No one even replies. They’re all hunched over their tiles again.
I line my phone up so the screen takes in the board and my rack of tiles. Then I press the photo button.
“Just taking a family snap!” I say quickly as the faces rise in response to the flash. I’m already sending the photo over to Sam.
“It’s your turn, Poppy,” says Magnus. “Would you like some help, darling?” he adds in an undertone.
I know he’s trying to be kind. But there’s something about the way he says it that stings me.
“It’s OK, thanks. I’ll be fine.” I start moving the tiles back and forth on my rack, trying to look confident.
After a minute or two I glance down at my phone, in case a text has somehow arrived silently—but there’s nothing.
Everyone else is concentrating on their tiles or on the board. The atmosphere is hushed and intense, like an exam room. I shift my tiles around more and more briskly, willing some stupendous word to pop out at me. But no matter what I do, it’s a fairly crap situation. I could make RAW. Or WAR.
And still my phone is silent. Sam must have been joking about helping me. Of course he was joking. I feel a wave of humiliation. What’s he going to think, when a picture of a Scrabble board arrives on his phone?
“Any ideas yet, Poppy?” Wanda says in encouraging tones, as though I’m a subnormal child. I suddenly wonder if, while I was in the kitchen, Magnus told his parents to be nice to me.
“Just deciding between options.” I attempt a cheerful smile.
OK. I have to do this. I can’t put it off any longer. I’ll make RAW.
No, WAR.
Oh, what’s the difference?
My heart low, I put the A and W down on the board—as my phone bleeps with a text.
WHAIZLED. Use the D from OUTSTEPPED. Triple word score, plus 50-point bonus.
Oh my God.
I can’t help giving a laugh, and Antony shoots me an odd look.
“Sorry,” I say quickly. “Just … my patient making a joke.” My phone bleeps again.
It’s Scottish dialect, btw. Used by Robert Burns.
“So, is that your word, Poppy?” Antony is peering at my pathetic offering. “ Raw? Jolly good. Well done!”
His heartiness is painful.
“Sorry,” I say quickly. “My mistake. On second thoughts I think I’ll do this word instead.”
Carefully, I lay down WHAIZLED on the board and sit back, looking nonchalant.
There’s an astounded silence.
“Poppy, sweets,” says Magnus at last. “It has to be a genuine word, you know. You can’t make one up—”
“Oh, don’t you know that word?” I adopt a tone of surprise. “Sorry. I thought it was fairly common knowledge.”
“ Whay-zled? ” ventures Wanda dubiously. “ Why-zled? How do you pronounce it, exactly?”
Oh God. I have no bloody idea.
“It … er … depends on the region. It’s traditional Scottish dialect, of course,” I add with a knowledgeable air, as though I’m Stephen Fry.42 “Used by Robert Burns. I was watching a documentary about him the other night. He’s rather a passion of mine, in fact.”
“I didn’t know you were interested in Burns.” Magnus looks taken aback.
“Oh yes,” I say as convincingly as possible. “Always have been.”
“ Which poem does whaizled come from?” Wanda persists.
“It’s … ” I swallow hard. “It’s actually rather a beautiful poem. I can’t remember the title now, but it goes something like … ”
I hesitate, trying to think what Burns’s poetry sounds like. I heard some once at a Hogmanay party, not that I could understand a word of it.
“’Twas whaizled … when the wully whaizle … wailed. And so on!” I break off brightly. “I won’t bore you.”
Antony raises his head from the N–Z volume of the dictionary, which he instantly picked up when I laid my tiles down and has been flicking through.
“Quite right.” He seems a bit flummoxed. “Whaizled. Scottish dialect for wheezed. Well, well. Very impressive.”
“Bravo, Poppy.” Wanda is totting up. “So, that’s a triple word score, plus your fifty-point bonus … so that’s … one hundred and thirty-one points! The highest score so far!”
“One hundred and thirty-one?” Antony grabs her paper. “Are you sure?”
“Congratulations, Poppy!” Felix leans over to shake my hand.
“It was nothing, really.” I beam modestly around. “Shall we keep going?”
35 I finally winkled this out of him on the phone at lunchtime.
36 Magnus says Wanda has never sunbathed in her life, and she thinks people who go on holiday in order to lie on beds must be mentally deficient. That’ll be me, then.
37 “Study of Continuous Passive Motion Following Total Knee Arthroplasty.” I’ve still got it, in its plastic folder.
38 She didn’t say exactly where it was questing to.
39 Although I am rather good at footnotes. They could put me in charge of those.
40 No idea what most of these words mean.
41 Which apparently is a word. Silly me.
42 Stephen Fry of QI, I mean. Not Jeeves and Wooster. Although Jeeves probably knew a fair bit about Burns’s poetry too.
5
I won! I won the Scrabble game!
Everyone was gobsmacked. They pretended not to be—but they were. The raised eyebrows and astonished glances became more frequent and less guarded as the game went on. When I got that triple word score with saxatile, Felix actually broke out into applause and said, “Bravo!” And as we were tidying the kitchen afterward, Wanda asked me if I’d ever thought of studying linguistics.