The Keeper of Lost Things

The dapper, 68-year-old Anthony Peardew, after riding a local London train from Brighton, arrives at his rambling Victorian home in the center of the city. The home, which he calls Padua after St. Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost things, is his sanctuary. A reclusive semi-retired writer, Anthony lives alone. His study is packed with hundreds of lost items, dropped unintentionally, that he has found all over London. For more than 40 years, Anthony has dedicated his life to gathering these items and carefully tagging them in the hopes of returning them someday to their owners. Today he found a cookie tin left on the train. When he opens it, he finds that it appears to contain cremains. He fixes himself his usual gin and lime and puts on his favorite record, Al Bowlly’s classic recording of “The Very Thought of You,” a song that reminds him of Therese, the love of his life, who was killed in a car accident some 40 years earlier just days before they were to be married.

Over the last six years, Anthony has come to rely on Laura, his housekeeper and personal assistant, along with Freddy, the gardener, to run the day-to-day operations of Padua. He has never told Laura about his collection of lost things or even allowed her into the study. Six years earlier, when Laura answered his ad, she was drifting, depressed and self-medicating with prescription drugs. At 35, she had just divorced an abusive husband, Vince, a used car salesman she finally left after his repeated affairs and his escalating threats of violence following the couple’s miscarriage. Laura now loves the Victorian atmosphere of Padua, and she has come to love the “gentle strength, tranquil manner, and immaculate urbanity” of Anthony himself (6). Laura once dreamed of being a writer and even tried writing a novel years earlier, but it was rejected by a round of publishers. She wonders now whether “she had engineered her own failures” (21)—her life of frustration, disappointments, and lost opportunities.

The narrative shifts to 1974. Eunice, in her twenties, responds to an ad for a secretarial position at a small but reputable London publishing house. At the interview, she falls under the spell of the charismatic publisher, Charles Brockley, who calls himself Bomber after the stylish jackets worn by the Allied POWs in The Great Escape. Eunice, a cinephile, immediately responds to the allusion. The two chat at length, and Bomber offers her the job. As an editor, Bomber reads only manuscripts that intrigue him; among them currently is a collection of eccentric short stories entitled Lost and Found by an unknown London writer named Anthony Peardew. On the way out, feeling lucky, Eunice picks up a small religious medallion someone dropped in the street, not noticing that a car accident has happened across the street. Over the next several years, a friendship develops between Eunice and Bomber, shaped in large part by their love of movies and by their mutual dislike of Bomber’s overbearing sister, Portia, an aspiring writer of “bloody awful” romances. Bomber is certain his sister was spoiled long ago by being given access to an immense trust fund set up by their great-aunt.

The narrative then rejoins Anthony. Finding the cremains on the Brighton train reminds Anthony of his own advanced years. He senses the approach of death, which he terms his “leaving.” For him, death will be the chance to reunite at last with Therese. He has never forgotten her. He recalls how he planted Padua’s rose garden for her just months after they met. She was named for St. Therese of the Roses. When he showed her the garden, she was overwhelmed by the gesture. In gratitude, she gave him her First Communion medallion, her most precious keepsake, but he lost the medallion in the confusion after the car accident.

Anthony has shared with Laura his vivid memory of the day Therese was killed. That sharing “forged an intimacy” between the two (41). Now, Anthony worries over his vast collection of lost things. Over the years, the objects have served as subjects of the quirky Chekhovian stories he published, which found a small but enthusiastic following. Now, feeling death near, Anthony visits his solicitor and settles his estate, naming an unsuspecting Laura as his sole heir. That night, Anthony walks out to Padua’s rose garden. He remembers Therese and her lost Communion medallion and how that loss directed him to devote his life to returning lost objects. He lies down in the grass and slips into death. Laura finds him the following morning.

A shocked Laura is apprised of her inheritance in a long letter Anthony leaves behind. In it, he explains that Padua is now her home, but he details a particular codicil: She is to take over the work of returning the lost objects. He makes a mysterious reference to his own dedication to lost things and an object that he himself regrets losing. Now proprietor of Padua, Laura for the first time enters the study where Anthony kept all the pieces, with shelves and drawers lined with tagged objects. She is staggered by the responsibility.

She works her way among the objects, such as a cheap plastic hair clip. We are given its story: A young nerdy girl, relentlessly picked on in school, drops the clip in the grass after at last, with the encouragement of her mother, conquering her fear of climbing a huge tree. We are given another story about a single piece of a jigsaw puzzle: An elderly spinster, compelled to take in a sister she never liked after the woman’s husband dies, exacts a small kind of impish satisfaction by removing a single piece of a massive jigsaw puzzle her sister toils over, ensuring she will never finish it. A tiny ruby gemstone becomes the centerpiece of a story about a grandmother who intensely dislikes the wealthy man her beloved granddaughter was marrying. During the garden ceremony, the ruby from the ring the man foists on the bride (the girl wanted to use her mother’s far more modest wedding ring) drops out, lost forever in the grass.

Among all these neatly tagged objects, Laura finds an old key she thinks will unlock the upstairs bedroom never used since Therese’s death. The next morning, after Laura spends her first night in Padua, she meets Sunshine, an energetic neighborhood teenager with Down syndrome who cheerily introduces herself as Laura’s new best friend.