The Dictionary of Lost Words(76)

Lizzie reached under her bed and pulled out her sewing basket. ‘You’ll be needing these if you’re going to keep all that in order.’ She put her pincushion in front of me; it was hedgehog-full.

When I’d finished sorting all the words in the trunk it was dark outside. Both of us had sore fingers from pinning slips together.

‘Keep it,’ Lizzie said, when I handed back the pincushion. ‘For new words.’



There was a tiny hole in the wall of the Scriptorium, just above my desk. I’d noticed it when the chill of the previous winter had pricked the back of my hand like a needle. I’d tried to block it with a ball of paper, but the paper kept falling out. Then I realised I had a view: I caught fragments of people as they smoked their cigarettes; of Da and Mr Balk as they packed their pipes and exchanged Dictionary gossip. Gossipiania, I always thought, when titbits found my ear. An entry had been written for the word, but it was struck through in the final proof. I recognised all the assistants from what I could see of their clothes, and I had the uncanny feeling I was under the sorting table again.

The slight shaft of light had been moving across my page like a sundial, so I noticed when it disappeared. There was the clang of a bicycle being propped against the Scriptorium, and I leaned towards the hole. I saw unfamiliar trousers and an unfamiliar shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Ink-stained fingers unbuckled an ink-stained satchel. The fingers were long, but the thumb spread oddly at the end. The man was checking the contents, as I would check the contents of my own satchel just before going through the gates of the Press. I tilted my gaze upward, a slightly awkward manoeuvre, in an attempt to see his face. It wasn’t possible.

I pulled back from the hole and leaned a little to my right so I would have a view of the Scriptorium door.

He stood on the threshold. Tall and lean. Clean-shaven. Dark hair, curling. He saw me peering around the bookshelf and smiled. I was too far away to see his eyes, but I knew them to be evening blue, almost violet.

I’d forgotten his name, even though I remembered him telling it to me once, the first time I delivered words to the Press. I was barely more than a girl, and he’d been kind.

Since then, I’d only seen him from a distance when I went searching for Mr Hart in the Press. The compositor always stood at a bench at the far end of the composing room, practically obscured by the tray that held all the type. He would sometimes look up when I came through the door. He would always smile, but he’d never waved me over. I’d never known him to come to Sunnyside.

The only other person in the Scriptorium, besides me, was Mr Dankworth. I watched his head jerk up, attentive to who had come in. He took a second to make his judgement.

‘Yes?’ he said, in the tone he reserved for men with dirty fingernails. My fist closed tightly around my pencil.

‘I have Dr Murray’s proofs. Si to simple.’

‘I’ll take them,’ said Mr Dankworth, holding out his hand but not getting up.

‘And you are?’ the compositor asked.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The Controller would like to know who takes receipt of the proofs, if it isn’t Dr Murray himself.’

Mr Dankworth rose from the sorting table and approached the compositor. ‘You can tell the Controller that Mr Dankworth took receipt of the proofs.’ He took the pages before they were proffered.

In my place at the back of the room, I held my breath, irritation and embarrassment rising. I wanted to intervene, to welcome the compositor into the Scriptorium, but without his name I would look foolish.

‘I’ll be sure to do that, Mr Dankworth,’ the compositor said, looking Mr Dankworth square in the face. ‘My name is Gareth, by the way. It’s a pleasure to meet you.’ He held out his ink-stained hand, but Mr Dankworth just stared at it and rubbed his own hand up and down on the side of his trousers. Gareth lowered his arm and offered a slight nod instead. He glanced quickly to where I sat, then turned and left the Scriptorium.

I took a blank slip from my desk and wrote:





GARETH


Compositor.



I was standing just inside the door of the Scriptorium, reading an article in the Oxford Chronicle while Dr Murray finished off some correspondence he wanted me to take to Mr Bradley.

It was a small piece, buried in the middle pages.


Three suffragettes, arrested after a rooftop protest against Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, have been forcibly fed in Winson Green Gaol after several days on hunger strike. The women were gaoled for civil disobedience and criminal damage after throwing tiles at police from the roof of Bingley Hall in Birmingham, where Mr Asquith was holding a public budget meeting. Women were barred from attending.

My throat began to constrict. ‘How do you force-feed a grown woman?’ I said, to no one in particular. I skimmed the column of words, but there was no explanation of the procedure, and the women weren’t named. I thought of Tilda. Her last postcard had been from Birmingham, where, she’d written, women were willing to do more than just sign petitions.

‘Something for Mr Hart at the Press,’ said Dr Murray, startling me. ‘But visit the Old Ashmolean first; Mr Bradley is waiting on this.’ He handed me a letter with Bradley written on the envelope along with the first proofs for the letter T.

The Old Ashmolean was as grand as the Scriptorium was humble. It was stone instead of tin, and the entrance was flanked by the busts of men who had achieved something – I don’t know what. When I’d first seen them, I’d felt small and out of place, but after a while they’d encouraged a defiant ambition, and I’d imagined walking into that place and taking my seat at the Editor’s desk. But if women could be barred from a public budget meeting, I had no right to that ambition. I thought about Tilda, her hunger for the fight. And I thought about the women who had gone to gaol. Could I starve myself, I wondered? If I thought it would help me become an editor?