‘Chivalry,’ Pip said. I straightened for everyone.
The ice cream hurt my teeth.
‘Are we done here?’ David said to the police officer. She spoke into a radio.
No rest for the wicked, said the dog’s face, and she tugged at her leash, pleased by her efforts to communicate efficiently and without formality.
‘Nice meeting you,’ said Pip. I’m not sure to whom she addressed this. She took the choc-ice wrapper from my hand and left the scene without looking back.
F is for
fabrication
(n.)
Winceworth opened his regulation Swansby House leather attaché case, making sure no one was looking over his work. For some years now, just to pass the time and for his own amusement, he had been making up some words and definitions. He sketched these idle thoughts on borrowed notepaper whenever the mood took him: sometimes inspired by interactions with his colleagues in the Scrivenery – bielefoldian (n.), an annoying fellow; titpalcat (n.), a welcome distraction. Sometimes he just improvised little fictions in the style of an encylopaedic entry. To this end, he made up some fourteenth-century dignitaries from Constantinople and a small religious sect living in the volcanic Japanese Alps. More often than not, however, these false entries allowed him to plug a lexical gap, create a word for a sensation or a reality where no other word in current circulation seemed to fit the bill. This ranged from waxing poetical about a disappointing meal – susposset (n.), the suspicion that chalk has been added to ice cream to bulk out the serving – to ruminations concerning everyday events – coofugual (v.), the waking of pigeons; relectoblivious (adj.), accidentally rereading a phrase or line due to lack of focus or desire to finish; larch (v.), to allot time to daydreaming.
Winceworth flexed his hands. He meant no harm by this, he told himself, and he was allowed these small private amusements. He considered the much-discussed, absent Frasham and gnawed the end of his rediscovered Swansby pen. It was cheap and hollow, and infrequently he was worried he would chew right through it. Winceworth selected a new blank index card and wrote
frashopric (n.), the office or position of a dullard, acquired by money
Terence Clovis Frasham was one of the few people for whom Winceworth’s lisp presented an opportunity for cruelty. He was quite the darling of Swansby’s, not because he was a particularly talented lexicographer nor a very hard worker. He was, however, both exceedingly rich through some family jam-making business. Just as usefully, he also had a real flair for attracting and massaging the egos of exceedingly rich friends. Every so often, whenever Prof. Gerolf’s coffers ran low, Frasham was able to amass some glinting and bulging soirée and press his associates and acquaintances for donations, and magically money appeared. This genius for accruing funds for the dictionary meant that whenever Frasham did make an appearance at Swansby House, he was fêted as a princeling and benefactor.
Occasionally Winceworth saw invitations to these fundraising events – dances or regattas depending on the season – but never felt moved to attend. He had nothing to offer, after all, and was sure that some fault would be found with his attire or that he would make some embarrassing slip of etiquette. Terenth Clovith Fthrathm. According to the invitation slipped onto his desk the previous month, Frasham had been accepted to the 1,500 Mile Society on the occasion of his twenty-seventh birthday and would Peter Winceworth like to join him in celebrating this achievement?
There were many reasons to drink heavily in the presence of Terence Clovis Frasham. He was handsome, popular and had the posture of a professional tennis player. Tennis was a sport, along with fencing and long-distance swimming, for which Frasham had received Blues whilst at university. Winceworth, by contrast, if one was in the business of contrasts, had the posture of a middle-ranking chess player. Frasham also possessed that particularly resentful quality of being a complete braggart while also seeming simply charming. He had entered the employ of Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary at the same time as Winceworth and both were of similar ages.
According to the party invitation, Frasham qualified for entry to the 1,500 Mile Society having successfully returned from Siberia. This jaunt had been funded by Swansby House in order that the etymology of the words shaman and struse and (obtusely or abstrusely) the correct spelling of tsar might be researched for the S volume. Winceworth was still not quite sure how Frasham had talked Prof. Gerolf Swansby into this since Frasham did not speak, nor was qualified to translate, a word of Russian as far as anyone knew. Spurious (adj.), from the Latin spurius, ‘illegitimate’, from spurius (n.), meaning ‘illegitimate child’, from the Etruscan spural meaning ‘public’. According to one of the letters Frasham sent back to the offices, pursuing the etymology of starlet (n.) necessitated a funded audience with various members of Russian aristocracy.
Given the parallels between their lives thus far, the fact Frasham was sent to the steppes of Asia whilst Peter Winceworth was funded to undergo Dr Rochfort-Smith’s attentions in Chelsea seemed fair. Then Frasham’s photographs started arriving back at Swansby House. As London passed through smog-fumey summer and autumn, with horses slaughtered in the street to make way for automobiles and the city filleted for the Underground railways, the photographs sent by Frasham caused grown men and women at the Dictionary to coo with envy and excitement. Here was one featuring Frasham on camelback, another with him wreathed in silks looking over Lake Baikal and taking tea with a diplomat. A particularly dramatic shot of Frasham mock-wrestling a walrus was greeted with something bordering hysteria by members of Swansby House’s staff and was immediately pinned above his empty desk, shrine-like.
In the corner of the photograph one could just make out Glossop, the other Swansby House employee sent on the trip. While his companion was tall and strapping, Ronald Glossop was unprepossessing. Perhaps it was testament to Frasham being quite so particularly good-looking but standing next to him – and Glossop was invariably somewhere close to Frasham whether in the Westminster offices or on the coast of the Bering Sea, forever scampering at the latter’s elbow with pen and paper – it was difficult to remember any real defining features for the man. Winceworth could not even recollect what his voice was like or even if he had ever heard him speak. One thing he could recall of Glossop was the lime-green handkerchief carried in his waistcoat’s jetted pocket – it was a bright enough colour that everyone grew used to catching sight of it flashing like St Elmo’s fire across the wide central hall of the Scrivenery. Glossop was very much treated as Frasham’s assistant, although they actually held the same role at Swansby House and Glossop’s faculty for languages and philology was far more advanced. Winceworth suspected Glossop did most of the actual lexicographical work during their year-long Siberian trip together as well as any heavy lifting (other than for theatrical effect, cf. walruses).
In the walrus photograph Glossop stood almost out of frame. He was in the background, blurred and obscure, using a hatchet to saw a flipper from one of the put-upon walrus’s floe-mates.