The Book of Lost and Found

by Lucy Foley

  She has found herself another prospective job. It has come to her through Madame Fourrier, whose sister works as the housekeeper for a wealthy family in the 16th arrondissement.

  ‘They’re looking for a governess,’ she told Alice. ‘I told Bertrande you’d be perfect.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Come, my dear, it’s easy to see that you are bright, even educated. I’ve seen you racing through those books you bring back. Besides – and you mustn’t take this the wrong way – you clearly aren’t meant to be a waitress.’

  ‘It’s been so long since I was at school …’

  ‘You needn’t worry about that. The children have a tutor for most subjects. He comes every day.’

  ‘Then what am I needed for?’

  ‘English. The parents want them to learn it, though goodness knows why people think English is of any use to anybody. They want someone who will teach them to speak it naturally – you know, as well as a British person might. They’re good employers, Bertrande says. If you don’t mind permitting their sort a bit of oddness.’

  ‘What “sort”?’

  ‘You know: Jews.’

  Alice’s first meeting with Madame De Rosier is something of a surprise. She had expected a great and lofty personage befitting of the house – a building of which her mother would approve, built to awe and intimidate. Sophie De Rosier, however, confounds her preconceptions. Alice is shown into the morning salon – a white temple of a room flooded with the green light of the garden beyond the windows. In this space, Madame De Rosier seems small, and very young. In fact, she appears barely older than Alice herself – in her late twenties, at the most. Her face is an almost perfect oval, with a small mouth and large dark eyes. It is a face that could be solemn, pious, even, were it not for the smile of welcome.

  ‘So you are Alice.’ She speaks in English, but nervously, as though unfamiliar with the feel of the language in her mouth. Alice nods.

  ‘You speak French?’

  ‘Yes.’

  This is evidently a relief. Madame De Rosier moves gratefully into her mother tongue. ‘Good. Let us sit.’

  Alice takes the seat indicated, and for a moment her attention is caught by the painting behind Madame De Rosier’s head. It is a study of an orchard: a work of green and light. White spaces of empty canvas show through the branches of the trees, but the result is not so much one of incompleteness as of a greater realism than had they been filled in with paint: the effect of a pale spring sun penetrating the canopy of new leaves.

  Madame De Rosier catches Alice looking. ‘Cézanne,’ she says.

  ‘I was wondering if it might be … I’ve seen some of his work in the Gallery Luxembourg.’

  ‘My husband is a great follower of the arts. Both of us are, but he knows about the different movements, the new techniques and styles emerging … I only know what I like.’ Madame De Rosier gives a shy smile.

  ‘It’s beautiful. One of the loveliest I’ve seen of his.’

  ‘Thank you. It seems we share the same taste.’

  It is Alice who feels she should introduce the purpose of this meeting, for Madame De Rosier appears in no hurry to do so. ‘I understand you’re looking for a governess.’

  ‘Yes, we are. To the matter in hand, as my husband would say. You come with excellent recommendations …’

  Alice shifts in her seat. She hasn’t heard anything of these recommendations, though it wouldn’t surprise her if this were Madame Fourrier’s work.

  Madame De Rosier seems to interpret her discomfort as modesty. ‘If I am honest,’ she says, sitting forward in her chair, ‘the most important recommendation of all is that you are actually English.’

  ‘I am, though I live here now – I think of Paris as my home.’

  ‘But you could teach my children English ways and customs – and teach them the proper English, not that of a foreigner, however fluent. Perhaps, if there is any time left after the children’s lessons, you might instruct me, too?’

  Alice is introduced to the children: Antoine – five, cripplingly shy, and barely able to look her in the eye for more than a few seconds, and the girl, Marguerite, with that peculiar self-possession especial to six-year-old girls.

  ‘You don’t look very old,’ she tells Alice, challengingly.

  ‘No, I suppose I’m not.’

  ‘I thought all governesses had to be. Our tutor is. He’s a fossil.’

  On her way out, Alice’s attention is caught by another beautiful object: an elaborate eight-armed candelabra, wrought in silver.

  ‘It’s exquisite,’ she says.

  Madame De Rosier is suddenly ill at ease. ‘It’s an heirloom, from my husband’s family,’ she says hurriedly, then adds, ‘But, you know, we think of ourselves as French, first and foremost.’

  Alice is nonplussed. ‘Yes, of course.’

  Several weeks on, Alice sits once more with her new employer.

  ‘Why is it that you want your family to learn the language?’ Alice asks. They speak in English now as often as possible. Sophie insists upon it; she must be pushed, she explains, or she will become lazy.

  ‘It’s a wonderful language.’ Sophie takes a careful sip of her tisane and regards Alice over the fine rim of her cup as if trying to come to a decision. ‘There is another reason though. Monsieur De Rosier and I … for some time now we have been considering a move to England.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, you know, things have been …’ she hesitates ‘more difficult for my husband of late.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I realize it has been harder for everyone the last few years, and we have been lucky by most standards. For us, business is still good; you wouldn’t think people would be buying fur in a Depression, but it seems French women consider it a necessity. There is, however, a certain … resentment towards those of our kind. Not that it hasn’t always been there, to a degree. Of late, though, it has been more … shall we say … energetic.’

  ‘You believe England will be better?’ Alice thinks of her stepfather and his cronies.

  ‘Perhaps, perhaps not. Monsieur De Rosier has family in London, and there is talk of moving the business – joining with them. A new start for us.’

  ‘But you won’t go soon?’

  ‘Not right away. It will take some time to get our affairs in order. Besides, we won’t go until we can speak the language like locals. Monsieur De Rosier doesn’t believe that he needs any help with his English, but then it is true that, one way or another, he seems to be able to make himself understood wherever he goes.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘You are so good with the children,’ Sophie says, ‘we couldn’t take them away from you so soon even if we wanted to – I am certain they wouldn’t allow it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Alice says, touched. She has become fond of them in return. The girl with her fierce intelligence, picking up whole phrases easily – almost greedily – and challenging Alice to explain quirks of grammar and pronunciation: ‘Why did they decide to spell dove and move the same,’ she demands, ‘if they wanted them to sound so different?’ And the boy, slower to understand than his sister – but still almost a baby really – who likes to sit with his small, warm arm curled around Alice’s neck as she reads to him, his breath across her cheek sweet and vaguely milk-scented.

  ‘I don’t only mean the teaching, though,’ Sophie says, with a smile. ‘You have such a tender way with them. If it wouldn’t put poor old Nanny Bisset out of a job, I’d have you looking after them all the time. I know they would prefer it, too.’ She regards Alice, curiously. ‘You must want to have children of your own, some day.’

  Alice nods, mutely.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Sophie says, quickly – sensing something amiss. ‘That was too forward of me.’

  Alice shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s not. It’s …’ She takes a deep breath, hardly believing she is going to say it: ‘There was one, a baby girl. She died.’

 
‘Oh, Alice.’ In one swift movement, Sophie has moved to Alice’s seat and put her arms around her. The suddenness of it causes something in Alice to yield, and she is surprised to feel a single hot wet tear slide down her cheek. She brushes it away and tries to remember the last time someone comforted her in this way. She finds, to her surprise, that she cannot.

  A pattern is soon established. The children have their lesson first, for a couple of hours. Sophie’s tutorial follows, but it doesn’t seem formal enough to count as such. The two of them sit in the morning room and simply talk together, no topic out of bounds. Or rather, no topic save that of Tom. Alice has avoided mentioning him – not because she doesn’t think Sophie would understand, far from it, but because she fears that doing so would be too painful.

  Afterwards, Sophie almost always invites Alice to stay for lunch, sometimes with the children in the nursery and sometimes just the two of them in the airy breakfast room at the front of the house.

  One day, walking back to Fourrier’s, Alice understands for the first time her great relief at knowing that the De Rosiers’ move to England is not imminent. It is not simply the prospect of losing the companionship of the children or the satisfaction of the work. It is that she appears to have found in Sophie De Rosier, unexpectedly, what she has not truly had since Tom. A friend.

  The thoughts of Tom haven’t left her, though. And now it feels as if the tears shed earlier have caused some sort of transformation within her. She feels emboldened, even reckless. Has she allowed enough time to pass? She isn’t sure, but she sits down to write to him, all the same. A secret part of her longs to tell him the truth, but she must not – the larger, more sensible part of her knows this to be so. Instead she tells him, with no small pride, of her new independence. She describes Madame De Rosier, the American writer, her room at Fourrier’s, and she gives him the return address, care of Madame F. Does she secretly hope that, armed with this, he will board the first boat across the Channel and come in search of her? She will not allow herself to examine her feelings too closely.

  It would, she knows, be an absurd hope. She tells herself this when a package arrives instead: smallish, card-backed. She opens it carefully and discovers a letter and a sketch wrapped in oilcloth, the ink already beginning to fade with age. There she is by the lake, sitting beneath the overarching boughs of those twin elderly willows. She remembers the languorous heat of the day. She recalls too how she felt Tom’s eyes upon her as she removed her clothes and how she revelled in it, the awareness of her power over him. And the evening afterwards … Alice feels a pressure within her chest, almost as though she might be about to cry again. She turns quickly to the letter, in the hope of distraction.

  1 September 1934

  Dearest A,

  What it is to hear from you, and to know that you are happy. You are often in my thoughts, so now I can picture you more accurately – writing your letter, looking out across the rooftops of the city. Pardon me for saying this, but I can’t imagine you as a governess. Perhaps it is because it is such an indoor role, and I only ever seem to be able to imagine you outside. But I am glad you are enjoying it.

  I should say first that I have some sad news. Last week, father took his own life. It was Ma who found him, and she is beside herself. And yet – though it is a terrible thing to say – I can’t help feeling it has also come as a relief. He had been so much worse in recent years that caring for him had become a daily trial, and I’m not sure Ma could still see in him the man she married. Understandably, she no longer wishes to remain in the house in Putney. Tomorrow she will move to Islington to stay with Rosa and her family.

  I left the job on Silk Street yesterday. It was making me dull and unimaginative – I had begun to realize how much it was affecting my painting, and it scared me. I managed to sell six pieces – would you believe it? – to a man your aunt Margaret put me in touch with. Incredibly, I made from this sale almost what I would earn in five months at Locke & Proudfoot.

  So I am headed to New York. As I see it, there are two cities in the world where a would-be artist should want to be at the moment, and they are New York and Paris. I don’t want to be another Englishman like Rupert Grant, travelling to France to try to copy Picasso. They say New York is the place now: where artists are moving beyond what they have learned from Europe.

  I have enough from the paintings and my savings to pay for my passage, and, I hope, for a modest rent and living expenses for several months. It must seem unfeeling for me to be leaving so soon after my father’s death, but Ma is positively encouraging me to go – I would never have gone without her full blessing. I’m putting most of my work into storage over here, but when I discovered this drawing of you I didn’t want to consign it to some dry, dark place. I hope it will remind you of the fun we had together.

  My ship leaves Southampton in a couple of days’ time, and the crossing, weather permitting, should not take more than five or six days – incredible, when one thinks that not so long ago it might have taken as much time to get to Europe. For the first week or so I will be staying with an American fellow I knew at Oxford, Eddie Bloomberg. I can’t recall if you ever met him – I doubt it. Eddie is far too charming for me to have risked the introduction if I had any sense.

  After my time with Eddie I will try to find a place of my own, somewhere, ideally, right in the middle of it all. Eddie has offered to help me look, though I suspect his standards may be loftier than my budget will allow.

  I shall write again when I have crossed the Atlantic. There – doesn’t that sound like something?

  Yours, T.

  He sounds – what? – happy. Well, good. Alice is pleased for him. And yet she cannot do anything about the ache in her chest that forms at the thought of him moving yet further away from her, towards a new life. It is absurd, she knows – she was the one to enact the first separation, after all. But if Alice has learned anything from the previous few years it is that feelings are not rational, and cannot always be suppressed in the way one might like.

  41

  ‘What is it you do,’ asks Sophie De Rosier, ‘on the days you don’t come here?’

  ‘I type, sometimes, for a writer … but he can’t pay me. I also waitress at the Bistro Fourrier, though I’m not particularly good at it.’

  ‘That won’t do,’ Sophie tells her. ‘You must be horribly bored – you’re far too intelligent for waitressing. You should have somewhere interesting to work.’

  Alice shrugs. ‘It pays for my lodging – and there doesn’t seem to be much else about.’

  ‘Well,’ says Sophie, ‘that’s just it. I’ve heard of something that might have opened up.’

  And so, only a few days later, Alice begins a new job at the Dupré Musée d’Archéologie. It is owned by a friend of Sophie’s late father – the two men having studied together at university. Jean Dupré is elderly even beyond his years now, made frail by almost-blindness and the blow of his wife’s death. When he was young, fit and vigorous, Sophie tells Alice, he travelled the world as a self-made archaeologist, sourcing pieces for his collection. This was back in those days when a gentleman of leisure could still dabble in such a pastime as an amateur and hope to have some success.

  Most of the items now housed in the museum were discovered on Dupré’s travels, and many of them are intriguing curios rather than pieces of proper archaeological merit. All the same, they have the power to fascinate.

  Alice’s role used to be performed by Dupré’s daughter, Lucille, who has recently left Paris to live in the South with her new husband and start a family. As a result of Dupré’s incapacity, the de facto running of the museum has for several years been the work of his son, Étienne. Étienne is one of the tallest people Alice has ever seen – a good seven inches over six feet – and also one of the most gentle. He is thin and pigeon-chested, with a disobedient thatch of fairish hair – all of which lends him the appearance of an overgrown teenage boy.

  Then there is Georgette, a student of Ar
chaeology at the Sorbonne, who works as the museum’s archivist to earn her ‘going-out money’. As the daughter of intellectuals, Georgette takes her university education completely for granted. ‘But think,’ she says, ‘what Papa would say if I decided to work in an atelier, or … oh, if I were to get married and do nothing but have babies. He’d be horrified! He’d disown me, most likely.’

  Alice enjoys working with Étienne and Georgette – the one quiet and attentive, the other boisterous, wickedly bright, with a frequently bawdy turn of phrase and a string of inappropriate boyfriends, whose shortcomings she will describe in excruciating detail. But she also enjoys the times, usually first thing in the morning, when she is alone in the museum.

  Early in the day, the air in the museum has a peculiar chill and stillness, hung with motes of dust that stir lazily as she moves through the rooms. Alice has wondered whether the temperature in the rooms is affected by the artefacts themselves – wondered if they carry with them some memory of the cold earth in which they were buried for so long.

  There are the jewels, the earrings and the neckpieces, beautiful and probably once a sign of great wealth, but with a quaintness to them now, due to their handmade lack of symmetry. There are the coins, hammered discs of real gold and bronze, some as large as jar-lids, others no bigger than a thumbnail. Alice loves to look at them: these objects that once represented such power, now valued for their status as relics, rather than anything they might purchase or control.

  There is one skeleton in the museum. She lies in the centre of the last room within a glass cabinet. The remains date, according to the plaque, to the Norman era. She is the gallery’s most precious exhibit. She was discovered in an unmarked grave near Caen – shallower than the norm, and at some distance from the nearest church. A worse burial than would have been accorded to the poorest serf. Yet the ring found on her finger – a piece of incredible delicacy, set with a precious stone – would suggest that she was once a noblewoman. The plaque that introduces her speculates that she might have brought disgrace upon her family, with some ignominious act that could not be forgiven: a child born out of wedlock, perhaps. Or that she ran away and died alone, far from her own people, and this burial was provided as an anonymous courtesy. Georgette doesn’t like her and avoids going into the room, but Alice finds an odd sort of sanctuary here, alone in the early morning, and a strange sense of peace.