The Book of Lost and Found

by Lucy Foley

  She takes a deep breath and stirs her coffee with her free hand to focus her mind on his words, not on the delicious friction of his skin upon hers. ‘When do you go?

  ‘In the morning. I have a train ticket to Marseilles.’

  Alice thinks. The De Rosier family is holidaying in Provence: they will be there for the whole of August, as is their tradition. The museum is quieter than ever in this empty season, and there is no question that Étienne, Georgette and old Monsieur Dupré will survive without her. The American writer is visiting with friends in Marrakech. Then she thinks of her conversation with Madame De Rosier the previous morning: the feeling of vague, unspecific dread that she had carried with her for the rest of the day. She is struck by the thought that she must not let this chance pass her by.

  ‘All right.’

  He looks so astonished by this that she laughs. ‘You thought I wouldn’t say yes?’

  ‘Not exactly. I hadn’t quite dared hope that you would.’

  The train south is an exercise in self-control. They sit with their knees touching as the carriage grows ever more crowded with passengers, rather than emptying as might be hoped. Alice tries to focus on the newspaper she bought at the kiosk in Paris but realizes that though she has looked at every page she has not read a single word.

  Corsica is sun and dirt and herbs. It takes a few minutes, stepping queasily off the boat from Marseilles, for Alice to appreciate it fully, this vertebra of rock protruding from the placid green wash of the Mediterranean.

  The cottage is a former peasant’s dwelling. Two rooms: an upstairs and a downstairs, not much larger than Alice’s room at Bistro Fourrier, but it is sufficient for their needs. The view of the sea, which is almost limitless, more than compensates for any lack of space.

  On that first day they go immediately to the beach, picking their way along the coastal path that skirts the cliffs and then plunges down between them to sea level. The sand is hot underfoot and coarse, reflecting the midday sun with a dull mineral glimmer. There is a small patch of shade in the lee of the rocks where they choose to sit. It is only the two of them and the loud silence of the surrounding beach; the slap and swell of the water, the delicate vibration of the wind.

  In the evening they have supper in a small town outside Bonifacio. The place appears utterly unchanged by the twentieth century: no motor vehicles in sight and fishermen setting out for the night-time catch, oil lamps burning to attract the creatures out of the black depths. Tom sits and sketches the scene, while Alice imagines that the furthermost lights are in fact pirate ships, off to plunder and pillage.

  They eat in the only restaurant available; an unusual meal of sea urchins, surprisingly creamy and delicious, hidden among buttery strands of pasta. All eyes are upon them: the foreigners with the city clothes, but Alice is unaware of anything but the miracle of his face before her, and the secret knowledge of what further pleasures the night will bring. She feels that they are, briefly, outside time, that they have carved out a space for themselves in which they are protected from it. The past – and her lie – the present drama in Europe, the future – and all that it may bring.

  The next day they hire a fishing boat with a peeling green hull that seems barely seaworthy on dry land but sits reassuringly high in the water. The flimsy awning slaps and screeches in a stiff new breeze that has rushed in over the sea without warning. The sea is a deep purple-blue now, stippled with tiny waves.

  Alice relishes the respite from the heat. She sits on the wooden seat near the bow, and between her feet is their lunch basket: bread, boiled eggs and cheese, matter-of-fact Corsican red wine. She licks her top lip and finds a thin crust of salt. Tom sits opposite her, grinning into the wind. Alice explores him secretly with her eyes: she has still not had her fill of looking. The changed shape of him, the sun on his brown hair turning it to gold. He catches her looking and smiles a different sort of smile.

  When they reach the place they haul the boat up the sand behind them to where it will be safe from the swell. The beach is sheltered by two arms of rock on either side and the heat immediately has them in its grip again. They discard their clothes and run into the pale shallows, where shoals of silver fish scatter and re-form.

  Tom doesn’t take his eyes from her, and she feels doubly naked and doubly warmed, his gaze like a second sun. ‘Remember that day, by the lake?’ he says, with an odd urgency.

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘When you came out of the water … I’d never seen anything so beautiful—’

  ‘Tom …’ She is embarrassed by his fervency.

  ‘—but it pained me, too, because I knew that no matter how I tried I could never have captured you as you were, not properly.’

  They return to the cottage in the evening gritty with sand: burned and buffeted by the day spent outside, deliciously tired. They roast a fish whole and watch the smoke rise up and mingle with the purple dusk. In the distance are the lights of Bonifacio, the dark headland. Gradually the light fades further into velvet blackness and the stars begin to show themselves. It is a clear sky and they appear so bright that the man-made lights of the city seem like their dull, imperfect reflection.

  ‘We could live here,’ Tom says. ‘One day, when we’re old.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ She doesn’t want to say yes, though, suddenly, she knows that she wants it desperately. To agree, she feels, might be to alert the Fates. But perhaps it could happen, she thinks. It might.

  *

  Overnight, with no warning, the wind grows. They lie in bed listening to it begin to gnaw about them, hearing its eerie exhalation down the chimney. After a while Tom falls asleep, but Alice lies awake in the crook of his arm, breathing in the scent of his skin that is unique to him, and so beloved to her. She does not say it aloud, but the wind unnerves her. It is the inevitability of it, perhaps, that makes her think of those other inarguable forces: fate, time. Try as she might, she cannot help but read some sort of message in it. It has discovered them in what she thought was their safe, separate place. Nothing stays still, it says: not air, not sand, not one moment stretched greedily between two lovers. Life is movement and violence.

  By dawn the wind is howling in from the sea, whistling through the roof tiles, drumming against the windowpanes. It is astonishing, this violence of thin air. They say the Mistral can send you mad. It is not wise to venture out when it blows. And yet some brave souls do, hunched against the onslaught, driving themselves blindly forwards.

  Alice and Tom are content to stay inside. They spend almost the whole day in bed, lost to everything but each other – the novel and yet familiar delight of each other’s bodies. Tom explores her with his hands and mouth, but it is his gaze that feels warmest of all upon her skin. At one point, almost unnerved by the intensity of his concentration upon her, she laughs. He raises his head and gives a slow smile. ‘I need to prove to myself that you’re real, that it’s not simply another dream.’

  In turn she learns the changed landscape of his body: the coarse new hair upon his chest and those faint freckles along the ridge of his collarbone that seem to her like tiny particles of fallen rust. They must be new, she decides: she cannot see how she could have failed to notice something so distracting before.

  His stubble leaves a pinkish rash across her breasts and the secret blue-white skin of her inner thighs and as even she watches it fade Alice wishes that it would remain like a brand. The strangest thing, but even as he moves inside her, even as she almost completely forgets herself in pleasure, the dread of impending loss follows close behind. It is irrational: he is here with her now, yet it is as though some part of her beyond thinking, a deeper sort of knowing, understands it cannot last.

  They make a simple meal that they eat with their fingers, half-clothed. Alice asks Tom about New York. He tells her more about his life there, speaks of the glamorous excesses of the nightclubs and restaurants he has known, the famous names he has encountered. And he talks about that other side of the city that is
rough and dirty and desperate. The streetwalkers who patrol the streets near his flat with runs in their stockings and broken heels. The Brooklyn neighbourhood he visited where he saw a family rummaging through the contents of the rubbish bins, the children climbing over the refuse like stray cats. It is, as they say, a jungle, a melting pot. Infuriating at times, and exhausting, but the energy of the place is addictive, like no other place on earth. ‘Not even Paris?’ she asks, rather jealously.

  ‘I haven’t spent long enough in Paris to say,’ he says prudently.

  The next morning they wake to a peculiar hush. As quickly as it appeared, the wind is gone. They lie in bed and listen to the silence, their legs tangled together beneath the sheets. Tom brushes the skin of Alice’s back with his fingertips – lightly – up, down, in widening circles. She presses her face deeper into the pillow and revels in the sensation of his touch.

  ‘Come back with me, Alice.’

  She had expected the question, and dreaded it. ‘I can’t,’ she says, knowing it to be true but wishing there were some way to soften the blow for both of them. ‘Not yet, anyway. I have a life in Paris, and there are ties I can’t break quickly. I am needed there, and I like it, Tom – I like being needed.’

  ‘But I need you,’ he says, almost peevishly.

  She tries to smile. ‘Not like that. I mean that I am useful – I have a purpose.’

  ‘So when could you come?’

  ‘In a year, maybe.’

  ‘A year!’ He is appalled.

  ‘It’s not such a long time.’

  ‘But what if you have to?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If war does break out. If France is threatened.’

  ‘It wouldn’t make me leave.’ It is only as she says it aloud that she realizes the truth of it.

  He is exasperated by this. He can’t see the logic in it.

  ‘You’d stay in America, if there was a war?’

  She can see that this has defeated him. He shrugs. ‘No. I wouldn’t want to be so far away, but it’s—’

  ‘Precisely. You’d want to be at home, so that you could do your part, if it were needed. Paris is my home, Tom.’

  He throws up his hands in surrender. ‘You’re infuriatingly stubborn, but part of me can’t help loving you for it.’

  That word – spoken so lightly. And yes, like a powerful, yet subtle, incantation, it has worked its inevitable magic, caused everything to shift.

  44

  New York, September 1986

  ‘It must sound,’ said Alice, ‘as though we were very naïve. That we had no idea of what was around the corner. We understood that the machinery was in motion, that something was coming, even if we didn’t know exactly what … though I knew that the De Rosiers had felt it more than most. And yet …’ she smiled, ‘and yet knowing, in some interior, cleverer part of yourself, isn’t the same as acknowledging it. It’s a sort of arrogance, I suppose. Not believing that it is going to affect you. We could talk about the possibility of war, Tom and I, but we didn’t actually think it would come to us. Because when the war is somewhere else, however much you might try to prepare for its arrival, it isn’t real. There’s something Martha Gellhorn said: “War happens to people, one by one.” That’s exactly it, you see. Until it happens to you, you have no way of understanding it, let alone imagining it. Until then, it is simply a monster under the bed.

  ‘So Tom went back to his life in New York, and I carried on in Paris, certain that I would join him, in the end. I was addicted to the city, to my life there, but I knew that for him I would go anywhere. I only needed some time to say goodbye to it all.’

  ‘But you stayed,’ I said, realizing in that moment that that must be the case. ‘You never left.’

  ‘Yes, I stayed. You see, when it came to it, I couldn’t leave.’

  ‘Were you trapped?’

  ‘No, not exactly. I could have escaped, with all the others that left – before they arrived. But I had already made the decision to stay if it came to it – just as I’d told Tom. Tom liked to tell me that I was brave, but I wasn’t. I’d run away from everything once before. I wasn’t going to run away again.

  ‘If I had known then what it would mean for us, in the end, would I have acted differently? Perhaps, in staying, I was acting not out of courage but from that same arrogance, that belief in one’s own invulnerability. Believing, blindly, that everything would work out all right.’

  Alice cocked her head to one side and regarded me. Then her eyes slid to the waiter moving silently between the tables at the far end of the room. ‘The wine is lovely, in its way, but I think for the next part I have to tell you we could benefit from something stronger.’ She gave a quick, conspirator’s smile. ‘Tell me, my dear. Have you ever tried absinthe?’

  45

  Paris, Late May 1940

  ‘When do you leave?’

  ‘As soon as we have finished packing. In the next couple of weeks, hopefully.’ Sophie makes a twist of her mouth. ‘We had been planning to leave at some point, but I hadn’t thought it would be quite so … so like rats escaping from a sinking ship. It feels horrible, to be running away. But with the children, you know, I think one cannot be too careful.’ She grimaces. ‘I have family in Czechoslovakia, and it has been very bad there. The Führer does not like us, you see.’

  Sophie’s children have already left the city in the company of some of the De Rosiers’ expat friends. Monsieur De Rosier has insisted on staying on for another month. ‘He wanted to tie things up properly,’ Sophie explained. ‘He was loath to leave his employees in the lurch. You know, if he hadn’t seen with his own eyes all those poor people flooding in from the Ardennes, he might never have been persuaded to go.’ Because Monsieur De Rosier, like most other Frenchmen, didn’t believe it would happen. Until the Maginot Line turned out to be as unbreachable as the Titanic was unsinkable.

  Monsieur and Madame De Rosier will go south in the hope of catching a boat from Spain to England. In doing so they will join the line of Parisians and northerners that has straggled out of the city for the last few weeks: a maundering procession of men, women, children, animals – cars, bicycles, horse riders and those on foot, pushing wheelbarrows or prams laden with possessions.

  Anything Sophie cannot take with her, she gives to Alice. Flanders linen that was once part of her bridal trousseau, a library of books – some of them first editions.

  In return, Alice hands over her most valuable possession: a sketch of a woman sitting by a lake: an early Thomas Stafford.

  ‘I will come and collect it from you,’ Alice tells her, ‘when all of this is over. Look after it for me in the meantime, will you? I’d like to know that it’s safe.’

  Sophie studies the drawing closely, and then looks up at Alice with a curious smile. ‘You never cease to surprise me,’ she says. ‘One day, you know, I’m going to force you to tell me all about the real Alice.’

  ‘The problem is, Sophie, I’m so far now from the person I was before that none of it seems real. It would be like telling a fairy tale.’

  Sophie shakes her head. ‘I disagree. I think we carry all of our past selves with us, in tight layers. Somewhere within you is that girl, however many other, new selves you may have grown in the years since. She’s what holds you together, at the very centre.’

  46

  New York, September 1986

  Alice had been tired when I left her at the apartment. She had tried to insist that I stay longer, but the concern in Julie’s expression had told me that there had been enough talking for the day.

  When I returned to the East Village there was a message at reception for me from Oliver, which the desk clerk had transcribed for me: Kate, I hope all is going well. I am thinking of you. O. It wasn’t much, and it had the inevitable dislocation of any message sent via a third party – like a card written in a florist’s hand – but it was enough to lift my spirits. Surely, I thought, this meant that he did not regret what had happened
.

  I had planned to stay at the hotel and while away the rest of the afternoon, but the silence and smallness of my room oppressed me. I wandered out on to the street and then along Broadway, hardly aware of where I was headed but enjoying for the first time the noise and chaos of the city, the purposeful – if directionless – sense of moving forward through the fray.

  At one point I looked about me and realized I was completely lost – though I was strangely unworried by it. I would keep going, I decided, and something must eventually reveal itself to me: I didn’t feel like turning back, anyhow. I came to a huge roundabout, followed it round, and kept walking.

  Suddenly, I glanced to my left and saw, across the lanes of traffic, a building I recognized. The lofty, graceful arches that formed the front; the windows with their geometrical leading: these were as images remembered from a dream. I had a fleeting impression of snow falling thick and silent from the night sky – thicker than I had ever seen it in England – and a white carpet already formed on the pavement, squeaking beneath my booted feet. A memory of light blazing through those tall windows as though a giant fire had been lit within. And I saw Mum, her dark hair drawn back into a chignon and a soft grey shawl wrapped about her. As I drew this image towards me I could even detect the perfume she wore: rich, powdery, enigmatic. It was a scent that I would forever associate with Mum’s ‘evening’ self, clad in one of her many black simple dresses, poised and delicately beautiful, but not without a particular emanation of strength. I grasped for the tail of the memory, tried to force it to reveal itself. Then I saw a sign that had been strung up, and I understood.