The French Photographer

by Natasha Lester

  Which meant only one thing. It was coming. The mammoth attack on Europe. An attack Jess would never be allowed to witness or report on. She wanted to thump her hand on the jeep from the injustice of it. Instead, she said, ‘I’ll visit her whenever I can. I mean, I’ll have plenty of time if Warren Stone has his way.’

  Dan stopped in front of the car. ‘You’re a great photographer, Jess. Keep fighting them.’

  And she found herself momentarily speechless at having received admiration of the real kind, not of her face or her cleavage or her legs. ‘Thanks,’ she said at last, before she climbed into the jeep.

  Dan drove fast, but expertly, as if they had somewhere they needed to be, and soon he’d stopped and was jumping out. ‘Now we have to walk.’

  They joined the column of soldiers winding up the escarpment before them, the dawn sun just beginning to tinge the landscape orange, mist wafting around, then disappearing below them as they climbed higher so that they seemed to have stepped over the clouds and into the sky. Hardly anyone spoke, and all Jess could hear were boots shuffling through sand, guns rattling on shoulders, and the one warning Dan had given her: ‘Don’t step off the path. There are mines everywhere.’

  The shutter on the Rolleiflex clicked intermittently as they hiked and Jess was grateful that nobody had really noticed her yet; her helmet hid her face, her uniform was the same as the men’s, and she was tall enough that she didn’t look too out of place. The only thing that marked her as different was the camera she carried instead of a gun.

  They reached a place where the slope levelled out into a ledge, with a large flat rock in the centre. The men veered off and found positions, seating themselves on the ground or leaning against the face of the mountain. Jess sat near the edge, the daredevil child still hidden inside her making her hang her legs and boots over the side, swinging freely. Dan did the same and they both stared out at the massive Garigliano Valley spread before them. A faint ribbon of distant sea shone blue on one side, the mountains loomed up over the other. Most of the ground in the valley was ruined but, up here, olive trees clung stubbornly to the hillside and anemones bloomed pink and purple in cracks of ground. She drank in the view like whiskey, trying to ignore the fire that burned below them, blazing high even though Jess couldn’t believe there was anything down there left to burn.

  She lined up the Rolleiflex and shot the once fertile valley, which now grew nothing but guns, then a group of men sprawled on the ground, then a mule with, inexplicably, a small camp organ on its back, then another man with a large book that he placed on the flat rock. Jess realised he was wearing a chaplain’s uniform but before she could ask Dan about it, a shell whizzed over the group, dropping harmlessly into the valley below them, more fire marking its detonation.

  ‘How close exactly are the Germans?’ she asked Dan.

  ‘About four hundred yards,’ he replied cheerfully.

  ‘That sounds a little too close,’ she said.

  ‘They won’t hit us. It’s Easter; a temporary ceasefire. Besides, we’re not in range. They’d have to move and they’re not going to come out of their dugouts with so many of us sitting here.’

  Before Jess could decide if Dan was right, the chaplain began to speak. Somehow, they had a microphone and loudspeakers rigged up and the chaplain’s welcome, to both Catholics and Protestants of the US and German armies, and his wish to them all for a joyous Easter, was proclaimed in both German and English, the sound ringing out to where Jess imagined the German dugouts must be, and carrying far out over valley below them.

  ‘After the Sabbath, and towards dawn on the first day of the week, Mary of Magdala and the other Mary went to see the sepulchre,’ the chaplain read in German. Then he re-read the gospel in English.

  Throughout, nobody spoke. Instead they sat listening to the story of a miracle, all too aware that what everyone wanted, no matter their nationality, was a miracle of the kind that hadn’t been seen since the Gospel of Saint Matthew was written.

  When the chaplain finished, somebody sat down at the organ and began to play. A nurse stood up from a small group and began to sing ‘I Know That My Redeemer Liveth’ from Handel’s Messiah and the beauty of that lone voice, the sonorous organ ringing out over a desecrated Italian valley, was too much for Jess. She squeezed her hands together and gritted her teeth but her throat burned and the tears were too many for her eyes to hold and they spilled over, running like the Italian winter rain down her cheeks. She closed her eyes and swallowed, trying not to sob aloud, trying to hold herself together, to stop her body from shaking.

  Something brushed her hand and took gentle hold of it. Jess opened her eyes to find that Dan had taken it, that his jaw was clenched tight too, that just one drop glistened on his cheek. They sat like that for the entire song, hands pressed painfully together, but it was the only way to listen to the hymn and not fall to pieces like the shell that had burnt out to nothing far below them.

  Keep fighting them, Dan had said. And she would, she vowed, as the hymn crescendoed. Warren might well string her up when she got back to London or confine her to the Savoy. But, damn the consequences; she’d press the rules to the limits to find a way to get out of the Savoy and back to Europe, to photograph the moments like this, a lacuna of pathos amidst the firestorm of invasion.

  The silence after the song had finished vibrated with the sound of the soprano voice, the final words – For now is Christ risen from the dead, the first fruits of them that sleep – bittersweet. Jess knew that none who fell here at Monte Cassino or during the imminent invasion would rise; that all the men around her, including Dan, might tomorrow be the ones to sleep forever.

  PART TWO

  D’Arcy

  Seven

  FRANCE, JUNE 2004

  As the train sped out of Charles de Gaulle Airport, D’Arcy’s eyes banqueted on the view; she could almost smell the chestnut-and-lily–scented French summer air seeping into the train. It had been too long and she’d missed the church spires in every village, the railway bridges arching like ornate rainbows over river and road, the dusky Van Gogh yellow of the cornfields.

  In an hour, she reached Reims, ready to pick up her car, hoping the gallery had remembered to book a small vehicle for her, one designed for navigating French towns, not a typically muscular SUV like everyone in Sydney preferred to drive. She was relieved to find a minuscule blue Renault awaiting her and she promptly opened all the windows, not caring that her long blonde hair would fly about madly as she drove past engorged grapes, so full of champagne juice that it was a wonder the slipstream of her car didn’t burst their skins. Oaks – how she wanted one day when she was finally a grown-up to have a grand driveway lined with oak trees – peered majestically down at her, some bowing their heads, others raising their arms to the sky as if they too were celebrating the fact that D’Arcy Hallworth was finally back in France.

  She glanced down at the map on the passenger seat occasionally until, after about twenty minutes driving south-east, climbing up high into the Montagne de Reims, the valley spilling out in picturesque impressionist shades below her, she turned off the A-road and onto a D-road towards Verzy, passing a succession of champagne caves. After a short time, she reached a road that was so narrow she found herself breathing in foolishly when she encountered a vine tractor coming in the opposite direction.

  All of a sudden she saw the signpost, Lieu de Rêves, almost hidden. She swung into the driveway. An avenue of plane trees, densely planted, made it impossible to see where she was headed. And then, all at once, she was there: in a fairytale. The trees opened out onto a true chateau made of white stone with a blue slate roof and an actual drawbridge, turrets and a keep.

  ‘Oh!’ she said, unable to stop the exclamation escaping.

  She parked the car and stepped out, glad to stretch after the long journey. She tried to smooth down her hair and her dress, which had at least only had to suffer the train and the car as she’d changed at the airport. It was a floral pri
nt dress, brightly patterned with orange and blue, the skirt kicking out at her knees, teamed with brown cowboy boots. She crunched over the gravel and crossed the drawbridge, unable to resist straightening her back, holding out her skirt, slowing her pace and pretending she was a princess despite the boots and the fact that she was twenty-nine years old.

  She grinned at herself and just managed to let go of her skirt in time as the door to the chateau swung open and a man stepped out to greet her.

  ‘D’Arcy Hallworth?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s me.’ Her smile grew wider when she saw that the man in front of her made all synonyms for handsome meaningless, his almost-black hair sexily ruffled in stark contrast to the perfection of his crisp blue shirt, which was just a shade lighter than his eyes.

  ‘I’m Josh Vaughn.’

  ‘Oh, you’re American.’ She realised her faux pas the second the words left her mouth.

  ‘Sorry if you were hoping for a dashing Frenchman to go with the castle,’ he said, unsmiling.

  She decided to risk a joke. ‘Well, at least you’re dashing,’ she said.

  He laughed in surprise, which suited him much better than the serious face he’d greeted her with. ‘For that, you can come in.’

  She stepped through the doorway and her body automatically spiralled around, soaking in the grandeur, the elegance, the lack of excess. Even Josh paled in comparison to the surrounds.

  The centuries-old chessboard-patterned black-and-white marble floors echoed with the sound of her boots. The walls, which should have felt forbidding, cut as they were from stone too, receded behind the photographs adorning them. Photographs that D’Arcy recognised, photographs she’d studied over the years, photographs she could now reach out and touch except that would be like stroking the crown jewels – a sacrilege.

  ‘What a pity I can’t take all of this back to Australia with me,’ she said, indicating the ceiling flying up into the void above them, almost impossible to see without arching both neck and back.

  ‘Excess baggage charges would probably set you back a bit,’ he said dryly as he watched her drink in the house, assessing her, but not in a voyeuristic way.

  ‘So do you trust me yet?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  It was her turn to laugh. ‘Repaying my flattering honesty with your more brutal version, I see.’ Then her eye caught sight of it, just one of the many things she’d wanted to see: a single photograph, not large, but one that made her advance.

  It was a picture of a mother and child, inspired, she knew, by an 1883 Christian Krohg painting of an exhausted mother sitting beside a sleeping baby, her head dropped onto the nearby bed, asleep, fatigue etched into every stroke of oil on canvas. In the same way that the painting had eschewed the artistic tradition of the devoted mother and child, the photograph in front of D’Arcy showed the naked torso of a woman, sweat slicked, hair glued to her head, a newly born child screaming on her chest, one arm outflung, protesting. The woman’s eyes were shut and her face echoed the exhaustion of the painting, as if she were saying, Why now after hours of labour must I feed this child? But then the careful viewer saw the mother’s hand, one finger outstretched, caressing the baby’s hidden cheek.

  ‘It’s …’ She paused, realising she’d been in a reverie, had been standing with her hand reaching towards the photograph, as if communing with it. ‘One of the best pieces of work I’ve ever seen,’ she finished simply. Then she turned to Josh, relocating her professionalism. ‘Why is it hanging? I thought it would be packed.’

  ‘The contract was for you to pack some of the more valuable pieces,’ he said as if she were an idiot.

  ‘I signed the contract, so I know what it says,’ D’Arcy replied testily. ‘But I wasn’t expecting to pack something like that.’ It was a dream, to handle a photograph so exquisite, but it was also a bit of a nightmare. What if she ruined it? ‘How many exactly do I have to pack?’

  ‘Most of them,’ he said matter-of-factly.

  ‘Most of them?’ she repeated. ‘I’m only here for two days.’

  ‘You’ll have to change your plane ticket. It’ll take at least a fortnight.’

  ‘The contract you sent to the gallery – I assume you are the Josh Vaughn who, as the photographer’s agent, wrote the contract to which I am subcontracted – mentioned “a few valuable pieces”. Most of them is not a few of them.’

  He shrugged, irritatingly, as if it wasn’t his problem. ‘I called the gallery and explained that the photographer didn’t trust anyone else to do the packing. That you’d need to do it and you’d need to stay longer. They emailed back a confirmation to you of your extra fee now that the job will take more time.’

  ‘So you know how much I get paid,’ she said, annoyed.

  ‘Didn’t seem too bad an amount for the privilege of travelling to France and handling photographs you’ve obviously been dying to see.’ He was stiff, almost adversarial; the artist’s agent concerned only about his client.

  She couldn’t resist the riposte. ‘But did they include danger money for dealing with you for a fortnight?’

  She saw the corners of his lips twitch up for just a moment and she childishly congratulated herself for the small victory before he handed her a printed page. It was a confirmation from the Art Gallery of New South Wales for her to stay in France for as long as it took to pack the photographs she’d simply thought it was her job to courier. As an art handler, she was used to hiccups and problems and she was also used to managing them to everyone’s satisfaction; one only had to spend as much time in transit as she did to know that when planes and trucks and warehouses and customs brokers and art were all thrown together, moments of chaos were to be expected. But adding an extra week or two on to the trip was somewhat unusual. She was beginning to understand why the gallery had asked her to go so early.

  ‘It will be easier if you stay here in the chateau,’ Josh said.

  ‘I guess I could handle that.’ D’Arcy looked around once more at the magnificent surrounds. ‘Is the photographer in residence?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Do you ever see her?’

  ‘We don’t converse via telepathy.’

  She smiled, although she had no idea if he was being sarcastic or joking. ‘Will I see her?’

  ‘You’re assuming the photographer is female.’

  ‘I know she’s female. Her body of work has a degree of compassion for the subject that I’ve never witnessed in that of a male photographer.’

  ‘Cartier-Bresson. Penn. Mapplethorpe. They’re not compassionate enough for you?’ He folded his arms across his chest.

  ‘No.’ D’Arcy was emphatic. ‘They were technically masterful but empathically absent. Like Ansel Adams said, a great photograph gives expression to precisely how the photographer feels about their subject and thus illustrates how one feels about all of life.’

  He raised an eyebrow in response and she supposed that throwing Adams into the conversation probably made her sound like either a show-off or a know-it-all. Or both.

  But he only asked, ‘What about Capa?’

  Ordinarily she might concede to Capa. Not today. ‘Shouldn’t you be defending your client rather than listing the photographic canon, a group of men who need no more recognition?’ she replied.

  ‘You didn’t just come to babysit photographs on a plane, did you?’

  Yes, because that’s all an art handler does, she almost snapped back. Instead she said, ‘I’ve been flying for more than a day – Sydney is on the other side of the world, after all – then on a train and a car for another few hours. What I really need to do right now is sleep and then tomorrow I’ll get started. If you could show me where my room is? Given you’ve had notice of my forthcoming stay, I assume you have that organised.’

  ‘Célie will show you.’ He indicated a woman who’d just appeared from nowhere. As her travel-fuddled brain shut down, D’Arcy followed the woman up the stairs, which spiralled within the turret, then down a long
hallway and into a room that she would peruse tomorrow. Right now, all she wanted was a shower and her bed.

  D’Arcy woke the following morning thankful that her nomadic existence meant she’d learned to sleep whenever and wherever, and that jet lag never bothered her. She yawned and stretched and, for the first time, revelled in the luxury.

  Sheets so sumptuous they must be Egyptian cotton. A true French bed of curved and carved wood, the moulded flowers spilling delicately across the headboard, the wood painted a soft creamy white, D’Arcy thought at first, but then she realised the paint held the palest note of blue, offset by the velvety blue-grey wallpaper. Matching carved bedside tables stood on either side.

  She sat up and swung her feet over the edge of the bed, walking over to the soft white drapes, pulling them open to reveal doors that led onto her own balcony. Her stomach growled and she realised she was starving and had no idea what to do about breakfast. Would they feed her? Or would she have to drive to the nearest town and grab some coffee and croissants?

  In answer to her question, a knock sounded on the door.

  ‘Come in,’ D’Arcy called.

  Célie appeared, breakfast tray in hand, loaded with croissants and baguettes and cheese and fruit juice and – D’Arcy sniffed the air – coffee.

  ‘Breakfast on the balcony?’ Célie asked in French.

  ‘Oui, merci.’ D’Arcy followed her out and breathed in the wild scents of the French countryside – musky sweet chestnut, the strong fragrance of artemisia, spicy liquorice and citrus. Yellow buttercups frolicked over the garden below and she could see that a loose formality played hide-and-seek with the natural landscape: pleached limes bordered a mass of wild orchids, a separate garden room had been created with drooping mulberry trees to house the potager, which was full of strawberry and blackberry bushes, as well as the most vividly orange pumpkins D’Arcy had ever seen, perfect for flamboyantly gilded fairytale carriages. There was even a maze.