There it was. In the medicine chest. The book of stamps I thought lost for ever. But how did it get there, and does that mean I may still find the fifty-pound note my husband left me when he set off for the Lebanon: natural destination, in those far-off days, for a systems player who had been banned from every gambling club in London? That fifty pounds was to keep me and our baby son going while he was away. Careful, as ever, I put it away safely, and have never been able to find it.
And what about the unopened pack of poppadoms, the barely begun jar of marmalade, and those lacy headbands that hid my attempts to cut my own hair? Will I ever find those? All have disappeared so thoroughly that I am beginning to think there is a poltergeist at work in this house in which there have been no visitors for over six months.
Best to think about the things I have found instead. There is a favourite photo, lost for ever, I had thought, taken in a Gambian orphanage, and the long-lost letter from Mollie Keane’s agent which would have resolved, once and for all, the unseemly dispute about whether the manuscript of Good Behaviour had been sent to Diana Athill or to me.
And then there is a whole category of things, like the Estonian doll and my father’s prayer shawl, which weren’t actually lost, because I had forgotten they existed. These were among the things which surfaced as I rooted around in the massive, carved chest – shipped from some outpost of Empire by a mining-engineer friend of my father’s and still, after almost a hundred years, smelling of camphor.
Better still than lost things, are people newly found: those young relatives who, like me, are waiting to know what, if anything, they will be getting from an eleven-year-old will which came to light only recently. It is thanks to this I am now in touch with the daughter of a half-brother I never knew, and the son of a favourite cousin: both unearthed by an agency whose business it is to find Lost People.
That nothing is ever lost for good, I learnt as a ten-year-old when I dropped my precious Parker Pen on the sports field. Hours and buckets of tears later, I was allowed to go and look for it, though warned not to expect to find it. But I did, and I still remember the moment when I saw it, lying in the wet grass, momentarily as big as a small tree: an epiphany! My first and my last. Nothing, I remind myself, as I hunt for the marmalade, is ever lost for ever.
