The Liar's Dictionary

He suggested that he really should be returning to work. In doing so he suffered a small coughing fit as if his body rebelled against his getting any words out at all. Sophia pulled her new shawl more snugly about her to obscure the more obvious daubings of pelican-blood. ‘The dictionary can spare you just one more hour. Besides,’ and she quickened her pace. ‘After a shock it is often good for the constitution for one to sit somewhere quiet.’

Winceworth thought of his desk in the Scrivenery, flanked by Appleton and Bielefeld.

‘To drink something hot and to eat something sweet,’ Sophia said.

The image of the paperwork strewn across his desk. ‘I wouldn’t dare oppose your medical advice, given the previous patient, no. Not without some kind of suit of armour.’ He mimed the gait of a spar-chested pelican with the martyred dignity of a waddling St Sebastian.

‘I have simply no idea what you might mean,’ Sophia said. ‘And, do you know, I think you should probably explain it to me, at length, somewhere warm?’

He felt the arm tense gently beneath his.

The Café l’Amphigouri was Sophia’s selection, picked at whim down a side street some way towards Whitehall. Despite its proximity to Swansby House, Winceworth was unfamiliar with the place or must have overlooked it whenever he passed it on his walks through town, discounting it as a destination not meant for him. The tablecloths were as thick as royal icing and the bowl of sugar came with a pair of ornate silver tongs. The café’s owner applied some baking powder to the cut above Sophia’s eyebrow as they were seated. They were placed by the window and soon a spread of tiny cakes, buns and dessert forks was laid before them.

‘Back home,’ Sophia said, turning a plate to examine a delicate layered confection, ‘we would call this a Napoleon cake.’

‘Looks nothing like the man,’ Winceworth said, playing with an eclair on his plate with his fork.

‘Very good,’ Sophia said, and he beamed. She tapped the side of the cake with her fork, counting the strata of cream and thin sheets of pastry. She removed a wisp of icing sugar from the corner of her mouth with a fingertip. Winceworth leaned forward in his chair in order that he might have the best chance of catching her words, but whatever thought she might have been framing seemed to leave her within the same instant. She raised her teacup to her lips instead, leaving Winceworth confronted with a face eclipsed by floral china. The base of her teacup bore the manufacturer’s hand-painted name: HAVILAND & Co., Limoges.

He wanted to commit the whole scene to memory as accurately as possible. Every detail of the tearoom was laden with significance now that Sophia was a part of it. From the angle of shadows amongst the curtains to the number of faceted cubes within the sugar bowl. The arrangement of the chairs and the postures of the other diners suddenly seemed of critical importance. The exact pitch of the bell as they passed through the door was a crucial fact to be treasured and privately indexed away.

Perhaps all encyclopaedic lexicographers experience love like this, Winceworth thought – as a completist might, a hoarder of incidence-as-fact. It was not that he even particularly liked the details: he wanted to dash the teacup to the ground for coming between them – damn you, blasted furnaces of Limoges! – but he wished he could identify the blue, twist-leafed flower that patterned its porcelain. If he knew the flower’s name he would run to the nearest florist and fill his lodgings with armfuls of the stuff, plug his rooms to the rafters with posies, bouquets and tussie-mussies of it. He wanted to glut on every detail, block out any not-tearoom scented light that dared to come anywhere near him ever again.

Sophia was still concentrating on the cake.

‘All these layers, you see, meant to symbolise the Grande Armée. And this —’ she raked the cake’s surface and crumbs kicked back against her fork – ‘this represents the Russian snow that stalled the French advance, helping to defeat the little Corsican’s troops before reaching Moscow.’

‘Pelican surgery, military history expressed through cakes – you are quite the dissector.’

‘What would you call it?’ Sophia asked. ‘This type of cake?’

Winceworth tried to usher some poetry. He failed. ‘A variant on the custard slice.’

Sophia nodded, sympathetically, and cut herself a portion.

Winceworth felt so unused to this gentleness, this back and forth. It all felt a complete nonsense. He would not have been surprised if a Mad Hatter joined them from another table or if a Carollian dormouse appeared over the lip of the sugar bowl and started talking about mousetraps, memory and muchness. That, or the other diners had hidden their haloes and stowed their angelic harps. He was worried he might forget how to use cutlery correctly.