The Book of Lost and Found

by Lucy Foley

  I waited, braced for the sting – whatever it was to be. This time I would be ready to defend myself.

  ‘I wanted to say I’m sorry.’

  My surprise made me swallow my mouthful too quickly, and the sponge lodged horribly in my windpipe. I coughed, and barely managed to stop myself from spraying him with crumbs.

  ‘Why?’ I asked hoarsely, when I could trust myself to speak again. What I really meant was ‘Why now?’ He’d shown no sign of being troubled by any qualms only a few short hours before.

  ‘Well,’ he said, spreading his palms, ‘I realize that I haven’t been …’ he shrugged ‘… the most welcoming I could have been to you.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. I stared at him, still half wondering if it was a trick.

  But then – with a sudden flare of clarity – I understood. ‘Is this about my mother?’

  I knew immediately that I had found the answer, because I saw it there in his face: pity.

  Oliver nodded, shifted in his seat. ‘Grand-père told me, this morning,’ he said. ‘After I bumped into you.’

  I saw it now. He must have gone to Stafford to tell him about my ‘crime’, and Stafford, to exonerate me, had told him. He shouldn’t have, I thought – he had no cause to. I had no desire to be pitied, especially not by Oliver. In fact, now that I considered it, it had almost been a relief to have one person who didn’t know, who didn’t feel they had to treat me as if I might break with rough treatment.

  Oliver cleared his throat. ‘I read about it, when it happened. I couldn’t stop thinking about it – all those people …’

  I grimaced. I did not want to think about the newspapers, the photographs they had somehow been allowed to print. Sensing this might not be the right tack, Oliver said, ‘If I had known, I wouldn’t …’ He stopped. ‘I suppose I jumped to conclusions. I thought you were here to pester Grand-père for something. He’s explained to me that you’re here at his express request – that you’ve come here as a personal favour to him.’

  This last made me uncomfortable – because it wasn’t strictly true. Then again, if Stafford had decided to doctor the facts, I was happy not to contradict him.

  ‘He told me about your mother …’

  ‘Honestly,’ I said, firmly, ‘you don’t need to worry about it. It happened a while ago.’

  ‘A year,’ he said. ‘That’s not long, not when you’ve lost someone you love. Grand-mère died several years ago – and I haven’t stopped missing her.’

  He was staring at me intently, and suddenly I found that I could not hold his gaze. To my horror, I felt my eyes smart ominously. Not now, I told myself, not in front of this stranger, who until moments earlier had been behaving like an enemy. I had preferred him when he was hostile – it was far easier to deal with. I stared down at my plate, forcing the tears into retreat.

  That evening and at breakfast the next morning Oliver’s new civility continued – which I suppose should have come as no surprise. And yet, given how he had been before, I was thrown by a feeling of unreality. He acted towards me like a polite stranger – a waiter, or a train conductor. I was quite relieved when Stafford asked if I was ready to head to the studio with him.

  I was rising to my feet to follow him when Oliver stopped me.

  ‘Kate,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I wanted to ask you something. I’d planned to go to Bonifacio this evening – I always try to visit while I’m here. I wondered if you felt like coming with me.’ Again he spoke with that curious new tone – the remote, formal politeness.

  ‘Thank you … but no.’ The prospect of spending an evening with Oliver acting as though I were an invalid was even worse than spending it with him at his most hostile. I was certain that he was not motivated by a genuine desire for my company. ‘I mean,’ I said, feeling the need to explain, ‘it’s kind of you to offer, but I don’t want you to feel that you have to … babysit me. I’m quite happy to stay here with your grandfather.’

  I wondered, in fact, whether this too had been orchestrated by Stafford. The idea that Oliver might be asking me under sufferance of his grandfather’s wishes made it even less appealing.

  ‘All right,’ Oliver said, ‘but that’s not why I was suggesting it. I’d like to go, and I know that Grand-père will be too tired to come: he never goes out in the evenings now. And – well, if I can avoid it, I’d prefer not to go by myself.’

  I was not convinced. ‘Did your grandfather suggest it?’

  Oliver looked slightly insulted. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It was my idea.’ His annoyance was something of a relief, far more natural than the impeccable courtesy.

  ‘Oh.’ I sought for an excuse. ‘Surely it would be rude, though, to leave him here?’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll mind.’ No, I thought, he undoubtedly wouldn’t. In fact, I suspected that Stafford would be rather pleased if Oliver and I reached an accord.

  ‘Look,’ Oliver said, ‘I understand why you wouldn’t want to, but I will try to be … better company from now on, I promise.’

  I looked at him, and saw that he meant it. This was his peace offering – and it would be churlish not to accept.

  ‘Fine,’ I found myself saying, before I could think further about it. Immediately I regretted it, but told myself that it was only one evening. Hopefully, once he was satisfied that he’d done his duty, he would leave me alone.

  ‘Oliver offered to show me Bonifacio,’ I told Stafford, as I took my seat in the studio. ‘This evening.’

  My suspicion that the invitation was the artist’s doing was laid to rest by his delighted surprise.

  ‘Excellent!’ he said, beaming at me. ‘It is an incredible place – and you could not wish for a better guide.’ He seemed especially pleased by the idea, and I hoped he wouldn’t set too much store by it. I could not imagine Oliver and I becoming the best of friends. In fact I remained on my guard, awaiting a return to hostility.

  ‘Kate,’ he said, ‘I know that he feels badly for not having been … as friendly as he might have been to you. In his defence, Oliver has had a bad time of it recently – as I think I mentioned. He has not quite been himself.’

  Presently, to my relief, we moved on to the subject of Alice.

  ‘After Easter, I went back up to Oxford,’ Stafford said, ‘and though I hoped she might, Alice did not come to visit again. She told me that she wasn’t able to, because she no longer had anywhere to stay in Oxfordshire. Lady M. had left the country for her riad in Marrakech. She used to go there to write, apparently.’

  ‘She was an author?’

  ‘Of sorts. She wrote … a certain kind of book … of the more risqué variety. It was a hobby rather than a vocation, I think you might say. I can’t imagine it endeared her to Lady Hexford – if, indeed, she knew of it. She wrote under a nom de plume: Scheherazade. They aren’t badly written, you know – I believe they are now considered classics of their kind, though they are somewhat explicit. Lady Margaret did not do things by halves.

  ‘It was probably a good thing that I didn’t see Alice, because I don’t think I would have been able to concentrate on my studies if I’d been anticipating her appearance at any moment. And it was exam season.’ Stafford smiled. ‘Though I don’t want to give you the impression that I was a good student. I was too intent on trying to put Lady Margaret’s advice into practice: experimenting with different techniques, pushing myself to be more radical in my approach. My room was littered with half-finished canvases, not books.’

  ‘Did you see Alice once you got back to London?’

  Stafford nodded. ‘That summer was the happiest of my youth … perhaps of my life. I have spent many wonderful summers here, but there is nothing to equal the perfection of an English summer, when the weather it at its best, and when one is young and in love. Because I was in love, you see, even if I wasn’t quite aware of it then.

  ‘Alice and I were invited to a number of weekend parties in the countryside, at the homes of friends
, or almost-friends. I felt something of an interloper, knowing the only reason I’d been invited was my perceived association with Alice.

  ‘Alice was always the first to change into her tennis outfit, to pull on her boots to go for a walk in the grounds. She’d been the same way as a child; forever restless, forever active, impatient to get on the tennis court, attempt a round of golf or croquet …

  ‘She looked delicate, but she was a gifted sportswoman. She couldn’t compete with someone like Diana Ruston, who had arms like great haunches of ham and could hit a tennis ball as hard as any man, but Alice was so determined, even fierce at times. Not exactly competitive, at least not in any unpleasant way, but she so enjoyed the game – any game – that she threw herself into it with an incredible vigour. It was an energy that was … intoxicating.’

  14

  Sussex, September 1929

  It is the hottest day of the year so far – even hotter than the couple of weeks that have preceded it, which have left the ground cracked and arid, the grass withered, the leaves of the plants curling in desperate thirst. People are beginning to complain: September should not be like this. And yet it is, in a way, rather glorious.

  Alice is enjoying it. She bathes in it – stretching out her long pale limbs in almost feline delight, letting the sun beat down upon the delicate skin of her face as she turns the pages of her book. There is already a pinkish stripe across the bridge of her nose, but Tom would never suggest that she move into the shade, for she would only laugh at him. He knows, too, that like many fragile-seeming things, Alice is far stronger than she appears. And except for that stripe, her skin retains the same pallor as the interior of an eggshell, while most of the guests – himself included – have turned ruddy and brown.

  They have been at the house for a couple of days now. The building is a spectacular if elderly Palladian affair. It reminds Tom of one of those grand old ladies seen at certain London parties. The noble lines of the façade are drooping slightly with age – a picturesque decadence – and yet the underlying structure stands firm, throwing an important shadow before it, its grandeur less about aesthetics than the simple fact of its impressive longevity.

  It would be wrong, however, to assume that the structure of the household within is crumbling along with the stones and mortar of the exterior. The boundaries that exist between above and below stairs are as rigidly defined as ever. Tom has stayed in few houses of this sort, and is bemused by the extreme deference of the staff, and unsettled, when he returns to his room, by the evidence that someone has been there in the interim. He never realized that pyjamas could be quite so impeccably folded. It is as though his every whim is anticipated, and that it is always somebody’s absolute pleasure to indulge it.

  Tom doesn’t know his host and hostess well, and is fairly sure that he has only been invited because of his connection to Alice. He is perfectly prepared to accept this, and has had a pleasant time of it. There is a colourful array of guests in the party. The writer with the girl’s name, small and fair and minutely observing everything about him. A young photographer too, increasingly popular among the female Bright Young Things because of his talent when it comes to retouching. He is caustic in his disparagement of painting. Tom decides this is probably because he couldn’t draw if his life depended upon it. He tells himself it isn’t worth his while to engage with the fellow, yet Alice has other ideas.

  ‘Surely,’ she says, ‘now that photography can be used to show us things as they are, painting is liberated.’

  ‘I don’t quite take your meaning.’

  ‘Well, these days painting can be used to the best, the most noble ends, as interpretations of reality, not direct reflections of it.’

  The young man scowls but seems, for once, lost for words.

  Roddy is here, too. When he catches sight of Alice and Tom sitting together he raises his eyebrows and mouths something excitedly. Tom decides it is safest to pretend he hasn’t noticed, but when he goes outside to take some fresh air Roddy follows him on to the steps.

  ‘So,’ he says, hunkering down next to Tom and lighting a cigarette, ‘you and the Honourable Miss Eversley, is it?’

  ‘I don’t know—’

  ‘I’m happy for you,’ says Roddy. ‘No need to say more. Though, I hope you don’t mind my saying this’ – he peers at Tom – ‘wouldn’t have seen it coming, personally.’

  ‘Why?’ Tom asks, despite himself.

  ‘Thought she’d be the sort to go for an older fellow.’ He draws on his cigarette. ‘Have you met the stepfather yet?’

  ‘Hexford? No.’

  ‘An interesting fellow, as far as I can tell. Gave a thunderingly boring talk at the Union, got ever so exercised about nationalization of industry, the Jews, degenerate art – that sort of thing. Jolly excitable, for such a serious-looking chap.’

  ‘What about the stepbrother? Do you know him?’

  ‘Matthew? Oh yes. Knew him at Harrow. He was my head of house.’ Roddy, for once, seems subdued, and disinclined to say more.

  *

  The next morning there is a hunt – following the hosts’ outlandish idea to hold a summer fixture – and a party made up of most of the guests will depart at mid-morning to meet up with the rest. Tom, never having learned to ride, has declined. Alice, too, though Tom knows that she is an excellent horsewoman.

  ‘Don’t stay on my account,’ he says – thinking that he could happily spend his day in solitude, sketching the house and grounds, perhaps taking a cooling dip in the lake he has spied from his bedroom window.

  ‘The thing is,’ says Alice, ‘I don’t see why something has to die for the sake of sport. I get as much pleasure from un-bloodthirsty games. No one has to die in tennis.’ She pauses, thoughtfully. ‘Though it looked like it might go that way for poor old Roddy in that third set yesterday afternoon. It can’t be healthy for anyone to turn that colour.’

  The others depart, leaving behind Tom, Alice and the hostess’s mother, who claims a sun-induced headache and elects to spend the morning lying in a darkened room with a cold compress, moaning softly to herself. Tom can’t help suspecting that her condition may owe more to the great quantities of champagne she was seen to enjoy the night before.

  Alice and Tom take themselves off into the day – he with a sketchbook, she armed with a novel. ‘Hemingway,’ she tells him. ‘Something in the way he writes reminds me of the way you paint. The simplicity, the truthfulness of it.’

  They make for the lake and throw themselves down in the blue shade of the trees that fringe the water. The spot is absurdly idyllic. At close range, though, the water looks less appealing than it did from a distance: the shallow banks fringed with dried bulrushes, and the surface an opaque, greyish green, disturbed by occasional trails of bubbles rising up from whatever lives within. Dust motes hang in the sunlit air.

  Tom begins by sketching the pair of willow trees that hang over the surface of the water, their foremost branches plumbing the depths. He likes the languorous lines of their boughs, the rough and knotty texture of their trunks. They look like two preening women, he thinks, long hair trailing into their reflections.

  When he has made his study of them, Tom turns his attentions upon Alice. She is a poor model, if one is looking for stillness in a subject. She seems to find it impossible to sit in one position for more than a few minutes, but in the end it doesn’t seem to matter. The movement is there in the drawing itself, in the quick lines of his pen. This, he realizes in excitement, is something new.

  After five minutes or so of feverish work he sits back and surveys the sketch. He knows without doubt that it is the best thing he has ever produced. He puts pen to paper again to sketch a suggestion of the water in the background, the picnic basket and rug.

  ‘Have you nearly finished?’ Alice asks, craning forward.

  He laughs. ‘I’d have finished by now if you’d stop fidgeting.’

  ‘I’ll try harder, I promise.’ Another minute passes, and then Alice tu
rns to look at the water and sighs. ‘I can’t do it any longer, I’m afraid. It’s too hot to stay in one place.’

  ‘All right – I’ve almost got it now anyway.’

  ‘Good. Then I think we should go swimming.’

  ‘What, in there? No thank you. Look at that water – it’s a swamp.’

  ‘Oh, come on … where has your sense of adventure gone? The Tom I know doesn’t baulk at a few weeds. It’ll be refreshing.’

  Alice stands up and, in one fluid motion, pulls her dress over her head. Tom tries desperately not to stare at the pale body revealed beneath, clad in an oyster-silk shift. She enters the water in a shallow dive, her head surfacing on the opposite side, dark and slick as an otter’s.

  ‘Come on! It’s gorgeous, I promise.’

  Tom has never been much good at refusing her in anything. It takes only a moment to shrug off his own clothes and plunge into the pool, far less gracefully. He surfaces, coughs pond-water and tastes the metallic savour of it in his mouth. He feels the spongy, silty bottom give beneath his feet, the slick tendrils of the weeds brushing and curling about his ankles.

  Alice swims towards him in an easy crawl. ‘See? Not that bad.’

  She moves to float on her back and Tom sees the flash of her bare torso through the now translucent fabric of her shift, the surprisingly full breast with the dark shadow, the mere suggestion, of her nipple.

  He seeks to distract himself. He swims beneath the fronds of the willow, letting them trail over the bare skin of his back, while Alice makes her way to the centre, diving beneath again and surfacing, tossing the water from her head in a graceful arc.

  When they have had enough, they clamber up on to the bank to dry in the sun. Alice is unselfconscious about her near nakedness. Tom strives to keep his eyes from the shadowy impressions of her naked body visible through the slip, and feels himself burn with the effort. If he could have one sign from her, he thinks … if there wasn’t such a weight of history and friendship between them.

  ‘Alice,’ he says, and his voice is low, unfamiliar, not quite his own. He curls his body over hers. He looks down at her upturned face, at the dark eyelashes parted with the weight of the water upon them and those extraordinary eyes, reflecting the sky. And then, as he is making up his mind to do something, common sense be damned, she pushes herself up on to her forearms, rolls out from underneath him and sits.