The Book of Lost and Found

by Lucy Foley

  It was the Metropolitan Opera. The night I recalled was the first evening of the Royal Ballet tour – a series of short, radically experimental different parts that Mum had choreographed. Now I could remember her apprehension and excitement: she had been uncharacteristically nervy and breathless, almost childlike. It was a big gig for her, and – I have heard it suggested – the one that cemented her reputation as more than just an exceptional dancer.

  At the time I had been too young to recognize it, but now I understood how much courage it must have taken. Mum could quite easily have rested on her laurels: she had made more money in her years as Prima, she had said once, than was ‘quite sensible’. Then I thought of Alice, remaining in Paris despite all that called her away. Alice’s was a different manifestation of bravery, certainly: a more momentous, newsworthy sort. Nevertheless, it was of the same stock. I knew, innately, that Mum would have stayed too. I saw in that instant how like one another they were: how steadfast in their ways – even to a fault. Would I have stayed? I did not want to examine it too closely.

  On the far side of the road stood a mother and her small daughter, looking up, like me, at the building. I blinked at them stupidly, wondering if this too was an illusion borne from memory. But no, this was real. They were part of a crowd of people, in truth, but they were the only ones I saw. The child spoke and the mother bent down to hear. As surreptitiously as I could, I took my camera from my bag and framed the shot.

  47

  Paris, June 1940

  Paris is a changed place: a ghost town.

  Georgette says that she is staying put, as are her parents, even though they have been living with friends since a rare night-time visit from the Luftwaffe destroyed one wing of their house. The damage included Georgette’s own room. ‘I was out with my boyfriend Jean when it fell,’ she says. ‘My parents think he’s a no-hoper, but even they couldn’t argue that it was a good thing I went out with him that evening.’

  Étienne, too, will remain. He would never leave the museum – Alice sees that. It is as much his as his father’s, if not more so – a part of him. He worries, though, about the exhibits: ever since the raids started he has been carrying the most precious pieces down into the basement. ‘Like a squirrel,’ laughs Georgette to Alice, rather unkindly, ‘rushing about with his tuft of hair bobbing, his arms full of goodies.’

  Madame Fourrier is staying, though this comes as no surprise – she is as permanent a fixture on the Left Bank as the Panthéon itself. But leaving Fourrier’s each day, Alice finds fewer people on the pavements, less bread in the bakery – and in the épicerie where she gets her groceries the few vegetables are spotted with age. Cats and dogs that have been left behind forage in packs, yowling in the evenings. Two days ago a herd of cows was seen grazing on the marigolds in the Tuileries, having wandered in from some deserted outlying farm.

  One evening, on her way back from the museum, Alice passes a salon from which the music of a gramophone bleeds out into the empty street; inside, the coiffeur and his clients banter and gossip as though nothing were amiss. Alice has cut her hair herself for a decade, but she is so encouraged by the normality of the scene that she goes in and asks for a trim, an excuse to be surrounded by the laughter and the companionship.

  * * *

  12 June 1940

  * * *

  Dearest A STOP Back in London STOP Staying with Rosa in Islington STOP Signing up tomorrow STOP I love you Alice

  * * *

  The telegram reaches her just in time, before the silence falls.

  At first she decides to keep it with all of her other treasured things, in the drawer with the newspaper cuttings. Then she changes her mind: she will keep it with her, like a talisman.

  They say that they are but a day or so away. Tall plumes of smoke seep into the sky from the factories, ablaze, on the outskirts of the city. This waiting is the worst part. The silence in the streets is even more profound now, with a new intensity to it: the potent quiet of an indrawn breath.

  They will come, perhaps this evening, perhaps tomorrow, first thing. Alice imagines that she can sense them there, circling the city like wolves surrounding a cottage, misting the windows and breathing through the letterbox.

  And then they arrive. Alice, Étienne, and Georgette hear the rumbling of the tanks from the museum, and head to the Champs-Élysées to watch. They hear too the incoherent trumpet of a man’s voice, amplified by a loudspeaker. This sudden hubbub is all the more marked in comparison to the hush that has descended over the rest of the city, like a child shouting in an empty playground. When they reach the Champs-Élysées they see the crowds. They throng along either side of the road in two thick ribbons, watching as the tanks and foot soldiers move past them in weird pageantry. They look, at first, like spectators at a bicycle race. Only there are no cheers here, merely that great, collectively held breath and, every once in a while, a hastily stifled sob. All except for one woman, who, forgetting where she is, begins to clap, then remembers herself and looks about in apologetic mortification.

  It is almost a relief that the moment has finally come. For weeks, and especially the last few days, the city has waited, crouching, fearful, for the next turn of the screw. Now the thing they have feared is before them. And it is strange, because the German soldiers don’t look like men of war. Most of them look like boys: sunburnt, flushed with excitement; the wolves of Alice’s imagining were far more terrible. Some of them even behave like performers in a pageant, smiling down as they pass by – giving the occasional wave. ‘Like schoolchildren on a trip,’ Georgette mutters. Somehow these soldiers are far worse to behold than those who scowl. Alice feels outraged by these smirking boys, gliding past as they survey their new home. It is robbery, in broad daylight. It isn’t their city. It is hers, and Georgette’s and Étienne’s; it is Sophie’s and her family’s. How can something like this be permitted to happen? ‘It can’t be allowed,’ she thinks, before realizing that she has spoken it: a whisper, but audible to Georgette, who turns and looks at her.

  It is two weeks before Alice sees Georgette again. Georgette has never been away from the museum for so long before, but things are different in war – people do not keep to their usual itineraries. Nonetheless, Alice is relieved when Georgette does eventually appear at the museum, flushed from riding her bicycle.

  ‘The pigs,’ she fumes, throwing down her bag. ‘As if it weren’t enough to sit in our cafés and steal our petrol and food, they seem to think it’s all right to whistle at you as you cycle past. I nearly stopped and thumped him.’

  ‘Thank goodness you came to your senses before you could.’

  ‘Part of me regrets that I didn’t. By the way, have you heard?’ she says, disgustedly. ‘They’ve only gone and draped the bloody tower itself with swastikas.’ She laughs, drily. ‘Though at least they had to work for it. The lifts were blocked off, so they had to climb up the sides. Wish they’d fallen off.’ She looks around to check they are alone, and drops her voice. ‘What was it you said, the other day? “It can’t be allowed.”’

  ‘Yes … but I didn’t intend to say it aloud.’

  ‘Did you mean it? Did you say it for … oh, something to say? Or did you mean you want to do something about it?’

  ‘Both, I think. I would want to act if I were able—’

  Georgette cuts her off. ‘What if you could?’

  ‘Well, certainly, but I don’t see …’ Alice stops to watch Georgette rummaging furiously in her bag. She pulls out a notepad, tears off a leaf and scribbles something on it before handing it to Alice. ‘Read that.’

  Alice does. It is the name of a bookshop, an address, a date and time.

  ‘Do you know the place?’

  ‘I’ve never been there, but I know the street.’

  ‘Can you remember this address?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’ Georgette plucks the piece of paper back. She draws a box of matches from her bag and, with something of the theatrical, sets
it alight, letting the flakes of ash fall to the floor. ‘I’ll see you there.’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘Just come along.’

  It is strange, thinks Alice, the way a smell stirs the memory far more powerfully than an image, or a sound. Sitting in the dimly lit basement of an antiquarian bookshop in the Quartier Latin early one evening, she is transported to the library at Winnard Cove. It is the smell of old leather and paper, of accumulating dust. Oddly enough, to Alice this is the scent of the summer, of childhood. She was too young to read properly then, but she could sit and look at the pictures in Lord Eversley’s books – of ships and continents and shelves of ice – while her father worked.

  She remembers the sound of the breaking water outside and the screeching of the gulls sounding so faintly through the old stone and glass that they could have been portents of another reality. Alice’s mother never entered the library. She claimed that the dust made her cough and wheeze, but Alice wondered, thinking on it later, whether it was because the place reminded her of her well-hidden ignorance.

  Sometimes, Archie would join them, picking up a volume, leafing his way quickly through. But he seemed to find the air, the very fact of being inside, stifling. After quarter of an hour he’d throw down the book, almost as though it had offended him in some way, and stride from the room. He could never be still for long. How strange to think of him forever stilled, enclosed in a tomb of Flanders mud.

  The atmosphere in this basement, of course, is utterly unlike the quiet and repose of the Eversley library. The air feels charged with the tightly coiled expectation of its occupants. Most of those gathered here are students, in their early twenties, and it is with a shock that Alice realizes that she is no longer young herself, but some undefined, in-between age. Georgette and Étienne – he too has been persuaded along – sit nearby. Her eyes move from them to the new faces. There is a handsome young man, his hair slicked against his skull with grease, as is the current fashion among the students. ‘Anton,’ murmurs Georgette, following Alice’s gaze. The marked indifference of her tone is a clear sign of her special interest in him. Next to him sit a couple of girls of around the same age, leaning forward on their seats – apparently impatient to begin. They, like Georgette, wear almost identical, thick-lensed glasses that do nothing to mask the freshness of their complexions. ‘Danielle and Berthe,’ Georgette clarifies. ‘I don’t know him’ – this directed at a quiet-looking man in a trenchcoat – ‘or her.’ Georgette gestures at perhaps the most surprising attendee: a middle-aged woman sitting on her own. She wears a suit of pale tweed and clutches a finely made handbag to her chest, as though afraid to set it on the dusty floor. She looks rather ‘Right Bank’ – and absolutely out of place.

  Before Alice can consider her further, the man in the trenchcoat stands up and introduces himself. His name is Yves, he tells them. He is small and extremely slight, and the outsized coat is aged, possibly old army-issue. He can be no older than forty, but his dishwater-brown hair is thinning severely across the pate and the skin sags tiredly beneath his eyes. He speaks, though, with a quiet confidence – a natural assumption of authority – and it is apparent that they are to consider him their leader. He looks at each of them in turn, assessing. He has, he says, the greatest confidence in them. He believes they will do their part for France. He is modest about his own experience, though it is clear that it is extensive. The Parti Communiste Français; activities for the Front Populaire; communications with Russian revolutionaries. He has been, he tells them with quiet pride, an activist his entire adult life.

  At the next meeting their roles begin to crystallize. Yves has arranged for some false papers to be made up. Alice receives hers and sees that her backstory has been cleverly chosen, that the details to a large extent match her own, while differing in the essentials. Her name is Célia, an anagram of her own name but different enough, her surname is Mertenat, and she grew up in Martinique, which accounts for any oddities of accent. When her parents died, she came to France and then to Paris to look for work as a governess, but her previous employers left the country after war was declared, necessitating her move to the museum. The quality of the documents impresses her too – they are indistinguishable from the real thing as far as her inexpert eye can establish.

  ‘Why do we need false documents?’ Georgette asks. ‘It isn’t as though most of us are wanted men and women.’

  ‘They are for your own protection – and that of those you hold dear. If they were to catch you, and discovered details of a mother, father, sister … they could use your love for them against you. You understand?’

  Georgette nods.

  ‘The best agents are those with no family, with nothing to lose. So we must approximate that as closely as we can with fictional relations … those who can never be harmed.’

  Shortly, Yves moves on to the leaflets the group has been distributing, which consist of anti-German propaganda, articles, advice for the occupied Parisians.

  ‘Georgette has done a good job so far,’ he tells them. ‘But we need to think in terms of greater reach. We have to produce at least a hundred times the number we have been circulating to have any real impact.’

  ‘We should look for someone to type the articles,’ says Georgette. ‘There isn’t time to write them all out by hand, and after a while your hand gets so tired you can’t manage anything but a scrawl that no one can read.’

  ‘I can type.’ Even as she says it, Alice wonders whether she will regret having spoken. She hasn’t decided for certain whether she wants to be a part of this. Certainly, she dislikes the fact of the occupation as much as anyone here, but she isn’t one of them, she isn’t a Communist. She didn’t put all her faith in the Front Populaire, has never felt that the answer to the country’s ills lies in looking towards the Soviet Union, as Yves does. Alice doesn’t believe in anything as rigidly defined as socialism. She believes simply in liberty. Yet perhaps all that is important is that they have at least that one common end: the expulsion of the Nazis.

  Georgette grows animated as she thinks it through. ‘Yes – Alice can type them at home, and we can copy them in the museum. There’s a mimeograph machine in the basement. I can find out how to operate it.’

  Alice turns to her. ‘But Étienne? He’s almost always in the museum. He’d notice something.’

  Georgette raises an eyebrow. ‘You think so? I reckon I could shimmy in there wearing Josephine Baker’s bananas and it would go unremarked.’

  Alice thinks of the silent intensity with which Étienne watches Georgette’s every move and suspects otherwise. ‘I don’t know, Georgette. He sees more than you think.’

  ‘Fine. Then we’ll bring him in on it.’

  Alice is wary. She can’t imagine Étienne wanting anything other than a quiet life. It isn’t that he appears cowardly, exactly, more that he is so gentle, so sanguine. Georgette, however, seems determined on her course.

  The next morning she beards Étienne in his den, striding straight into his office and closing the door, coming out triumphantly an hour later. ‘He’s in. He even wants to help. He says he’ll come to the next meeting with us.’

  The typewriter they find Alice is an ancient Remington, and the keys feel odd to her – stiffer, less sensitive than those of the Corona. The ‘e’ key sticks, so that she has to strike it with extra force, and sometimes, even then, it doesn’t register. She practises first on paper, with typewriter ink. Then comes the precious mulberry paper to make the stencils, with its thin curd of wax. The typewriter ribbon is removed so the bare metal of the keys can strike the paper directly, punching the letter-shaped holes that the ink will occupy.

  Alice sits late into the night at the Remington, the pile of handwritten articles next to her. She has become adept at recognizing the different hands, the different styles. Some are more politicized than others, exhorting the reader to look to Russia, to embrace the revolutionary cause. Others, such as one pamphlet called 33 Conseils à l’occupé, sp
eak of the shame of living in one’s own country as a second-class citizen, of having to defer to the authority of the occupying power. They ask the French people to resist in the small ways that are available to them. Not disobedience, but not cooperation either. Refusing to smile at the German soldiers, giving vague or misleading directions when asked. Treating them, in the shops and restaurants, with civility but never friendliness or deference.

  She works with squares of black paper stuck to the windowpanes. The bombing raids are no more, but the night-time curfew is strictly enforced, and a light in the early hours of the morning, however dim, could draw the wrong sort of attention. She lives on three or four hours of sleep, now, but the museum is so quiet these days that there is often time for a half-hour’s rest in the elderly armchair in Étienne’s office. In the mirror above the washstand each morning she appears tired and wan, but determined, too. It is undoubtedly the work of her imagination, but her features seem more resolute, the face of someone with a purpose, with a secret of great power.

  At twilight – that time of day when things can slip more easily beneath notice, Alice and Georgette do their rounds of the city. They put leaflets through doors, in bus shelters, on the benches in the Metro stations. Their movements are sure and practised – both can now boast a sleight of hand to rival any pickpocket’s. They are masters of the moment, the snatched opportunity. Alice has learned to arrange her features into an expert pretence of studying a timetable, or examining one of the new German notices as she ferrets the papers from her bag and scatters them in plain sight.

  People do get caught, though. No one from their particular group, but Alice has seen it happen. She’s seen a teenage boy beaten to the ground with a truncheon, papers spraying from his hands like so much confetti, and hauled into a waiting car. Driven away to no one knows where – but there are rumours of hostages, of prison camps, of daylight murder.