The Book of Lost and Found

by Lucy Foley

  Alice understands. ‘Who’s yours?’

  ‘My little girl, Thais.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  For the first time, Alice sees Berthe unsure of herself. ‘I don’t know. I told her to go straight to the nearest church if there was trouble.’

  ‘I’m sure she would have done it,’ Alice says, for reassurance. Then, because she has been wondering: ‘Why are you here?’

  Berthe gives a humourless smile. ‘A man came to see me. He asked me to do something that I don’t do, so I told him it wasn’t on the menu. Then he tried to make me do it, so I bit him, here.’ She taps her cheekbone. ‘There was a lot of blood,’ she adds, with unmistakable relish. ‘It turned out he was SS – an Oberführer – and the next day they came to pick me up. I never had a chance to check on Thais, because they came for me at work.’ Her eyes are black in the low light, unblinking.

  ‘I’m sure she will be all right,’ Alice tells her, as confidently as she can. She tries a smile, but the muscles of her face seem to have forgotten the expression. ‘Especially if she’s like her mother.’

  *

  Alice and Berthe work side by side. Their task is to clear the land of the rocks and stones that pervade the poor soil, preparing it for future propagation. The idea that anything might be expected to grow here is ludicrous. As Berthe says, they must be getting desperate. They work with broken spades and shovels, wheelbarrows with no wheels.

  Every day, another handful of women will survive the torturous roll call only to be ground out several hours later in the frozen earth. Apparently, it could be worse. There are rumours of processing plants where the fumes cause slow blindness; of munitions factories in salt mines, where the chemicals eat into the skin and weather it away in layers, leaving weeping sores that refuse to heal. Perhaps it is preferable to die in the air, in nature, beneath this endless sky? Or perhaps it is all the same, in the end.

  They are ordered to work in complete silence, and contraventions are punishable by a day cleaning the latrines, or the floor of the infirmary, which, even more surely than anything else here, equals death. Yet they have become skilled at the art of communicating without detection. It is worth the risk. Alice does not know how she would survive the day without conversation.

  When the nearest guard to them has made his progress along the line to the furthest point away from them that he can get, Berthe whispers, ‘Who’s yours?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know, like Thais is mine.’

  ‘Oh.’ Alice, suddenly, isn’t sure that she wants to say. She feels, irrationally, that to mention his name aloud in this stinging air might taint those memories of him that are so precious. But she must. Berthe, after all, has offered up her daughter.

  ‘His name is Tom.’

  ‘Your lover? I know that he can’t be your husband.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of the way you say his name. I’ve never met a woman yet who speaks of her husband with such a tremor in her voice.’

  ‘All right. Yes, he was. And my friend.’

  They fall silent as the uniformed figure makes his way back down the line. Later, Berthe revisits the subject.

  ‘Tell me about him, then, your Tom.’

  ‘It’s complicated.’

  Berthe nods. ‘I can understand complicated.’ She gives an odd smile. ‘I wasn’t always a whore, you know.’

  Alice looks at her, deciding. Berthe will understand, she realizes. She is aware, too, that this may be her only chance to tell anyone. ‘I don’t think I’d ever loved anyone before him,’ she says. ‘I mean any sort of love. My father and my brother, perhaps, but they died when I was a child. I know, if I get out of this place, that Tom’s the person I want to spend my life with.’

  ‘So what was the problem?’

  ‘There was a child …’

  ‘Ah,’ Berthe says, knowingly. ‘He didn’t want you to have it?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. He didn’t know that it was his.’

  Berthe seems unconvinced. Alice can almost read her thoughts: there’s not knowing, and then there’s choosing not to know. She is quick to explain. ‘I told him it was someone else’s.’

  ‘Even though you were almost sure it was his?’

  ‘Even though I knew it had to be his. He was the only one.’

  ‘Why? You were scared of how he would react?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so – though not in the way you might think. If I’d told him the truth, he would have given up everything – all his hopes and ambitions – in order to provide for us. I could never have forgiven myself.’

  ‘Sounds like a saint.’

  ‘Not a saint, no. Just a very good man. Then the baby died, so there was even less reason to tell him. Or so I thought. But having that secret from him … it has made it difficult to imagine a future for us.’

  ‘You have to tell him, you know,’ Berthe says. ‘Can’t go keeping things like that from the person you love.’

  ‘I know.’ I will, thinks Alice. If I survive this, I will tell him. Then we’ll start anew.

  58

  Poland, November 1943

  Every few weeks, a new consignment of women arrives at the camp. Usually, enough prisoners have died in the interim for there to be space to accommodate the influx. The new ones are easy to identify. They may have become underweight and unkempt wherever they have been before, but they are never as malnourished, as grey-skinned, as ridden with sores as the women who have been here for several weeks.

  Alice watches the new arrivals being marched through the gates. Something about one of the women gives her pause. It is the tug of familiarity, she realizes, looking closer. Then she understands. It is Marcelette, the beautiful child. She is quite changed, now. ‘Marcelette?’ Alice calls, incredulous.

  The girl starts, seeing her, and hangs her greasy head. Alice moves a little closer, making certain. ‘Marcelette – is it you?’ She tries to make eye contact, but Marcelette refuses to look up. Alice goes to her. She takes hold of the thin shoulders and feels that the girl is trembling like an animal caught in a trap.

  ‘Marcelette, please! Talk to me. Are you ill?’ All the time, she is thinking: is it a fever? She has heard talk of a cholera outbreak. She presses her palm to the girl’s forehead, expecting to find it livid with heat, and is surprised by its coolness. So, not a fever after all. Yet the girl’s trembling is getting worse. Then a terrible sound – a howl – rips from her. It isn’t just a sound, though: Alice hears words too, incoherent though they may be.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Alice says, as calmly as she is able. ‘What is it that you’re trying to tell me?’

  Marcelette’s voice drops to something less than a whisper. Alice strains to hear, and this time the words are unmistakable: It was me.

  ‘What was …?’ Alice looks at the girl again, and suddenly understands.

  The story spills from her – terrible, inevitable. ‘It was Julien,’ she says. ‘They came to me – they found me out. They told me that they had him, but they said if I could give them names …’ She trails off.

  ‘What, what did they say?’

  ‘They promised that they would let him go. They’d arrange for us both to travel to the Free Zone, to help us to leave France.’

  Alice stares at her, in pity and fury. ‘And you believed them, Marcelette? You actually thought they would do that?’

  The girl gives a miserable shrug. ‘I loved him,’ she says, simply. ‘I would have done anything.’

  59

  New York, September 1986

  ‘I don’t want to talk much more about that place. I lost three years of my life to it,’ Alice said. ‘It isn’t that I’m not able to, you understand. It’s the fact that, with the worst things, merely to speak of them is to allow some of their taint to seep back into the world. Do you see?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘But … one last thing, if you don’t mind my asking. How did
you survive?’

  ‘There wasn’t anything noble about it,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t any braver or any stronger than those who died. I was luckier, perhaps. That my sores didn’t spread and fester as some did. That I didn’t get properly ill until the end, as we were about to be liberated. It was what they call lockjaw.’ I must have looked blank, so she explained: ‘Tetanus.’

  ‘But that’s fatal, I thought.’

  ‘Often, yes – if it is allowed to progress. Again, I was fortunate. We were already with the Polish Red Cross when I started showing symptoms. The doctors knew what it was straight away. They’d seen enough cases in men at the front.’

  The camp had been liberated in January but Alice hadn’t been fit to travel until May. When she was out of danger, she had been taken with a group of others to recover on a farm in Sweden. ‘We stayed with an elderly couple. They fed us cream and eggs and fish … things that had been difficult to come by, even when we were free. Back in that place, I had tormented myself dreaming of such food – but when it came to it, it seemed so rich that I almost couldn’t stomach it. They were so kind, our hosts, but all I wanted was to go and find him.’

  60

  London, March 1946

  Alice makes her way along Upper Street. She is aware of the strange figure she cuts. She has not yet regained a healthy weight, and her form floats in the too-large dress and coat – donations from her Swedish hosts. Her skin is greyish, her hair thin and lank. She has never been vain, but she avoids the reflections of shop windows all the same.

  All about her is the evidence of the bombing. Yawning craters expel powdered mortar on to the wind. They are building sites now, and men crawl over the rubble, working busily with picks and shovels. Alice hurries her step. She cannot allow herself to entertain the possibility that Tom’s home may, at this moment, be spilling on to the street in a mess of masonry and glass.

  It is Rosa who answers the door. She is unmistakable: the wide-set blue eyes, the chin with its unusual dimple and even the seraphic dark-gold hair are unaltered since childhood. Forgetting how she herself has changed, Alice waits for some sign of answering recognition from her. None comes.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Rosa asks.

  ‘Is … Thomas Stafford here?’

  Rosa shakes her head. ‘No, he isn’t, I’m afraid. He’s in Corsica. What is it about?’

  Alice can’t be sure exactly why she does it. Perhaps it is the humiliation of not being recognized, of realizing how much she must have changed. Or perhaps it is that she doesn’t feel like Alice Eversley any more – as though the last vestiges of the person she was were sloughed away in that place.

  ‘My name is Célia,’ she says. ‘I’m a friend of Tom’s. I wanted to ask …’ She stalls. What is it, exactly, that she wants to know? ‘I wanted to ask … is he well?’

  Alice can feel Rosa’s curious gaze upon her. ‘Would you like to come inside for a cup of tea?’

  When they are both sitting at the kitchen table Rosa, who has been studying Alice’s face with new scrutiny, says, ‘I’m sorry … but what did you say your name was?’

  ‘Célia.’

  ‘Because, you know, looking at you again I could have sworn …’ She shakes her head. ‘It must simply be a likeness. You remind me of someone I knew ever so long ago. Look,’ she places a sponge cake on the table between them. ‘Can I offer you a slice? I hope you don’t mind me saying, but it seems you could do with it.’

  Alice looks down at herself. It is still a shock to her, when she glances down and sees this frail, stranger’s form: the wasted limbs and flattened chest; the body, to all intents and purposes, of an elderly woman. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I’ve been unwell.’

  ‘So you’ve come about Tom.’ Rosa takes a bite of her cake. As she chews, Alice sees the dimple in her round cheek show itself, exactly as it had when she was a child. It had fascinated Alice at the time, this small detail. Rosa had always had an expressive face, and the mark had seemed to Alice like much-needed punctuation for the capricious play of emotion across her features.

  ‘Yes,’ she remembers to say, as Rosa looks up and catches her staring.

  ‘How did you say you know him?’

  Alice thinks quickly. ‘From … New York. We met in New York.’

  ‘Ah. He’s all right, which is a relief. He got some shrapnel from a shell in his leg – in the shin, but he’s recovered well. But he wasn’t quite himself when he came back from France.’ Rosa lowers her voice. ‘My father had some … trouble, after the Great War, so we feared the worst.’

  Alice strains to maintain an expression of friendly concern – the sort that an acquaintance should feel – without letting her real anxiety for Tom show through.

  ‘Still, it all seems to have worked itself out now. He took himself off to Corsica – I think he’d spent some time there before the war.’

  Alice is already reaching for her coat and bag. Corsica. She should have known he would return there.

  ‘And,’ says Rosa, blithely, ‘he seems to have got himself married, of all things. Ma was hurt that we weren’t invited, but in the circumstances I suppose—’ She breaks off and stares at Alice. ‘But my dear woman … is something the matter?’

  61

  New York, September 1986

  ‘I don’t know what made me lie,’ Alice told me. ‘Whether it was some instinct of self-preservation, some idea of what I might discover … I’m not certain. I was glad that I hadn’t told the truth, when it came to it.

  ‘So you see, I had a rather bad time of it in London, in the end.’ She said it lightly, but I could only imagine how eviscerating it would have been, to discover that the man you loved had given himself to someone else.

  Should I tell her that he had come looking for her? I wasn’t sure. Before I could decide she had continued, and the opportunity was lost.

  ‘My next visit,’ she said, ‘was to the address in Hampstead that Sophie had given me for her friends. When I arrived there, I discovered that the De Rosiers had never arrived. I’d spent the war imagining them safe in England, but they had never left France.

  ‘With hindsight, it is easy to see that they were cutting it too fine. They hadn’t the right papers, which would always have caused problems, but they were unlucky, too. The last telegram that Sophie’s cousin had from them said that they’d stopped at a hotel in Montoire overnight. As they slept, all of the fuel was stolen from the tank of their car, so they would have to continue on foot.

  ‘That telegram was the last anyone heard from them.’

  ‘That’s awful.’ Even as I spoke the words, I was hopelessly aware of how inadequate they sounded. ‘What happened to the children?’

  ‘They had got to England, thank goodness, thanks to Sophie’s foresight in sending them on ahead. I was so happy to see them that I wept. Marguerite has told me since that they didn’t recognize me at first – emaciated and altered as I was – so it must have made an alarming sight.’

  ‘Marguerite?’

  ‘Ah, but you’ve met Marguerite – I forget. She’s Sophie’s daughter. She resembles her mother so closely that at times I find it hard to believe it isn’t Sophie I’m looking at, even though she’s older now than her mother was when I knew her.

  ‘When Aunt Margaret died, not long after the war, she left me rather a sum. I didn’t want to take it at first, you understand. I had been happiest in my life when I had been at my poorest. I didn’t see how money could improve my lot in any way. But then I realized what I could do with it. I could afford to support Marguerite and her brother Antoine – and so I became their guardian. I already loved them almost as my own.

  ‘So we returned to Paris, the three of us. We didn’t know anywhere else to be – it was our home. Besides, we had to go back: because otherwise it would have been as though they had taken that from us, too.’

  Alice smiled, and I could see how tired she was, though undoubtedly unwitting to admit it. I began to make my excuses.

  ‘You
will come to the gallery tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, I’d like that.’

  ‘Good.’ She seemed very pleased by this.

  On my way back to the subway, I couldn’t stop thinking about that ill-fated trip she had made to Islington, only to find out that the man she loved was lost to her for good. And then to Hampstead … I felt – it’s difficult to explain – infected by her grief, as though it had got right underneath my skin. I wanted to call Oliver, to talk to him about it. I hesitated outside a payphone, doing the calculations. It would be the small hours of the morning in France, I realized, so I carried on my way.

  Back in my hotel room, I thought about Oliver, realizing that I hadn’t heard anything more from him since that last short message. Was he, now that we were apart, realizing that it was too soon for him after all? Was he beginning to have doubts? I don’t, I said to myself, twisting the pillow in my hands. I don’t have any doubt. But is that enough?

  62

  New York, September 1986

  The gallery was off East 64th Street. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but the building was far grander than I could have imagined. My first thought was that it was like some great, white, secular temple. Beautiful, and stirring, in its starkness.

  Alice was waiting for me in the foyer, a lofty, sunlit atrium. She wore one of her characteristic brightly patterned silk scarves, and her white hair seemed almost to reflect its colours. She was pleased, I thought, but there was something else too. It was with some astonishment that I realized she seemed nervous.

  Within the atrium the light had an incredible quality, as though it were being filtered through the spray of a waterfall, and I realized that the effect came from the great glass panels that surrounded it. They were like no stained-glass windows I had ever seen, the pattern an abstract of green and blue leaf-like shapes.