The Book of Lost and Found

by Lucy Foley

  It takes Tom a good fifteen minutes to walk the length of the drive to the front door. The building stares down upon him, impassive yet watchful, like some resting beast. The door creaks open before he has even reached the first step, and another butler emerges: older than Simpson with a shock of white hair, a more pronounced sag to the shoulders.

  It is the same story, give or take a few words. Lady Alice is unwell, and not receiving visitors. In what way is she unwell? The butler looks at Tom as if he has committed an act of gross indecency, and informs him that he ‘is not at liberty to say, sir’.

  ‘I’m a friend,’ Tom says, reasonably, ‘and I’m concerned for her …’

  ‘Nevertheless, sir …’ the man begins closing the door, ‘nevertheless, I’m afraid that I must ask you to leave.’

  ‘My name is Thomas Stafford’ – his voice is almost a shout now, despite his efforts to stay calm – ‘will you at least let her know that I called?’

  The butler makes a quick motion of his head that could be a shake or nod – impossible to say. Then the door closes, surprisingly quietly for something so large, with a tiny click. Tom stands there, his whole being taut with frustration. In the emerald silence of the grounds, the pounding of his blood in his ears is deafeningly loud. He lingers for a minute or so, considering his options.

  As stealthily as possible, Tom makes his way round the side of the house, searching for another entrance. At the back of the building he comes upon a low annexe, which a clamour of metal and belch of savoury steam reveal to be the kitchens. Almost without thinking, he makes for the door. As he reaches it, it swings open and a figure emerges.

  ‘Alice?’

  She hurries towards him, pulling her coat about her. It is a man’s trench coat, and her bare knees beneath its hem appear pale and naked in the cold glare of the day. She looks far from ill, Tom thinks. And yet there is a change in her appearance, though it is difficult to determine exactly what. She seems … softer. There is an unusual rosiness to her cheeks, too – not, Tom decides, the unhealthy flush of the invalid.

  ‘Let’s walk, shall we?’ She takes his arm and he feels her warm against his side.

  ‘Look, Alice,’ he says, trying to remind himself that he is angry with her, ‘what’s the game? I haven’t heard from you for months. We were worried about you.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Your aunt and I.’

  ‘I’ll explain everything – once we’re properly alone.’ She leads the way through a gate into the walled kitchen gardens, and they make for a stone love seat at the far end. ‘We can’t be seen from the house in here,’ she says, ‘though it may already be too late for that. You made quite a racket, you know.’

  ‘Are you surprised? They said you were ill, but wouldn’t say what was wrong or how bad. It was as if you’d been locked away.’

  There is sunlight now, though a weak and trembling sort. The stone is cold beneath them, and the dew-wet grass about them exhales a shimmering mist of moisture into the air. Tom looks at Alice, her pink knees, her mussed hair, and forgives her everything: the long silence, the worry she has caused him. Sitting here beside her, in this garden of enchantment, with spring suddenly upon them, it all seems to make sense. Then Alice speaks, in a voice unfamiliar to him.

  ‘The thing is,’ she says, quietly and slowly, choosing the words carefully, ‘the thing is, I’ve been rather a fool.’ She looks down at her hands, as though she might read her next lines there.

  He waits for her to continue. He has never seen Alice like this. In this moment they are so silent and still that a magpie struts its way past their feet, unperturbed by their presence.

  Alice twists her fingers together. A slow flush creeps up the side of her face, and she refuses to look up and meet his gaze. Finally she says: ‘I don’t think there’s a way of dressing this up. Oh, Tom. The thing is, you see, I’m going to have a baby.’

  He cannot speak.

  Alice gives a strange, humourless laugh. It is a shocking sound, in the silence of the garden. The magpie screeches and takes flight.

  ‘Is it … was it …?’ Instantly, Tom is making calculations, weighing options. He’ll go into the law after all. He’ll make a home for them, support Alice and the child.

  But when he looks back up at her, ready to say all of this, he sees that she is shaking her head.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he says.

  She still won’t look at him. ‘It wasn’t you, Tom. When I was in Venice …’ She stops when she sees the look on his face. He cannot hear any more. He thinks of the things he could say now, that would leave him anatomized before her.

  ‘It was my maid, in London,’ Alice tells him. ‘She saw all the signs, even before I did. She must have reported it back to Mother.’

  ‘What are you going to do? You can’t want to stay here like this.’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Then why …’

  ‘I’m going to play along with her game, Tom. She wants me here, hiding myself away.’ She gestures down at herself, and Tom sees now that the curve of her belly is visible beneath the loose folds of the coat. ‘I’m in no fit state to do anything at the moment. This is the best place for me … until I can work out what to do.’

  ‘You could come and live with me.’

  ‘No, Tom.’

  ‘But I could look after you both.’

  She shakes her head again.

  ‘You aren’t going to him, surely?’

  ‘To whom?’ She looks at him in confusion, and then, understanding: ‘Oh. No. No, of course not. I’ll do this on my own.’

  ‘Where will you go? How will you live?’

  ‘We’ll manage.’ Then she smiles, almost like the Alice of old. ‘Do you know, I wonder whether that sense I had of needing to do something meaningful, to make something of my life … well, I wonder if it was this all along.’

  He tries one last time. ‘Alice, please let me help you. You can’t stay here. Come with your aunt and I. She’s waiting in the car at the gate.’

  Alice reaches up with her free hand and touches the side of his cheek lightly. He closes his eyes. ‘You’re so very wonderful, which is why I would never think of coming with you. I will not be your responsibility.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You should leave, Tom.’ She says it gently, but this only makes her words all the more terrible.

  ‘When will I see you?’

  She leans over and kisses him on the cheek, and he breathes the familiar scent of her skin. ‘Not for a while, I think.’

  *

  Returning the way he came, towards the waiting car just visible beyond the gates – Tom turns, once. Alice has disappeared inside. The house stares blindly as before, but then he catches a flutter of movement in one of the upstairs windows. He thinks he glimpses a white face, gazing down upon him. Then a flash – like the scales of a fish turning over in the sunlight – of pale blonde hair.

  Back in his room in Oxford, Tom lets his bag fall to the floor. He can feel a great pressure building inside him: pressing itself against his ribcage. A feeling that is more akin to grief than to rage – but easily as powerful and destructive. He looks about him wildly. In the corner of the room he sees the wooden chest, the one in which he keeps all of his painting supplies. As though driven by some influence beyond thought, he strides over to it and unlocks it, begins pulling it all out: paint, brushes, putties and pencils, letting them scatter across the floorboards. A couple of the tins of oils burst their lids and begin to shed their bright contents. Tom doesn’t notice – his attention is solely on the task at hand. He pays no heed when he snags the skin of his thumb on a scalpel and the blood begins to flow freely. The sharp pain – so much more manageable than the pain inside – merely aids his single-minded focus. He does not pause until the chest is empty.

  The studies of Alice are the only pieces that he has allowed to face outwards – the only works of which he has, up until this point, felt truly pro
ud. This makes them easy to find in the small space, though they are many. Tom takes them up, every one. Into the chest they go, all of them. He forces those that will not fit properly, hearing as he does the crack of wood and the unmistakable sound of ripping canvas. The sound is oddly gratifying. His eyes burn – not with tears, but with the terrible, aching absence of them.

  He shuts the chest, wrenching the lid down, and forcing the clasps into place. He takes the key and locks it. Only now does he reach for the whisky kept in his cupboard. He rarely drinks the stuff and the bottle is three-quarters full. It should be enough, he hopes, to take away some of the pain.

  In the shifting, queasy darkness, Tom wakes from his stupor, and sways across the floor to the chest, lit by the cold, weak light from the quad. He opens it quickly, as though something might escape, and removes the drawing: the one of Alice by the lake. He knows the size and shape of it without looking. He is unable, he realizes, to bear the thought of it shut away in the dark.

  Then he rams the lid down, hard.

  23

  I see now how naïve I was. Before that, I believed that if you willed something to happen with all your being, it could be so. But I had lost Alice, I knew that I had – and there was nothing I could do about it. It was a hard lesson to learn, that one.

  Describing it to Kate brought everything back so violently that I could almost feel again the hurt and rage that had carried me up to Oxford and through the weeks that followed. With hindsight, I can see that what I thought of as righteous fury on her behalf was my own unsightly jealousy.

  ‘The baby,’ Kate asked me, ‘was it my mother?’

  I told her that I was as certain as I could be that it was. She went very quiet at this, but I knew that more questions were taking shape – questions that I knew I couldn’t answer to her satisfaction. I admit that I feigned a greater tiredness than I felt in order to escape from these, to buy myself time. Because I simply didn’t have the answer to why Alice had chosen to abandon her baby.

  24

  Corsica, August 1986

  Stafford retreated into the cool of the house for the rest of the day. I spent the afternoon lying by the pool, while the shade moved from where it merely grazed my toes to envelop me completely.

  Stafford had told me that he was as sure as he could be that the baby was Mum. So, it seemed, my mother had been the Frenchman’s daughter.

  It was now that I put my secret wish to rest. Since Stafford had first told me of his love for Alice I had harboured some hope that he might, in fact, be my grandfather. I had even – I blushed to think it then – begun to tentatively wonder if my interest in art might after all be something inherent … in my genes. I had come to like Stafford so much that I had longed for this to be the thing that strengthened the bond between us so it could not be broken. I had only allowed myself to explore these thoughts in small, furtive bursts, telling myself not to allow the hope to grow too great, as the disappointment would be all the more bitter if it were crushed. In this I had failed.

  As for Alice, she had been twenty-two years old, alone and afraid, in a less forgiving era. Was it enough to exonerate her, for giving Mum away? The rational part of me knew that it probably was. But why send the letter, so many years later? Why that desperate, lonely attempt to get back in touch? Could I forgive her that? I wasn’t sure.

  When Oliver came down to swim lengths I feigned sleep, but it felt as though the top layer of my skin had been removed so that I was aware of his every disturbance of the air between us. I did not want to talk to him. I was oddly certain that if I did I would not be able to stop myself from telling him what I had learned.

  I heard him clamber from the pool and pad over to the other chair, where he had left his things.

  ‘Kate?’

  I was forced to open my eyes and look up at him.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, cautiously. ‘I’m fine.’

  He reached for his towel and began to dry himself. I tried not to look as he did it, at the expanses of taut skin that were revealed by his movements.

  ‘Gerard and I have spent the morning working on the boat, making sure she’s watertight. I was thinking of how – when we were in Bonifacio – you mentioned going out in her …’

  I nodded, flushing to recall the embarrassment I had felt. It seemed a curiously long time ago, now.

  ‘Perhaps we could take her out later. Would you like to? You could bring your camera, if you wanted.’

  ‘OK then – yes.’

  ‘I don’t think we can go as far as the caves – I’m not sure she’s ready for such a long journey – but we could take her along the coast here. It’s flat out there – it’ll be the perfect evening for it.’

  So, before supper, we went out in the boat. I did bring my Nikon, and though I’d had misgivings about its safety I was glad that I had. At this time of day the sand of the coves and the rocks that ringed them appeared aflame: a fire that had miraculously found its way across the surface of the water to burn there too.

  There was a kind of alchemy to photography back then that has been lost to us in the digital age. Now, we can view a photo on a screen as soon as it has been taken. Then, we were attempting to collect some fragment of what we saw with no guarantee that we would bring back anything of worth. It was akin to a child dangling a fishing net in a rock pool, watching as the life forms seem to swim their way into captivity, only to lift it out and discover that just seaweed remains.

  Oliver had brought a tripod with him, and he helped me to fix the Nikon to it. My fingers trembled, ever so slightly, when his hands brushed mine. Then he told me to crouch low in the boat, too, to steady myself.

  ‘The first time I tried to take photographs from the boat they came out like abstracts,’ he said, ‘blurred shapes and colours – quite beautiful in a way, but not what I had been hoping to achieve.’

  I got myself into position, crouching down, thankful that the water was millpond-still. I did not want to risk these photos being ruined. I wanted to get it all exactly as it was. In fact, I felt again that frustration that I could not in some way capture everything else: the marine scent that emanated from the old boat’s interior, the warm fingers of the evening breeze. And there was that hush – unlike anything I could ever experience in London – broken only by the call of swifts catching insects near the shore, where they soared and plunged in extraordinary patterns.

  ‘I can tell you’re a good photographer,’ Oliver said.

  ‘Oh? How did you come to that conclusion?’

  ‘Because of the way you look at things,’ he said. ‘You’re watchful …’

  I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that – it reminded me, uncomfortably, of how he had caught me looking at the photos. ‘Can that be a good thing?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, intently. ‘It’s not simply good – it’s essential for an artist. I see it in Grand-père too. It has to do with the way you look at everything. An intensity.’

  ‘You must have that too,’ I told him, ‘to be an architect.’

  ‘No. It’s much more prosaic, a matter of mathematics rather than art.’

  He was being modest, of course. ‘But you take photographs too,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, and I enjoy it. But I have never been able to take any I am truly proud of. Mine are just a record of what’s in front of me. To make the viewer see something beyond the image – that’s a special skill. As different as one of Grand-père’s works from a paint-by-numbers. I try – but I won’t ever be a great photographer, it’s just not there.’ He paused. ‘It’s important to know your limitations. When I was young I thought I could paint, even decided I wanted to be an artist, like Grand-père. It was quite a long and painful process to discover I would never be good enough.’

  He said it without any discernible trace of bitterness, though I was sure that the reckoning would have come as a blow at the time.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it was a short and painful process to
discover I couldn’t dance. Thank God I found out I could at least do something useful with a camera.’

  He smiled at this, and I felt rather pleased – his smiles were a rare commodity.

  ‘I need to stop talking to you and let you concentrate,’ he said then. ‘You’ll lose the light otherwise.’

  I realized with alarm that he was right, that the band of brilliant light was slipping down the cliffs, soon to be lost. I put my eye to the viewfinder and took several shots – more than were strictly necessary, just to be sure.

  Suddenly a rogue gust of wind whipped my hair across my face, blinding me. Before I could disentangle my hands to sweep it away, Oliver had reached out a hand and done it for me. I turned back to thank him and found him gazing at me with the strangest expression, one that caused the words to stick in my throat. We were trapped by that look, like two animals. It frightened me, the possibility in it, even as excitement quickened in my stomach.

  But then Oliver spoke. ‘It looks like we’re starting to lose the light,’ he said, his voice slightly louder than it needed to be. He moved away from me, heading towards the engine – right at the back of the boat. ‘We should make for the shore.’

  The moment had disintegrated – almost as though it had never existed.

  Oliver started the engine. As we sped across the darkening waters, I tried to tell myself that we had avoided something terrible – something that could not have been allowed to happen. He had done the right thing, for both of us.

  25

  Even all those years later, I couldn’t help wondering how things might have turned out if I had acted differently, more decisively. I found myself recollecting what had happened when I told Lady Margaret what Alice asked me to say: that she was all right, that she had a plan, and that for the time being we must not intervene. She disclosed something then that showed Alice’s mother to me in a rather different light.