‘That’s really good,’ I said.
‘I thought so. Go on then – get a load of these potential culprits, detective ma’am.’
A caption was printed under the picture on a ribbon of yellow paper: Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary Staff, S–Z – 1899.
The photograph featured three rows of crossed arms and unrelaxed faces. Two figures at the bottom were lying propped on their elbows in a stiff attempt at a sprawl. It’s an unlikely posture that’s usually relegated to commemorative photos of sports teams or lion-slumped big-game hunters, one that only ever really suits drunk Romans handling grapes in frescoes or walruses sunning themselves on ice floes and tundras. The men’s suits, ties and taper-straight moustaches all implied that striking such choreographed floppage came rather less than entirely naturally.
Presumably for the photograph’s benefit, a number of posh-looking carpets or rugs had been dragged out onto the floor as a stage for the ensemble and they lay there overlapping and runkled on the ground just above the caption. I was actively suspending the moment of looking at the staff members’ faces, taking in every detail of a carpet instead, its tassels and bunched-up wrinkles. I wondered where these carpets had come from, whether they were the photographer’s own and, more particularly, where they had got to by now, or which storage cupboard was affording some moths the best meal of their soft-bodied lives. Nowadays, the Scrivenery was all about scratchy purple, nylon-pile, tiled modern flooring: thick enough to trip over but thin enough to allow an office chair to wheel over with a few extra leg pumps. Too thin to absorb coffee stains particularly well, as I knew to my cost. These carpet tiles ran at waist height along the walls throughout the building too. I imagine that the same carpet lines flimsy cubicle partitions in offices across the capital. I imagine people across the city pinning family photos into the pile of these fake walls, to help keep their work space a weird approximation of home.
‘Are you holding your breath?’ Pip asked from behind the photograph. ‘I can tell from here.’
‘No,’ I said. I exhaled.
Every person captured in the photograph was looking in a slightly different direction and nobody seemed to know or have been told what to do with their hands. Some had gone for a just-bagged-a-brace-of-pheasant dip at the hip but, for the most part, all the members of the Swansby staff had arms pressed firmly across their chests, not wanting to give the photographer anything of themselves. They also all looked quite daunted as if ill at ease with being outdoors, or as if they could sense Pip’s hands, giant and white at the untattooed knuckle around their frame.
The only two women in the photograph stood together in the middle, fussy collars and satellite-dish hats; one had black hair and the other entirely white. The photograph itself was that mottled kind of sepia that is not quite grey and not quite brown, ash and moth-coloured. It is a colour that leads you to believe that if you were ever moved to lick the photograph it would taste of toffee and bourbon and bookshop dust.
The beaming man on the far left-hand side of the picture sported a huge beard: the focus in the picture was sharp, so much so that even the crinkles around the man’s eyes and the links of his pocket chain were distinguishable, but for whatever reason his marvellous beard sat beneath the glass as heavy and matt as a gravestone appended to his chin. I recognised the first Prof. Swansby from the portrait in the lobby downstairs. I could almost see something of Swansby’s current editor David in this man’s posture or in his wide eyes. The beard was quite a distraction. Also, the current editor was about three feet taller; clearly some non-Swansby, more dominant genes had blossomed along the line.
Spurred on by the familiarity of Prof. Swansby’s face, I found myself trying to recognise the features of people that I knew replicated beneath the glass, and to think of period actors who best resembled them and could step into their roles.
One of the figures in the photograph had his whole face blurred there was just a feathered smudge of paleness. His head must have snapped up as the camera’s shutters did their work. Or maybe a fault when it had been developed, a thumb slipping and dredging ink in the darkroom’s developing tray? No, there was still a trace of face there within the distortion, the shape of a head that had turned too soon. This figure was looking up and across, staring somewhere above the camera and off to the left as if in horror at something hitched in the clouds.
‘It must have been taken in the courtyard outside,’ Pip said, lowering the frame. ‘If you imagine it without the bins and the air vents.’
She was right. The ivy lacquering the wall behind the figures still clung to Swansby House. I could crane my neck at my desk and look down at that courtyard, the ivy leaves glossy and bouncing behind them in a light spritz of rain. Those leaves were often the only reason that I could tell one season from the other from my desk, whether they were rustling with raindrops or winter moths or nesting finches. I peered again at the photograph: the ivy was thinner there, with fewer branches splayed across the brickwork.
Pip handed the photograph to me. ‘But it’s good, right? What do you think, do you have a good eye for cheating bastards?’
I rolled my chair back over to my cubicle and to the window. I spun on my chair midway: you have to take your perks when you can get them. I overbalanced slightly by the potted plant.
I extended my arm and tried to best match my view of the yard with the orientation of the photograph. If the alignment was correct, the blurry-faced man must have been looking directly up at my window just as the picture was taken.
As Pip continued looking for fake words, I propped the photograph in the centre of my desk, where usually an employee might have a photograph of their partner.
R is for
rum
(adj.)
Winceworth waved goodbye to the landlord and the cab pulled away from the Barking kerb. He had shaken off most of the dirt from his clothes. He looked down: ink, crumbs, muck, cat-sick, blood. It was an archive of a day that seemed to be from a different life. For years he had kept his head down, worked with words silently and cleanly. As the cab hurtled through unfamiliar streets he felt a strange new energy lodge and jangle in his lungs and heart. It was a reckless energy, manic, tightening and reverberative, rebarbative, verve surge urge, one that felt not so much like something renewed as deranged.
The cab dropped Winceworth by the gates of Swansby House just as Westminster chimed seven o’clock. He muttered thanks to the driver and ducked beneath the steaming horses’ noses. He hauled up to Swansby House and wrenched the gates open. The clunk and rattle of his arrival caused a panic-scattering of Titivilli cats in the halls. At this late hour, it was unlikely that many lexicographers were still at work: the building was the cats’ empire.
Gripping his satchel in his hands, Winceworth took to the stairs and into the Scrivenery hall. Pons pons pons. It was eerily quiet and his footsteps rang with odd shadows of noise and unexpected echoes. When the place was not teeming with people keeping their noses to their respective lexicographical grindstones, it was not so much that the place just felt empty – the air was oddly pressurised, the Scrivenery’s shelves and bookcases impossibly high, filled with an impossible number of books filled with an impossible weight of words. As Winceworth rounded the corner, he spotted one of his colleagues still working, hovering by his desk. Bielefeld looked up from his papers, visibly paled – ‘Dear God, man! What happened?’ – and scrambled over tables and around chairs to reach Winceworth’s side. He took a firm grip of Winceworth’s elbow and steered him through the rows of desks. Bielefeld wanted to position him under one of the lamps fitted between the desks so that he might bear closer inspection.