The Keeper of Lost Things(33)

“Is it any good?”

“It depends what you mean by good.”

Laura sat down in the chair facing him.

“It did very well. Apparently Anthony’s publisher at the time was very happy. He was a peculiar little man, I seem to remember. He came to the house once or twice. Used far too much hair spray.”

“Too much!” Freddy expostulated. “I should think that any is too much. Unless you’re Liberace. Or a ballroom dancer.”

“It’s called male grooming.” Laura smiled. “But I wouldn’t exactly call that your specialist subject,” she added, looking at the unruly mop of dark curls that crept over the collar of his shirt and the stubble that shaded the contours of his face.

“No need,” he replied, winking at her. “I’m naturally handsome.”

He was, Laura silently agreed. Oh God! She hoped it had been silent. But maybe she’d nodded. She could feel a telltale flush creeping up her neck. Bugger! Maybe he would just think it was her age. Double bugger! Maybe he would just think it was her age. Middle age. Ready for big knickers, hot flushes, and winceyette nighties. And she absolutely wasn’t. In fact, she was going on a date.

“But did you think it was any good?”

Freddy was speaking.

“Sorry. Miles away. What was that?”

Freddy waved the book at her.

“Lost and Found—what did you think?”

Laura sighed and spread her hands on the table in front of her.

“I thought it was safe. It was beautifully written, as always, but the content had lost a little of his usual edge. It was a bit too ‘happy ever after’ for me. It was almost as though if he wrote enough happy endings for other people, he’d get one for himself.”

“But it never came?”

Laura smiled sadly. “Until now.”

Fingers crossed.

“Is that why he stopped writing?”

Laura shook her head.

“No. He wrote several volumes of these short stories, based on the things he found, I now assume. At first they were optimistic tales; congenial and commercial. Bruce the peculiar was delighted with them and, no doubt, the money they brought in. But over time the stories grew darker; the characters more ambivalent; flawed even. The happy endings gradually gave way to uncomfortable mysteries and unanswered questions. All this was before my time, of course, but when I eventually read them, I thought they were much better and they were certainly more like his earlier work; crediting his readers with both imagination and intelligence. Anthony told me that Bruce had been furious. He just wanted more of the ‘nice’ stories; literary lemonade. But Anthony had given him absinthe. Bruce refused to publish them and that was that.”

“Didn’t Anthony look for another publisher?”

“I don’t know. By the time I started working for him, he seemed to be writing them more for himself than for anyone else. Eventually he stopped giving me anything to type at all apart from the odd letter.”

Laura picked up the book from the table and tenderly stroked its cover. She missed her old friend.

“Maybe that’s what we should call the website—Lost and Found?”

The website had been Freddy’s plan. At first Laura had been unsure. For so many years Anthony had resisted the intrusion of technology into his tranquil home, and to throw open the doors to the behemoth Internet and all its goblin relatives so soon after his death somehow felt like a violation. But Freddy convinced her.

“The only thing Anthony asked you not to change was the rose garden. He left the house to you because he knew that you would do the right thing. It’s your home now but it came with a covenant on its coattails and Anthony trusted you to use whatever method you saw fit to get those things back to the people who are missing them.”

The website would be a huge, virtual “lost property” department where people could browse the things that Anthony found and then reclaim items that belonged to them. They were still working on the details, including the name.

“Lost and Found. Too boring.” Sunshine had wondered in from the study looking for biscuits.

“Shall I make the lovely cup of tea?”

Freddy rubbed his hands together in exaggerated delight.

“I thought you’d never ask. I’m as dry as James Bond’s martini.”

Sunshine filled the kettle and set it carefully on the hob.

“How can the drink, which is wet because it’s the drink, be dry?”

“That’s a good question, kiddo,” said Freddy, thinking, To which I’m buggered if I know the answer.

Laura saved him.

“How about the Kingdom of Lost Things?

Sunshine wrinkled her nose in disapproval. “St. Anthony kept all the lost things safe. He was the keeper, and now you are. We should call it the Keeper of Lost Things.”

“Brilliant!” said Freddy.

“Where’s the biscuits?” said Sunshine.

Laura arrived back from the hairdresser’s salon just as Freddy was leaving for the day.

“You look different,” he said, almost accusingly. “Have you got a new jumper?”

She could, quite cheerfully, have kicked him. Her jumper was several years old and bore a generous sprinkle of pilling to prove it. But she had just spent the best part of two hours and seventy quid having her hair cut and colored with what her stylist, Elise, had described as burnished copper lowlights. When she left the salon, tossing her glossy, chestnut mane like a frisky show pony, she had felt like a million dollars. Now, for some reason, she felt like she’d wasted her money.