‘You say this because you have not yet found the balance.’ Sophia halted their pace and held him at arm’s length, regarding him as a physician might an ailing man. ‘You keep yourself all tight and closed up. You are all confidences and no scandal, all battening down of hatches and no great spuming fray.’
‘I hear the lady has taken a turn for the metaphorical!’ said Bielefeld, eavesdropping and leering into their path. Winceworth and Sophia stared at him for a beat. Bielefeld hiccoughed an apology and scuttled off into the crowd.
‘I have my secrets,’ Winceworth said.
‘But are they interesting ones?’
‘I’m not – not at liberty to—’ Winceworth felt the room spin a little as if he was drunk. He wished he was drunk.
‘I apologise,’ Sophia said curtly. ‘I am thrilled to hear you have secrets. Your secret life: the most precious thing. You must define your own terms for that.’ She smiled, and a part of Winceworth’s heart felt good and sore at her frankness and her strangeness but already she had moved on, sighing at their surroundings with a theatrical tone meant for other people’s benefit. ‘I must not forget – I am on duty and should be charming for the sake of other’s coffers. Fewer the-good-so-and-sos than the party where we first met,’ she said, nodding, ‘but the vulgar do have deep pockets.’
‘I’m afraid I am not amongst their number.’ He felt a little sick and a little giddy.
‘But, I say,’ Sophia said, catching his sleeve and pretending to look cross, ‘about my chess set! The one that belonged to my countrywoman, the Tartuffe in skirts. I mentioned it to you before, I think.’
‘I’ve seen enough.’
She regarded him, smiling. ‘I’m sure you have.’
‘You are toying with me, or trying to embarrass me.’ Winceworth closed his eyes as if shutting out the whirls and juttings of the room might make things clearer to him, might make him seem more in control. ‘Which is your right and I hope your pleasure. But I have had a long, long day and I would thank you if you could do me the courtesy of—’
Sophia was not listening. He opened his eyes to find her extending a hand towards him. It was not a grand sweep of arm as had been her usual mode this evening – rather, she brushed her fingers against his as they stood close together. It was a gesture designed to not be seen by anyone around them. She passed him something. He took it like an automaton, and he felt a new heaviness in his hand – small and cold – as her glove touched his fingers. She said, carefully and deliberately, so that he caught every word, ‘A shame for you to miss it. Each pawn worth over seven hundred pounds alone.’
Winceworth accepted the gift and slid it into his pocket as he raised his head to thank her or fully ascertain what she had done.
‘You cannot mean—’
But Sophia had stepped away and was lost again in the crush and Winceworth, left wordless, let himself be swallowed by the crowd and their carousing. He cast about for some minutes, not recognising anyone, and not recognising any of the emotions on anyone else’s faces. The band struck up once more and suddenly his shirt collar felt too tight and the air winched flat and thin about his lungs. He needed to not be confined, and to be somewhere unseeable. He thought of shrinking to one of the corners of the room, pressing his back against some shadowy part of the hallway where he would not be noticed or get in the way. He thought of the moonlight finding tildes and breves on the cobblestone outside, the stop-and-start kerning of London’s early-morning traffic. And in his mind he imagined blending into the facelessness of its streets, and outward, outward, beyond the remits of the capital and onto paths and edges of maps where he did not know the names of landmarks or roads, down to the sea, or further—
He felt for the pawn in his pocket once more. He looked around the room at all of the lexicographers losing themselves in the moment. He thought about their pride in working for an encyclopaedic dictionary, gathering as many words and facts as possible under their jackets and stuffed into their pockets. He thought about their ambition, their hunger for it all to be set down just so, just so.
Setting his shoulders and with a fresh resolve and firmness to his stride, Winceworth made for the door. Nobody noticed him slip out or challenged him as he traced his way back to the exit. Unimpeded, he began to make his way out of the corridors and dim passages to find the world beyond, its undefined futures, its waiting [SEE ALSO]s.
auroflorous (adj.), to escape at night, usually with a renewed sense of purpose(s). Obsolete
Acknowledgements and thanks
Small book, prolonged expressions of gratitude.
Thank you to the people who made this novel possible: my agent Lucy Luck, and the patient and tenacious editors Jason Arthur and Lee Boudreaux with their teams.
I am indebted to Royal Holloway, University of London for the research scholarship that allowed me time to fall over/into/between dictionaries. Sincere thanks to Judith Hawley and Kristen Kreider for their insights and candour throughout my studies: thank you for your confidence. Thanks also to Patricia Duncker and Richard Hamblyn for their invaluable critiques, comments and kind words, and to Andrew Motion and Robert Hampson for their early encouragement and conversation. Thank you to my colleagues and students in the English department for animating me.
I could not have written any of this without the aid of a number of institutions and organisations. Thanks to the Society of Authors for a Writers Grant in 2017. Thank you to the University of Greenwich for having me as writer-in-residence in 2018, and to Jonathan Gibbs at St Mary’s University for support at a crucial time. Thank you for the boost, space and thoughtfulness of the MacDowell Colony: thanks to all that work and worked there, galvanising so much. Thanks, Clare Sole.
I am much obliged to Beverley McCulloch for her assistance in the OUP archives and to curator Davey Moor for helping me see Mountweazel-related exhibition images from the Monster Gallery in Dublin. In terms of the history of lexicography, two books I always kept close at hand were Jonathan Green’s Chasing the Sun: Dictionary-Makers and the Dictionaries They Made and Simon Winchester’s The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. Fiction only knows and can tell the half of it.
Some elements of this book first appeared in small press publications and online journals: thanks, Jo and Sam Walton at Sad Press! Thanks Soma Ghosh at ‘The Demented Goddess’! Thanks Suze Olbrich at Somesuch Stories!
Thank you to all long-suffering friends for their zhushing and guidance (witting or otherwise). Specifically, thank you Špela Drnovšek Zorko, Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain, Nisha Ramayya, Matt Lomas, Timothy Thornton, Joanna Walsh, Robert Weedon, Copy Press, Oli Raglan & Jenny Selvakumaran & Rachel Lambert & Victoria Schindler, A & A & E & E & I & M & S & S & X, and the good people of Twitter who clarified words’ sillinesses and strangenesses. Thanks for your company.
Nell Stevens superlative, adj. and n.
To my family: thank you.
