The Dictionary of Lost Words(99)

When his mug was safely in the basket, he took a deep breath and turned to face me. A smile moved gently across his face. Without looking away, he took my mug and put it less carefully on the grass. Then he held both my hands in his.

He pressed my fingers to his lips, and the warmth of his breath sent a shiver through me. My whole body wanted to be pressed against him, but my mind was content to look over the features of his face; to memorise every line on his forehead, his dark brows and long lashes, blue eyes like a summer sky at dusk. There was grey at his temples, and I longed to see it spread, over years, through the dark mop of his hair.

I don’t know how long we sat like that, but I felt his eyes roam my face as mine roamed his. Nothing obscured us, no polite gestures clung. We were naked.

When our eyes finally met, it was as if we had journeyed together and come home more familiar. He released me and reached for the satchel. A subtle tremor made his fingers clumsy with the buckles. If I hadn’t been sure before, I knew then what the satchel held.

But it was not what I expected.

He pulled out a parcel. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with string: the signature wrapping of the Press. It was the dimensions of a ream of paper, though thinner.

‘For you,’ he said, offering the parcel.

‘Not proofs, surely.’

‘Proof, of sorts,’ he said.

I released the bow and the thick paper fell away.

It was a beautiful object, leather-bound and gold-lettered. It must have cost Gareth a month’s wages. Women’s Words and Their Meanings was embossed on the green leather in the same typeface used for the Dictionary volumes. I opened to the first page where the title was repeated. Below that, Edited by Esme Nicoll.

It was a thin volume, and the type was larger than that of Dr Murray’s dictionary – two columns on each page instead of three. I turned to the letter C and let my finger trace the familiar shapes of the words, each one a woman’s voice. Some smooth and genteel, others, like Mabel’s, gravelly and coated in phlegm. Then I came to it, one of the first words I ever wrote on a slip. To see it in print was exhilarating. The limerick fluttered across my lips.

Was it more obscene to say it, to write it, or to set it in type? On the breath it could be taken by a breeze or crowded out by chatter; it could be misheard or ignored. On the page it was a real thing. It had been caught and pinned to a board, its letters spread in a particular way so that anyone who saw it would know what it was.

‘What must you have thought of me!’ I said.

‘I was glad to finally know what it meant,’ he said, his earnest face collapsing into a grin.

I kept turning the pages.

‘It took a year, Es. And every day that I held a slip with your handwriting, I came to know you better. I fell in love with you word by word. I’ve always loved the shape and feel of them, the infinite pairings. But you showed me their limitations, and their potential.’

‘But how?’

‘A few slips at a time, and I was always careful to put them back just where I’d found them. Half the Press were in on it by the end. I wanted a hand in every part of it, not just the typesetting. I chose the paper and worked the press. I cut the pages, and the women in the bindery fell over themselves to show me how to put it all together.’

‘I bet they did.’ I smiled.

‘Fred Sweatman was my lookout at the Scrippy, but none of it would have been possible without Lizzie. She knows your every move and all your hiding places. Don’t be cross with her for giving them away.’

I thought about the shoebox in my desk and the trunk under Lizzie’s bed. My Dictionary of Lost Words. She was its custodian, I realised. And she’d wanted the words to be found.

‘I could never be cross with Lizzie,’ I said.

Gareth took my hands again. The tremor in his was gone. ‘I had to choose,’ he said. ‘Between a ring and the words.’

I looked at my dictionary, traced the title with my fingers and heard the words on my breath. I imagined a ring on my hand and was glad for its absence. I wondered how it was possible to feel so much. I had no capacity for more.

No more words passed between us. He didn’t ask, and I didn’t answer, but I felt those moments like the rhythm of a poem. They were the preface to everything that would come after, and already I was plotting it out. I held his face, felt it differently against the skin of each hand, then brought it near. His lips were warm against mine, the taste of tea still pleasant on his tongue. His hand on the small of my back asked nothing, but I leaned in, wanting him to feel the shape of me. The flan cooled and remained uneaten.



‘Where is it, then?’ asked Lizzie when I came into the kitchen.

We both looked at my hand, as unadorned as it always had been.

‘Is there anything you don’t know, Lizzie Lester?’

‘A whole lot, but I know he loves you and you love him, and I thought I’d find a ring on that finger when you came back from your picnic.’

I took the thin volume from my own satchel and put it on the kitchen table in front of her. ‘He gave me something far more precious than a ring.’

Smiling, she wiped her hands on her apron, then checked them before touching the leather. ‘I knew the words would win you, all bound and beautiful. I told him as much when he showed me. Then he showed me where my own name was printed and made me a cup of tea while I blubbered.’ Tears sprang again and she wiped them quickly away. ‘But he never said he had no ring.’