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Kitabı oku: «The Book of Lost and Found: Sweeping, captivating, perfect summer reading»

Lucy Foley
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Copyright

Harper

The News Building

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

Copyright © Lost and Found Books Ltd 2015

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Cover photograph © Condé Nast Archive/Corbis (woman by sea)

Lucy Foley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007575350

Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9780007575343

Version: 2016-04-25

Dedication

To my grandmothers

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The Portrait

Part One: The Work of a Master

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Part Two: The Logic of a Fairy Tale

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Part Three: A Girl with a Secret

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Postscript, 2015

Epilogue

Read on for The Book of Lost and Found

A Q and A with Lucy Foley

Reading group Questions

A note on Inspiration from Lucy

Lucy’s Guide to Corsica

Keep Reading from The Invitation

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

The Portrait

She hangs in the National Portrait Gallery now. Her smile has not faltered through the years, and her hair still falls just above her jaw, as sleek as cat’s fur. She sits awkwardly: the pose of a moment held for eternity. Her eyes squint slightly, shielded from an invisible sun by her hand.

Who is she? The drawing bears no clue, nor the little square of text beside it.


Friend is a difficult word – it can conceal so much. Who was she, really, to the young man who sat down and sketched her one afternoon, with the spoils of their picnic beside them? Even this most gifted of artists is restricted by his medium to work only in the realm of the visible. Some things must be lost to time.

PART ONE

1
Hertfordshire, August 1928

Already the gardens are thrumming with life. The air is scented with expectation; people are here to do reckless things, stupid things that they might later regret, though the point of it all is in not regretting. For the idea of the party is youth. Not all of the guests are young, but that does not matter – youth can easily be faked with the right attitude. It is this attitude that counts. It is there in the pale knees that flash beneath hemlines, the clink and spill of champagne, the jungle beat of the drums. Most of all it is in the dancing – fast, too fast to identify each of the individual movements, so that all one can make out is a sort of hysterical blur, seething, sweat-sheened.

Tom is not a dancer. Or, at least, not until he has had three or more glasses of champagne, the first of which he is drinking thirstily. The spindly stem and the wide saucer with its fragile glass lip were not designed for hasty gulping, and he manages to pour a good deal of it down the front of his shirt, where the material now sticks translucently to his skin.

Tom is somewhat out of his depth. He has never been to this kind of event before. It is the sort one reads about in the society columns: drunken, wealthy youths performing outrageous stunts; the Bright Young People. The press love and hate them – they celebrate them, they vilify them, and they know full well that they would not shift nearly so many papers without them. There are men with cameras stalking the shadowy perimeters of the grounds. Tom spotted a couple planted by the bushes as they came in, though no flashbulb flares were wasted on his entrance. He is here as a ‘plus one’ – the guest of his well-connected Oxford acquaintance, Roddy. They have both been up there for a year now, and Tom is not quite convinced that the friendship will see them through to Finals. Tom is a couple of years older – his university career having been delayed by his father’s ill health – and they seem to have practically nothing in common, but, nevertheless, here they are together. ‘You’re pretty,’ Roddy explained, ‘so you’ll attract the gals, and I’ll swoop in and snare them.’

The theme for the evening is Arabian Nights. Tom wears a fez and tabard, embellished with pieces of mirror and coloured beads. He found them both in an antique shop in Islington. They smelt of mothballs and insidious damp, but he was proud of his discovery, though concerned that they might be too much.

He needn’t have worried: the other guests are apparently competing to be too much. Roddy pointed out the hostess herself as they entered – Lady Middlesford, swathed in scarlet chiffon, beringed and bejewelled with the treasures of the Orient, veiled with a scarf of the same red from which a thousand metal ornaments dangle and clink together with the chime of tiny bells. A woman smiles up at him, sooty rings of kohl around incongruously pale blue eyes. By the doors that open on to the garden stands an odalisque, her stomach bare save for the adornment of a winking ruby.

Roddy left Tom as soon as they stepped out into the garden, promising to go in search of drinks, but it has been nearly an hour now, and there hasn’t been any sign of him since.

A woman approaches. ‘Have you a light, darling?’ Her accent is regally, glassily precise, the very apotheosis of Englishness, though her outfit of ballooning silk pantaloons and tight fuchsia jerkin is pure Scheherazade. An imp’s face – not pretty, too pinched about the eyes, the front teeth too long – but interesting, all the same. An androgynous sparrow’s body and hair, shingled below the ears, of an unfeasibly lurid apricot hue. Then suddenly he recognizes her. He doesn’t read the Mail as a rule, but you’d have to be a hermit not to know of this particular Bright Young Person. Babe Makepeace: ‘twenty-one and lives for fun’. Lives, if the rumours are true, on a pitiful allowance begrudgingly bestowed by her disapproving old pa. Subsists, apparently, on a diet of nuts and Prairie Oysters, to keep that boy’s body so fashionably slender in a flapper’s shift.

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his lighter. She lifts the cigarette to her lips, pinching her funny little face together in a deep inhalation.

‘You’re a jewel.’ She gives him a playful knock on the arm. ‘What’s your name?’