The Book of Lost and Found

by Lucy Foley

  ‘You’ll come back?’ she asked, a little querulously. ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Good. I will look forward to it so much,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For not judging too harshly, when you didn’t know the truth. For giving me the chance to redeem myself.’

  I felt guilt then, sharp and sour, because I had judged her harshly, because I had been unable to stop myself from believing the worst.

  ‘When you come tomorrow,’ she said, ‘I think we should go for a walk. What do you say?’

  I couldn’t help glancing down at her legs, which seemed frail and misshapen inside her loose trousers, but I nodded, all the same.

  She gestured towards the park. ‘Let’s meet by the boating lake. Do you know the one?’

  I started to shake my head, but something surfaced from the depths of memory: eating ice cream from a glass flute with a silver spoon, watching through the windows as the gliding triangles of colour moved like shapes dancing in a kaleidoscope. It wasn’t the boating pond in Battersea Park, I knew, nor that one in the Tuileries where Mum and I had drunk hot chocolate together from Styrofoam cups. It must, I decided, have been Central Park, that first time we’d visited the city – the time I’d believed beyond memory. So I nodded. ‘I think I do,’ I said.

  I wandered back to my hotel, trying to reconcile the person I had come to know via Stafford – that girl so full of youth and vigour – with the old woman I had met. Stafford’s recollections had so captivated me that I had failed to consider the changes that the passing of time would have wrought, ageing her almost beyond recognition from that figure in the sketch. The sleek black hair faded to bone white, the supple lines of her frame diminished to brittleness.

  To see her there in her chair, so small and frail, had been a great shock. Nevertheless, once she had started talking, this had lessened, because it was evident that there was immense strength in her still. Her voice was not an old woman’s, weak and tremulous, but deep and clear – like those silver eyes, it had not aged with the rest of her.

  38

  Paris, November 1930

  The new waitress at Bistro Fourrier is largely ignorant of the interest and speculation her arrival has caused. She is aware only of the peculiar delight of being mistress of her own destiny, answerable to no one but herself.

  Alice likes the room in the attic, this low triangular space beneath the twin slopes of the roof. It is so far removed from the vast bedroom in London where she, like a blot of ink in that cavernous white expanse, craved privacy. A place, however small, truly hers: somewhere free from the intrusions of the maids, her mother, or even – God forbid – her stepbrother.

  From the small bedroom window she can see for miles: across the slate roofs of the Latin Quarter in their variations of grey, lavender and mother-of-pearl green, past the dome of the Panthéon and the bluebell-shaped turret of St Étienne-du-Mont, as far even as Sacré-Cœur, gleaming a burnished silver above the city.

  Sometimes, in the quiet of the early morning, Alice thinks of Tom, with the same tentative, gently self-destructive manner as someone probing a bruise. On several occasions she has picked up pen and paper to write to him, and her various attempts to explain her actions litter the small desk in the corner of the room. None, thus far, have been sent.

  In the opposite corner from the desk is a washstand where Alice performs her morning toilette with the aid of one of her few extravagances – a small sliver of soap scented with Attar of Rose. Then she steps into her uniform: a fitted black dress, a plain serge apron. When she dresses in the mornings she thinks, sometimes, of Chebworth – of how those in uniform were like a different race, a separate species. How they would gawp to see her now, all of them.

  At six o’clock, she makes her way carefully down the three flights of stairs, past the rooms occupied by the other lodgers. She enjoys the atmosphere of anonymous slumber. She even rather likes the peculiar smell of the place: creeping damp and cigarettes and the cheap perfume of strangers.

  Downstairs in the bar, whilst the rest of the city sleeps, Madame Fourrier will make them each a short, dark coffee with a thick sediment in the bottom. Alice will sip hers gingerly, wincing even as she enjoys the strange bitter savour, whilst her employer tosses hers back with finessed nonchalance, slamming the cup into its saucer with a clatter.

  Alice relishes these early hours before opening, the hush of the square outside, the sleeping buildings. The only sounds are within, it seems – their voices, occasionally, and the clang of cutlery landing in the metal bucket after Alice polishes it, the tick of the clock, the whine of the hot water in the pipes. It is a time for quiet, companionable industry.

  She has grown fond of big, red, loud Madame Fourrier – which is not to say that she isn’t slightly afraid of her. In her forthrightness, her undemonstrative kindness and her small eccentricities, the Belgian woman reminds her of Aunt Margaret. She is a woman who is proud of her aloneness, who draws from it strength and authority.

  Some of the customers at Fourrier’s are known to Alice by sight, if not by name. These are the regulars: people who come back almost daily to sample Madame Fourrier’s brand of Belgian cooking – her eel stews and mussel broths, her superior hot chocolates, her waffles with their thick crust of caramelized sugar.

  There is the professor of literature who comes for his baked eggs every morning before cycling off on his ancient bicycle, bound for the nearby Sorbonne. He stops Alice as she takes his order one day and tells her that he is becoming quite alarmed by the version of the language – ‘polluted with Belgian horrors’ – that she is imbibing from Madame F. ‘You must read,’ he tells her, ‘it will fight against the infection.’ The next morning he hands her a canvas bag, extraordinarily heavy, crammed with books. She lines them up on the shelf next to her bed, where, along with the volumes she has acquired herself, they provide the only real colour in the room. In such a small space they are luminous, jewel-bright in the low light.

  Then there is the writer, an American, who lives in a flat across the square, but insists he has to remove himself from his apartment in order to work. ‘The silence is deafening,’ he told Alice once. ‘In there, the work becomes all-important, and therefore impossible. Here, in the café, with the noise, it is merely another part of the scene – small, unexceptional … and hence achievable.’ He writes, longhand, in notebooks, but often ‘work’ seems to consist of little more than staring out at the square, drawing greedily on a cigarette.

  The writer, Madame Fourrier tells Alice, used to be part of a far larger scene here in Paris, but many of his former cronies have moved on now – back to America, to London, to Marrakech. ‘They would take over one corner of the bar,’ she tells her, ‘for a whole day … long into the evening, until they’d got drunk and foolish and I had to tell them to leave. There were always some very attractive girls that dressed like boys.’ She raises her gingery eyebrows expressively. ‘Those English and American girls. So modern.’

  One night, the American writer asks Alice to have a drink of pastis with him at his table. She watches in fascination as the water he pours into their glasses turns the spirit an exquisite bluish white. They speak in English because, despite having lived here for several years, his French is abominable.

  ‘You fascinate me,’ he tells her, with no preamble.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘That accent. I may be a Yank, but I know that’s not the way I’d expect a French waitress to talk, even if she’s talking in English. You are English, aren’t you?’

  Alice smiles and takes a sip of her drink, but doesn’t deny it.

  ‘I knew it. Cut glass, that’s what they call it, I believe. You speak like a duchess. Are you a duchess?’

  Alice shakes her head and laughs, partly in an attempt to convince him of how far from the mark he is, and partly in secret recognition of how close he is to the truth.

  ‘The way you hold yourse
lf, your profile – there’s something regal about it. I think I’ll write about you, if you don’t mind. The English aristocrat, slumming it as a Paris waitress. I like that.’

  ‘Well, I’d be honoured. Even though you’ve got it all wrong.’

  ‘You don’t want to set me straight?’

  ‘No. Surely it’s better that way? It leaves you more room for the fiction.’

  He chuckles and touches his glass to hers.

  When she isn’t needed for serving, Alice begins to work some evenings as an amanuensis for the writer. She uses his Corona, which they set up on one of the tables in the quietest corner of the bar. The going is slow at first – she has to ask him to repeat sentences and occasionally whole paragraphs, and the keys stick and the ribbon jams. But after a couple of weeks it becomes easier, and she realizes that she is able to type without thinking about it: to type better, in fact, if she lets her fingers move almost of their own accord.

  The work isn’t paid, but Alice earns enough from the waitressing to manage her rent. And the writer introduces her to Paris by night. They attend parties where men dance with men and women dressed in three-piece suits kiss one another openly. They watch the dancers flit and shimmy across the stage at the Bal Négresse to the beating of drums and the howling of the saxophone. They visit a nightclub called La Coupoule – where the writer’s current lover works as a barman. Here they dance and drink until an egg-yolk dawn has broken on the horizon and spread pale gold along the Seine and the men who come to fish the water near the Île Saint-Louis have begun to unpack their kit and bed in for the morning’s sport.

  On these mornings, viewed through tired eyes, the city is at its most beautiful. At the same time it is, for Alice, tinged with melancholy. Why? Perhaps because the mad distractions of the night are over, because there are still several hours before she is needed at work … leaving nothing for her to do but think. So it is now, more than any other time, that she remembers what, or specifically who, she has left behind. He who would appreciate this beauty even more than she – who would, no doubt, attempt to harness it for her.

  Not for the first time, she wonders if she should write to him. But what to say? So difficult, with this lie between them. What would be the good in it? What would be the point of having started this new life? Of having left him free to find greatness? Because she knows that he will be great.

  So she comforts herself by reading the papers, scouring the arts pages for any mention of his name. It is only a matter of time before it will appear, she is certain of that.

  39

  New York, September 1986

  I looked up from my cappuccino. We sat in the café that I remembered, bathed in September sun and watching the gaudy boats glide and turn before us. Alice had come in an electric wheelchair: Julie had escorted her here and then left. ‘I know I spoke of walking,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid I meant it rather euphemistically. Still, one can pretend. It does much the same thing: the fresh air, the sights, the sense of being out in the world, exploring.’ For all that she was dressed exquisitely, as before, and the Pucci scarf that she’d tied about her neck almost made up for the lack of colour in her complexion.

  Alice seemed energized by the life about us: she watched the couples in boats and the families chattering at nearby tables with a kind of hungry delight. I, by contrast, had slept badly again and felt I would have far preferred the hush of her airy drawing room to the chaos of Central Park on a Saturday. My mind had been too full that night to switch off. I had been unable to prevent myself from imagining various scenarios in which things had turned out differently. Scenarios in which Alice’s mother hadn’t committed her crime, or in which Evie’s conscience had forced her to tell my mother about the letter.

  ‘So you have met my Tom?’ Alice asked me now.

  ‘Yes.’ I looked up. ‘Mr Stafford was kind enough to invite me to stay with him.

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Very well.’ I thought of his vigour and health, of how much better he seemed to be faring in old age than she.

  She smiled. ‘That is good to hear. And you managed to contact him. I have learned from experience, you see, that it is rather difficult these days.’

  She said it lightly, but I wasn’t fooled. I thought of that postcard Stafford had kept so carefully, and never found himself able to answer.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I wrote to him, and I sent him the drawing – the one of you by the lake.’

  She brightened at this. ‘You saw the drawing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did she see it, too? June?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid … no, she didn’t.’

  ‘So she never knew?’

  The pain was so naked upon her face that I considered lying – considered whether, perhaps, I might say that when Mum had boarded that plane she knew that she had not, as a child, been cast aside. But I couldn’t do that. I shook my head, then immediately felt compelled to add: ‘But she was happy, you know. Content. It didn’t make her a victim.’

  ‘No, I can see that.’ Alice sipped her coffee carefully. ‘I was – am – so terribly proud of her. I wish I could have known her, or met her, just once. Perhaps it’s selfish of me to feel that. Perhaps it was best that she never knew about me, that I never had the chance to explain. I wouldn’t have wanted to jeopardize what she had with her stepmother.’

  ‘It was wrong of Evie, not to tell her.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’d like to believe that, of course I would. But was it, really? Would I have acted differently, in her position? I wonder.’

  We listened to the splashes and the screams of delighted children for several moments.

  ‘Is he still working?’ Alice asked, suddenly.

  ‘Yes,’ I told her. ‘He’s still painting, every day – I believe.’

  ‘It is how I imagine him. On his wild isle, with his canvases, surrounded by the wind and water – it is exactly the sort of place where he would be happiest. You liked him? Did you get along?’

  ‘Yes, very well.’

  Alice seemed pleased by this. ‘I thought you would. You’re quite like him, in many ways. Funny, because I always thought expression, gesture, that sort of thing came from nurture, not nature. Perhaps they too are in the genes.’

  This didn’t make sense. ‘You’re speaking of us as if we’re related.’

  Alice looked at me, and there was the longest pause. Then she said: ‘But, my dear, you are. Tom Stafford is your grandfather.’

  I felt as if I’d fallen down the rabbit hole. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, he isn’t.’

  She gave a laugh then, more surprised than amused.

  ‘My grandfather is the man you met in Venice – Julien.’

  ‘That is what Tom believes – it’s what I told him – but it was a lie. I never did have those sort of relations with Julien – though certainly he tried.’ She sighed. ‘So, you see, everything I told Tom that day in the garden was true … except the part that wasn’t.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked, wildly. ‘Why would you do that to him?’ I saw the couple at the next table glance our way and managed, with an effort, to lower my voice. ‘I think it broke his heart.’ It sounded drastic, but I realized the truth of it even as I spoke.

  ‘I know.’ Her voice was small. ‘It was a necessary cruelty … if you can believe such a thing. And if you can accept that, perhaps you can also understand that I did it for him. You’ve met Tom, Kate. You know what sort of man he is. He would have given it all up, everything he hoped for. He would have continued doing that job he detested in order to support us. I am sure that he would have resented me, in the end.’

  ‘But what about afterwards, when you thought the baby had died?’

  ‘Why make it his tragedy too? It would have been a needless cruelty. I want you to know something, Kate. It wasn’t only his heart that was broken when I told that lie.’

  I couldn’t stop myself from going further. ‘If you had kept her, my mum, if they hadn’t taken h
er to the orphanage … would you have confessed to him eventually?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. I wanted to leave him free to do the thing he loved. I’d planned to run away with the baby. I knew that we would go to Paris. Then, maybe, when Tom had had the chance to realize his hopes, perhaps I would have told him. Not in order to bind him to us, but because he deserved to hear the truth.’

  ‘How did you know it would be Paris?’

  ‘When I was sixteen years old, my aunt—’

  ‘Lady Margaret,’ I supplied.

  She looked at me in surprise. ‘Yes, Aunt Margaret took me to Paris, for a weekend. We went to her favourite café, near the Boulevard du Montparnasse. The place was full of interesting sorts, but there was one woman in particular. She was by herself, and she had ordered a coffee. There was a small dog sleeping at her feet, and she had a book, held up in her right hand, like this –’ She mimed it. ‘I thought to myself: “That is the person I want to be. Someone who can sit on her own in a café without being answerable to anyone.”’ She smiled. ‘You can tell from that how naïve I was. She could have been someone’s mistress. She could have been killing time while her husband worked. To me, however, she represented someone in charge of her own destiny. And I thought to myself in that moment, “Paris is where I could be that person.”’

  40

  Paris, June 1934

  It seems strange to Alice that her time in the city has been as short as four years. For it is home to her now: the centre of her own particular universe. She could walk the streets near her rooms with a blindfold tied over her eyes and know where she is at all times. If she ever thinks about all those years she lived in London it appals her to think that she never understood the city; never knew the fine arterial network of streets that connected those places she might have passed in the back seat of a car.

  There are those who say that Paris is not what it was in the 1920s, when the city was awash with money and the sort of happy abandonment that accompanies a time of prosperity. There is no one interesting dining at the Ritz now, they claim. The arts are not what they were, now that so many of the great writers and painters have left in search of pastures new. Those big expatriate names: the Hemingways, the Fitzgeralds, the Joyces … all gone. Alice, never having known that Paris, cannot imagine a more exciting place than the one she inhabits now.