The French Photographer

by Natasha Lester

  Which she did. They showed her a photograph of her mother; Jess couldn’t imagine how they’d got hold of it but, that night, when she returned to her apartment and looked through her boxes, it wasn’t in her photo album, which only proved that Emile was more of a bastard than she’d realised.

  Just as she’d done the day she and Emile stepped off their ship in New York City to be greeted by the news of her parents’ death, Jess sat on the floor of the Greenwich Village apartment, weeping. Back then, she’d been watched over by the angelic forms of dust sheets and the brooding presence of Emile, standing in the doorway, not knowing what to do. Now she was alone. She hadn’t wept for such a long time. But seeing the photograph of her mother, knowing that she and her father and botany had never been enough for her, if what the War Department had said was true, brought back the grief.

  Then she heard the ghost of her mother’s voice telling her to be practical, to stand up, to not wallow. To not let the War Department get to her. So, just as her mother had always been the one to find the best camping spot, to give everyone errands so that food would be cooked and supplies purchased, Jess scrubbed her cheeks dry with a Kleenex and took out her own supplies.

  To start with, the Rolleiflex her mother had given her. Then she hunted around for the Leica Emile had bought for her birthday their first year in Manhattan. She preferred the Rollei but knew it would be an advantage to take two cameras with her.

  She ran her hand over her typewriter; it had been her mother’s. Each night of her childhood, Jess had fallen asleep to the sound of keys striking paper, the lullaby of her youth. It wouldn’t do for Europe though. A baby Hermes would be just the ticket. How much paper could she feasibly take? Martha had said there were shortages across Europe. She made herself keep thinking along those lines – as if she was going – because the idea that she might have to stay working as a house model, waiting for advertisers to consent to her returning to the pages of magazines, had become unbearable.

  A knock at the door startled her and she opened it to find Bel bearing a pot of soup and a bottle of wine.

  ‘The last supper,’ Bel said cheerily as she made her way into the kitchen. ‘I thought if we acted it out, it might come true.’

  Jess managed a smile and took bowls and glasses out of the cupboard, then hugged her friend. ‘Thank you. What the hell will I do in Europe without you?’

  ‘You’ll find someone. You’re the kind of girl who always lands on her feet.’ Bel put the soup on the stove and they sat at the kitchen table, waiting for it to warm. ‘How did it go?’ Bel asked shrewdly, studying Jess’s face.

  Jess reached for a cigarette. ‘As badly as Martha said it would.’ She hesitated. ‘They showed me a picture of my mother. I took it in a club in Montmartre during one of my parents’ rare visits out of the field and into civilisation. I was at boarding school there and they picked me up on their way out for the night; I don’t think it ever occurred to them that Montmartre jazz clubs weren’t really the place for sixteen-year-old girls.’

  Bel smiled. ‘Sounds like your parents were the kind every sixteen-year-old thought they wanted. I imagine the reality was a little different.’

  ‘I didn’t think so at the time but now …’ Jess pictured the photograph. Her mother sitting at a table in the club in the centre of a group of artistes, having always been a part of that circle; her college training had been in illustration and drawing as well as botany. In the background, her father stood by the bar, watching her mother as if she was the most precious thing in the world. He always sat at the edges, eyes fixed to her mother’s face, content to listen and admire. Jess used to sit with him until, later, it transpired that Jess could tell a better story than anyone – or so she’d thought at the time – and she took her place at the table. She’d soon understood that her moving into the centre actually coincided with her growing into her body and into her smile rather than her abilities as a raconteur.

  ‘I had my first gin when I was fifteen,’ Jess said to Bel, inhaling smoke deep into her lungs. ‘My first kiss that same night, and you could say that I quenched my curiosity of all things sexual by the time I was seventeen. My parents were either oblivious or had a different moral compass to most – I’ve never been sure – although I’m fairly certain my mother wasn’t faithful to my father.’

  ‘Which the War Department was only too happy to confirm,’ Bel said slowly, piecing together the story of what had happened that morning.

  Jess nodded. ‘They listed the names of men my mother had had affairs with. And they listed the names of men I was suspected of sleeping with. They were trying to establish a pattern, they said. A pattern of licentiousness that would preclude me from ever being let loose among an army of men. Of course, their list of my paramours was long and hugely exaggerated.’

  ‘So you’re not going?’

  ‘I don’t know. I told them …’ She hesitated, wondering now how she’d ever had the bravado to retaliate when all she’d wanted to do was cry, because the irony of it all was that Jess might have lived openly with a man for three years but it was only one man; she would never cheat on anyone, no matter what the War Department thought.

  ‘I hope you said something typically Jessica May and left their filthy mouths hanging open.’ Bel reached across the table for Jess’s hand.

  Something typically Jessica May. It was the first time, sitting in the War Department offices, that she’d ever wanted to be anything other than typically Jessica May. But why should she change for a group of condescending men?

  ‘I said,’ Jess stood theatrically, hand on hip, ‘“My, my, it’s a wonder I have any energy left to apply to be a correspondent. Do you provide the men who apply with a list of their conquests? Or is that something you all drink to at the bar later? Perhaps I might write about this screening process for Vogue, seeing as how I apparently don’t have a reputation left to lose.”’

  Bel laughed. ‘Bravo!’

  Jess walked over to the stove to stir the soup. Of course she’d been dismissed after that, her threat hanging in the air like cheap perfume, tawdry but essential; if she capitulated, then how would she ever survive in the European Theatre of Operations?

  ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m always saying goodbye,’ Jess said suddenly, back turned to Bel. ‘It’s one of the things I remember about growing up. That I had to be funny and fabulous so I’d make friends and then, once I’d made the friends, we’d leave. Even when I was at boarding school in Paris, my parents would pull me out every few weeks when they needed photographs taken. Then I’d come back and, even though it was the same school, it was like starting again.’

  Starting again. Which was what she’d be doing now if she was ever accredited by the War Department.

  She continued. ‘There’s just one girl, Amelia – she was English – who I still write to. Her parents had left her at school when she was seven and she’d only seen them twice in nine years. We bonded over a certain kind of parental ignorance, although our parents were nothing alike. Her father was in the army and always away somewhere. My father had the social skills of a mollusc, so my mother thought that taking me to all their parties would teach me both how to look after myself and how to win people over.’

  ‘Did it work?’ Bel asked with a trace of irony.

  ‘I won you over, didn’t I?’ Jess teased, facing her friend and pushing the past back down to where it belonged.

  She ladled soup into bowls and pushed a pile of clippings across the table towards Bel. ‘Martha told me to read these. Ruth Cowan and Inez Robb got themselves assigned to the WACs – the Women’s Army Corp – in North Africa and they’ve been reporting from there. About what it’s like to have to wear trousers instead of skirts and the trials of only going to the hair salon every few months. In this one,’ Jess pointed to a page, ‘Cowan even says she’d prefer to have a bomb fall on her than share a ditch with a spider. I wonder if any of those things cross the minds of the soldiers out there? Every one of their by-line
s carries the words “Girl Reporter”. If you put that on any of my pieces I’ll never speak to you again.’

  ‘What are they going to do with you if you do get yourself over there?’ Bel said, shaking her head and starting to laugh. ‘I’d hate to be the first man to try calling you a girl reporter. Don’t forget you’re probably subject to military law so you might have to eat your words occasionally. Although I can’t imagine how a woman who had her first kiss at age fifteen will tolerate censorship.’

  ‘My plan is not to kiss anybody while I’m away,’ Jess informed her primly. ‘If I do, then I just reinforce every suspicion they already have about me. I’m sure they’re itching for me to seduce an entire division of the US Army. I’m not planning to give them the satisfaction.’

  ‘Sounds like you won’t be having any satisfaction while you’re away, then.’ Bel grinned, and that did it.

  Jess felt her eyes tear up and her throat tighten. ‘I think Emile has cured me of wanting that kind of satisfaction for a good while.’

  ‘I wanted to make you laugh,’ Bel said. ‘Don’t cry. The formidable Jessica May does not cry. Even when our art director excoriated you in front of a whole team of graphic designers for framing a picture with too much surrealist ambition, I never saw you cry.’

  Jess gave a small laugh and wiped her eyes, hoping to wipe away all thoughts of Emile. ‘I’d forgotten about that,’ she said to Bel. ‘That was the day you told me you were going to run my first piece. We went and drank too much champagne at the Stork Club afterwards.’

  ‘And here you are now, waiting to take more photos and write a whole lot more pieces about a war.’

  ‘Perhaps it pays to be publicly excoriated and then to go out and get drunk.’

  ‘Sounds like a motto that might hold you in good stead for the next couple of years.’ Bel hugged Jess. ‘I’m going to miss you. When you go. Not if. When.’

  Three

  The War Department did let her go. Thankfully, the Condé Nast empire’s influence was vast. They made Jess cut her teeth on some home-front reporting of the training of WACs, which Vogue published, and when she managed to do that to everyone’s satisfaction, she was finally given orders to go overseas, not long after her twenty-third birthday.

  Thus she became a captain in the US Army – her rank and uniform a courtesy meant only to provide camouflage and to stop her being shot as a spy if she was captured. She was inoculated against tetanus, typhoid and typhus, and given a card from the Adjutant General’s Office of the War Department showing her finger prints and stating her birth date, hair colour, eye colour, height, weight, and including a photograph of her looking stunned – it would never make it into the pages of Vogue, she thought with a smile. She kitted herself out in trousers – she packed the two skirts they thrust on her but doubted if skirts and combat zones were a terribly good combination – two men’s army shirts, a tie, her pinks and a green US War Correspondent patch for her jacket and cap.

  Her embarkation point was in Brooklyn, where a sergeant looked her over and said, ‘Virgin?’

  Jess couldn’t help laughing. ‘Only in matters of war,’ she replied smoothly and saw every visible piece of his skin flush bright red.

  He led her to a warehouse, punishing her with silence for turning his attempt to embarrass her back on him. She was issued a musette bag, a canteen, a helmet, sunglasses that she surreptitiously slipped back into the pile – she knew from being out with her parents that her sunglasses were probably better than anything the United States Army could issue her with. Next came insect powder, which she was used to from paleobotany expeditions, chocolate, mosquito netting and gloves. She added the items to everything she’d brought with her: socks, underwear, cold cream, lipstick and powder, her two cameras, film, lenses, flash bulbs, repair parts, and typewriter paper. Plus a Stella Designs dress, made especially for her by Estella Bissette, from the lightest silk, which folded down to fit into the palm of her hand. Thankfully she’d been allowed to have her Hermes baby typewriter go as an extra piece of baggage, rather than having to fit that into her bag as well.

  She’d done her homework and asked to go to Italy where the nurses, she’d been told, were closer to the front than they’d been in any other war. As a woman, Jess wasn’t allowed to cover the actual war. Just the ancillaries. So her destination was Naples, recently liberated by the US Army, and her orders were to record the work of the nurses for the readers of Vogue.

  In Naples, the Public Relations Officer – or PRO – a man she discovered she’d have to mollify despite the papers in her hand, let her cool her heels for a fortnight while he verified that her orders were real and that some damn fool in Washington had actually let a woman come to Italy to report on the Medical Corps and that Stone, the damn fool PRO in London – hadn’t warned him about it.

  ‘You can go out to the Eleventh Field Hospital,’ he told her at last. ‘But you’ll have to wait until someone’s heading that way. I don’t have a jeep for you.’

  ‘Where do you suggest I wait?’ she enquired coolly. ‘By the side of the road with my thumb out? Or does the US Army have a more orderly approach to hitchhiking?’

  ‘If I were you,’ he said evenly, ‘I’d concentrate on keeping myself safe. Women are absolutely not allowed near a combat zone. I’m not taking any shit if you get yourself hurt.’

  How exactly does one stay safe when one is taken to an area that is supposed to be out of the combat zone, but which turns out to be the scene of a conflagration?

  In Naples, on the dance floor at the Orange Club, Jess had learned that the Eleventh Field Hospital was near Mignano on the ridge of hills surrounding the Cassino Valley. It had sounded lovely but, in a jeep that had come to a sudden halt in the place where the field hospital should be, there was nothing lovely: only sound beyond anything she’d ever imagined, so loud that she couldn’t distinguish individual noises but rather one catastrophic roar, like a gargantuan lion provoked.

  The drive north from Naples had given her no indication of what she was heading into. She’d sat in the jeep, which had the floor sandbagged to minimise the effect of any mines they might drive over, one of a constant stream of olive-coloured vehicles – tanks, trucks, ambulances, command cars with names like Black Devil and Death Dodger painted on them. They passed tent camps that stretched for miles in a sea of mud, dotted with soldiers stripped to the waist, shaving. Mounds of rubble that must once have been villages; occasionally they passed a pink wall still standing. Italian women washing clothes in troughs because laundry still had to be done even in the midst of war. Coils of communications wire that stretched on as if the veins of the earth were unexpectedly and horribly on display. Children playing in wrecked munitions carriers.

  And then, suddenly and magnificently in front of her stood the mountains, snow-capped and wild, perforating the sky. The peaks rose above a valley from which white puffs of smoke erupted, the scars of shells gouging the once beautiful land, artillery tracks making a crazed, circular pattern. The view was obliterated a moment later by the rain that had been threatening. It came in thick and grey, engulfing everything.

  Immediately afterwards, the driver skidded to a halt. They’d rounded a bend and found a battle instead of a hospital. The sound became something Jess heard not only in her ears but all through her body, thudding on irresolutely like a secondary, even a tertiary heartbeat. A sound she couldn’t escape from and could hardly bear, such was the pressure of it in her head and her chest. The driver made to turn the car around but Jess opened the door of the jeep – Rollei around her neck, Leica in hand – and jumped out before he could stop her.

  ‘You should help them,’ she cried when the driver hesitated. To her, it looked as if the soldiers on their side were capable of nothing more than defence in the face of what was being thrown and shot and hurled at them.

  He hopped out too and hit the ground, diving straight into a mud so viscous it was hard to believe solid ground could exist anywhere beneath the mire. ‘
Stay by the car,’ he ordered, clambering across the ground, the camouflage patterns on his uniform no longer needed because his whole body was now covered in clay.

  ‘Stay by the car?’ Jess shouted. It was a ridiculous command; the car was exposed. A horrific scream that seemed to be right above her head had her instinctively mimicking the driver: making for the ground as fast as she could. By sheer luck, she fell into a ditch, which provided a semblance of cover and she thanked God that the person there wore an American uniform rather than a German one.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ the owner of the uniform barked.

  ‘This was supposed to be a field hospital,’ Jess snapped back. ‘He,’ Jess indicated the driver, who was hunched over a couple of feet away in the same ditch, ‘was meant to know where we were going.’

  ‘If he’s come from Naples, then he doesn’t know shit. It was a field hospital. It was evacuated last night.’ The GI, whose rank insignia proclaimed him a captain, raised his head and fired his gun into the blindness in front of them.

  Jess crouched where she was, unmoving. It was inconceivable that this was battle: a huddle of men in a boggy ditch popping their heads up every few seconds to shoot in the general direction from which a cannonade of machine gun fire emanated. And she knew, as surely as the fact that she could actually die at any moment, that she’d been a damn fool. She hadn’t thought about what armed conflict would be like. She’d understood she’d be roughing it, that her accommodations would likely be tents, that there would be no luxuries. But she’d been so busy fighting to get herself here that she hadn’t stopped to imagine how it would feel to be in range of enemy bullets. Because she wasn’t supposed to be in range of enemy bullets.

  Thank God for the noise and the physical echo of the sound inside her body. It deafened her to the usual physical reactions to fear; she couldn’t feel her heart or her breath and whether both were faster than usual, she couldn’t even comprehend that she had hands, let alone that they might be sweating. Her eyes were almost the only thing that seemed to be within her control and she tried to fix her gaze on one thing, rather than everything. As she did so, she realised that she was the only one in the hole who was frozen; none of the men looked scared. After their first flicker of surprise at seeing she was a woman, each one had settled back into a state that looked a lot like resignation. Which meant they’d done this before. Too many times. And they’d survived or else they wouldn’t be here. It gave her hope.