Orange wall-hangings, orange satin throws, the array of bright orange walnut sapwood pieces of furniture, the orange songbird. In contrast to all this, Rochfort-Smith always wore a particularly lichenous cut of tweed. Perhaps it was the headache, but in this fourth elocution session Winceworth thought this suit clashed against the room’s decor with a new and particular energetic violence.
When Winceworth had first entered the room, the bird trialled some chirrups and then progressed to a trilling burr. As the clock hiccupped something about the passage of time and Dr. Rochfort-Smith began his solemn incantation about soft suffusion, the bird decided its talents would be better spent in the percussive arts rather than just simple arietta and began slamming its body against the wire of its cage.
The doctor inclined his head and waited. Winceworth closed his eyes, marshalled his resolve and repeated the phrase back to the room. Every syllable took the effort of a poorly thought-through lie.
“ ‘A ro—’ ”
CLANG, went the birdcage.
“ ‘—with—’ ”
CLANG
“ ‘—divulged?—’ ”
tingINGting
TING TING-TLINGting
tingTLINGtlllingling
The slamming, the screeching, yesterday’s whisky excesses: the headache bit across the length of Winceworth’s skull and rocked him back, defeated, into the recesses of his chair.
* * *
—
Winceworth’s lisp was the official reason for his time with Dr. Rochfort-Smith. He had not booked these sessions and was quite opposed to the idea of them for the very good reason that his lisp was completely manufactured. Since childhood and throughout his youth and certainly for the five years that he had been working at Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary, Peter Winceworth had concocted, affected and perfected a fake speech impediment.
He was not sure that he had developed the lisp for any reason other than sheer boredom. There was perhaps a childish, childlike idea that it made him endearing, and from an early age the act of altering his speech in this way made people respond to him with a greater gentleness. As far as he knew, which is as far as he cared, the deceit hurt nobody. Simple pleasures, small comforts.
Occasionally in private Winceworth repeated his name in his shaving mirror just to check that the lisping habit had not become ingrained.
* * *
—
“ ‘Roseate’!” urged the doctor.
“ ‘Roseate,’ ” Winceworth said. His tongue flicked the back of his teeth.
* * *
—
While Winceworth’s mother found his boyhood lisp endearing, his father found it ridiculous. This made child-Winceworth even more resolved to keep up the pretence. A great-uncle on the paternal side had spoken in a similar way and family legend revolved around this forebear’s sudden shyness when The Times swapped the long, medial ∫ form to s on its pages so that his gruff declarations of “finfulneff!” and “forrowful!” over the breakfast table could no longer be excused as simply too-quick reading. In truth, this family legend was made up by Winceworth to scatter into conversations when pauses were too awkward for him to bear. Winceworth lied easily when there was no clear harm in doing so. Once his school years were completed, with accusations and repercussions of perceived effeminacy duly weathered on the sports pitches and in detention, Winceworth considered leaving the lisp behind him with the chalkboards and the textbooks. Out of habit, however, and perhaps nervousness, he accidentally let slip a nethethary during an interview for a minor proofreading role at Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary.
The editor’s eyes had softened with an unmistakable sympathy. The lisp persisted and Winceworth gained meaningful employment.
The lisp became a more pressing issue when Winceworth’s job at Swansby’s focused on the letter S. Day in, day out he shuffled powder-blue index cards covered with S-led words across his desk, headwords and lemmas all sibilance and precise hissing. The same editor who had been so well disposed to Winceworth’s non-impediment at the time of interview summoned him from his desk and explained, gently, that rather than a Christmas bonus this year Winceworth would be enrolled in a series of classes with one of the premier elocutionists in Europe.
“As we enter the Ryptage–Significant volume,” Prof. Gerolf Swansby had said, placing a hand on Winceworth’s shoulder. He was close enough for Winceworth to detect his breath—a strange mix of citrus zest and Fribourg & Treyer’s finest tobacco. “I thought it might be a good time to address the matter—you know, as you go on working as an ambassador for our great Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary.”
“Ambassador, sir?”
Swansby replied after a pause, trying to look kind. “Exactly.” The hand on Winceworth’s shoulder tightened a degree.
The lisp was so much a part of Winceworth’s identity and presence at Swansby’s that this offer was difficult to refute or dismiss. Sessions with Dr. Rochfort-Smith were duly scheduled at considerable cost to the company’s pocketbooks, and so it was that January’s Winceworth sat back in an orange armchair, battling a headache and feigning a lisp to a doctor for the fourth week in a row.
Dr. Rochfort-Smith’s methods of tutelage proved curious but not wholly unenjoyable. This was due in part to the added cat-and-mouse element, Winceworth having to hide his perfectly standard diction and evade detection. Their last appointment featured pebbles inserted into his mouth while he read passages from Dr. Rochfort-Smith’s Coverdale translation of the Bible. Another involved a kind of puppet show whereby the active musculature of a speaking mouth was demonstrated using a silk, larger-than-life-size model of the human tongue. Winceworth was informed that this tongue had been made by the absent Mrs. Rochfort-Smith. Although surely a woman of many talents, at the time it occurred to Winceworth that tongue manufacture was perhaps not one of her greatest. Some of the silk’s stitching was too obvious and a few wisps of stuffing escaped in sad papillae at its seams. With the bundle safely clamped between the jaws of a pair of vulcanised rubber dentures, Winceworth had watched for a good half-hour as Dr. Rochfort-Smith revealed the ways by which one’s enunciation might be improved.
Presumably primed and ready for its next exhibition, today the tongue was hanging unwaggingly from its nail by the door.
Dr. Rochfort-Smith held a tuning fork in both of his hands. “Your pitch,” the doctor said, “is adequate and tone assured. But, I wonder: ‘roseate,’ once more?”
Maybe the doctor was fully aware the lisp was false: if you waste my time, I shall peep-twang my way through yours. This was Winceworth’s only rational explanation for the tuning forks. It was doubtful that their resonance could be heard over the songbird, anyway. He had no idea how Dr. Rochfort-Smith stood this sound—for his part, Winceworth’s headache set about trying to wring liquid or pluck a particular note from his optic nerve. Blood thudded in his ears, pons pons pons, and Dr. Rochfort-Smith suddenly had either far too many teeth or too small a mouth. A squint might clarify things, Winceworth thought. A thorough, concerted winching of the eyes might portion the world into tolerable slices. He did not want to appear rude. Gently does it, steady, the Buffs—he need only lower his brows by a fraction and bend his forehead into the subtlest of corrugations so that his squint would pass as mere attentiveness.