Sophia was still concentrating on the cake.
‘All these layers, you see, meant to symbolise the Grande Armée. And this —’ she raked the cake’s surface and crumbs kicked back against her fork – ‘this represents the Russian snow that stalled the French advance, helping to defeat the little Corsican’s troops before reaching Moscow.’
‘Pelican surgery, military history expressed through cakes – you are quite the dissector.’
‘What would you call it?’ Sophia asked. ‘This type of cake?’
Winceworth tried to usher some poetry. He failed. ‘A variant on the custard slice.’
Sophia nodded, sympathetically, and cut herself a portion.
Winceworth felt so unused to this gentleness, this back and forth. It all felt a complete nonsense. He would not have been surprised if a Mad Hatter joined them from another table or if a Carollian dormouse appeared over the lip of the sugar bowl and started talking about mousetraps, memory and muchness. That, or the other diners had hidden their haloes and stowed their angelic harps. He was worried he might forget how to use cutlery correctly.
‘A certain pragmatism to custard slice,’ Sophia said. ‘Is that the term for it? When a word just sits there, entirely fitting but somehow flat?’ She glanced out of the window at the passing Whitehall traffic. Winceworth recognised the way she flicked her eyes from passer-by to passer-by at random. He did that too when he was trying to find the right word for something, to coax the word forward from a forgotten part of his mind. When she spoke again she did so slowly, carefully. ‘When a word has pragmatism mixed with stolidity mixed with bathos mixed with clunk: what is that called?’
Me, Winceworth felt moved to say. He felt drunk. Was she drunk? This was awful. This was lovely. What was she talking about, and had he started this? Was this what conversation should be, or could have been, all along? Conversation as meaningless and wonderful, and terrible.
‘So, tell me all about your work,’ Sophia said. ‘Have you always loved language?’
‘Do you mind if I do not?’ Winceworth said. ‘You will excuse me: I am not good at talking about myself.’
Sophia raised her eyebrows. ‘I appreciate that in a person.’
‘I’d much rather talk about you,’ he said.
‘Nothing I can tell you,’ came the reply, which made no sense at all but Winceworth concentrated very hard on his cake and tried to look pleased with this answer. She looked pleased to have given it. Winceworth hoped he hadn’t somehow allowed an impasse.
‘And secretly, between you and me, I am glad to not have to hear much more about Swansby’s. Do you know how many names I had to memorise for the party last night? I ended up having arranged them in my head alphabetically: A is for anxious Appleton, B for bloviating Bielefeld, C is for the curious Cottingham twins.’ Sophia counted down on her fingers. ‘I believe I have a space left for E, but then there’s Frasham of course, followed everywhere by that strange little gurgle of a man Glossop—’
‘This is quite scandalous,’ Winceworth said, enthralled.
‘I should not defame the good dictionary. All power to its eventual publication. Do you play chess?’ Sophia asked, helping herself to a canelé.
‘No, but I would like to try.’ Conversation as meaningful and entirely wonderful precisely because it means nothing except to the two people involved. Terrible because of the pressure to fill the silence with a special type of nothing-ing – a kind of everything-nothing – and make it seem artless all the while?
Sophia smiled at him. ‘I would like to teach you! Do you know, I had a dream about you in your little longed-for Cornish cottage.’ Winceworth’s fork twanged weirdly off his plate. ‘I was visiting you and we were playing chess.’
‘That sounds – that would be—’ he began, but she cut across him.
‘You would love the vocabulary of chess too, I think,’ she said. ‘Have you heard of zugzwang?’
‘Zugzwang,’ Winceworth repeated, unlispingly. If she liked it, it would be his new favourite word.
‘Wonderful, isn’t it? It is the situation where a player is obliged to make a move to one’s own disadvantage. Great word, horrible feeling, like being caught in a lie.’
love (v.), to fill a void with icing sugar and healing weeds, or with glib little shared lies
‘I profess to know little of chess,’ he said.
‘There are many excellent phrases to be had there.’
‘Much more than check or stalemate and I would be out of my depth.’
‘I have much to teach you,’ she said. ‘It all changes with the fashions, of course. For a time, did you know players would announce gardez when the queen was under attack? Or en prise. But the warning is no longer customary. That’s chivalry for you.’
Winceworth wanted to tell Sophia that the fear of seeming like an idiot had cured his headache. He just wanted to say that in this moment he aspired to be a fearful idiot for the rest of his life, and that he wished his life to be such meaningless moments, over and over, for ever.
The window next to them was hit with an awful bang. Winceworth, his fight-and flight-and freeze-responses engaged all at once, gripped the table and all the silverware clattered.
Terence Clovis Frasham waved from the street outside, his cane raised as he rapped on the windowpane once more. He was smiling with all of his teeth.
Sophia gave a start and then a smile settled across her face.
‘What an extraordinary coincidence,’ she said.
Frasham entered the café with great strides all abluster, making the tiny bell spring on its gantry above the door. He waved the owner away and placed his hat on their table, barely missing Winceworth’s plate.
‘Sophia!’ He dipped his face to kiss the air above her ear. Winceworth looked away. Frasham was too big for the tearoom, too well-formed. Pulling a chair from another table, the other lexicographer sat down with his legs apart. He pressed the fingers of one hand in and across his fine red moustache as if framing a yawn or loosening his face. This was a mannerism Winceworth had forgotten. He found it indefinably repulsive. ‘And Winceworth too! Why, man, you should be at work! Tea, cake, a man’s wife-to-be – you devil!’
Sophia and Frasham and Winceworth laughed at such an idea. Aha aha.
‘In fact,’ Frasham said, clapping a hand to Winceworth’s shoulder, ‘I say, old man: don’t you have a train to catch?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Not that I want to break up your little tête-à-tête, of course, but,’ and Frasham’s face changed as he looked at his fiancée at close quarters. ‘Good God, what’s all this dust on your face?’ He touched the silt of baking powder above Sophia’s eye. ‘You look ridiculous. Winceworth, why didn’t you tell her?’
‘There was a cut—’
‘A cut!’ Frasham took Sophia’s chin in his hands and studied her. He seemed concerned, then amused. ‘What do you get up to? Quite the buffet you’ve taken. Eating cakes when you know we are going for dinner this evening, and – what? – getting into fights? And leading young bucks like Winceworth astray all at the same time?’
‘Did you say – what train—?’ Winceworth tried. Perhaps he had misunderstood. He also realised that at the sight of Frasham, his lisp had automatically returned. He wondered whether Sophia detected the change. He wondered whether he could choose his words carefully enough that no S-words would be necessary in Frasham’s earshot.