the book of lost and found by lucy foley

By the doors that open onto the garden stands an odalisque, her stomach bare save for the adornment of a winking ruby.

A woman smiles up at him, sooty rings of kohl around incongruously pale blue eyes. Roddy pointed out the hostess herself as they entered-Lady Middlesford, swathed in scarlet chiffon, beringed and bejeweled 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. He needn't have worried: the other guests are apparently competing to be too much. They smelled of mothballs and insidious damp, but he was proud of his discovery, though concerned that they might be too much. He found them both in an antique shop in Islington. Tom wears a fez and tabard, embellished with pieces of mirror and colored beads. The theme for the evening is Arabian Nights. 'You're pretty,' Roddy explained, 'so you'll attract the gals, and I'll swoop in and snare them.'

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. 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. He is here as a 'plus one'-the guest of his well-connected Oxford acquaintance, Roddy. Tom spotted a couple planted by the bushes as they came in, though no flashbulb flares were wasted on his entrance. There are men with cameras stalking the shadowy perimeters of the grounds. 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. It is the sort one reads about in the society columns: drunken, wealthy youths performing outrageous stunts the Bright Young People. He has never been to this kind of event before. 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. Or, at least, not until he has had three or more glasses of champagne, the first of which he is drinking thirstily. 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. It is there in the pale knees that flash beneath hemlines, the clink and spill of champagne, the jungle beat of the drums. Not all of the guests are young, but that does not matter-youth can easily be faked with the right attitude. 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. Already the gardens are thrumming with life.

The book of lost and found by lucy foley