The Book of Lost and Found

by Lucy Foley

  She is clever, too. Not at waitressing, admittedly, but Madame F. has seen the way she stops to read the newspapers discarded by patrons – in French and, oddly enough, English. She’d read them from cover to cover if she were allowed to, Madame F. is certain. There are books as well: Madame F. saw them when she came up to show the girl how to boil an egg – honestly, boil an egg! – after seeing smoke pluming from beneath the door. She buys them from the bookshops with her meagre pay.

  There was one other thing she saw, too. A beautiful drawing – a drawing of the girl herself, no less, tacked to the wall by her bed. With short hair and odd clothes – a rich woman’s clothes, if Madame F. was not mistaken.

  Yes, a girl with a secret, certainly.

  33

  New York, September 1986

  I stayed in a hotel in the East Village, and hardly slept the first night, despite the jet lag. I lay there listening to the hooting of car horns, the laughter, shouts and music bleeding through from the street and the roar and rattle of the subway beneath me. Nothing could have been further removed from the blue quiet of those Corsican nights that had been punctuated only by the sound of the wind and the chirruping of crickets in the maquis.

  When morning came I lounged in bed, feeling gritty-eyed and almost drunk with tiredness. My whole mission felt even more surreal now than it had done at the departure gate in Charles de Gaulle.

  A toasted sandwich and a black coffee in an Italian greasy spoon a couple of streets away went some way towards restoring me. I checked my reflection in the washroom there and combed my hair, rather pointlessly, as it quickly rearranged itself into its habitual tangle. For some reason it had suddenly become important that I should be looking my best. It bothered me that there were dark circles beneath my eyes, that any colour I had managed to pick up in Corsica seemed to have disappeared overnight. In the halogen light, my skin had the bluish tinge of skimmed milk.

  I liked the East Village, I decided, making my way to the subway at Astor Place. It was raw and unformed back then – a creative’s Mecca, not unlike modern-day Brooklyn. The phone boxes here weren’t plastered with phone-sex ads but with flyers for exhibitions and ad hoc installations in flats, warehouses and vacant lots. Art was visible on the street, too: en route to the platform I saw a Keith Haring-like mural of nude commuters carrying briefcases.

  New York then was a cheaper, rougher place than it is now, and the Village was almost unrecognizable from what it has become. At least, that’s my experience. Travelling back recently, I saw bijou espresso bars and boutiques, sleek four-wheel drives, loft conversions. You could find the imprint of the old place, if you looked carefully. Or could you? Was, perhaps, the gritty appearance of the record shop I found on Bleecker Street merely clever, nostalgic ersatz? It was difficult to say.

  It was also different to the city I had known when I visited with Mum. She had been an honorary guest at a special Christmas exhibition by the New York Ballet, and we had stayed in the St Regis, a white-and-gilt wedding cake of a hotel on Fifth Avenue. The city had glittered with new-fallen snow: as deliriously unreal as the one that lived inside the snow-dome Mum had given me on the plane. We had come on one other occasion, in summer – though I had been too young to remember much of that. Now that Mum was gone, I found it hard to accept that there were memories like this, that would be forever lost to me.

  It seemed that I was bound to return to that world of old New York splendour. The apartment was in one of those huge blocks that soar into the sky on the east side of Central Park, and I was immediately intimidated, understanding that I was about to enter into a rarefied sphere. These buildings housed the inconceivably wealthy – the old, moneyed American families, scions of the dynasties that had built New York. I knew suddenly how Tom must have felt, walking up to the front door of Chebworth Manor. I recalled what Oliver had said about the townhouse in Paris: Alice had clearly returned to the life of privilege.

  I thought the porter would look at me askance, but when I gave my name he smiled as though we knew one another and swept me inside with a bow. Inside, the building was even more awe-inspiring than without, and there was more marble, more gilt, more baroque splendour than I remembered at the St Regis.

  I was taken up to her floor in one of those lifts in which you aren’t allowed to press the buttons yourself: a liveried member of staff does it for you. When the doors pinged open at the top, a single door faced us beyond a carpeted antechamber.

  ‘Is the way to the apartment through there?’ I asked the attendant, bemused. ‘Which number is it?’

  ‘That is the door to the apartment. She has this floor and the next one up.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I pressed the doorbell and waited for so long that I was tempted to ring again. At last I heard quick footsteps behind the door and it swung open to reveal a tall woman in a tailored tweed suit.

  She spoke before I could introduce myself. ‘Hi, Kate. I’m Julie.’ She was American. ‘I’m Célia’s housekeeper.’

  Then a voice called from within, high and slightly quavering. ‘Is it her, Julie?’

  Julie smiled and beckoned me in. ‘Would you like anything to drink?’ she asked, as we passed through an elegant, sage-green anteroom. I opened my mouth, but was suddenly lost for words. Julie seemed to understand. ‘Well,’ she said, gently, ‘I usually bring her coffee at eleven, in half an hour, so you could have something then.’ As she spoke I noticed a picture hanging behind her – a charcoal sketch of a street scene that, judging by the unmistakable shape of the fire hydrant in the corner, had to be New York. The style was by now familiar to me: I recognized that sparseness of line, that expert but restrained treatment of light and shadow. And there in the corner was the small hieroglyph I knew so well: those two linked initials.

  We were moving through into open space, entering the great lofty sitting room of the apartment proper: high-ceilinged and airy, thanks to the huge windows that looked on to the park. Of the other three walls, only the smallest and most necessary of spaces remained between the artworks that had been hung upon them. The effect should have been one of chaos, and yet it was not. Or rather, it was the best sort of chaos: carnivalesque, a celebration of colour and human creativity.

  A tiny figure perched in an armchair facing us, the light coming in behind her haloing her white head. Her smallness was, if anything, emphasized by the size and clamour of the room in which she sat.

  ‘Hello, Kate,’ she said.

  My voice, when I spoke, sounded not at all like my own. ‘Hello, Alice.’ Perhaps I should have called her Célia. That was her new name: Alice was a person from the past. Yet that person, the one Thomas Stafford had loved, was the one I knew.

  Julie moved across to her and plumped the cushion at her back, helping her to sit up in her chair. Alice was far frailer than Stafford, I saw. I couldn’t imagine how it could be that she still travelled between New York and Paris; it was hard to believe that she ever left the chair for long. She was no longer slim, as Stafford had described her, she was skeletal: delicate as a bird’s bone. For all that, her expression was alert, her gaze upon me interested and alive. How I wish I had inherited those eyes. Mine are also grey, but to leave it there is to mislead: a comparison of lead with silver. Hers had a unique luminosity, like mother-of-pearl, their brilliance undimmed by age. She was dressed immaculately, and yet there was something bohemian about her appearance – in the bright splash of the blue silk scarf about her throat, the golden bangles that clattered up her arm as she reached towards me.

  I moved closer and she grasped one of my hands in both of hers, half a handshake, half a caress. Her skin was cool, as thin and dry as tissue paper.

  ‘So you are Kate,’ she said. ‘You are Kate, and you have come to see me, at last.’ A pause. Her eyes were travelling my face, and I felt completely exposed to that silver gaze. I fought the urge to step back, to lower my head in case she found me wanting.

  ‘You are like her, unmistakably, and yet I think, thoug
h it is a boast to say it, that you are even more like me. Or as I once was.’

  I couldn’t speak. I looked beyond her to the table beside her. On its surface sat a pair of reading glasses, a stack of books, and a photograph. It was my mother, performing in Swan Lake. She was Odette, in that moment when she emerges from the lake a woman for the first time, no longer a swan. Mum looked as beautiful and ethereal as I had ever seen her: hardly real. I hadn’t seen that image for a long time, but it was a well-known shot. Alice must have found it somewhere and bought a print, I realized. The idea that this woman, surrounded by the otherwise richness of her life, had had to buy a photo of her own child was almost unbearable. But she had left her behind, I reminded myself. Whatever Marguerite had said, that fact was incontrovertible.

  I looked back at Alice and she was studying me closely. ‘I imagine you must have much to ask me,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. I …’ In the end, I asked the only question that I could think of, even though it was probably too soon to ask it. It was the only question that seemed important. ‘Why did you leave my mother?’ I said. ‘I mean … I know you were young, and …’

  There was a long pause, and then Alice smiled, sadly. ‘But, you see, I never did leave her.’

  ‘I thought—’

  ‘Or at least, not knowingly.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I think, perhaps, that I have rather a lot to explain.’

  Julie chose that moment to enter with a pot of coffee and wafer-thin almond-studded biscuits. She poured two cups, and left the room. As we drank the silence was punctuated only by the ring of our delicate china cups on their saucers. Then Alice finished her tiny biscuit and placed her coffee carefully down before her.

  ‘You must understand,’ she said, suddenly, ‘I had always intended to bring her with me.’

  ‘That was what Mr Stafford said.’

  ‘Yes – because I told him as much.’

  ‘So how did she get left behind?’

  I’d anticipated excuses that I might, perhaps, be ready to forgive, knowing that she was so young and undoubtedly so afraid. She would not be the only woman to have acted as she did. But I could not have anticipated what came next.

  ‘I did not know that I had left her – not in the way you think. You see, they told me that she had died.’

  34

  Chebworth, July 1930

  She remembers pain: a great deal of pain. Followed by a total absence of it, of any sensation, a drifting in shadows, a sinking through dark water.

  It seemed years, centuries, aeons.

  They tell her it was only a couple of days. They tell her that she lost a lot of blood, so much that she had nearly died. But the baby – where is it? She must try and rest, they say.

  35

  New York, September 1986

  Alice spoke into the silence.

  ‘The birth was difficult. There was a complication that the doctor hadn’t foreseen. I was too narrow. They should have performed a Caesarean, but no one had realized, and once the labour had started it was too late.

  ‘I lost a lot of blood, and I am sure that I was barely conscious for much of it. It was a few days, apparently, before I was able to understand anything anyone said. I was told that I had come close to losing my own life, and I do not think that was untrue. As for the baby … the air supply had been cut off for too long. The doctor had explained to my mother that the child had been unable to breathe, and had suffocated inside me.

  ‘Perhaps, if I had been less weak, less confused, I might have asked more questions, though I’m not sure it would have done any good. They had the story sewn up, and I had no reason to doubt my mother. We had never got along, but I had no cause to suspect that she might try to do me harm.’

  ‘But that’s monstrous—’

  ‘It was unforgivable. She wasn’t evil, my mother, I want to make that clear. I’m certain that, terrible as it may appear, she didn’t act out of a desire to cause me pain.’

  ‘To do such a thing, though – to pretend – that was evil.’

  ‘I think that, as she saw it, she was doing me a great service. She was protecting me from shame.’

  36

  Chebworth, July 1930

  Lady Hexford sips her coffee and touches her blonde hair with an elegant white hand. She is looking particularly radiant today, astonishingly young. Her head and face are bathed in light from the long windows, and she survives the sun’s exposing rays well: her forehead remains relatively unlined, her profile taut. From the right angle she still looks like a girl – not much older than the Sargent portrait of herself as a sixteen-year-old debutante that hangs in the drawing room.

  Her daughter, by contrast, is a dismal sight: her skin blotched where it isn’t sallow – the invalid’s complexion. Her cheeks are gaunt, her hair lank. These things, of course, are eminently reversible, and Lady Hexford is keen to emphasize this.

  Appraising her daughter, she says, ‘Next week, I shall take you to have your hair cut in town. I can’t understand this vogue for “shingling”, but anything would be better than what you have at the moment, which is no style at all.’

  Alice stares down at her egg. The bald, pink dome of the shell defeats her. She picks up a triangle of toast and eats it laboriously.

  Lady Hexford watches her and gives a small sigh. ‘It’s time we returned to London. We need to have you seen. They all think you’re recovering from glandular fever. Thank goodness dropped waists are still the thing – it will make our task rather easier.’ No one, Lady Eversley explains, save for a select few members of staff, and she and Alice herself, know anything of what has taken place at Chebworth Manor. She sits back, good-naturedly, as her boiled egg is swept away and then replaced with some ceremony, its cap neatly excised, the yolk beginning to bleed its way through a fissure in the white. ‘Any longer than it has been and I am sure people will start to talk. So we must have you seen at a function or two …’

  They may talk of the Modern, Lady Eversley says. Girls now may drink as much as men. The clothes may have changed. But a bastard remains a bastard. An unmarried girl who has a baby is still ripe for ostracism: a social leper.

  ‘Which was it?’ Alice asks.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

  ‘A boy or a girl?’

  ‘It was a girl.’ Lady Hexford gives another small sigh. ‘It will not do to be morbid about this, Alice. You must move on, return to what was always the proper path for you. We will treat this … this entire episode as a momentary aberration. A lucky escape, in fact. Such an outcome … don’t you see? You have been given the chance to preserve your dignity, to begin anew. Think,’ she says, as a passing shot, ‘of your stepfather, of the damage this whole affair could have done, had it not gone thus. To speak of this to anyone would cause harm beyond what it would do to you. We must remember to be selfless.’

  37

  New York, September 1986

  ‘So how did you find out about Mum?’ I asked Alice. ‘How did you discover that she didn’t die, after all?’

  ‘I went to see my mother when I learned that she was very unwell. She had suffered a gradual mental breakdown – no doubt brought on by the continuing shame over my stepfather’s fall from grace. For someone with such a fear of scandal, I am sure she’d had rather a hard time of it. There was money, but the humiliation would have been terrible for her.

  ‘I hadn’t had any contact with her for twenty years. I read about her illness in a newspaper, if you can believe it. I’m not sure exactly why I decided I had to go, but I know I would not have forgiven myself if I hadn’t.

  ‘She was completely changed from the woman I had known. Meek, fearful – a rather pathetic figure. Perhaps it was a result of the illness, or simply of the scandal that had caused it in the first place, but it seemed that she now questioned all that she had been certain of before. But she was so altered that, when she told me, it was as though she were speaking of the actions of another. My ang
er with her felt thwarted. I knew then that I had to try to free myself from it, or I would carry it for life. I had learned that much from experience.

  ‘I was forty-one years old when I learned the truth, and your mother was by then almost the same age as I’d been when I had her.’

  Julie entered with a tray bearing lunch, and I was amazed to discover that more than two hours had slipped by without my noticing. The spread was almost preposterously British: the sandwiches were cucumber, the crusts neatly excised. It was a translation of English custom from across the water and from an earlier time, unweathered by exposure to the customs of modern Britain. There was lemonade, too, in a cut-glass pitcher. We were silent as we ate. I was too stunned by what Alice had told me to think of anything to say. Of all the things I had imagined I would never have expected that.

  Alice picked her way through two tiny triangles, and swallowed as much of the lemonade as a bird might drink of water from a leaf. When she was finished, she passed a hand in front of her eyes and seemed to sink further into the chair, as though the effort had sapped her last reserves of strength.

  ‘I’ll go,’ I said, standing. ‘I can see that you’re exhausted.’

  She made no attempt to deny it, but said, ‘I am so lucky that you have come to find me, Kate. I have always hoped that, by some miracle, your mother might turn up at my door, and then, when you were born, that you would, too. That I might get that one chance to meet you. I never allowed myself to believe it would happen though.’

  ‘I’m glad too,’ I told her, conscious of a tightness in my chest, trying not to think about the fact that only half of her wish had come true.