Foley, Lucy - The Book of Lost and Found by Foley Lucy

Author:Foley, Lucy [Foley, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-10-30T04:00:00+00:00

21

Corsica, August 1986

‘I forgot to ask,’ Stafford said, as we sat in his studio the next morning, ‘did you jump from the top of the waterfall?’

‘No, I’m afraid not. Oliver did, though. He told me that you taught him.’

Stafford grinned. ‘I did.’ He seemed inordinately pleased by this. ‘Until quite recently I would have been up there doing it myself, but unfortunately as one gets older one has to recognize one’s limitations. Annoyingly it isn’t the jumping off that has become difficult but the boring part: the climbing up.’

It made me uncomfortable, to hear him speak in this way. It was hard to imagine anything – even old age – slowing him down, and to hear Stafford himself remark on his increasing frailty was a painful dose of reality. I had grown to like him so much, and the suggestion that he might not be around for ever depressed me. I knew it was irrational, this feeling – it was hardly as though he was on his deathbed – but if the last couple of years had taught me anything it was how short a time you might have left with someone.

‘Kate,’ Stafford said, surprising me out of my thoughts, ‘I have to admit that I’m not looking forward to telling the next part. It isn’t a time I would choose to revisit – and I have been a coward in putting it off. You need to know … and perhaps it’s good for me to speak of it. A catharsis, if you like.’ The smile he gave me then, for once, was not a real smile – more of a grimace than anything else.

‘After that fourth letter, I had nothing from Alice for months. Complete silence. She’d told me she expected to return in December, and I’d even gone so far as to hope she would want to meet over the holidays, but my weeks back in London passed without any message or sign from her.’

‘Didn’t you think of going to see her instead?’

‘That wasn’t how it worked. I know it sounds feeble on my part, but our meetings had always been on her terms. There was the never-spoken understanding that I would not be a welcome caller at Lord and Lady Hexford’s house. I was embarrassed, too.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’d sent her three letters since that last from her with no reply. I told myself I had to accept the fact that she was tiring of our friendship. That final letter I’d had from her, being so brief and ill thought-out … it seemed the likeliest explanation. I was miserable. It didn’t help that it was January, with its bleak weather and short days, the distractions of Christmas gone by and only my final exams to look forward to.

‘My own misery coincided with a wider depression in spirits. All the news was bad. It had been since October, but by January it was clear that the economy wasn’t going to recover quickly, as many had hoped. It was as if we were all suffering from some great tiredness, a malaise.

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