The Liar's Dictionary

Perhaps the hope that he might trickle out through the door once a necessary hour of social grace had been observed remained a possibility. He decided to stand behind one particularly lush potted plant in order to evade the further attentions of the serving staff and Frasham. Here count down the minutes in the relative safety of the potted plant’s leaves. It was a huge plant, as tall as a lexicographer and with large flat drooping leaves. He did not want it to appear as if he was sidling. He had spent the day in the office defining this verb, and was keenly aware that to sidle can convey a certain sinister intent if one happens to be observed. It pleased him that sidle (v.) could slide into slide (v.) – the surreptitious becoming the graceful. It was just a question of bearing, and perhaps the same reason that Frasham seemed more charismatic than he. Winceworth thought a good trick to counter any accusations of sidling

might involve bouncing slightly at the knees and keeping elbows close to the body. So it was that Winceworth, now obsessed with the fact he was one of humanity’s natural sidlers, slid bouncingly into what he might at his most thesaurusial choose to call the potted plant’s arboreal verdancy without disturbing a single leaf.

He sidled straight into a young woman already hiding there.

The woman was crouching slightly and caught in the act of eating a slice of birthday cake. They stared at one another – both of their eyebrows went up at the same time and tilted into identical angles of surprise. Their expressions changed simultaneously: their eyebrows were at once a grave accent, then acute, then circumflex ò ó ô signifying shock then furtiveness and then an attempt at nonchalance. She deposited her cake into a beaded purse without breaking eye contact and then set her shoulders, and Winceworth, drunk enough to interpret this as an invitation to dictate proceedings, cleared his throat.

‘—’ he said. He considered and then continued, whispering, ‘I beg your pardon. I had not realised this plant was taken.’

She was dressed in dove-grey stuff with pearls as big as eyes or frogspawn, no, something nicer, it doesn’t always have to be approximate, they were large pearls around her neck. Her neck was very white. Why was he staring at her neck? He had forgotten to lisp. Winceworth’s head snapped back to the crowd visible through the potted plant, but not before he noticed the three leaves bending against her hair as she stepped back a pace under the plant’s shadow. He shook his head to force concentration.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ the young woman was saying. ‘This plant has the distinct benefit of coming fully recommended.’ She held her hand towards Winceworth. ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ Their expressions changed from distrust to shared, good-humoured conspiracy: ō õ. Winceworth, quietly and implausibly and in a frankly impractical way, suspected he had fallen in love.

‘I’m not sure the good doctor was invited.’ He drew closer into the plant and brought his heels together.

‘In which case,’ she said, ‘one might say some people have all the luck.’

‘You do not want to be here either?’ He wondered whether he was standing upright properly and tried to rearrange his spine.

‘I could not possibly comment.’ She adjusted her gaze so that it mirrored his own, directed back out into the room. ‘I suppose you’re staging an escape too?’

The plant’s trunk had a label nailed into it bearing the name of its species. The label was slightly askew and he realigned it with a thumbnail. The room seemed to be chanting rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.

‘Hardly that,’ he said. ‘I’m a desk man.’ He trialled another glance at her face and found it puzzled. ‘Rather than a man of the field, that is,’ he clarified, poorly. ‘Unlike Terence. Mr Frasham, I mean. I am sorry, have we met?’

Leaves rattled around them. The label on the plant read DO

NOT TOUCH.

‘I do not believe so,’ said the woman. ‘Have you travelled fifteen hundred miles?’

‘Not this evening.’ Two men walked past their plant discussing politics, loud enough for Winceworth to gather they were using parliamentary terms incorrectly. From this angle, Winceworth could see that one of the band’s musicians had concealed a hipflask in his viola case. ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘have you dropped anything?’ Her eyes were brown and one of them had a curious green notch in it. Why was he looking in her eyes? At her eyes. He felt that if he did not look at her he could not be blamed for whatever rubbish he was saying. ‘I only asked in case you were in here –’ and he gestured at the leaves surrounding them – ‘for any specific reason. If you had dropped something, for example, I might assist you in retrieving it.’