The Liar's Dictionary

‘I am not at my best during busy social occasions,’ the woman said, or words to that effect, bluntly but gently. ‘But I do know a good vantage point when I see it. I am enjoying watching people from here,’ she said. She lowered her voice still further. ‘Manet’s scene through a Rousseau jungle. And for the most part it allows me to avoid small talk.’

‘You must continue to do so,’ Winceworth said. He withdrew and raised a glass between them, promising himself to look up any draft Manet and Rousseau biographical entries in Swansby’s at the first opportunity. ‘Hiding behind plants is the closest I get to intrepid, but I can do so quietly.’

‘Let us intrepede together, then.’

He considered intrepede. This was the longest sustained conversation he had kept for months. He considered starting every day by drinking whisky or whiskey and maybe everything would always seem this cogent and easy. ‘What have you observed so far?’

‘A great many things.’ The young woman appeared to have perked up and nodded towards the scene before them. ‘The migratory patterns being made, the watering holes being chosen, the different calls used within different groups. I had, in fact, been watching you until quite recently.’

‘Nothing untoward, I hope.’ He felt his cheeks.

‘You will forgive me –’ she said (perhaps she is drunk too) – ‘I concluded half an hour ago that you are a very good negotiator of meaningless paths.’

Winceworth detected a slight accent on the way she pronounced the letter t in negotiator

. He tried to place it.

He said, attempting charm, ‘I suppose we all are, in our own small way.’ He pressed the whisky glass again to his lips – somehow, he missed his mouth but his wrist kept going, propelling the glass all the way up to his eye. For a second, glimpsed through the angled glass, her dress appeared as if stained yellow. He kept the glass there for long enough for the Glenlivet fumes to make his eyes burn.

She did not take her eyes from the room. ‘That man over there has been doing the same perambulations as you for the past hour but in the opposite direction – you went clockwise, while he is quite widdershins.’

Widdershins immediately became Winceworth’s favourite word in the whole world.

‘And that woman—’ the young lady pointed, and Winceworth followed her finger – ‘no, not her, that one, with the prominent bump on the back of her head, like her pons is trying to escape out of her skull—’

‘Pons?’

‘Wearing the curry-coloured hat. She has been pivoting on alternate feet every seven minutes. And Glossop –’ she indicated the man by the door – ‘why, he has not moved at all.’

‘You know Glossop?’ Winceworth asked. ‘Well. Well! Glossop is famed for his –’ Winceworth took another gulp of whisky and considered his phrasing – ‘his stolid permanence.’

‘I should be making a spotters’ guide. Where would you rather be right now? I wonder?’

The question threw Winceworth off balance and he blurted the truth before he understood where it came from: ‘Sennen Cove.’

Her face registered a crease of confusion. ‘I’m not sure I know—’

‘It’s in Cornwall. Near Land’s End – never been, myself, but I once saw a picture of it in a newspaper clipping. It had the caption,’ and Winceworth affected a slightly different voice for quotation, rolling his eyes back involuntarily with the small effort of memory, ‘“Sennen Cove boasts one of the loveliest stretches of sand in the country”. Lots of tales of mermaids and smugglers. I could have a little whitewashed cottage.’

‘You could,’ the woman said.

‘Shipwrecks too, of course – a place filled with ghosts. Sorry, am I wittering? I’m wittering. Thank you for asking. I’ve looked it up since, Sennen: I confess, now I think on it, I became quite fixated for some while on a fantasy of upping sticks and living there.’

Winceworth had never disclosed these dreams or thoughts to anyone before, but he realised the words and truth of this daydream, this desire, were always on the cusp of being said. He had not known how close to the surface of every waking thought this daydream lurked, ready to spring out.

He went on: ‘There’s a rock formation nearby called “Dr Syntax” and another called “Dr Johnson’s Head” on account of its peculiar silhouette – isn’t that marvellous? Or tedious.’

‘Marvellous,’ the woman emphasised. She repeated it in case Winceworth could not hear her over the band. ‘What a pleasure to learn these things.’

Usually, Winceworth would be sure he was being mocked by such a sentence, but tonight he believed that perhaps all these thoughts were worth the sharing. ‘Marvellous. I hope I am not boring you, I’m so sorry. Since reading about the place I haven’t been able to get the idea of escaping all this—’ Winceworth took in the whole room, the whole capital, his whole life in a sweep of his arm, ‘and making my way there.’

The woman beamed at him. ‘You should do it,’ she said. ‘Escape.’