The Book of Lost and Found

by Lucy Foley

  *

  The next letter from Tom arrives about a week later.

  9 September 1934

  Dearest A,

  And so I have arrived in New York. It’s been a couple of days on dry land now, but it was a rough crossing and I still feel at times that the ground is listing beneath my feet.

  I say New York, but this may be misleading. When you, as I, imagine New York, I suspect you think of skyscrapers and statues. But I’m not in Manhattan, you see, but a place called Sand’s Point.

  Bloomberg’s family is from Old American Money. The house is spectacular, if incongruously English in aspect: oddly like a Jacobean manor, with plenty of dark wood and leaded glass, and a slightly excessive number of columns and parapets. The important difference, I suppose, is that while it may look centuries old, the essentials (such as plumbing and electricity) are all absolutely state-of-the-art, which means that everything functions with almost disconcerting efficiency.

  Eddie has two young sisters, Lou and Beatty: rather silly creatures who model themselves entirely, it seems, on the Talkie stars they so admire. When I arrived, in fact, Beattie was still reeling from a failed attempt to dye her dark hair Jean Harlow platinum. It had turned, instead, an unfortunate shade of tangerine. They’re amusing enough together, like a comic double-act – only it’s rather disconcerting when one remembers that all of their ridiculousness is not intentionally comical. Lou told me this morning that it was important I sketch her before I leave because ‘a girl is nothing without a man wanting to take her likeness’. A photograph, she told me, would have been preferred, but she would make do with my meagre pen and ink.

  For all the luxury of the house and the grounds, and my hosts’ great generosity and kindness, I can’t wait to get over the water to Manhattan. I can see it across the sound, the skyscrapers like a row of dark teeth against the sky. Tomorrow I am going across to look for lodgings, probably in a neighbourhood that would make poor Mrs Bloomberg faint with horror. Apparently, in this post-crash climate, it’s easy enough to find short-let places on the cheap. I shan’t give the return address here: I intend to be in my new place soon, if I can, and I’ll write as soon as I am.

  Yours, T.

  As promised, the next letter arrives within a few days.

  13 September 1934

  Dearest A,

  I have found the place! It’s perfect for me, small but light, and not too smart, so that I don’t worry as I perhaps should about getting paint on things. It’s in a neighbourhood they call The Village, and I suppose it is rather like a village, as it seems to have an identity of its own separate from that of the city. And you should see the number of journals purely dedicated to the cultural output of this little enclave.

  I live on a street called Bleecker, above an Italian bakery. I wake each morning to the scent of the new bread baking, and the fear that they will sell out of my favourite loaf gets me out of bed and downstairs far more effectively than any alarm clock. There is a German grocer further down, and a Polish barber beyond that, with his pole standing sentinel outside like a giant stick of confectionery. If you go the other way along the street, you meet with an Armenian launderette and a French bistro. So much of Europe is represented on a fifty-yard stretch of this street alone.

  Everyone, it seems – everyone who still has the money to spend on anything other than basic necessities – wants to be seen as a patron of the arts. To be investing in culture, apparently, is a nobler endeavour than buying a racehorse, say, or a racing car – which would be unseemly at a time of such want.

  To be an artist in this city, even an unknown like me, is therefore to carry a sort of passport that allows one to move within the social order as one might not otherwise be able to. I am invited to the most unexpected events and presented to people as ‘the painter’ – despite no one actually knowing my name. I find myself, of an evening, travelling from my modest lodgings to places like the nightclub they call the Elmo, where the wealthy and celebrated recline on zebra-skinned seats, and a single Tom Collins costs more than my neighbour the Polish barber is likely to make in a month.

  For these people, the crash was nothing but an inconvenience – they carry on in much the same way as they did in 1928. Perhaps they order the 1922 vintage rather than the 1910 but probably more out of a desire not to seem extravagant than due to a genuine loss of funds. And nowadays, of course, they’re mainly thankful that they can drink it legally.

  Naturally, some of those dancing on Elmo’s sacred floor are only pretending to be members of this rarefied group. I was first taken there by two Broadway chorus girls who were working as artists’ models in the daytime to make ends meet. They wore their costumes into the club like some sort of uniform and kicked their legs about in a dance called the Lindy Hop. After this performance, they draped themselves over any specimens old and ugly enough to have millions in the bank.

  Always, around every corner, you come face to face with someone who has lost everything. I think it may be something about the road system in New York, which is arranged like a grid. It means that you turn left off an elegant avenue of boutiques and cocktail bars and find yourself on a street where men lie on the sidewalk like so many broken umbrellas. I feel, walking down a street like this, guilty for the shoes on my feet, the coat on my back. I can’t look these men in the eye when I hand over my change, for the fear that they will see a wastrel, a sponge: a man who gave up a perfectly decent job to live a life of decadence and irresponsibility.

  When I see these men, I feel that I should be using my art to make a statement, to deliver a lesson on the wrongs of Capitalism as played out in this city. Instead I am drawn to tell a story. I want to show New York in all its wonder and evil, its colour and darkness.

  I am working better than I have ever worked, here, and the pieces seem to take shape at an astonishing rate. I wake each morning terrified that it will have left me, this new surge of productivity, that I will be wrung out, dried up. But each day the miracle repeats itself. I don’t stop to question why, or where it has come from. To look too closely at it might cause it to flee.

  The works are selling, too. If you can believe it, in a week’s time I will have a show of my own.

  Yours, T.

  42

  New York, September 1986

  We had made a circuit of one end of the park, tracing the edge of the reservoir that is now named after Jackie Kennedy Onassis, and were headed away from the Upper East Side towards Midtown – where Alice said she knew a good French restaurant for lunch.

  The weather had turned grey and the water of the reservoir was a darker reflection of the sky, pinched and ruffled by the breeze. Alice manoeuvred her chair quickly, even impatiently, and I had to walk fast to keep up. I sensed that she had always done everything with great energy, and that she wasn’t going to let old age and frailty get the better of her now. She was frail, though. I could see the blue-white of her scalp through the sparse white hair, the skeletal hunch of her shoulders beneath the enveloping swathe of scarf.

  As we walked she asked about my life with Mum. Where had we lived? What had we liked to do at weekends? Did Mum read – who and what did she read? Did she like art? Music? Aside from the ache of loss, these questions provoked in me a sense of unease because, banal as they were, Alice asked them with such evident hunger.

  ‘I’ve read all the interviews,’ she told me, ‘but, as I’m sure you understand, it isn’t enough.’

  I tried to convey as much as I could – both the big and the little things. I told her how Mum had always seemed to me just as graceful dancing in her slippers as she ever had en pointe. I told her about the times she took me swimming at Tooting Lido and for ice cream afterwards, about how for my fourteenth birthday she baked me a birthday cake, accidentally substituting salt for sugar, then let me drink a whole glass of champagne in compensation – which made Alice laugh. I spoke about the Barbara Morgan show and the darkroom she’d installed for me in the cellar.

  None
of it would be enough, though; I could see that. Knowing her favourite pastimes, the dishes she liked to cook … none of it could be a substitute for having known her, because without that the answers to the questions were all in the abstract.

  As I was thinking this, wondering how she could be blind to the futility of it, Alice said, ‘I hope you don’t mind my prying, but I so enjoy hearing you talk about her. It is as much the way you speak of her, you see, as what you tell me about her. It helps me to understand how much she was loved.’

  There was a long pause, the two of us moving together in companionable silence. Then: ‘You were very lucky,’ Alice told me, ‘to have had that sort of friendship with your mother. Certainly, it may be the difference between generations, too, but I can tell you that that sort of bond is not guaranteed.’

  She had knowledge of the fact first-hand, I thought.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I always thought of her as my best friend.’

  I saw Alice nod. ‘But of course,’ she said softly, ‘that must have made it all the more terrible, when you lost her.’

  I couldn’t quite find the words to answer her, and was glad in that moment that she couldn’t see my face.

  The restaurant was indeed very good – and very French. Inside it was difficult to believe in the American city without. The look of the place was Art Deco: gleaming dark wood and chrome, glass leaded in geometric patterns.

  ‘The original owner left Paris in the thirties,’ Alice told me, ‘and the food is of that time. Perhaps superior, even, to anything I can remember eating there. Back then, though, I would never have been able to afford the better sort of restaurant.’

  A waiter swept over and Alice ordered us each a cocktail called a French 75. ‘There’s nothing especially French about it,’ she explained, ‘except for the champagne. It’s rather good though.’ The drinks came immediately, twinly tall and pale and beautiful, with a waifish curl of lemon rind balanced expertly on the rim. I chose the confit of duck, because it seemed the right sort of thing to eat in a place like that, and Alice had poached trout and creamed spinach.

  We ate in silence for a few moments and then Alice said, ‘So, Kate. You have told me a great deal about your mother and you have already heard much – no doubt far too much – about me. But what about you? Tell me, please, about yourself.’

  I looked at her expectant face, and felt something like despair. ‘I’m not …’ I shrugged, and laughed, rather desperately, ‘I’m not especially interesting. Not like Mum.’ It came out sounding like an apology, which I suppose in a way it was.

  She put her glass down, and her expression was rather fierce. ‘I shall pretend I didn’t hear that,’ she said. ‘I don’t have enough time left to listen to nonsense.’

  ‘Well,’ I gestured, helplessly, ‘I have no great talent, like her.’

  ‘What about your photography?’

  I felt my face grow hot. ‘How do you know about that?’

  ‘It isn’t difficult. Even had you not had the strap dangling from your bag’ – I looked, and saw she was right – ‘I do already know a bit about you. I have, shall we say, kept an eye on things.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well …’ she paused, as though deciding whether or not to continue, ‘I visited your degree show – at the Slade.’

  I stared at her.

  She smiled, almost sheepishly. ‘I work in the art world, Kate – it is a small enough place. I found out about it relatively easily. And I should tell you … I do not come to London often. I didn’t visit the city for a full two decades after I left for Paris.’

  ‘But …’ I was trying to make sense of it, ‘only about fifty people came to the show.’

  ‘I was one of them. Why should you have noticed me? I was a stranger.’

  It was true, I thought. It was only upon closer acquaintance that one understood the ways in which Alice was exceptional. From a distance, she was just another elderly woman.

  Then I thought of something else. ‘The letters. You sent Mum one once a year, every year she performed.’

  She nodded. ‘Yes. Seeing her perform became … rather like a ritual for me – despite it often requiring travel to London. I only permitted myself one such excursion a year. It would have been wrong to do so more often – too much like an obsession. As it was, it became a way of being connected to her, I suppose.’

  Then she changed the subject – perhaps because she could not stand to see the pity on my face. ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘I want to hear more about your photography.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I love it, but sometimes I wonder if I should give it up – get a proper job.’

  Alice looked at me quizzically. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean a proper career … teaching, perhaps – or an office job.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Alice said, ‘if that is what you want. You should not be doing it out of fear though. I once knew a young artist who had exactly the same doubts as you – who had a first-class degree from Oxford, a promising career in Law. He, too, was fearful – and almost convinced – of failure.’

  I nodded. ‘He told me. He told me, too, that he wasn’t particularly good when he started out.’

  She seemed amused by this. ‘Did he? Yes, I can imagine he might have done.’ Her gaze, for a few seconds, grew vague, pensive. Then it snapped back to me. ‘Where are you living, now?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m still in the house I grew up in, in Battersea – where Mum and I, and … ah, Evie, used to live.’

  She digested this, frowning slightly. Then she said, ‘I think that you should leave.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I seem to be getting terribly opinionated in my dotage. We hardly know each other – though to me it doesn’t feel like that – and already I am trying to tell you what to do with your life.’

  She smiled. ‘The beauty of it, of course, is precisely that it is your decision alone what you do with it. Even so … I cannot help feeling that a young woman of your age and talent should not be rattling around on her own in a big house full of memories.’

  ‘I don’t know where else I’d go.’ It sounded particularly feeble, spoken aloud.

  ‘A new city, perhaps? A new country. Is there anywhere you can see yourself living?’

  Paris, I thought immediately, without quite knowing why. It was more a feeling – or rather a constellation of feelings – than anything specific. It was the discovery that, although there were memories there, they had not drained or oppressed me in the way that the memories in the house did. I thought of that vision of the lights on the water, at night, and how I had remembered seeing them with Mum and had – almost – been able to enjoy doing so, rather than finding myself disabled by grief.

  But then I realized that it was where Oliver lived; that it would be impossible. I pushed it from my mind, and shook my head. ‘I’ll think about it,’ I told Alice.

  The waiter returned to clear away our plates, then swept back with a dessert menu.

  ‘I could imagine staying here all day,’ I told Alice, somewhat eager to shift the attention from myself.

  Alice nodded. ‘I have done, before. When I sit in here,’ she told me, ‘I can almost imagine that I am back there – not so much in Paris, because I am there often, but in that time: when everyone was so unsuspecting, still, of what was to come. Naïve, you could say. People thought, with the first war, and then, with the crash, that we’d weathered the worst that could happen.’

  ‘Were you happy?’

  ‘Oh, ever so. I had begun to feel very much at home in the city, and I was busy. For the first time in my life I felt useful. You know the play, Three Sisters?’

  I nodded; only because it had been on the O level syllabus at school.

  ‘Much fun is made of the sister Irina, of her fanciful idea that work will give her life meaning, but I think she is on to something. I have always thought it rather unfair, how disappointed she is by lif
e in the end. Because, if the nature of the work is right, there is great reward to be found. The feeling that one has a place in the world, that one is useful in some small way, is not to be underrated. Perhaps my only regret was in not having someone to share my new happiness with. However there was no one I wanted to share it with, apart from Tom, and I had altered things irrevocably there, I thought.’

  ‘You must have been happy for him, finding success in New York.’

  ‘Yes, I was – I was thrilled. It was the beginning of everything he had hoped for, back when I knew him in 1929. That first exhibition, small as it was, put him on the map. And it is such an extraordinary thing, to witness someone’s dream becoming a reality.’

  That must have been how it was for Evie, I thought then, when Mum had her first successes. It was hard to imagine Mum not being the star she became but just another hopeful. An even stranger thought struck me then – and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t considered it before. If it weren’t for Evie, would Mum have found that path? Perhaps not. In fact, probably not. I wondered if Alice had ever thought of that.

  ‘I wished I could have been there to see it,’ Alice continued. ‘Reading about it in his letters – and increasingly, in the newspapers – made it all feel so far away, hardly real. Once they even printed a photograph of him, and I wished I hadn’t seen it. I don’t know whether it was the haziness of the newsprint, but I felt almost as though I were looking at a stranger.’