‘The smell of a donkey burning,’ I corrected.
‘Got to be into something, I suppose.’
Somewhere above us came a distinct scuttling in the ceiling. A piece of plaster floated down and landed square in the coffee Pip had brought me. It was a flake the shape of Hy-Brasil.
‘This place is falling apart,’ Pip said. ‘Is that rats above us?’
‘I can’t imagine David will do anything about it if it is. I don’t think he really manages to cope with how much it must cost just to keep the place running as it stands: I doubt he’s going to spring for speculative mousetraps.’
‘Maybe it’s ghosts,’ Pip said cheerfully.
‘They can pay rent like the rest of us.’
Pip returned to the desk. ‘Chess, chess-apple, chess-board, chessdom, chessel – I resent alphabetical order,’ she said.
‘Welcome to my world. What’s a chessel?’
‘It says here that it’s a vat of cheese.’
‘Nice.’
‘Dictionaries should arrange everything by nouns, then verbs, then moods, then – geographically. I don’t know. Shut up.’
‘I didn’t—’
‘I was talking to the ratghost.’ We were possibly being driven word-mad by this point in proceedings.
‘I had a professor,’ I said, massaging my temples, ‘who once told me that rats were the first archivists – ripping strips of paper from early books and manuscripts and taking them away to their nests.’
‘Do rats live in nests? Dreys?’
‘That’s squirrels,’ I said, uncertainly.
‘Squirrel a better verb than rat,’ said Pip. ‘It’s a shame that cat with the awful name can’t do anything about whatever it is up there. Everyone slacking at their jobs!’
Some more moments of reading.
‘You once told me that the office cat is descended from a load of office cats,’ Pip said.
‘That’s what I’ve been led to believe.’ I was becoming a little annoyed by her interruptions: it was difficult to concentrate with someone unused to the need for brain-crimping silence when intensively word-sieving. ‘Masses of them. Chowders.’
‘You mean clowders.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘If there were so many cats about, I wonder whether that might have inspired him,’ Pip said. ‘Say what you see and all that. Define what you know.’
I gave her a thumbs-up, unconvinced, and returned to my pile of index cards.
N is for
nab
(v.)
Immediately post-pelican, and leaving the scene in the capable hands of a park-keeper, Sophia took Winceworth’s arm and sallied forth beyond the park’s gates. ‘I demand, in the words of Hippocrates, to be fed eclairs and served hot tea before the day proves all too much.’
Winceworth at once forgot any local knowledge and his brain pitched with dither. Sophia did not seem to notice – as he stuttered and glared at their surroundings and every point on the compass, she took the time to fuss over the blood on her sleeves. She picked up her stride and before Winceworth knew what was happening they were browsing nearby streets and market stalls for shawls. He was unused to shopping quite so casually, and hung back as she made easy conversation with the retailer, touching textures of fabrics with her fingertips and nodding with interest as they extolled different cloths’ virtues and characteristics. A new shawl duly acquired, Sophia promptly announced that she would now like to visit a stationer’s. Her arm looped through his, and before long Winceworth was walking just off Pall Mall with a bottle of Pelikan-brand India ink and a new silver fountain pen in his pocket just above his heart.
‘You mustn’t feel so uncomfortable accepting gifts!’ Sophia said, laughing at his twisting and squirming shoulders. ‘Especially since you sacrificed your Swansby pen for such a noble cause. It is only right that I replace it.’
He suggested that he really should be returning to work. In doing so he suffered a small coughing fit as if his body rebelled against his getting any words out at all. Sophia pulled her new shawl more snugly about her to obscure the more obvious daubings of pelican-blood. ‘The dictionary can spare you just one more hour. Besides,’ and she quickened her pace. ‘After a shock it is often good for the constitution for one to sit somewhere quiet.’
Winceworth thought of his desk in the Scrivenery, flanked by Appleton and Bielefeld.
‘To drink something hot and to eat something sweet,’ Sophia said.
The image of the paperwork strewn across his desk. ‘I wouldn’t dare oppose your medical advice, given the previous patient, no. Not without some kind of suit of armour.’ He mimed the gait of a spar-chested pelican with the martyred dignity of a waddling St Sebastian.
‘I have simply no idea what you might mean,’ Sophia said. ‘And, do you know, I think you should probably explain it to me, at length, somewhere warm?’
He felt the arm tense gently beneath his.
The Café l’Amphigouri was Sophia’s selection, picked at whim down a side street some way towards Whitehall. Despite its proximity to Swansby House, Winceworth was unfamiliar with the place or must have overlooked it whenever he passed it on his walks through town, discounting it as a destination not meant for him. The tablecloths were as thick as royal icing and the bowl of sugar came with a pair of ornate silver tongs. The café’s owner applied some baking powder to the cut above Sophia’s eyebrow as they were seated. They were placed by the window and soon a spread of tiny cakes, buns and dessert forks was laid before them.
‘Back home,’ Sophia said, turning a plate to examine a delicate layered confection, ‘we would call this a Napoleon cake.’
‘Looks nothing like the man,’ Winceworth said, playing with an eclair on his plate with his fork.
‘Very good,’ Sophia said, and he beamed. She tapped the side of the cake with her fork, counting the strata of cream and thin sheets of pastry. She removed a wisp of icing sugar from the corner of her mouth with a fingertip. Winceworth leaned forward in his chair in order that he might have the best chance of catching her words, but whatever thought she might have been framing seemed to leave her within the same instant. She raised her teacup to her lips instead, leaving Winceworth confronted with a face eclipsed by floral china. The base of her teacup bore the manufacturer’s hand-painted name: HAVILAND & Co., Limoges.
He wanted to commit the whole scene to memory as accurately as possible. Every detail of the tearoom was laden with significance now that Sophia was a part of it. From the angle of shadows amongst the curtains to the number of faceted cubes within the sugar bowl. The arrangement of the chairs and the postures of the other diners suddenly seemed of critical importance. The exact pitch of the bell as they passed through the door was a crucial fact to be treasured and privately indexed away.
Perhaps all encyclopaedic lexicographers experience love like this, Winceworth thought – as a completist might, a hoarder of incidence-as-fact. It was not that he even particularly liked the details: he wanted to dash the teacup to the ground for coming between them – damn you, blasted furnaces of Limoges! – but he wished he could identify the blue, twist-leafed flower that patterned its porcelain. If he knew the flower’s name he would run to the nearest florist and fill his lodgings with armfuls of the stuff, plug his rooms to the rafters with posies, bouquets and tussie-mussies of it. He wanted to glut on every detail, block out any not-tearoom scented light that dared to come anywhere near him ever again.