The Book of Lost and Found

by Lucy Foley

I am trying to remember how she put it exactly. ‘She looks young,’ she said, ‘but she isn’t as young as she looks. She was older than my brother when they married, by three or four years. The boy, Archie, was born only seven months after the wedding, and you have never seen such a huge, healthy child. Do you understand what I am telling you?’ I nodded, and she went on: ‘My parents chose to see it as a young couple’s rashness, ill-advised and shaming, but ultimately rectified by the marriage. I wonder now if they saw more than they admitted. You see, my brother only met her the month before they married. I know: I was there that evening to see him lose his head over her.’

  I can’t quite explain why, but suddenly much about Alice’s mother made sense; the way she had doted on Archie and neglected her daughter. The absolute fear she had of scandal of any sort. But it stunned me, too, that she – the apogee of decorum and seemliness – could have been involved in such deceit. Lady Margaret must have seen the expression on my face, because she laughed and said, ‘I can see that I have shocked you. Believe me, although there is no love lost between her and I, I do not say this simply to blacken her name. I have a horror of gossip for its own sake. I am telling you because it is worth bearing in mind what she is capable of.’

  Kate and Oliver went out on the boat that evening to take photographs of the shore. As soon as they returned for supper, I knew that some new thing had occurred. The silence between them across the table had a weight and texture to it that had not been there before. I was intrigued, but I also felt … how to describe it? Not envy, exactly, but some close cousin of it. For I understood then, as I had not before, that I would never again share that particular sort of silence with another person.

  I worried for them, too. I reminded myself, firmly, that there was nothing I could do about it. After all, it was exactly what I had secretly begun to hope for. But now that it seemed it might become a possibility, I was all too aware of everything that was at stake.

  The next morning, I decided to tell Kate about that last time I saw Alice in England. It was late summer, and I was working in a solicitor’s office. I had gained – to everyone’s surprise, including my own – a first-class degree from Oxford. I knew instantly that this success would work against me. If I had scraped a Third, I might have been left to my own devices. Instead, I now appeared to be destined for a life of intellectual pursuits.

  My father had got much worse, in those last few years before his death. He was still at the firm, but his hours had been greatly reduced: he wasn’t well enough to work full time. In truth, he wasn’t well enough to work at all, but they kept him on out of loyalty. For more than a decade it had been eating away at him, this disease of the mind, and most of the time he was unrecognizable from the man he had once been. There would have been no question of leaving my mother to cope with him alone, and the responsibility of helping her fell to me. My oldest sister Rosa now lived in Islington with her young family, and my other sister, Caro, had married in the summer and moved to Nova Scotia. And so I had returned to live in the house in Fulham.

  The job was in a solicitor’s office in Silk Street – Locke & Proudfoot – and my position was that of a glorified clerk. The work bored me, and the boredom made me stupid, so that I seemed to spend half my time correcting my own blunders. I’m sure that my employer, old Mr Proudfoot, wondered whether the first-class student he had been promised had swapped places with some moron changeling.

  The one saving grace was that the hours were good. If I managed to make few enough errors to be able to finish undoing them by six o’clock, I would be home in time to fit in some drawing before supper. That was what I was hoping for the day she came to find me. It was a golden evening, and I was walking home across that small triangle of earth they rather optimistically call the Green. Something about the figure on the bench made me stop in my tracks. I can’t explain what it was that drew my eye to her, exactly. Perhaps it was the running dog, returning to its master, that sped through the space between us. Or maybe it was the strange pull she exerted upon me. From that distance I could not have been sure it was her by sight – and yet I knew that it was.

  She had fallen asleep, slumped slightly to one side. I remember it so clearly, the way she looked when I stood over her, wondering whether or not to wake her. Her face was thin and drawn. She seemed an entirely different person from the Alice I had seen only a few months previously.

  26

  London, August 1930

  Alice stirs, as though the pressure of his gaze has woken her. She shivers, and blinks in confusion before she comes to an awareness of where she is. Her silver eyes are huge in her face and as she stares up at him she looks strange and fey, rather wild. Then recognition dawns, and she relaxes back into her seat.

  ‘Alice? Are you all right?’

  ‘Tom.’ She gives a tired smile. ‘I’d almost given up waiting. How embarrassing, to fall asleep.’

  ‘You look exhausted.’ He sits down beside her.

  ‘I haven’t felt like sleeping much.’

  ‘What are you doing here, Alice? Where …’ Tom is about to ask after the child, but something stops him. Looking at her, it is hard to believe that a mere few weeks ago she had been carrying a baby inside her. She is thinner than ever – she looks barely old enough to bear children. Her skin has a yellowish tint to it and her hair is lank, clinging to her skull. He sits down next to her and takes her hand. Her fingers are cold – no doubt from several hours of waiting in the cooling evening air.

  ‘You’re freezing. I think we should go inside.’ He tries to persuade Alice to come home with him, but she is adamant that she doesn’t want to cause any fuss. In the end, lost for inspiration, he ends up taking her to the nearest pub, where the atmosphere is thick with pipe smoke and stale beer, and the men stare at them curiously over their evening pints. Tom isn’t even sure that Alice, as a woman, is allowed to be in here. He hurries her to a table in the furthest corner, as far removed from the crowd at the bar as it is possible to be.

  She doesn’t seem to be aware of her surroundings, or of how incongruous she looks in her well-cut travelling clothes. She takes a tin of cigarettes from her bag and slides two out, offering him one. He reflects that he wasn’t even aware before that she smoked. How is it that he didn’t know? He accepts one, and she lights them with fingers that betray her agitation with a slight tremble.

  ‘I’ve left,’ she says.

  ‘Oh.’ He feels the quickening of excitement – and panic – inside him. What is it that she is telling him? What does she need of him? His head spins with the possibilities, and he speaks before he has time to think better of it: ‘And the baby?’

  Alice’s expression shutters. She gives the tiniest – almost imperceptible – shake of her head and looks down at the scarred surface of the table. She does not say anything, but she doesn’t need to: it is clear what this means. The child could not come too. Perhaps, in the end, she realized she was not up to the challenge of supporting both herself and the child. He understands, too late, that he should not have asked.

  Desperate to change the subject, he asks: ‘Why don’t you stay the night, here, with us?’

  ‘No.’ She rests her hand on his wrist. ‘I have a hotel. Goodness,’ she says, with unconvincing gaiety, ‘I do sound independent. I used to find the thought of hotels rather exciting, probably because we so rarely stayed in them. Unfortunately, it isn’t that sort of hotel. Nonetheless, it will do. And do you know something? It transpires that hotel rooms are expensive, even the ones with algae-green wallpaper and no soap. But I shan’t be there long.’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘Paris.’ She smiles and shrugs. ‘Where else?’

  Tom stiffens. He doesn’t ask, because he doesn’t want to know the answer, but she watches him curiously, sensing that there is a question. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s him, isn’t it? The Frenchman – you’re going to stay with him.’

  ‘Oh. No – I hadn’t even thought … Besides
, he doesn’t live in Paris, not any more. I want to go because when I think of anywhere I can imagine living, of starting a new life, I think of Paris. It’s been like that ever since I went there with Aunt M. as a teenager.’

  She tells him that there is a train, early in the morning, to take her to Southampton. Then she’ll get herself passage on the first ferry she can.

  ‘Can I visit you?’

  She glances at him and her expression is odd, even guilty. ‘Perhaps, one day.’

  ‘Or I could come with you.’ Yes, he thinks, and feels excitement quicken at the prospect. ‘I could get a job, or sell my paintings – the bad ones, the only ones people seem to actually like. There wouldn’t be much, but we wouldn’t need …’ He trails off. She is shaking her head, and her eyes have filled with tears.

  ‘I came to say goodbye, Tom. It has to be like this. Do you understand?’

  And he understands that he has lost her. The story that started all those years ago in Winnard Cove has finally come to an end.

  27

  It wasn’t the last time I saw her. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell Kate the rest. Some memories, I have discovered, are too precious – and too painful – to share.

  I told her something else. I told her about the postcard. I had gone to Ajaccio to retrieve it, the day Oliver and Kate went to the mountains, because that was where it had been left, in a deposit box at the bank there. I had been worried that to keep it in the house might prompt me, in a weaker moment, to act recklessly.

  Like a coward I had not shown it to Kate at once. I had kept it for a couple of days, a vain attempt to play for time. Because I knew that, as soon as she had seen it, everything would change. I would lose her.

  The postcard had come with terrible timing. Elodia was dying, then – and it was the worst part of the dying, when she was still fighting against it with all her might. Before she became resigned to it, though the latter is the worst of all, in its way.

  I didn’t believe it, when it came. My first thought was that it was a hoax. Alice was dead. She had been dead for nearly thirty years.

  28

  Paris, September 1945

  He remembers his way to the square easily, though he has only walked this way once before. There is the building with the small bistro on the first floor.

  From a distance, it looks much the same. The fire-engine-red paint, the scattering of ironwork tables and chairs upon the flagstones outside. And there are people, so many people – more, even, than there had been before. It is difficult at first, looking upon this scene, to imagine that these people have experienced war. The same war that has wrung him, torn him, spat him out. Yet, as he draws closer, he sees the chunks of plaster missing from one wall. He sees that the surface of the red paint is chipped and peeling away. His gaze roams the faces. He feels that at any moment he will see her. It seems impossible that she should not be here. This was how he imagined it every time, crouching beneath the hell overhead. Him, lifting her into his arms, climbing the steep, narrow stairs up to the small attic space. The white bed, the light falling across them. But she is not here. All these people, all these faces, yet not that one he seeks.

  He will find the patronne: he remembers her. She will be able to tell him something. It is possible that Alice no longer lives here, but she had loved that room. When he had seen her in it, with her meagre but precious possessions about her, he could not imagine her living anywhere else.

  Tom almost doesn’t recognize the woman at first. He remembers a strapping Belgesse, ruddy-cheeked, large-bosomed, in the prime of life. He sees, instead, an elderly woman, staggering under the weight of the tray she carries. Something has happened to her face, and her hair, formerly a reddish blonde, is a shock of bone white. Her movements between the tables are pinched and arthritic. Tom is fascinated and appalled, frozen for several moments where he stands watching her. What must a person have experienced to undergo such a change?

  It could be that his stillness in the midst of the movement and chatter draws her attention, or that she simply feels his gaze upon her. She turns and looks at him, trying to place him, sifting through memory. Then he sees her face change as she recognizes him.

  ‘I’m looking for Alice,’ he says. Perhaps his pronunciation is poor, maybe she doesn’t hear him properly, because she backs away from him, shaking her head. He follows her across the room. ‘Alice? Do you know where she is? I’ve come to see her.’

  The woman told me that Alice had been murdered. They’d taken a group, fifty men and women, into a clearing in the forest and shot them. They were hostages. There’d been an attack on a German soldier on one of the Metro stations, and that was how they did the sums: one German life was paid for in kind by fifty French. The prison had released the list of names in the papers, to warn off others as much as to notify relatives. The woman had paid out of her own pocket for a site in the cimetière, though she had nothing to bury there.

  Fifty lives. Was it selfish to consider hers more valuable than any of those other lives that had been lost? But to me it was infinitely precious. The irony was that the thought of her had kept me alive. That thought had kept me sane. I had believed in her, in the future we would make together, the way other men believe in God.

  I didn’t know what to do with myself, after the woman showed me the stone with the dates. And so I went home. I couldn’t paint: I think I may have had a breakdown, the quieter sort, the sort that goes largely unremarked. It took me a long time to remember where it was that I’d last been able to paint – where I had last been happy.

  It was then I thought of Corsica, the place we had discovered together … that time I had not told Kate about. I craved the wind, the sun and salt, the simplicity of the island. I still barely ate or slept, but, gradually, I began to do a little work.

  I met Elodia a month after I arrived. There was a daughter – three years old – a product of a wartime liaison. Her family had chosen to despise her, both for having had the relationship with an Italian and then, perhaps more importantly, for not being able to make him stay and marry her. They’d been thrown out, she and her daughter, and left to fend for themselves.

  About a week after I moved in she came to my house to ask if I wanted my laundry done, for a small fee. The child clung to her leg. I didn’t need anything washed, but I found some anyway. Something about her gave me the impression of survival against the odds, even before I knew the story.

  It became a twice-weekly thing. I was perfectly capable of doing my own washing, but I came to look forward to her visits. Eventually, she trusted me enough to explain her situation. In a way she reminded me of Alice: her courage, her tenacity.

  We married five months later. I know how it must look, how unforgivable a thing, that less than a year after I discovered the love of my life had been killed, I married another woman. But, you see, in a way it made perfect sense. With her gone, I would never marry for love, that much was certain. The only person for me in that way had been Alice. All the same, I was a young, healthy, whole man – at a time when so many had been maimed or killed. And I was so lonely. When I met this young woman, left all alone with her daughter, I wanted to help her.

  Elodia understood that what I was offering was friendship, companionship, support. All the things that should be part of a marriage: all except love. I think that suited her well though. You see, she had known love too, and it had let her down. We did grow to love one another in the way that friends do – though it was a love of a different species entirely to what I had felt, and would continue to feel, for Alice. Elodia and I lived together for more than thirty years in almost total harmony, but unpalatable as it may be, I never stopped mourning Alice and what we could have had.

  So when the card came, it seemed an impossible thing. I assumed initially that it might be a cruel hoax, from one who had somehow discovered our story.

  19 August 1979

  To my dearest Tom,

  Would you consent to a meeting of old friends? I go by
another name now, but I’m still the girl you once knew.

  She was dead. I had seen the very stone that marked that fact.

  But then I turned it over and saw the photograph on the other side of the postcard: Winnard Cove, Cornwall: watercolour. The shape of the bay and the wych elms exactly as I remembered, though Eversley Hall had been turned into a hotel, and a phalanx of beach umbrellas bristled the lip of the cliff. The writing was the same – or, almost. And she gave an address: not far from where she had been living before. It couldn’t be … yet, incredibly, it was. I knew that it was.

  29

  Corsica, August 1986

  My reaction, when Stafford told me about the postcard, surprised me. It was one of anger, of betrayal at the fact that he had kept from me something so vital. I had begun to assume from the way he spoke of her that Alice must be dead. But now, not only was there the strong possibility that she was still alive, there was also an address at which she might – just conceivably – be found.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? At the beginning?’

  ‘Because you didn’t know the full story,’ he said. ‘I needed to explain all of it to you so that you’d understand. So that you’d understand her, before you went looking.’

  Stafford said that before he’d got the postcard he’d been certain that Alice had died, decades earlier. That was war, he said, that was the sort of mess it made out of what you thought you knew, out of the life you had imagined yourself having. So the thing seemed, at first, like a message from a ghost.

  ‘Have you seen her since?’ Had he kept this from me too?

  ‘No. I never went.’

  ‘Why … because of Elodia?’

  ‘Yes. It would have been a terrible disloyalty.’

  Was that the whole picture? I think perhaps not. In fact, I am sure there had been fear, too. Fear that he might find Alice changed beyond recognition from the person he had loved: that it would be better to remember her as the young woman she had been. Fear that she might find him terribly changed, too – that she would find him wanting.