The Book of Lost and Found

by Lucy Foley

  ‘Oh.’ I realized, spelling it out in my head, that he was right.

  Stafford’s attention was on the drawing once more. ‘Firstly,’ he said, ‘I need to ask how you came by this.’ There was no challenge in his words, but he spoke with an intensity that unnerved me.

  ‘There isn’t much more than what I wrote in my letter.’ And I described that dreadful day in the nursing home – Evie and her terrible guilt.

  ‘It was an unforgivable thing, in many ways, what she did,’ Stafford said. ‘However much she may have loved your mother, it wasn’t her secret to keep.’ I was about to interject, suddenly filled with a powerful need to defend her, when he said, ‘It is understandable, though, don’t you think? She had built her life around being a parent. I imagine she was very frightened by that note. Her whole purpose, suddenly, could have been stripped away.’

  I nodded. ‘She had an excuse to ignore it, for a while,’ I said. ‘My mother was already quite famous by that stage. So I think, at first, it was easy for Evie to convince herself that the person who wrote it was merely a fan, lying in the hope of getting close to my mother. It was never a secret that Mum was an orphan, you see.’

  ‘Then the drawing arrived,’ Stafford said.

  ‘Yes. And my mother and this woman in the picture … they could almost be the same person. When Evie got it, when Mum was twenty, I think it would have been even more obvious.’

  Stafford regarded me thoughtfully. ‘I’ve seen photographs of your mother. And, yes, I can see it now – though, interestingly, I never would have made the connection before. When I saw you, it was different. You are – how can I put this? – the image of Alice as I remember her. That is why I was so taken aback when you walked up those steps. It was a strange moment for me.’ He sighed. ‘I do not want to make you uncomfortable in any way. I am an old man now, and it all happened many years ago. But when you appeared at the top of those steps, I thought I was seeing a ghost. It nearly brought me to my knees. You see, she was the love of my life.’

  Hertfordshire, August 1928

  It is her: Alice. Unmistakable now that he has made the connection. The band has started up again, another fast number, but neither of them moves. He can feel himself smiling at her, stupidly. He must look like a fool, with his inane grin – and wearing this ridiculous fez. But she smiles back, and is suddenly transformed into the girl he knew, all those years ago.

  They do not part again all night. It is like being drunk, Tom thinks briefly, this feeling of only being able to focus on one thing, on one person, though the effects of the champagne must have worn off by now. It is, then, perhaps, the feeling of finding again that one soul that speaks clearly to his own.

  Alice is no longer that girl he met in Winnard Cove – she is a grown woman, beautiful and refined. Yet beneath this new exterior she seems, in the essentials, unchanged. Tom finds in this Alice the same yearning for adventure, the same love of the unconventional, the same fey intelligence that he knew in her six-year-old self.

  He follows her as she leads him through the dark dew-wet grass, towards a stone folly hidden in the trees on the far side of the lake. Like that time, long ago, when he would have followed her anywhere.

  They sit on the stone seat together and as he looks at her pale face, at once familiar and strange, he is flooded with memories that he had lost – subsumed within the vague, nostalgic haze of early childhood. It is as though the very presence of her has provided him with the lost key to that past.

  Now, with astonishing clarity, he remembers how she showed him all of her favourite parts of Winnard Cove, how she introduced him to its secrets. The cliffs that one could enter at low water by climbing around the sharp promontory of rocks that fringed the beach on one side. He recalls them now: dark and dank, and with the sounds of wind and water echoing strangely within them – sometimes giving out a long moan, like the sound of an animal in pain … or worse, the last cry of a dying man.

  Alice, he remembers, had always planned meticulously for their visits to those caves, knowing precisely when her nanny would be at her least vigilant: after tea, when the woman was digesting the walnut cake of which she was so fond, and, most likely, falling asleep in her chair. A handful of unlucky times they had been caught and severely reprimanded, but the experience was never painful enough to outdo the enduring lure of those dark caverns and the possibilities – boundless and terrifying – that they encompassed.

  And the cellars of Eversley Hall, he thinks, with a thrill of surprise as the memory reveals itself to him. The approach to these was fraught with another danger: Lady Eversley. Tom had known with a child’s keen instinct that his presence in the Hall would not be approved of. But again the enticement was too great to ignore. The cellar of the Staffords’ house in Parsons Green was a simple cavity beneath the drawing room of the house – half the height of a man, dark as pitch, disappointingly small. The cellars beneath Eversley Hall had been of a different order. There were rooms and corridors, a warren-like configuration that seemed almost as large as the structure above. The first space was taken up with Lord Eversley’s extensive wine collection. It was here, for the first time ever, that Tom had sampled the bitter but strangely alluring drink: a Burgundy from before he had been born, when the old queen had still been alive. A few draughts of this had been more than enough for the world to begin to reshape itself. The two of them had torn through the labyrinth, hallucinating shapes from the shadows.

  Tom recalls his desperate hope that when Alice began her exploring in earnest, she might consider him for a member of her crew. In each of their expeditions he strove to prove to her his courage in the face of adversity. He could be useful in other ways, too. Alice had generously praised his proficiency at map drawing. He made her a map of the beach and the caves, and another of that subterranean world beneath the house – and another, more imaginatively, of the possible smuggling routes between Winnard Cove and France. Alice had him sign each with his initials – lest, she said, he ever became a famous cartographer.

  ‘I still have the maps,’ she tells him now, with that familiar conspirator’s way of hers. And she smiles, but he sees from that smile that the memories are coloured with sadness for her, too. It is the awareness that that past is only to be viewed as a halcyon, barely believable time – a lost paradise. After it, everything had changed – for them both, for the world.

  ‘My mother remarried,’ Alice tells Tom, when he asks about her family, ‘not long after the war ended. It was as if she’d had my father to look after her, and then Archie … and when they’d both gone she needed a new protector. I wonder sometimes if she can actually love him, the new one.’ She glances over at Tom, her face in shadow.

  ‘What is he like, your stepfather?’

  ‘He’s … ambitious, you could say. Carving out something for himself in politics.’

  He and Lady Eversley, thinks Tom, sound rather well suited to one another. ‘And you have a stepbrother?’

  ‘Yes. Matthew. A facsimile of the Wicked Stepfather … only less charismatic. It’s bad of me to say that, I know, but according to him I waste my time with fairies and degenerates, so I would say the feeling is mutual.’ She does not seem inclined to say more.

  Then Alice speaks of her childhood grief for her real father and brother: her disbelief that they could both have been taken so quickly from her. She tells Tom of her banishment to a convent school in Switzerland some years later. ‘Which was funny, as it was when they died that I decided I didn’t believe in God.’

  Tom talks about his father. He tells Alice that which he has never told anyone, of Mr Stafford’s erratic behaviour – the nightmares that end with him screaming the whole household awake. He talks about his mother’s hope that he will follow his father’s footsteps into the law and his desperation whenever he contemplates the possibility. And, with a reckless plunge, he tells Alice of his secret desire to become an artist.

  They sit like this for a long time. They watch the lights of the pa
rty on the opposite shore, the numbers dwindling through the small hours of the morning as revellers leave in search of sleep, until the first glow of a new day appears in the sky and turns the silver surface of the lake rose pink.

  Corsica, August 1986

  The sky had lost the last light of the day now, and we depended on the candles for illumination. Something strange had happened to Stafford’s appearance: perhaps it was the chiaroscuro effect of the candle flame – though it might have been something more complicated than that. According to this illusion, his hair looked not white but fair, and the surface of his skin softened, so that, if only for a moment, I was able to believe that I was looking at a much younger man. For those scant few seconds, I thought I saw young Tom Stafford, in love.

  Then he spoke again and the spell was broken. ‘It felt like a miracle, to find her again. So much had happened in between that 1913 seemed like another age. Fifteen years is a long time – particularly when one is young – but back then it was the difference between two worlds: the Before and the After. My father had gone to war and came back quite changed. He was undamaged physically, which was a miracle, considering the state in which so many returned. He was never again right in his mind, though. Nowadays he would be diagnosed with shellshock, but it was unidentified at the time, and all the more frightening for it. My mother suffered terribly.

  ‘The world had changed. It must feel like that after every war, but to me, because it coincided with my leaving childhood behind, it was the loss of innocence – only magnified on a vast scale. All those men, coming back physically and emotionally maimed. Men far younger than my father, who had already grown old through what they had experienced. And there were those who never returned, like Alice’s brother.

  ‘Far more had changed in Alice’s life than it had in mine. She and her mother now lived with the stepfather and his son. Not a nice man, Lord Hexford.’

  I tried to think why the name sounded familiar to me. ‘Not—’

  ‘Yes,’ said Stafford, guessing what it was I searched for, ‘the Fascist. One of Mosley’s cronies.’

  Now I remembered. ‘He was disgraced, I thought?’

  He nodded. ‘Churchill had him imprisoned in 1941, and Alice’s mother was detained soon afterwards – though only for a brief time. After the war she seemed to disappear from Society completely, probably to escape the mortification of it all. And she would have been mortified by it. If I know anything of the sort of person she was, I’d imagine that to have her husband brought down like that would have almost destroyed her.’

  ‘What was she like, Alice’s mother?’

  ‘All I have to go on are my memories from when I was a boy. But I do believe that when you are young your impressions of character are often more true, because they are based on instinct alone, on pure feeling.

  ‘When I first saw her, I was still young enough to associate beauty with goodness. Though some people, perhaps, never relinquish that idea.’ He smiled. ‘Artists, in particular, have to be wary of making that mistake. And Lady Eversley was particularly exquisite – one of the great beauties of her time. She looked like the illustration of an angel in a children’s book.

  ‘I think my child’s mind found it difficult to understand how it was that someone who looked the way she did could be so cold – even to her own child. Alice, that is, not Archie. She loved Archie – he could do no wrong in her eyes. But Alice she barely acknowledged.’

  ‘Poor Alice.’

  ‘Yes. I think her mother hoped that sending her to that school in Switzerland would refine her. She had no doubt succeeded in part. Yet Alice was still the girl I’d known in 1913. That was what I loved about her: her trueness to herself, a particular kind of courage.’

  I wanted to hear more, to press Stafford for further details about her, but we were interrupted by the distinctive cough of the 2CV’s engine from the road. A few moments later, Oliver appeared at the top of the steps, camera slung about his neck: a heavy, professional-looking Canon. He sat down between us, but did not seem particularly inclined to talk, even after he’d finished the plate of food Marie had brought him. With him there at the table, it was impossible for Stafford and I to continue our own conversation.

  Suddenly I was almost overcome with weariness – it had been a long day. Stafford, with a sensitivity that I already understood was characteristic of him, noticed this and asked Marie to show me to my room.

  I said goodnight to them both. As I did, Oliver raised his head and I saw the dark gleam of his eyes reflected in the candlelight. I could feel that hostile, dark gaze upon me as I left, and my skin prickled.

  When I saw the girl for the first time my old heart nearly stopped. There she was, to all intents and purposes Alice: almost exactly as I remembered her. She was dressed in the garb of her generation. Denim jeans cut off above the knee, a pastel-coloured T-shirt. My first thought was that such clothes would have been anathema to Alice; as different from anything she would have worn as the dress of a Red Indian. Then I remembered the loose men’s shirts and those dark trousers I had seen her wear in Paris and I realized perhaps not.

  The hair was different – worn long, with a curl to it – but her face was so similar. The shape of the mouth: the top lip fuller than the lower, the straight nose with its unexpected tilt, the pointed chin. But all of these things were as naught to the eyes, which were Alice’s exactly. The resemblance had thrown me. It was – and it strikes me that this is absolutely the word for it – uncanny.

  I was forced to face another fact, perhaps even more disheartening than the first – that even were Alice to walk up those steps, she would not be the woman I recalled. Time would have worked its distortions upon her, too: within as much as without. Would I know her still for the person I had loved all those years ago? The thought disturbed me.

  When the girl’s letter had arrived, with its extraordinary photograph, I had not known what to do. Some part of me had been prepared to believe that it was a hoax, that the drawing the photograph showed was a fake, that I should not pursue it. But I knew that it was real.

  I had told the girl in my reply that everything had been delayed by the Corsican postal system. That was only half the truth. I had spent a full week with her letter in my possession, trying to decide what to do: veering between excitement and dread. Surely, I thought, in my more sensible moods, no good could come of it. It would only mean bringing difficult memories to the fore, exhuming them from where they had long stayed buried.

  The hold the past had on me turned out to be even stronger than I had realized. I could not sleep at night for thinking about it. Or, when I did sleep, my dreams were of long ago, so astonishingly vivid that when I woke reality itself seemed false, and I could not understand where I was – how I had come to be trapped in this old man’s body, on an island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Thus through the girl’s letter the past called to me, staked its claim once more upon me. And the lure of revisiting that time – both the good and bad of it – was, in the end, irresistible.

  I had not explained the presence of the girl to Oliver, not properly. I’d told him simply that she had come to talk to me about a drawing of mine – one that I had long thought missing. I had chosen not to explain anything of the history and meaning behind that work.

  Oliver had arrived only a few days before she did, unexpectedly. Paris was too quiet, he told me. And, I am sure, too loud with memories as a result, filled with the spectre of his former life there.

  He had come down several months before, too, when it had all finally come to an end. Marie had been quite tearful when she first saw him, and I admit that every time I had glanced at him it gave me a shock. For an attractive man he had looked, in a word, terrible. He had lost weight, and it showed in his face most of all, the bones sharp beneath the skin. I had not seen him like it for years – not since he was a boy, after all the horror he had endured. How relieved Elodia and I had both been when, finally, he appeared to be shedding the grief and guil
t, when we began to see him smile occasionally. I had hoped, vainly, that in the future I would be able to protect him, so that he would never have to feel such pain again. But then that boy became a man who had to make his own choices, and his own mistakes.

  It was some comfort to see that he was no longer so gaunt, and to hear that his life had resumed once more. He had talked to me about his work – his upcoming project, a hotel – with a new energy. Still, if I had known beforehand that he had planned to come down I might have tried to postpone the girl’s visit. Alas, there had not been time – and for once I had rued the lack of a telephone at the house.

  As it was, I knew that the Maison du Vent had always been a place of refuge for Oliver and I did not want that to change, nor did I wish to burden him with the knowledge of what I would be discussing with the girl. Perhaps I was wrong not to, but I flinched from the thought of hurting him. He had loved Elodia so fiercely, and the existence of the drawing – if properly explained – might have seemed to him like a betrayal.

  8

  I did not sleep well that night. I was tired, but my thoughts were too agitated. My mind was too full of all that Stafford had told me – of this past that had suddenly become a part of my own story, where before there had been only a blank.

  I feared now that Stafford might decide he did not want to continue. Even as he seemed to take some pleasure in recounting them, it had been clear that the memories pained him, too. Perhaps he would feel that it was not worth that pain. If he did, could I simply return to London and carry on as though nothing had happened? I did not want to contemplate it.

  I rose gratefully as the first suggestion of the day began to show itself through the window, dressed in my swimming costume and cut-offs, slung my Nikon around my neck and crept from the bedroom into the hallway without.