The Liar's Dictionary

Frasham grinned. Winceworth wondered how difficult it might be to club someone over the head with a 400-pound potted plant. ‘It was quite extraordinary,’ he heard Frasham say. ‘And, at the same time, often completely preposterous. I mean! Watching some Cossack in a suit fracturing his tear ducts pronouncing czar tsar or sdzar in any fourteen hundred different ways, and poor Glossop scribbling it all down.’

Winceworth helped himself to another drink from a tray swung by his elbow. He smiled but his mouth felt stiff, snappable. He believed that he could hear every tiny movement of bone in his jaw in syrupy clacking sounds. There was small gratification that his shrub-mate looked absolutely bored by this turn in the conversation.

Someone across the room produced a balalaika, an instrument that Frasham had apparently mastered on his travels, and this gave him cause to peel away from their little circle and resume a position on the club-room’s sofa. He played a version of ‘The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery’ without looking at the instrument’s strings, fluttering his eyelashes at Glossop. The old rogue. Good old Terence.

Winceworth nosed his whisky.

He considered leading Sophia back to their plant and explaining – how might one set down the phonetics of a hiccup? – that this lisp nonsense was far behind him. It became, befuddledly, crucial that Sophia not only be made to understand that he wanted

to apologise, but that he was a Good Sort. He could not play the balalaika but he had other talents. He could spin the etymology of the word hello from its earliest roots.

Frasham was by now miming to a delighted crowd the way in which he had wrestled the walrus in the famous photograph received by the office. Lamplight caught his hair, clinking off his teeth and making gold chevrons in the fabric of his suit. He was singing again.

‘A dreadful, handsome show-off, is he not?’ murmured Sophia. They watched Frasham turn his head upward and serenade the ceiling, his throat was exposed. Winceworth could not help but think that Dr Rochfort-Smith, connoisseur of mouths and mouthparts, would probably call Frasham’s throat a perfect specimen.

Þrotobolla is the Old English word for a man’s Adam’s apple, Winceworth wanted to say. It means throat-ball – no poetry there, just etymological pragmatism. The jutting shape of the letter Þ enacting the jutting swell of the gullet. He blinked at Sophia in front of him and she momentarily doubled in his vision.

What was I saying?

Winceworth thought. Ignore what Terence said about my lisp, Sophia. Do not think about my tongue as a buzzing, fat proboscis like that of a fly. Do not think of my tongue at all. I am more than that.

A fresh whisky was held out to Winceworth. The hand offering it had extremely freckled fingers and bloodless nails. The knuckles formed a row of white Ms spelling out a mumble along the cusp of the fist. Let me tell you about the etymology of the word hello, Winceworth thought, taking the drink. I cannot sing and I cannot be handsome, but I can perhaps charm you with a fascination with the particulars rather than the general, that’s my talent. This tendency to drift off and delight with small details, the transformative power of proper attention paid to small things.

He really was quite quite drunk.

‘Are you feeling all right?’ Sophia asked.

Helloa, pronounced like cocoa

, from an emphatic imperative of halôn, holôn, to fetch, used especially in hailing a ferryman, a distant or occupied person, or said with surprise at an unexpected meeting, such as within the shadow of an expensive potted palm. Hallow, as in the ground, cf. demonstratively splendid. To shout ‘halloo’ at dogs in order to urge them on. Lo! Hullabaloo, from bas, là le loup! (down there, the wolf!), hallelujah! Ah, etymologies, the speculative pedigree of a word. What do you think of me as a lexicographer, Sophia?

Winceworth wondered as she doubled once in his vision. What would that knowledge prompt you to ask? What is my favourite word? Or, more particular still, my favourite letter? Allow these private fictions to a boring lexicographer. Ask me something, Sophia, Winceworth thought.

Terence Clovis Frasham was again by their side. ‘Of course,’ he was saying, pulling his arm about Sophia’s shoulders, ‘there was one particularly fine acquisition I made on my travels.’

Winceworth noticed the two small details of Sophia and Frasham’s matching rings and something tightened just beneath his Adam’s apple.

Winceworth made his apologies and stumbled down the stairs out of the society.

In a phrase of which Dr Rochfort-Smith would no doubt be proud, January sun had long since sought solace, silently, amongst some small scudding cirrus clouds. Winceworth ran – prestissimo; he shambled – lento; he trudged – andante moderato.