‘I can’t be late,’ I said.
‘You won’t be.’
A few days later, Bill, Tilda and I met for tea at the station. Bill kissed my cheek. Anyone watching would have guessed old friends, cousins, perhaps. They wouldn’t have noticed his gentle breath in my ear, or the shiver that met it. Over three evenings, he had explored me. Found seams of pleasure I didn’t know existed. Should he stay in Oxford? He’d asked. If you have to ask, I’d said, then probably not.
Tilda handed me a paper bag.
‘Don’t worry, they’re not leaflets.’ She smiled.
I opened the bag.
‘A lip-pencil, eye-pencil and eyebrow-pencil,’ said Tilda. ‘Easily obtained, though perhaps not from the hairdresser your godmother goes to. I also bought you some lipstick. Red, to go with that hair of yours. You’ll need a new dress to make it work.’
I took out a slip. ‘Put lip-pencil in a sentence.’
‘The lip-pencil followed the contours of her ruby lips like an artist’s brush.’
‘She’s been practising that,’ said Bill.
‘I can’t write that on a slip.’
‘If this is for the real Dictionary, doesn’t it need to come from a book?’ Bill asked.
‘It’s supposed to, but even Dr Murray has been known to make up a quotation when those that exist don’t do justice to the sense.’
‘That’s my sentence, take it or leave it,’ said Tilda.
I took it. Bill poured more tea.
‘Do you have a play already lined up in Manchester?’ I asked.
‘It’s not theatre work that’s taking us to Manchester, Essy,’ said Bill. ‘Tilda’s joined the WSPU.
‘Which is?’
‘The Women’s Social and Political Union,’ said Tilda.
‘Mrs Pankhurst thinks her stage skills will be useful,’ said Bill.
‘I can project my voice.’
‘And make it sound posh.’ Bill looked at his sister with such pride. I couldn’t imagine him ever leaving her.
Elsie Murray made her way around the Scriptorium, her hand full of envelopes. I watched as each of the assistants received one, variations in thickness indicating seniority, education, gender. Da’s envelope was thick. Mine, like Rosfrith’s and Elsie’s, looked almost empty. She stopped by her sister’s chair, and as they spoke Elsie re-pinned a lock of fair hair that had escaped Rosfrith’s bun. Satisfied it would stay, Elsie continued towards my desk.
‘Thank you, Elsie,’ I said as she handed me my wage.
She smiled and put an even larger envelope on my desk. ‘You’ve been looking a bit bored these past few day days, Esme.’
‘No, not at all.’
‘You’re being polite. I’ve done my fair share of sorting and letter-writing. I know how tedious it can be.’ She opened the envelope, pulled out a page of proofs and slid it towards me. ‘Father thought you might like to try your hand at copyediting.’
It wasn’t a cure for the mood that had descended on me, but it was welcome. ‘Oh, Elsie, thank you.’
She nodded, pleased. I waited for her usual questions.
‘A new play will be starting at New Theatre tonight,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘Will you be going?’
I had been getting an envelope every Friday for six years, and every Friday Elsie would enquire about what treat I would buy myself. It had always been something to brighten our house, but since meeting Tilda my answer had barely wavered: I would take myself to the theatre. ‘What is so fascinating about Much Ado About Nothing?’ she’d asked once. Bill came to mind, his thigh against mine in the darkness beyond the stage, our eyes on Tilda.
‘I don’t think I’ll be going to the theatre tonight,’ I said.
She regarded me for a moment. Her dark eyes seemed sympathetic.
‘Plenty of time. I read it was popular in London, and they’re expecting a long season.’
But I couldn’t imagine another troupe or another play, and the thought of sitting in the stalls with someone other than Bill brought me close to tears.
‘Must get on,’ Elsie said, touching my shoulder briefly before walking away.
When she was gone, I looked at the proofs she had given me. It was the first page of the next fascicle, and a slip was pinned to the edge with an additional example for misbode.
Dr Murray’s scrawled instructions were to edit the page to make it fit. I recalled the word coming out of an envelope years before; a lady’s neat script and a line from Chaucer. Da and I had played with it for a week. This new sentence made me pause. Her misboding sorrow for his absence has almost made her frantic.
I missed them. It was as if they had written a play and constructed the set, and whenever I was with them I had a part to perform. I fell into it so easily: a secondary character, someone ordinary against whom the leads could shine. Now that they had packed up and left, I felt I had forgotten my lines.
But did Bill’s absence make me frantic?
He’d given me something I’d wanted since the first time he took my hand. It wasn’t love; nothing like it. It was knowledge. Bill took words I’d written on slips and turned them into places on my body. He introduced me to sensations that no fine sentence could come close to defining. Near its end, I’d heard the pleasure of it exhaled on my breath, felt my back arch and my neck stretch to expose its pulse. It was a surrender, but not to him. Like an alchemist, Bill had turned Mabel’s vulgarities and Tilda’s practicalities into something beautiful. I was grateful, but I was not in love.
It was Tilda I missed the most; her absence that left a misboding sorrow. She had ideas I wanted to understand and she said things I could not. She cared more for what mattered and less for what didn’t. When I was with her I felt I might do something extraordinary. With her gone, I feared I never would.
‘Poorly again, Essy?’ Lizzie asked, when I came into the kitchen for a glass of water. ‘You’re looking a bit pale, that’s for sure.’
Mrs Ballard was checking the Christmas pudding she’d made a few months earlier
