It had been a long time since I’d put anything in the trunk, but Lizzie took no more than a moment to understand. ‘I’ve often wondered if you’d find anything else to put in it.’
The slips weren’t the only words that found their way into the trunk.
On the floor of Da’s wardrobe were two wooden boxes. I found them when we were playing hide-and-seek. The sharp corner of one stuck painfully into my back as I pushed myself into the furthest corner. I opened it.
It was too dark among Da’s coats and Lily’s musty dresses to see what was inside, but my hand stroked the edges of what felt like envelopes. Then there was a clomping on the stairs, and Da sang ‘Fee Fi Fo Fum’. I closed the lid and shuffled towards the centre of the wardrobe. Light flooded in, and I jumped out into his arms.
Later that night, when I should have been asleep, I wasn’t. Da was still downstairs correcting proofs, so I sneaked out of bed and tip-toed across the landing to his bedroom. ‘Open Sesame,’ I whispered, and pulled on the wardrobe doors.
I reached in and brought out each box. I sat with them beneath Da’s window, the dusky evening light still good enough to see by. They were almost the same – pale wood with brass corners – but one box was polished, the other dull. I pulled the polished box closer and caressed the honeyed wood. A hundred envelopes, thick and thin, pressed against each other in the order they were sent. His plain white against her blue. They mostly alternated, though sometimes there were two or three white in a row, as if Da had a lot to say about something that Lily had lost interest in. If I read the letters first to last they would tell a story of their courtship, but I knew it was a story with a sad ending. I closed the box without opening a single one.
The other box was also full of letters, but none were from Lily. They were from different people and were tied in bundles with string. The biggest bundle was from Ditte. I slid the latest letter from beneath the string and read it. It was mostly about the Dictionary; about the C words that never seemed to end, and how the Press Delegates kept asking Dr Murray to work more quickly because the Dictionary was costing too much. But the last bit was about me.
Ada Murray tells me James has the children sorting slips. She painted quite a picture of them huddled around the dining table late into the night, barely visible under a mountain of paper. She even ventured to say that she thought this may have been his motive for a big brood all along. Thank goodness for her sense and good humour. I do believe the Dictionary might have faltered without it.
You must tell Esme to stay well-hidden when she’s in the Scrippy or she will be Dr Murray’s next recruit. I daresay she’s bright enough, and I wonder if she would, in fact, be willing.
Yours,
Edith
I put both boxes back in the wardrobe then I tip-toed across the landing. The letter was still in my hand.
The next day, Lizzie watched as I opened the trunk. I pulled Ditte’s letter from my pocket and placed it on top of the slips that covered the bottom.
‘You’re collecting a lot of secrets,’ she said, her hand finding the cross beneath her clothes.
‘It’s about me,’ I said.
‘Discarded or neglected?’ She’d insisted on rules.
I thought about it. ‘Forgotten,’ I said.
I returned to the wardrobe again and again to read Ditte’s letters – there was always something about me; some answer to a query of Da’s. It was as if I were a word and the letters were slips that helped define me. If I read them all, I thought, maybe I would make more sense.
But I could never bring myself to read the letters in the polished box. I liked to look at them, to run my hand across their spines and feel them flutter past. They were together in that box, my mother and my father, and when sleep was about to catch me, I sometimes imagined I could hear their muffled voices. One night I sneaked into Da’s room and crawled like a hunting cat into the wardrobe. I wanted to catch them unawares. But when I lifted the lid of their polished box, they went quiet. A terrible loneliness shadowed me back to bed and kept me from sleeping.
The next morning, I was too tired for school. Da took me to Sunnyside, and I spent the morning beneath the sorting table with blank slips and coloured pencils. I wrote my name in different colours on ten different slips.
When I opened the polished box later that night, I nestled each slip between a white envelope and a blue. We were together now, all three of us. I wouldn’t miss a thing.
The trunk beneath Lizzie’s bed began to feel the weight of all the letters and words.
‘No shells or stones. Nothing pretty,’ Lizzie said when I opened it one afternoon. ‘Why do you collect all this paper, Essymay?’
‘It’s not the paper I’m collecting, Lizzie; it’s the words.’
‘But what’s so important about these words?’ she asked.
I didn’t know, exactly. It was more feeling than thought. Some words were just like baby birds fallen from the nest. With others, I felt as though I’d come across a clue: I knew it was important, but I wasn’t sure why. Ditte’s letters were the same, like parts of a jigsaw that might one day fit together to explain something Da didn’t know how to say – something Lily might have.
I didn’t know how to say any of this, so I asked, ‘Why do you do needlepoint, Lizzie?’
She was quiet for a very long time. She folded her washing and changed the sheets on her bed.
I stopped
