionary of Lost Words(74)

I re-read the meaning I’d written for morbs. Not quite, I thought. Mabel wasn’t morbid and nor was I. Sad, yes, but not always. I took a pencil from my pocket and made the correction.





MORBS


A temporary sadness.

‘I get the morbs, you get the morbs, even Miss Lizzie ’ere gets the morbs … A woman’s lot, I reckon.’

Mabel O’Shaughnessy, 1908

I put the slip in the trunk and rested Taliesin on top.



The following Saturday, I joined Lizzie again for her trip to the Covered Market. As always, it was crowded, but we pushed through.

‘Dead.’ Mrs Stiles called from her stall when she saw us coming. ‘Carted her off yesterday.’

Mrs Stiles momentarily looked me in the eye, then bent to arrange a bucket of carnations. Lizzie and I turned to look for Mabel.

‘She’d stopped coughing, you see. Blessed silence, I thought. But then it was a bit too quiet.’ She paused in her arranging and took a deep breath that stretched the fabric across her bent back. She stood to face us. ‘Poor love. She’d been dead for hours.’ Mrs Stiles looked from me to Lizzie and back again, her hands smoothing down her apron again and again, her mouth tight around the slightest quiver. ‘I should have noticed sooner.’

The space that Mabel had occupied was already gone; the neighbouring stalls had expanded to fill it. I stood there for a minute or an hour, I don’t know which, and struggled to imagine how Mabel and her crate of whittled sticks had ever fit there. No one who passed seemed to notice her absence.





When Mr Dankworth moved to the sorting table, it felt as though a too-tight corset had finally been unhooked. It was Elsie who made it happen.

‘You know, Esme,’ she said one morning, when I tried to suggest a particular word might need a more skilled eye than mine, ‘everyone who contributes copy to the Dictionary will leave a trace of themselves, no matter how uniform Father, or Mr Dankworth, would like it to be. Try to take Mr Dankworth’s comments as suggestion, not dictum.’

A week later, I overheard her commenting that it was hard to access some of the shelves with Mr Dankworth’s desk in such close proximity. That afternoon, Dr Murray had a word with Mr Dankworth, and when I came in the next day Mr Dankworth was sitting at the sorting table opposite Mr Sweatman, a border of stacked books set up between them.

‘Good morning, Mr Sweatman, Mr Dankworth,’ I said.

A smile from one, a nod from the other. Mr Dankworth still couldn’t look me in the eye. Already his desk had been removed, and mine was just visible beyond one of the shelves.

I sat and lifted the lid. The paper that lined the inside was curling at the edges, but the roses were as yellow as they’d always been. As I ran my fingers over the flowers, I counted back the years to the first time I’d sat at the desk. Was it nine years or ten? So much had happened, and yet I hadn’t moved an inch.

‘Well, that looks familiar,’ said Elsie. ‘I remember pasting it on. A long time ago now.’

For a moment we were both silent, as if Elsie too was suddenly aware of time moving past her. I’d never thought much about her life beyond the Scriptorium, or Rosfrith’s. They had grown out of their perfect plaits and become their father’s helpers. I envied them, as I always had, but now I wondered if this was what they had hoped for, or whether it was just what they had accepted.

‘How are your studies going, Elsie?’ I asked.

‘I’ve finished. Sat my exams last June.’ Her face was bright with the pride of it.

‘Oh, congratulations!’ I said. Remembering that She had turned one last June. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘No graduation, of course. No degree. But it’s satisfying to know I would have achieved both if I wore trousers.’

‘But you can have it conferred somewhere else, can’t you?’

‘Oh, yes, but there’s no hurry. I’m not going anywhere.’ She looked down at the proofs in her hand as if trying to remember what they were. Then she held them out. ‘From Father. A quick proofread. He wants them at the Press tomorrow morning.’

I took the proofs. ‘Of course.’ I looked towards the space where Mr Dankworth’s desk had been. ‘And thank you.’

‘A small thing.’

‘That all depends on your perspective.’

She nodded, then made her way past the sorting table to Dr Murray’s desk and the pile of letters awaiting her drafted replies.

The lid of my desk was still open. Everything I needed to do my work was there: notepaper, blank slips, pencils, pens. Hart’s Rules. Beneath Hart’s Rules were things I didn’t require to do my work: a letter from Ditte, postcards from Tilda, blank slips made from pretty paper, and a novel. When I picked it up, three slips fell out. Seeing Mabel’s name made my eyes well up. It was enough to bring on the morbs, I thought. And then I smiled.

Each slip had the same word but a variation on the meaning. I remembered the shock of hearing it, then Mabel’s delight and the racing of my heart when I first wrote it down. Cunt was as old as the hills, Mabel had said, but it wasn’t in the Dictionary. I’d checked.

The slips for C had been boxed up, but words for a supplement were stored in the shelves closest to my desk. Dr Murray had started collecting them as soon as the fascicle for ‘A to Ant’ was published. ‘Dr Murray has already anticipated that the English language will evolve faster than we can define it,’ Da told me. ‘When the Dictionary is finally published, we’ll go back to A and fill in the gaps.’