The Book of Lost and Found

by Lucy Foley

  I padded through the sleeping house, looking about me with furtive curiosity. I had expected to see Stafford’s work everywhere, but save for a small landscape study in my room there was none in evidence. This spoke to me of the modesty of the man. Instead, there were photographs. Many of them were of a solemn child who I realized, with a shock of recognition, had to be Oliver. His black hair and sharp chin lent him a fey appearance. There he was with Stafford in a dinghy, a smile transforming his face; with a dark, smiling older woman, who I assumed was Stafford’s wife, and another woman who was much younger – beautiful, I supposed, in a poised, heavily coiffed way. She rested one small white hand on the child’s shoulder but otherwise stood apart from him. This had to be Oliver’s mother: they shared the same eyes: almond-shaped, heavy-lidded. There was something odd about her. I couldn’t put my finger on it precisely, but it was to do with the way she seemed to gaze out of the frame to a point beyond your shoulder, as though scoping her escape.

  When I stepped outside the air was cool, though the cloudless sky suggested that it would be another searingly hot day. The moon was still visible, way up in the violet reaches: a pale sickle-shaped sliver.

  The sea, too, looked purplish at this hour, deep and dark: less benign than it had seemed in the full light of day. I lifted my camera and framed the scene, but felt unusually frustrated by the limitations of my art. I wanted to capture it all: the scent of herbs, the hush of the breeze, the tentative warmth of the newly risen sun on my bare shoulders. I wondered if this was something Stafford might experience, too, when he sat down to try and render it in paint.

  I’d go for a swim, I decided – it was early enough that I could hope to have the pool to myself. I picked my way down the steps Stafford had indicated. The stone was coarse as pumice beneath my soles, and desiccated in places, falling away before me in miniature avalanches of scree.

  When I reached the pool, I saw that it was a modest size but quite deep. The very fact of its creation gave cause for wonder: it had been carved out of the steel-grey rock of the cliff itself, which fell away on the far side towards the cove. There was no diving board and no stepladder, merely an unembellished tank of – I dipped a cautious toe in – ice-cold water.

  I shrugged off my shorts and laid them down several metres away with my camera and towel. Gooseflesh washed my skin as I stood poised in indecision on the edge. Then, before I had any more time to think about it, I jumped. There was a shock, the smack of the surface, a rush of frigid water around my ears and my feet touched the slick bottom. I shot back up, gasping and laughing to myself stupidly, my heart racing from the cold, my breath high in my chest so I felt I couldn’t draw enough air into my lungs. But almost immediately I started to acclimatize, and the temperature began to seem bearable. I dived and surfaced, shook my head like a dog, revelling in it.

  ‘Good morning.’

  I spluttered and blinked, disorientated. Water was dripping from my lashes, blinding me, but gradually a dark figure took shape at the top of the steps that led up from the beach.

  It was Oliver, I realized. I saw that he carried his camera around his neck.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ I said, making an effort to be friendly. ‘Have you been down on the beach?’

  ‘Yes.’ That was clearly all I was going to get. The other questions I had intended to ask – about the photographs he had taken down there – died on my lips. Then he gestured to the water. ‘Aren’t you cold?’

  ‘No,’ I said with some bravado. ‘It’s fine once you’re in.’ I was starting to cool down though, I realized, and began to tread water to get my blood moving again.

  ‘Your lips are going blue.’

  ‘All right,’ I conceded. ‘It’s freezing. In fact, come to think of it, I’m refreshed enough. Would you mind passing me my towel?’

  Oliver picked it up and held it to his chest. I reached for it, but he stepped back. ‘You need to concentrate on getting out first. Here—’ he put out his arm, apparently suggesting I take hold of it. ‘I keep telling Grand-père that he has to put some steps in.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry – I’ll be fine.’ Rather stubbornly I decided that I did not want to accept his help. But when I surveyed the side, the small cliff of stone seemed suddenly intimidating and much steeper than I had realized.

  Eventually, accepting defeat, I relented and took Oliver’s outstretched hand. He gave a haul and I pushed with my spare palm against the stone lip, feeling the water suck lovingly at my legs and belly before it released me with a rush, leaving me sprawling at his feet. I thanked him pertly, making quick efforts to stand, but he merely pulled me up with another easy yank.

  My swimming costume was school-regulation chaste, a robust black fabric with a modest neckline. In terms of the amount it concealed, it was not so different from those suits worn by Victorian bathers, merely less flamboyant. All the same, I felt exposed before him, pale and scrawny. I looked down and realized that, despite its thickness, the material was doing a poor job of concealing my nipples, painfully erect with the cold. The whole experience was humiliating. It was as though an Olympian had stepped off his perch to offer a floundering mortal his divine assistance. I thought of the boy in the photographs with that sombre dark gaze. Could they really, I thought, be one and the same?

  ‘Why are you here?’

  His question was so unexpected that it threw me for a moment. There was an element of challenge in it, and suspicion.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, stalling for time. I retrieved my towel and wrapped it about me – an inadequate suit of armour.

  ‘My grandfather is a very private man.’ It sounded like an accusation.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘he did invite—’

  ‘People will try anything,’ he said, cutting me off. ‘Absolutely anything at all to get in touch with him. It’s ironic – the more he has tried to get away from people, the more eager they are to seek him out. You’re an art student, aren’t you?’

  I suddenly understood what he was accusing me of. ‘You think I’m some sort of … groupie,’ I said. And then I laughed – because it was so ridiculous.

  He went to say something, but this time I got in first. ‘You’re wrong,’ I told him. ‘It isn’t anything like that.’

  ‘What is it, then?’

  I gestured down at myself, at my sodden towel and goose-pimpling skin. ‘I’m not sure this is the time to talk about it.’ He did not have to know that I had no intention of discussing it with him. Anyway, I decided, if Stafford had not felt it necessary to explain everything, it probably wasn’t my place to do so.

  I looked up at him, and saw that he was not convinced.

  ‘One thing I can promise you,’ I said. ‘This is about something important, something very close to my heart. And, I think, your grandfather’s too.’ As I spoke I held his gaze, and felt triumphant when he was the first to look away.

  After he had gone I realized that I was trembling slightly, and not merely from the cold. I was appalled that I had managed to incite such dislike in him – and so quickly. I told myself not to take it personally. Yet no matter how much I tried to convince myself otherwise, it felt personal.

  ‘I salute you,’ said Stafford to me at breakfast. ‘I’ve only ever gone in in the heat of the day, when the water has had a chance to warm up. You are clearly made of sterner stuff.’

  We were eating at the table by the pool and it glimmered before us, its depths once more inviting, now that I was warm and dry. Marie had navigated her way expertly down the stone staircase with a laden tray, batting away my rather futile attempt at assistance, and unloading a cornucopia of delights: hot rolls, fresh figs, coffee, a luminous golden pat of butter. Stafford and I talked while Oliver sat gazing out to sea, apparently lost in thought – making no effort to join our conversation. Every so often Stafford would glance in his direction, though whether these were looks of concern or irritation, I could not tell. It was amazing: here was a man who was at a guess in his early thirties, be
having like a sullen teenager. A temperament more different from Stafford’s could not have been conceived – clear evidence, I decided, for the prevalence of nature over nurture.

  ‘Kate,’ said Stafford, leaning across to refill my coffee cup, ‘I had hoped that you and I might carry on our discussion after breakfast.’

  ‘Yes, please, I’d like that.’ So he did want to continue, I thought, in relief.

  ‘Good. I thought that we could sit in the studio, to avoid the heat. And I have an idea I’d like to put to you. I’ll explain when we’re there.’

  Oliver had turned to watch us now. It irritated him, I was sure, that his grandfather and I had something together from which he was excluded, and I could not help but feel a sort of childish triumph at this.

  The studio, rather like Stafford himself, was unexpectedly devoid of eccentricity and creative disarray. It was a cool white space, filled with light. The vast windows prevented any sense of sterility, however, for they let the outside in – the sea and sky felt immediate and present.

  I looked about me. ‘What a wonderful room.’

  Stafford smiled. ‘My grandson is very talented. It was one of the first projects he undertook after he’d qualified. It’s another signature of his, I think you could say, making the enclosed space the point, not that which encloses it – so that the structure is simply incidental, a frame. You’ll have to tell him you like it.’

  I nodded vaguely.

  Several large canvases were stacked against the far wall, but their board backs faced outwards so that no paint was visible. Stafford explained that these were works in progress, but that he didn’t like to have them turned around unless he specifically chose to look at them, ‘or they clamour at me, and I see all their mistakes – it makes me want to throw everything away and start again.’ Perhaps, I thought, a certain well-concealed eccentricity was present here after all. There were two chairs in the room – one was clearly the artist’s, with a contraption like a small easel fixed to an arm. The other chair faced it, as though in conversation.

  ‘I should explain my idea to you,’ said Stafford. ‘Feel free to say no, but I thought that you might be prepared to let me make a study of you, while we talk. I find I think and speak more freely while I’m working. It’s always been that way.’

  Thomas Stafford, internationally renowned artist, was asking me to sit for him. The fact that he felt the need to ask for my approval was almost laughable. I didn’t especially like the idea of it – I knew that I would no doubt disappoint as a sitter. But, more than anything, I was reassured. It seemed further proof that Stafford assumed I would be staying.

  ‘I’d be honoured,’ I said. ‘Though I should warn you that I doubt I’ll make a good subject. I’ve been told I don’t take a good photo because I fidget, and I never know what to do with my face – I can’t seem to hold an expression. I’m always happier to be on the other side of the lens, as it were.’

  ‘None of that matters,’ Stafford said. ‘If anything, I prefer it. A bit of movement translates well into a sketch – it helps to give the sense of strong, visible character. Alice was such a model – incapable of sitting still for any length of time. You can see it in the drawing that brought you here. It’s my favourite thing about that work: the sense that it’s an expression of a moment in time, that she is about to stand, to turn and jump into the water.’

  So I let myself relax into my chair as best as I was able, and Stafford picked up a stick of charcoal. I heard him describe long strokes on to the paper in front of him – once, twice, three times. And then he began to talk.

  ‘After the party I was terrified of losing her again. I was going back up to Oxford, you see. I gave her my address at Magdalen and she promised to write, but I’m not sure I believed her. I wasn’t sure she would welcome my friendship. Inside she might be the Alice that I remembered, but she was also a beauty: elegant, cultured and fiercely intelligent. She would have real men, men of experience, vying for her company, while I was still just a boy. How could I hope to compete with that?’

  9

  Oxford, October 1928

  Tom unfolds the letter with fingers made suddenly clumsy. He felt sure it was from her as soon as he saw the unfamiliar hand on the envelope. Green ink. Beautifully shaped, calligraphic lettering: a mark of that expensive Swiss education. But a subversive quality to the style, too: a certain flamboyance that is unmistakably hers alone.

  He had given up hope of hearing. Over a month has passed since he saw her, and nothing. Now, miraculously, here it is. Word from Alice.

  If he had expected to find a long letter, he is to be disappointed. A couple of lines, merely:

  Dearest T,

  Staying with Aunt Margaret in Oxfordshire. She has a car, and she’s going to get her man to teach me how to drive it. Apparently there’s nothing to it! Perhaps I shall come and visit? Still a few weeks left for picnics, I think …

  No date to look forward to, no confirmation that she will come. Yet this makes the possibility of it all the more thrilling.

  Three days later, Tom walks outside to find that something is happening in front of the building. There is an electric hum of excitement in the air, and a cluster of students stand in the street, intent upon some spectacle as yet invisible to him. He steps through the arched entrance and then he can see it. There, almost too large and modern to look quite real next to the antique building before it, is an enormous car, chrome body gleaming expensively in the autumn sunshine. In the front seat sits a woman from a Vogue illustration – a fantasy – emerald cloche pulled low above a pale face framed by the soft, dark suggestion of her hair. Alice has come to Oxford.

  ‘I thought it would be fun to look the part,’ she tells him, as they fly along the lanes that have led them ever deeper into the countryside outside the city. The hands that grip the leather steering wheel before her are clad in gloves of soft, close-fitting kid, and she wears a jacket of the same rich green as her hat. The same hat that, when they rounded the bend in the road from the college, she pulled off impatiently so that she could let the dark mop of her hair whip across her face. ‘It’s a bit much for picnicking, but it seemed worth it. A bit of pantomime.’

  Tom thinks of the surge of pride he felt, climbing in beside her before his watching peers – a feeling that had only a little to do with the spectacular car.

  It is unusually warm for October, though it feels odd to be picnicking on ground carpeted with dead and rotting leaves. They unpack the things they bought in a grocer’s shop en route. A rustic meal: bread, a lump of wax-sealed cheese, a couple of bottles of cheap red wine. ‘The lunch of a French peasant,’ Alice says delightedly. She has a smear of engine grease across her flushed cheek that Tom can’t quite bring himself to point out. ‘The best sort of meal,’ she declares. ‘Who in their right mind wouldn’t prefer this to one of those interminable dinners with six courses of tiny portions, all lukewarm from the fussing and stalling before they get to the table?’ Tom nods, although he hasn’t had much in the way of that sort of dinner, in all honesty. He tends to live on sandwiches in his rooms, punctuated by the odd supper in the college dining room, when he manages to get to it. This is the gulf between them – the one that she has always been so wonderfully ignorant of.

  They eat their lunch, and lie back on the rug – full, content, warmed by the wine, so that neither notices the air growing cooler or the shadows lengthening. They are both slightly to the wrong side of tipsy, and the time has come for the sort of confidences best made in this state.

  ‘Do you know,’ says Alice, ‘I always thought your sisters rather hated me.’

  ‘Oh no, not hated. I think they didn’t quite understand you. They didn’t see why you wanted to get all grubby on the beach like a boy while they played clean, dull games with their dolls.’

  ‘I never had much time for that sort of thing – to my mother’s despair. What are they like now, your sisters?’

  ‘Not quite so fond of dolls. My oldest sister
—’

  ‘Rosa?’

  ‘Yes, Rosa – she’s recently had her second child.’

  ‘Oh, how marvellous. I’m not surprised – she was always a caring type. I could see it in the way she looked after you. And …’

  ‘Caro?’

  ‘Yes. She was such a beauty, even then. Do you know, I think Ma would have exchanged us two, if she could.’

  Tom isn’t sure this is quite true. Yes, Alice’s mother did seem to feel the horror of having produced such an unfeminine child, but he doubted that Lady Eversley ever paid much attention to the Stafford children, except, perhaps, to disapprove of them as acquaintances for her own.

  ‘You know, Archie was fond of Rosa, I remember.’

  ‘Oh, I think she was fond of him.’ He feels slightly disloyal, even now, but the wine has loosened his tongue. ‘I think she was rather in love with him – as much as a fourteen-year-old could be. She’d draw pictures of them together in her sketchbook: their marriage, their children. I found it … she was terribly cross.’

  ‘Poor Rosa.’ But Alice’s tone has lost its levity. ‘Poor Archie.’

  Tom nods, thinking of the war. ‘It must have been awful for you. He was so young—’

  She turns to him. ‘Oh, you think I mean about him dying.’

  He looks at her in surprise. ‘Well – yes.’

  ‘I do mean that, but I was thinking of something else, too.’ She frowns. ‘I wish, every day, that he was still here. But it would have been hard for him if he’d lived, you know.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Tom asks, thinking of the affable golden person he had been so in awe of. Everything must have been easy for him. Archie Eversley had seemed to excel in anything he chose to do.

  Alice rolls on to a forearm. Her cheeks are rosy from the wine – two livid points of colour in her pale face – and her hair falls across her brow. He remembers her lying beside him in this way in the tree house, sharing secrets.