The Book of Lost and Found

by Lucy Foley

  ‘So,’ Oliver said, when he had gone, ‘New York.’

  ‘Yes.’ I felt my stomach twist with a sudden rush of apprehension.

  ‘Have you been before?’

  ‘Once,’ I said. ‘With Mum – though I can barely remember it. I was only a kid. Have you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Only once.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, vaguely, ‘quite recently. A couple of years ago.’

  Immediately, I understood what this meant. He had been there with her. Perhaps the alcohol was to blame for my tactlessness, but suddenly, inevitably, I had to ask:

  ‘Tell me about your wife. About Isobel.’ Speaking her name felt like uttering an incantation – one that could wreak untold results.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, warily. ‘You don’t want to hear any of that.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ I told him. ‘I want to know.’ Most of me didn’t, most of me cringed from it. And, judging by his expression, I was certain that he didn’t want to talk about her. Yet it seemed important now that I should hear it all.

  Our food arrived then, and Oliver looked relieved. I wondered if he hoped it might distract me from the train of our conversation, but when the waiter had disappeared once more I waited for him to continue.

  He took a long sip of his wine. ‘She was one of the other students on my course. She was extremely talented, full of ideas – we all thought she would be the star graduate. I was mesmerized by her,’ he said, ‘… at least to begin with.’

  I tried not to hate her.

  Isobel was manic depressive. Oliver didn’t find out until they had moved in together after a few months, and he discovered her lithium hidden in an aspirin box.

  ‘Before I lived with her, I think I only saw the “mania” – although she didn’t seem manic, exactly, merely … alive, spontaneous. It was exciting. I’d never met anyone like her. I didn’t see the bad times – though I did think it odd that sometimes she wouldn’t surface for days.’

  I thought of a student on my course whom I’d learned had the same condition. Because I hadn’t known him well I too had only been aware of one side of things – the city-wide treasure hunts he organized, the all-night parties he held in disused warehouses. How could you not become infatuated by someone who seemed to radiate such vitality? Half the student body had been a little in love with him. Though there were also weeks when he wouldn’t appear at a single class, and rumours of a failed suicide attempt.

  Oliver took another long sip of wine, nearly draining the glass. Immediately the waiter hurried to top it up. ‘Then her work started to suffer. She had all these ideas, all this imagination, but she couldn’t channel it into her work. Architecture is creative, but it is also extremely practical, and she couldn’t marry the two. She stopped taking her lithium because she thought it was stifling her. She became jealous – of my work, and of me, in general – who I was seeing, why I wasn’t spending more time with her. I felt guilty when I wasn’t with her too, because I knew she was fragile.’ He paused. ‘I thought – I thought that I would be able to help her, to make her better … I thought that loving her would be enough.’ He stopped.

  ‘It wasn’t?’ I ventured.

  ‘No. There was one evening when I got home and I found her …’ He swallowed. ‘Anyway, they said it would never have been enough to kill her.’

  With a shock I realized what he meant. Immediately, I remembered the picture he had painted, of a small boy discovering his lifeless mother.

  ‘I started drinking too much,’ he went on, ‘in that last year. I wasn’t sober often, in fact. I hoped it would make me care less – and it did, for a while. Ultimately, though, it made me hate myself more, for being so weak, for coping in the same way my mother had done.’

  ‘Did you leave her?’

  ‘No. In the end she left me. She’d been sleeping with a friend of her parents’. It caused quite a scandal when it all came out – he’s a politician, and much older than her. I learned about it the same way everyone else did, in a French tabloid.’ He plunged on, as if afraid of stopping. ‘I got drunk. I drank so much that, looking back, I was lucky to wake up in the morning. The next day I got on a train and turned up in Corsica without any warning. Grand-père was wonderful about it.’

  There was a long pause. Then I steeled myself to ask it: ‘Are you still in love with her?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. I wonder now if I ever was – though I thought I loved her, in the beginning.’ He sighed. ‘In a way, when I found out that she’d been cheating … It sounds terrible, but I was relieved more than anything. She’d made the break that I’d been too scared to, because I’d been so worried about how it might affect her. She’s getting married again, I heard.’

  ‘To him – the politician?’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps he’ll be better for her than I was – maybe she needs someone older, someone stricter … I don’t know.’

  He looked drained for a second, as though the telling of all of it had cost him a great effort.

  ‘So,’ Oliver said, as we walked away from the restaurant, ‘have you ever been in love?’

  For a moment I considered it – recalling the only two half-serious boyfriends I’d had: Charlie and the one other who came before him. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe so. Sometimes …’ I groped for the words, through the fug of wine, ‘sometimes I think I never will … that I’ll always be alone. I wonder if that’s how I’m meant to be.’

  Oliver gave a half-smile at this. ‘Oh, Kate,’ he said, quietly, ‘I may have managed to make a disaster of it so far, but even I know that no one’s meant to be alone. Least of all someone like you.’

  As we wound our way through the dark streets a thought struck me.

  ‘Are we near the river?’

  ‘Not far. Why?’

  I hesitated, feeling foolish. ‘When I came here with my mother,’ I explained, ‘she took me down to the river to see how it looked at night, with all the lights.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, ‘let’s go there.’ He was kind, I thought then. Coming to the house with me, booking the flight, and now this. It was so strange to think of how afraid I had been of him during those first few days in Corsica. Then again, he was different now – he, too, had undergone some sort of transformation.

  We wandered through the old streets of the district, past the shadowy shops with their grilles pulled down and the odd bar bleeding music and talk into the night air. Then we were at the river.

  It was as I had remembered: the black water, the alchemical rush of gold beneath the surface. Across the river was the Left Bank, but before that was the glittering giant of the Île Saint-Louis. As a girl it had seemed an incredible place to me, an enchanted island that might at any moment uproot and sail downstream. Perhaps a little of that magic, unique to childhood, had faded, but as if in compensation, the lights were multiplied tenfold by a mist of tears.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said to Oliver.

  He turned to look at me. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m fine.’ He looked away, understanding.

  ‘She sounds wonderful,’ Oliver said, as we were making our way back to the apartment.

  I nodded. ‘I wish I could be more like her.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘She was so brave.’

  ‘But I think you are, too. What you’re doing, here in Paris: that is brave.’ And then he said, ‘I’m sure she had her flaws, too.’

  At first, I was outraged. How dare he say that of her? Mum hadn’t had any flaws. She had been more than a mother to me: she had been a best friend. Friends at school had told me how envious they were of this. She was chic in a way that other mothers weren’t – and generous, too. On my sixteenth birthday she had rented a room at the Groucho Club, and we had sat at a candlelit table and eaten grown-up food – fillet steak and dauphinoise potatoes – and drunk champagne.

  Then, in a flash, I thought of Mum missing Parents’ Evening, year after year, bec
ause it clashed with performance dates; and the time she’d forgotten to collect me from my Geography field trip, because a rehearsal had overrun. Those weren’t flaws, though, surely – that was simply being busy. Still – the strangest thing – some part of me found it reassuring.

  Back in the flat, Oliver asked if I wanted a digestif before going to bed. I hesitated: I was tired, and more than a little drunk, but also very awake. My mind was alive with this somewhat altered image of Mum that he had provoked: an image at once disturbing and, strangely, comforting.

  I sat down in his bare sitting room while he found a bottle of wine and two glasses then came to sit beside me – closer than he might have done, I suspected, had he been completely sober.

  ‘I’ve had too much to drink now,’ he said, echoing my thoughts, and paused, as though he were finding his next words. ‘But there’s something I want to tell you, Kate.’ He’d been swaying slightly earlier as we walked back, but his gaze now was intent, absolutely focused.

  ‘OK.’ I suddenly felt quite sober.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think you’re great.’

  ‘Oh – thank you.’ It struck me that ‘great’ was possibly the blandest epithet he could have used.

  ‘No,’ he said, as if realizing this, ‘not great – I’m not thinking properly. What I mean is that you’re different. In the best way,’ he hastened to add. ‘You’re quiet, but you aren’t shy … and you’re watchful’ – there it was, that word again – ‘you see things differently, you understand them, in a way most people don’t. Am I making any sense?’

  ‘I think so,’ I told him, though I wasn’t entirely sure.

  ‘What I mean,’ he went on, enunciating carefully, ‘is that I couldn’t believe I’d told you – a stranger – all of those things, things I haven’t even spoken to Grand-père about. I’ve been thinking about it … and I’ve come to the conclusion it’s because of, well, how you are.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said again.

  ‘I’m sorry I followed you to Paris,’ he said.

  ‘Is that what you were doing?’ He nodded, and I felt a thrill go through me.

  ‘Why did you?’ I asked, as lightly as I could.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He took a deep breath, let it out unsteadily. ‘No, I do. I couldn’t help myself. I sensed from the beginning that it was a bad idea to spend too much time near you.’ He shrugged. ‘Once I knew about your mother, I understood that you must be suffering – and I … well, you know now what a disaster my life has been. And yet I don’t seem to be able to leave you alone.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I think I knew,’ he said, slowly, ‘right from the start, when I picked you up at the airport.’

  ‘No,’ I told him. ‘No, you didn’t. You were horrible to me.’

  ‘That’s exactly it,’ he said. ‘It was the only thing I could do.’

  He put down his glass, and I could feel his eyes on me. Possibility was there in the room with us now: thrilling, tangible – dangerous.

  ‘Look at me, Kate,’ he said, quietly. So I did, and found he was now very near to me. So close, in fact, that I saw for the first time a faint trail of freckles across his nose, and noticed the extraordinary length of the dark eyelashes that should have been feminine but were somehow absolutely not. His gaze dropped to my mouth, and I felt the pressure of it there upon my skin.

  ‘I don’t think,’ I said, unsteadily, ‘this is a good idea.’ But even as I spoke I hoped he would prove me wrong.

  Oliver nodded. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘it’s a terrible idea.’ He didn’t move any further away. ‘And yet’ – his gaze still on my mouth – ‘I don’t seem to be able to do anything about it.’ The moment stretched to an unbearable tautness, and he moved even closer, the spice of the wine on his breath intoxicating as any drug.

  Then something in me snapped. He had just told me about his divorce, for God’s sake. We were surrounded by evidence of it: the misery symbolically present in the boxes of possessions that lined the hallway. With a great, wrenching effort of willpower, I put down my glass and stood up.

  ‘I think I should say goodnight,’ I said. ‘But – thank you … for today.’

  I walked unsteadily down the corridor to my bedroom, moving with the slow, difficult steps of someone drugged. This was the only way it could be, I told myself, trying to think clearly. Anything else would be disastrous.

  As I closed the door behind me, I heard his footsteps. Despite myself, I felt a leap of pure exhilaration in my chest. I opened the door a fraction and looked at him. He was lit from behind, his face in darkness. ‘Kate,’ he said, and his voice was hoarse. ‘Please …’

  Then he was pushing the door and his mouth was on mine. That first taste, so long in coming, was unutterably sweet. We fell back together into the room, and this time I knew there would be no stopping. I remember that I thought – rather matter-of-factly – there’s nothing to be done about it. After that, I don’t recall thinking much at all.

  When I woke, Oliver was nowhere to be seen and neither was the pile of clothes that he had shed the night before – only my black dress, coiled there like a spilled slick of oil on the floorboards. For a moment I wondered if I had imagined it all. It seemed even stranger and less plausible in the light of day than it had in the small hours, as I had waited to fall asleep.

  But no: I could make out the distinct imprint of where he had lain beside me. There was the way my body felt, too: the pleasurable ache, the faintest trace of his scent. There was even the faint pink reminder of his stubble against my collarbone, where he had kissed and gently bitten the skin there.

  We ate breakfast together in the café beneath his apartment, and we were awkward with one another, overly polite – and then, when my taxi came, unsure of how to go about the business of saying goodbye.

  I wasn’t stupid. I think we both knew that it couldn’t be easy between us; that there was no way of telling what would come of it. In many ways, what had happened was the exact thing I had feared, what I had been guarding myself against in the months since Mum’s death. In my defence, it had taken me utterly by surprise, had ambushed me when I had been least expecting it.

  This was what happened, I thought, when you let someone beyond the barrier you had set up: you opened up the possibility for pain. Yet, despite my fears, I could not make myself regret it. Because I had not felt that close to being happy in a long time.

  32

  Paris, September 1930

  On the left bank of the Seine, not far from the shadow of the Panthéon, lives a young woman who is something of an enigma to those who have noticed her recent appearance here. She arrived one evening in August, smartly dressed if travel-worn, and asked for a room at Madame Fourrier’s.

  Fourrier’s is, as many say, ‘whatever you want it to be’. By day it is a café – a place to stop for breakfast or a morning café crème, a lunchtime potage, an afternoon snack. In the evening it is the most happening bar in the Quartier Latin.

  The food is plentiful and cheap, a draw for those who can no longer afford to eat in the more expensive establishments. The crowd is a heterogeneous mix of professors and students from the nearby Sorbonne, writers, painters, elderly men and their mistresses, workmen and the occasional tourist, delighted by their authentic discovery.

  People live here, too. The upper three floors of the building comprise the rooms where Madame Fourrier takes lodgers. The rooms are small and neatly, economically appointed – the topmost, the attic room, being the smallest of them all.

  Madame Fourrier is as well known as her establishment: a big Belgesse with a broad, amiable face and a fringe of frizzy, reddish-blonde hair. She is loud and ardent, and often exacting of her hard-working staff, but those who know her well understand that this apparent fierceness conceals a heart of gold.

  At first, Madame Fourrier wasn’t sure what to make of the girl who turned up on her doorstep in search of a place to lodge. She was far too pretty for her own good, albeit on the scrawny side
, and with an agitation to her that spoke of flight from some form of unpleasantness.

  Madame F. is not one to turn away a young woman so evidently in need of a safe place to stay, but she has learned to be careful. Only last year she rented a room to another pretty young girl, only to discover that she was using her quarters – and the late-night clientele of the brasserie downstairs – for the most insalubrious activities. It was a shame, Madame F. thinks, that she had to ask the tart to leave. She always paid her rent so promptly.

  The new lodger has been accepted on a short-term trial period. The landlady knew that she would be quicker this time at spotting anything untoward, but the new girl does not appear to have any friends, let alone acquaintances of the sort her predecessor did. She keeps her cards close to her chest, this one. Madame F. is curious about her and yet she knows, instinctively, not to probe too far. Unmistakably not French, though she has never said as much. Her accent is odd – Swiss, perhaps? – and she occupies that hinterland between competency and fluency, without the native’s grasp of idiosyncrasy and slang. Alice – that is what she is called. Her name is all she is prepared to tell of herself. Despite this reticence, Madame F. can’t help liking her. She is a mystery indeed.

  On the second day, the girl came down and asked for a job. Had she any experience? A little, she said. To judge by her performance, this had been an exaggeration. She was a terrible waitress: didn’t know the first thing about making coffee, pulling beer, or even arranging the linen cloths so that the creases met the corners of the tables evenly. Anyone would think that she had been brought up in a barn. She is a quick learner, though. Already she can carry three plates at once, one in each hand and the third held precariously in the crook of her arm. She only rarely drops a glass. She will never be an excellent waitress, but she may yet make a competent one. Besides, she is a draw, Madame F. has noticed, for some of the clientele. It is, perhaps, her strangeness that attracts them: the combination of those unusual looks, that odd accent, and the air of mystery that surrounds her.