The French Photographer

by Natasha Lester

  She was collected at the airfield by Warren Stone, the London-based PRO. Stone was tall, blond, with too many white teeth and he spoke to her in the kind of soothing tones she imagined a vet might use with a temperamental mare. He even put a hand on her arm, the same way one approached a horse’s rump, gingerly.

  ‘I know that a mistake was made,’ he said.

  ‘Exactly,’ Jess said, relieved that somebody understood she hadn’t purposely gone out looking to photograph a fight. ‘I was told I’d find a hospital there, which is what I was supposed to be writing about, not a battle.’

  ‘I can get you a more suitable assignment,’ Warren said, smiling at her. ‘We like the women to focus on women’s interest, for the women’s pages. Like this.’ He passed her a newspaper folded to a piece written by Inez Robb in North Africa. The headline read ‘War Fails to Spoil Midwinter Cruise on the Mediterranean’ and was accompanied by a cartoon drawing of Robb standing before a mirror applying lipstick. ‘I have no idea why you were sent to Italy. Like I said, now that I’m looking after you, it won’t happen again.’

  ‘I asked to go to Italy,’ Jess said quietly, while her mind processed both what he’d said and the way he’d said it, as if he were her protector, ready to guide her, with his sharp white teeth, towards the things seemly for a woman, rather than the unladylike.

  ‘But now that you’ve seen Italy, you’ll know you made a mistake.’

  He let the sentence hang in the air, giving her the out she’d thought she wanted. But to tell him, with all his condescension, that yes, she couldn’t face Italy and would rather report on cruises was something she found herself unable to do. Instead she said, testing, still unsure if she was reading the situation correctly, ‘I wouldn’t have been sent back to England if I was a man who’d been driven to a battlefield, would I? So it’s not just that I took photographs that were beyond the scope of my orders to report on the hospital, is it?’

  ‘Women are not permitted in combat zones. But I can get you plenty of other assignments.’ Again that touch on the arm, that smile – which suggested he was used to having some kind of potent effect when he flashed his teeth around – and Jess realised that, as well as wanting to relegate her to the kind of reporting she could just as easily do for Vogue back in America, he was flirting. And doing it with such assurance, as if he really thought she’d bat her eyelashes at him, be grateful that he’d rescued her and be only too happy to let him take her womanliness out to dinner – so long as the restaurant wasn’t on the same land area as the war that was forbidden to her by that same femaleness.

  ‘I should limit myself to cruises and cosmetics?’ she asked coolly, dumping the newspaper on the floor of the jeep.

  ‘Perhaps just cosmetics,’ he said, taking his eyes off the road, raking them over her face and then her body and grinning at her as if she’d appreciate the joke. ‘I believe it’s your area of expertise.’

  He knew who she was. She gritted her teeth. ‘I’m here because I possess other kinds of expertise as well.’

  ‘We can definitely talk about that over a drink.’

  ‘I just want to do my job,’ Jess said formally, as if it wasn’t a personal rejection; it wasn’t a good idea to get the PRO offside although she had no idea if she still had work, if she even wanted to do the work or if this uncomfortable meeting in a car was the end of it all.

  ‘Women don’t belong in the European Theatre.’ His tone was harder now and his eyes carried a warning: she should back off and accept his interest, his veiled offer of, not a date, but an assignation. She imagined that the women he allowed into the cosmetic arena of the European Theatre must fall for his smile and his offers – or at least pretend to do so in order to keep the peace. But she had never been very good at pretending. The jeep pulled to a stop outside the Dorchester Hotel.

  ‘Why not?’ She wished she could just walk away, certain his answer wouldn’t make her feel any better.

  ‘Well,’ he smiled again, ‘there’s the latrine business. Where would you –’

  ‘Don’t,’ she interrupted, unable to listen any more. Men were losing their limbs and their lives and the PROs were worried about where a woman might empty her bladder. She climbed out of the jeep.

  As she did, Warren said, ‘You’re confined to your room until the penalty for disobeying your orders is decided by the Public Relations Office.’

  Jailed. She was, she realised over the next week, effectively jailed. She’d been given a chance to scramble out of this mess, to go back to New York, or to write filler pieces about frivolities but instead she’d antagonised someone she would have to work with, if she stayed. If.

  For days she stared out the window at London, a dismal, bombed-up mess of rubble and dismembered buildings. How would the world ever be put back together again? There was hardly food enough to eat in the city, cigarettes and toothbrushes were nonexistent or worth a small fortune, all of which would make replacing the things she’d lost in the jeep explosion more difficult. London felt trapped in an eternal night; no sooner had the sun struggled to rise than it was dark by four in the afternoon, a darkness unrelieved by blackout conditions. Outside, along the street at the back of the hotel, she watched two girls dressed in homemade nurses’ uniforms bury their dolls in the crumbled brick and concrete remains of a house and then dig them out, put them in prams and administer to their wounds. They were playing at war, as if it were a game, as if it were the only reality they knew how to mimic. What happened to children who’d been born while the fighting was on, who didn’t understand that it wasn’t normal for bombs to fall from the sky like Chicken Licken’s acorns, who believed that streets were comprised of both intact buildings and desecrated ones, who had never seen a night alight with electricity?

  She sat at her chair before her desk, pen poised over paper, thinking to write down her thoughts and then perhaps type them up when she was able to replace her typewriter. But Warren Stone’s obvious belief that women should only write about – or provide – decoration made her both unable to write and unwilling to prove his theory that women and war didn’t mix. So she waited, reasoning that if the Public Relations Office threw her out, then she’d have to go; she wouldn’t be quitting. Would she?

  A tap at the door roused her and she opened it to find one of the hotel staff with a telegram for her.

  Sorry Darl, she read, none of your photographs made it through, not even the ones at the hospital. The War Department censored them all. What can I say, better luck next time? Bel xx

  Jess crumpled the paper in her hand.

  It had all been for nothing. Worse than nothing; her one attempt at getting a story had resulted in her being confined to a hotel room, waiting to be fired. But when had Jessica May ever waited to be fired? She hurled the telegram at the wall, then stormed over to the dressing table and stared at herself in the mirror.

  You’re not a coward, she told herself. So what if she wasn’t talented enough to take the photos she saw in her head? It was her job to make herself that talented. Nobody else would take those pictures; a male photojournalist would never think nurses worthy of any interest besides the prurient. And of course the War Department wouldn’t let Bel have Jess’s pictures because then everyone would know that a woman had been in a combat zone and that, apparently, was the real problem, not the death and dying and undocumented bravery of that small tent full of women in Monte Cassino. Not the children who were paying the price with their childhoods for a war they had never wished for.

  Jess watched the girls outside wrapping lengths of white fabric around their dolls’ heads, their faces serious, adult. Her mind whirled. The photos she’d taken in Italy, the photos she could keep taking if only she stayed on, were not like other journalists’ pictures from Europe: soldiers in trenches with guns, pictures declaring that war was about men and battles and bullets. Her pictures from Italy would have been clarifications: miniaturised explanations that these were the consequences of that war. In every photograph, Jes
s had held both horror and beauty in her hands – a thing as precious and rare as an asymmetrical butterfly. It was her duty to transmit that to the world, no matter what it did to her stomach. She picked up the Rollei, pressed it to the glass and captured on film exactly what, now, child’s play had become.

  Then she put the camera down and made for the door. She would put her case to the Public Relations Office. Because she had to stay.

  A tap at the door drew her up short. ‘Marty!’ she cried.

  ‘I thought you might need these.’ Martha Gellhorn marched into the room. ‘Don’t ask what I had to do to get them.’ In her hand was a large bottle of whiskey, and a new Baby Hermes typewriter. ‘I heard what happened.’ Marty settled into a chair and poured out two whiskeys, glasses full to the brim. ‘Cheers. Here’s to breaking the rules.’

  ‘You mean this has happened to you too?’ Jess took the whiskey and propped herself up on the bed. To look at Martha, legs crossed louchely, glass held casually in her fingertips, one would never think it.

  ‘I’m thirty-five years old and I’ve covered four theatres of war. Yet all I’m allowed to do here is sit on the sidelines. I spent the week at Bomber Command but nobody will take me up in a plane. I watched two male correspondents go up though.’ Marty swallowed her drink. ‘There was a press conference while you were in Italy and I asked, as I always do, if I could get a posting to a Press Camp – they’re right near the front. The delightful Warren Stone leered at me like I was a hooker and said, “Last time I checked, Martha, you were a woman.” Every single person in the room guffawed as if it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard – that Warren Stone had had the luck to discover I was a woman, which of course he hasn’t. Wolfing, I’ve decided to call it – when they treat you like all they want from you is your breasts and your legs and the space in between.’

  ‘You didn’t think to tell me any of this when you were so busy convincing Bel to send me here? What will they do to me? I don’t want to go back to New York.’ Jess said it with conviction.

  ‘Depends if someone speaks up for you and says what really happened,’ Martha said sagely, clearly the veteran of many a battle with the rules and those enforcing them.

  ‘Nobody will do that. It was my first day.’

  ‘Maybe they’ll let you off for naiveté. Don’t be afraid to wear a skirt; beg, borrow or steal a pair of silk stockings, cross your legs and bat your lashes,’ Martha advised. ‘You can soap off your principles later.’

  Jess stood up, a little unsteadily – the large glass of whiskey had found its way into her bloodstream quickly – and stroked the typewriter Martha had brought her. ‘Do you ever get scared?’ she asked, her voice low.

  Marty lit a cigarette and offered Jess a smile. ‘Do you remember that piece I wrote about the hospital in Barcelona?’

  Jess thought for a moment. Then she nodded. Martha had written about seeing a ward full of injured children, one boy sobbing for his mother. She’d been asked if she wanted to see the medical ward and in her article she’d written: ‘Well,’ I said. Well, no, I thought. Martha had wanted to turn away too.

  Jess looked up and caught the same look in Marty’s eyes that she could feel at the back of her own. Trepidation, which was, she supposed, somewhat different to fear or cowardice.

  ‘It means you’re human,’ Martha said gently. ‘Not that you’re incapable of doing your job. Channel it into your pictures. And your words.’

  It was good advice. Before she could say so, before they could both get caught any further in the sticky emotions of war, Marty turned the conversation. ‘I heard that Warren Stone didn’t get the promotion he’s been hankering after. Which maybe means there’s going to be some good news for you.’

  A knock sounded on the door. Jess opened it and her heart sank at the sight of an officer in dress uniform. ‘You’ve come to escort me to my doom,’ she said.

  The officer shook his head. ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ He removed his cap, as if that might help.

  Jess studied his face. There was something familiar about him. ‘Shit,’ she said when she realised it was the captain from the foxhole in Italy. Then she winced.

  ‘I seem to remember that my language in the ditch was probably more colourful than it should have been. So I’d say we’re even,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t recognise you without the mud,’ she said grimly. Now, in the light and without rain, she could see that his hair was actually dark even minus the dirt. His eyes were the grey-blue of dusk and his face was serious. ‘I really am doomed if they’ve brought you in to bear witness.’

  ‘I’m Dan Hallworth. I did come to bear witness.’ His mouth turned up a little and she felt herself stiffen at the thought that he would enjoy ruining her career as a correspondent before it had even begun.

  ‘And?’ she said despairingly. She felt Marty step in behind her.

  ‘And I told them it wasn’t your fault. That you had no choice but to be there because the US Army brought you there. I told them that you put no one in danger and got out the minute you could.’

  ‘You did?’ Jess wrapped both her hands around the now-empty glass of whiskey to stop from flinging herself in thanks at Dan Hallworth. ‘What did they say?’

  ‘That you should keep out of trouble in future. But,’ he added, looking at Martha, ‘I can see that’s probably not going to happen. How are you, Gellhorn?’

  ‘I’m damned fine, Captain, no, Major Hallworth. Look at that,’ she said, fingering the golden oak leaf insignia on his uniform. ‘You outrank us both.’

  He smiled at Martha. ‘I should have known you two would join forces. You even look like sisters.’

  Martha touched her hair, which was short and blonde like Jess’s, but even curlier. ‘If I was ten years younger, perhaps.’

  ‘Do you know everyone?’ Jess asked Martha.

  ‘Just the ones worth knowing.’ Marty winked at Major Hallworth. ‘I met Dan in Italy a few weeks back. He took the time to explain to me how fast our men are dying around Cassino.’

  ‘Nothing’s changed,’ he said, then looked at Jess. ‘You’re allowed back to Italy. I think your PRO is coming to tell you. But I know from Gellhorn that you ladies don’t get a jeep, so I thought I’d pick you up here at 0700 on Tuesday. We’ll be back in Purple Heart Valley by the end of the week.’ Dan turned to leave.

  ‘Purple Heart Valley?’ Jess asked, stopping him.

  ‘They’ve given out more Purple Hearts in Italy than ever before.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful name for a terrible place.’

  Before Dan could reply, Jess saw Warren Stone striding down the hallway towards her room.

  ‘I might leave you to it,’ Dan said.

  ‘Thank you,’ Jess called to his departing back.

  ‘Officer Stone,’ Martha drawled, hardly bothering to blow her cigarette smoke away from Warren. ‘Always such a pleasure.’

  ‘Cut the shit, Martha,’ he said.

  ‘I bet if I was in a nurse’s uniform you’d be a lot friendlier,’ Martha replied, raising an eyebrow.

  Jess drew strength from Martha’s lack of fear. ‘So I’m off to Italy again?’

  Warren grimaced. ‘Apparently you are. And I’ve been given the job of keeping you in line. So if you do as you’re told this time, then I won’t have to take the blame for your mistakes again.’

  Something in his tone, a mortification when he said the words – take the blame – made her wonder if Marty had been right. If there was some link between him not getting his promotion and her victory. She tried for appeasement; perhaps they could start again. ‘It was never my intention to go to a battlefield.’

  ‘But then you photographed it and sent those photos to the censors for everyone to see.’ This time his voice was hard and Jess sensed there was definitely something more going on – that he had decided she was the one at fault and that whatever had made him angry, he was channelling it into resentment towards her.

  It would be bes
t to end the conversation before things deteriorated any further. ‘I will avoid all battlefields from now on,’ she said before she shut the door. ‘What a jerk,’ she said to Marty after she’d heard his footsteps fade away.

  Martha shrugged. ‘That’s being kind. Like I said, he’s been after a promotion. When you met him, did he spin you a line about being able to get you whatever assignments you wanted? And did he ask you out for dinner?’

  Jess nodded.

  ‘He did the same to me and I, like you, was canny enough to be wary. He can’t action press assignments; he can only administer them. With a promotion, he’d be able to do more. But thankfully he hasn’t got it and I suspect it might be because Dan Hallworth – a CO who’s seen more than enough battles and actually knows what’s what, as opposed to Warren who hasn’t ever seen a battle – has come here and told them that they were wrong and you were right. The powers that be would have seen your photos and been irate that you were so close to combat and told Warren to deal with it. He hasn’t. And it sounds as if his punishment is to look after you.’ Martha ended with a smirk, as if she relished the chance to see fireworks erupt between Jess and Warren. ‘He, like many others, hates the idea of women doing this job – apparently it goes against nature, unless the women also agree to dine with him.’

  ‘I’m not sure that makes me feel any better.’

  ‘Getting a CO like Dan on your side is what you need. Some people call it an unfair advantage. I say that if you’re lucky enough to find one of the few men in the US Army who couldn’t care less if you were a woman or a flamingo – and they do exist; the French are much less concerned about women at the front – then use it. Besides,’ Martha added, ‘he’s very easy on the eye.’