by Lucy Foley
Alice followed my gaze. ‘There is a chapel, in a town called Vence, in southern France. The Chapelle du Rosaire. Matisse designed it with windows similar to these. When I visited, I thought it was the most peaceful place I had ever been. I wanted something like that here. I wanted people to come in from the busy, dirty street, and find sanctuary. A cleansing, if you like, of their daily concerns, before they go on to see the art. So I asked Matisse to make me these. I think it works, no?’
I nodded. ‘It does.’ Matisse, I thought. Henri Matisse had made them for her.
We made our way up to the next level. There were no stairs, just a circular walkway that gradually ascended. It was a weekday morning, but the gallery was already quite busy, and many of the visitors seemed to be students, sitting and sketching, taking notes.
Alice gestured to a long row of benches along one wall: ‘I had those put in, so that people could sit and draw, or simply look. There are never enough places to sit in galleries, I find, to relax and look. I don’t want people having to temper their enjoyment of the pieces with backache.’
As we moved past the pieces she reeled off names: ‘Epstein, Stafford, O’Keeffe, Miller, Stafford, Newman, Still, Stafford, Stafford …’ She turned to smile back at me. ‘Do you see something of a pattern forming?’ She hadn’t lowered her voice, and some of the students looked up as she passed with expressions from amusement to irritation. ‘They think I’m some mad old lady,’ she said, gleefully.
I craned for a look at each piece by Stafford. There were several of the New York night-time scenes he had spoken of: the colours slightly blurred as though viewed through rain. Scenes of Corsica from the Maison du Vent, scenes I knew so well and that, I realized, Alice would never necessarily have known first-hand. That thought gave me pause.
Alice was urging me on. ‘We’ll go to my office, so that we can talk properly.’
It was less like an office than another elegantly appointed drawing room, and there was no desk in sight: merely a vast glass table in the centre, strewn with books and attended by two armchairs. More books were stacked upon shelves that spanned the length and breadth of one wall. The windows of the exterior wall were the same stained blue and green glass as the atrium. The remaining two walls were covered with artworks.
They were, by and large, simple monochrome studies in pencil, ink and charcoal. All Stafford’s. Some were of New York, but many were from an earlier period, as proven by the handwritten dates.
‘They’re all his.’ I moved along the wall, studying each in turn. One stood out because it was done in watercolours: a view of the Grain de Sable, foregrounded by the white dart of a yacht’s sail. Bonifacio, 1939, I read, and understood why it was that she had kept this one here. This was a view she had been there to see.
‘Almost,’ Alice said, ‘but not quite.’ I followed her gaze and, suddenly, I saw it, right in the middle where it had somehow been previously invisible to me. I had to look twice to be absolutely sure.
‘That’s one of mine,’ I said. It was one of the series I had taken of Mum – barefoot, electric with movement – for my final show.
She nodded. ‘It was my favourite. I could not have left London without it.’
All these years, I thought – all of these years of our not knowing anything – and something of Mum and I had been here with Alice after all.
Next I found a series of a young woman I now recognized instantly: sitting on a Corsican beach, at a quayside restaurant, at the stern of a small boat. ‘These are all of you.’
‘Yes, I suppose they are. I’m selfish to keep these here with me. One day I know that they must be shared, but some of them feel … almost too intimate for unknown eyes – at least while I am alive. When I am gone, which cannot be long now … then, I think, the time might be right.’ She said it philosophically, as though she had given it considered thought. ‘For the time being I keep them here to remind me of her, the girl that I was. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that she and I are one and the same person. For all her faults – for all the selfishness, the naïveté, I still want to remember her.’ Alice laughed. ‘But you must think I’m talking nonsense,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I am a mad old woman, after all.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Stafford – Tom – said something similar. That he couldn’t believe sometimes that he had been that young man once … the person who painted these. And then, at other times, that he could not understand how he was no longer him – how he had suddenly grown so old.’
She looked up at me, and I had to glance down, discomfited, because her eyes had filled with tears.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve embarrassed you. It’s that … well, to me he will always be that young man. I imagine it is the same for him …
‘Do you like it?’ she said, suddenly.
‘What?’ I asked, confused by the leap.
‘The gallery.’
‘I do – it’s …’ I gestured, ‘far more than I had imagined.’
‘I was very lucky, to be able to do this.’
‘How did you?’ I said, thinking of how much the building alone must have cost.
She smiled. ‘Aunt Margaret. She left me a good deal of her fortune when she died. The other half went to her favourite projects – those artists who had not yet made a living from their work. The art world went into mourning at the loss of her. A number of prominent figures wrote about the influence she’d had on their career. Tom, as you might guess, was one of them.’
There was a give in her voice as she spoke his name.
‘It seemed right to invest the money she left me in art – I felt she would have approved. The gallery in Paris came first. I bought the old Dupré Museum. Old Monsieur Dupré, thank goodness, had made his way to his daughter in the countryside after Georgette and Étienne were taken. The Germans had gone into the museum and destroyed or ransacked everything. Anything of value, they took. The rest was broken and smashed or burnt.
‘At first the memories were so painful, I wasn’t sure whether I would be able to go through with it. I am unable, even after all these years, to go down into that basement and not see them asleep there in one another’s arms. In the end, though, it seemed the right thing; the only thing. I like to think that they would have been pleased with what I have done.
‘The first piece I hung there was the drawing I sent you. I discovered it in a warehouse, full of pieces that had been looted by the Boches. One of so many things they took from Sophie.’
The next thing Alice said came as a surprise: ‘I was never going to love anyone again, not in the way that I did Tom,’ she told me, ‘but that is not to say I didn’t take lovers in the years that followed – many of whom were to become good friends for life. All great men, in their way, even if they were not that person they could never have replaced.’
I must have seemed taken aback by this, because she smiled and said, quite gently, ‘I do not say this to embarrass you. It is that I don’t want you to see me as a victim, someone who stopped living when I lost the person I loved. To do so, when I had survived something that had claimed so many, would have been a terrible, selfish thing. In many ways, my life has been rather like a record of the lost and found. Perhaps all lives are like that. Lost: love; found: independence. Lost: a daughter; found: a granddaughter.’ I felt something expand inside me at this, almost a pain – but of the best sort.
‘I made some sort of choice in 1939,’ she said, ‘even if I could not have known then what the consequences would be. If I had gone with him, after that weekend in Corsica, I know that my life would have been very different. It is difficult, of course it is, not to dwell on what could have been – and I have had to struggle against that.’ She paused. ‘That is not to say that I haven’t thought of him every day since. Collecting his work has been my way to remain connected.’
I asked something that had been intriguing me: ‘Did you keep your new name, so that he wouldn’t know it was you?’
‘It was convenient – though
that wasn’t the main reason. So much had happened that there was no question of returning to Alice Eversley. Célia was my way of starting a new life … a means of survival, you could say. I knew from the start that the gallery would not be in my name: old or new. It would be the Galerie De Rosier.’
This time I couldn’t stop myself from asking it. ‘Did you know that Tom came to find you, after the war? That he met Madame Fourrier, and she thought you were dead?’
She shook her head. ‘She did say something, but it was already too late – he was married.’
‘You didn’t …’ I knew that I was out of line, but some demon was in me, forcing me on. ‘You didn’t think of going to Corsica, to find him?’
Her silver gaze was unwavering. ‘I was too late. Perhaps I knew that even before I saw Rosa. Perhaps even before the war, when I chose to stay in Paris. In another life, things might have been different. Or if I’d been a different person, I’d have gone with Tom when he asked me to. I’d have left France when there was still time.
‘But I wasn’t that other person, I was me.’ She smiled at me. ‘I can tell what it is you want, Kate. You want a love story. But, you see, I’ve given you a love story. It just doesn’t all work out the way one might have written it. You could say ours was not a generation blessed with many happy endings.’
Postscript, 2015
Alice lived for another year. She died in the autumn of 1987. Julie said that it had started as a cold that had taken root and wouldn’t let go, eventually turning itself into something lethal. She refused to be moved into a hospital, even at the end, and insisted on being taken to the gallery each day until she was too ill to leave her bed.
You could say that the grief I felt was disproportionate to the short time I had known her, but I don’t think so. After all, it wasn’t as if we were really strangers before I met her that first time – even before I first heard about her from Stafford. There were so many ways – her strength of character, her beauty, her bravery – in which she was like my mother. And I hope that in some ways she was also a little like me.
She left me almost everything she owned of Stafford’s work – including those pieces that she had kept in private, at her study in the gallery. At first, I didn’t know what to do. But then I remembered what she had said about hoping, one day, to be able to share them with the world. Several of them now hang in the National Portrait Gallery in London, though the De Rosier Gallery has the lion’s share.
There was also the study Stafford had made of me. He showed the finished work to me when I next went to visit, and I understood then what it was he had seen that first time we met. Looking at it made my heart ache, for it seemed that I found two other faces there besides my own, both so dear to me. When Stafford asked if he could keep hold of it for a while, I agreed. After all, I never felt that it was really mine to keep.
The strangest thing is that it was found in Alice’s apartment after she died, hanging beside the photograph I had sent her of Mum. Yet something stopped me from questioning Stafford about it. A few months later, when we were re-framing the picture for display, I discovered an envelope tucked between the parchment and backing: an odd place to keep such a thing. It was addressed, care of the museum, to Miss Alice Eversley. The letter that must have come with it was never found. It is almost as though Alice took it with her when she went.
Stafford is gone now too. Though whenever Oliver and I visit the Maison du Vent, which we do often, I always feel that he is there, somewhere out of sight. Down at the cove, perhaps, or taking a swim in the freshwater pool. The floor and walls of the studio are still splattered with colours of every hue, and in certain lights the paint gleams as though newly wet, and it makes me smile.
Epilogue
The two drawings hang together now. If you were passing quickly you might assume that they depict the same woman. On closer inspection, it is clear that this is not the case. There is a resemblance between the two faces, but it is familial rather than identical. It is the expressions that are so uncannily alike. Both women wear a look of slight incredulity, as though uncomfortable with the idea of themselves as muses. Their gaze enquires, too, demands something from those who look upon them. Not for them the quiet and patient passivity of so many subjects. One feels that their attention may be snatched away at any moment, lost to some more immediate and enticing thing beyond the realm of the paper.
Oddly enough, most onlookers are apt to see all of this before they notice the great gulf of years between the two dates: 1929 and 1986. Almost a lifetime.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my huge gratitude to everyone who encouraged me in the writing of The Book of Lost and Found and helped to get it out into the world. Without the following people this book would undoubtedly have remained a poorly-formatted Word document on my laptop. So thank you to:
Cathryn Summerhayes, for your agenting genius, unfailing support and for being such fun to work with. I am so lucky to have you on my team.
Dorian Karchmar, Annemarie Blumenhagen, Siobhan O’Neill and Ashley Fox – for all your wisdom, advice, patience and brilliance.
Kim Young: thank you for loving and understanding Lost and Found from the very beginning … and for still claiming to love it on the fifth reading! And to Laura Tisdel and Jennifer Lambert, for, with Kim, forming an incredible triumvirate of international editorial wisdom, working tirelessly (and ever tactfully!) to make the book stronger.
The team at HarperCollins: Ann Bissell – star publicist (and modesty-defender!), Charlotte Brabbin, Sarah Benton, Claire Palmer, Heike Schuessler (the incredible creative talent behind the cover), Katie Sadler, Charlotte Dolan and Thalia Suzuma.
The team at Little, Brown: Terry Adams (thank you for falling in love with Corsica!), Fiona Brown, Miriam Parker, Reagan Arthur and Carina Guiterman.
The team at HarperCollins Canada: Iris Tupholme, Cory Beatty, Michael Guy-Haddock, Rob Firing and Colleen Clarke.
Sherise Hobbs and Clare Foss for wonderful confidence-boosting lunches and invaluable insiders’ advice.
Mark Lucas, for being a mentor extraordinaire.
Richard Charkin, for telling me I should try writing all those years ago – I haven’t forgotten!
Anna Hogarty and Emily Kitchin for being the best friends and advisors a girl could hope for.
My beloved parents, Sue and Patrick Foley, for twenty-eight years – and counting – of love and encouragement. You have always made me feel that I could do anything I set my sights on. To Kate and Robbie, for making life so much fun (and for providing inspiration for the games Alice and Tom play on the beach!). To the whole family (Foleys, Colleys, Simmonds, Allens, O’Flynns and Crofts!) for all your support.
My darling Alex, without whose patience and wisdom this book would never have been finished, let alone sent out into the world. Thank you for putting up with me through all those long Sundays together in cafés while I worried over plot holes and sentence construction. Thank you, proofreader, cheerleader, chief strategist. I love you.
About the Author
Lucy Foley studied English Literature at Durham and UCL universities. She then worked for several years as a fiction editor in the publishing industry – during which time she also wrote The Book of Lost and Found. Lucy now writes full-time, and is busy travelling (for research, naturally) and working on her next novel.
Visit her Facebook page at www.facebook.com/LucyFoleyAuthor, and follow her on Twitter @lucyfoleytweets and Instagram @lucy_f_author.
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