The French Photographer

by Natasha Lester

  It was a line of thought she couldn’t let herself pursue. She shook her head and turned her attention back to Dan’s letter but then Warren slid into a seat at the bar next to her, his toothiness recovered, and she wondered if the previous week’s glimpse behind the facade had been a hallucination.

  ‘Well?’ she demanded, stubbing out another of the countless cigarettes she and Marty were working their way through.

  ‘You’re to discuss the matter with your editors,’ Warren replied as serenely as if they were discussing what to have for afternoon tea.

  ‘Why?’ Martha asked.

  ‘It’s somewhat … delicate,’ Warren said, unable to stop the corners of his mouth twitching.

  ‘More delicate than accusing me of sleeping with half the US Army in order to get my stories,’ Jess said collectedly.

  ‘You didn’t get the information about wasted parachute training places just by asking around.’ Warren didn’t bother to restrain his smile this time. ‘The US Army is very keen to protect your special skills.’

  Jess’s stomach contracted. She had no idea what he meant but she knew it didn’t sound good.

  ‘If you really would prefer to hear it from me, rather than someone who might handle it more sensitively, then here goes,’ Warren continued with faux concern. ‘As you can see, none of the staff sections could provide any reason why women should be prevented the right to descend by parachute into France.’

  He passed a letter to Jess and her nausea somersaulted into excitement. She looked across at Martha and grinned. No reason they couldn’t go! Then they’d be at the next jump training session. But if Warren hadn’t got his way, his bosses at SHAEF PR were likely furious with him. So he should be downcast at the very least. Instead, he bore a strong resemblance to the proverbial canary-eating cat.

  ‘Except for a major in the office of the Surgeon General,’ Warren said, leaning back and draping his arm along the back of Jess’s stool. ‘He was very concerned about the effects on the female anatomy of dropping out of a plane going 115 miles per hour. Add to that the brusque upward thrust of the opening parachute canopy and one doesn’t like to think about what might happen to the delicate female apparatus.’

  Absolute silence followed. Neither Jess nor Martha could make their mouths form a single word of response. How Warren must have searched high and low for that major. How he must have relished receiving that report and showing it to his superiors to prove that he was doing such a good job of keeping the women quarantined and out of the invasion fleet.

  Then Warren let his hand drop, seemingly accidentally, onto Jess’s shoulder.

  She shot to her feet. ‘And what does the Surgeon General’s office have to say about the effect on the dangling male apparatus? Oh, that’s right, it’s used to brusque upward thrusting but we women are too delicate to know anything about it. And I suppose if one has no balls in the first place, like PROs who sit in hotels rather than fighting for their country – for God’s sake, I’ve seen more of the war than you have! – then we shouldn’t be too concerned about any adverse effects on those balls.’

  Martha exploded with laughter, which set off the rest of the men at the bar, who’d heard all too clearly Jess’s tirade, delivered at full volume.

  Stone spoke so softly that Jess had to lean down, despite her disinclination to do so, to hear him. This time, there was no humanity, no vulnerability in him at all. ‘One day, Captain May, you will regret this conversation very much. And on that day, I will remind you just what you said about the brusque upward thrust.’

  With that he left, Jess’s victory as empty as any in Italy that had cost a hundred lives. By publicly calling him out on the fact that his ‘war’ service was confined to hotel bars rather than battlefields, she’d openly and unwittingly skewered another of Warren’s most tender spots. Neither she nor Martha would witness the invasion by parachute, and now she had to also try to forget what he’d just said, and what he’d meant by it. Everything he’d done and said to her before had been immature horseplay. But that threat wasn’t.

  She shivered and swallowed more whiskey.

  At Portsmouth, it seemed incongruous that, across the Channel, one could see France, see the enemy. Today was invasion day plus one; yesterday, everyone had decamped to the south of England and Jess and Martha had had to sit and watch the flood of male journalists boarding planes that blackened the sky, watch the soldiers who’d never seen battle swarming onto ships bound for France, stand in this very spot and stare across at the war that no female was allowed to witness.

  But instead of letting Warren’s threat and almost obsessive interest in Jess get them down – what could he really do to her in a hotel full of people? – Jess and Martha decided to use it to their advantage. So long as Jess stayed in Warren’s line of sight, Martha could at least try to get herself across the Channel.

  It was dawn when Martha embraced Jess and said, ‘I sure am glad I saw you at that party in New York.’

  ‘Me too. Now go.’

  Jess made sure to stride provocatively into the bar and sit beside Warren, ready to engage him in another battle of words while Martha slipped off to the beach. Then, between taking Warren’s barbs, Jess imagined Martha creeping onto the hospital ship as planned, hiding in a bathroom – would it really work? It sounded so simple and foolish now – landing at Omaha Beach and getting her story. The first woman to set foot on French soil post-invasion, the first woman to tell people how it really was. Not the way the men saw it.

  After a good hour or two, when she was sure that Martha had got away, Jess turned her attention to a couple of officers and availed herself of a ride to the village school nearby; Warren had, of course, refused her a jeep. She walked up the driveway to the school and heard her name, screamed at the top of tiny lungs, then a little girl in a muddle of dark curls and a too-big uniform ran out to throw herself into Jess’s arms. This time it was Jess who picked her up and swung her around, for Dan, who could not.

  ‘You did come!’ Victorine beamed and kissed both of Jess’s cheeks and Jess returned the gesture.

  A woman Jess assumed was the school mistress appeared and nodded at Jess. ‘You must be Miss May,’ she said, a friendly smile on her face. ‘Why don’t you take Miss May for a walk, Victorine? You can stop by the kitchen and ask the cook for some cake.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Jess said. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve caused any disruption.’

  ‘You haven’t,’ the woman said firmly. ‘She’s been pining for Major Hallworth and while we try to supply as many hugs as we can, it’s not quite the same. It will do her the world of good to spend the morning with you.’

  So Jess and Victorine sat down on a stile in a field and ate chocolate cake. Jess told Victorine about her own parents, how they’d died too, just like Victorine’s papa at the hospital in Italy, and how, even though she was older than Victorine, she still missed them. ‘I thought maybe we could look after each other,’ Jess finished. ‘I don’t have parents and nor do you anymore, and it would be nice to know that there was someone else who could be my family.’

  Victorine beamed. ‘I will be your family,’ she said seriously. ‘And you will be mine. Dan is my family too. So now he is yours as well.’

  Jess grinned as she thought about writing that in a letter to Dan. All he’d wanted her to do was pay Victorine a visit and now they’d been proclaimed family. But she also knew that the most important thing was to get Victorine through this war. If they could do that, then everything else would work out too. Or so she was trying to make herself believe.

  But that belief lay in tatters later that day when she heard from the pilots who’d made three hundred and twenty-five missions over to Normandy the night before to resupply Dan’s airborne division. ‘We threw the stuff out for the poor bastards and prayed; the Army doesn’t know where they are so it’s anyone’s guess if they find their supplies,’ one of them said to her between long drags of cigarette smoke.

  ‘What do you mean?�
� she made herself ask.

  ‘The fellas in the airborne division got dropped anywhere and everywhere because the Krauts were shooting down the planes. Hardly any of them are where they’re meant to be. That’s if they even made it to the ground alive, the way Jerry was shooting at them as they dropped.’

  Jess held up her hand. ‘I get it,’ she said.

  Now she had yet another reason to find a way into France. To find out if Dan was okay. She wouldn’t be able to see Victorine again until she knew because Victorine would see it in her face: her fear that the worst had happened.

  Warren Stone was waiting for her in the bar when she returned. ‘Your friend’s been arrested,’ he said, triumph in his voice. ‘Mrs Ernest Hemingway stowed away in the bathroom of a hospital ship and got herself onto a water ambulance that landed on the beach. As if that wasn’t stupid enough, she sent a story through to Collier’s, reporting what she saw. I picked it up from the censor. She convicted herself.’

  ‘I think that was her intention,’ Jess said evenly. ‘One doesn’t stow away on a ship to get a story and then not write the goddamned story. Wouldn’t it be easier if you just let us go?’

  ‘How it must torment you; she got there and you didn’t.’ Warren folded his arms across his chest as if he’d just made the final, winning rebuttal.

  ‘It doesn’t torment me at all.’ It was true. Jess was having a hard time holding back the jubilation that Martha had really done it, and had beaten her husband to the story. Hemingway hadn’t yet landed on French soil; Martha had. She risked a smile and raised her voice so everyone in the bar would hear. ‘When I think about how you must have felt when you found out what she did, all I can do is laugh. And raise a glass to her.’

  ‘Shame you won’t have anyone to raise it with. Martha Gellhorn has been confined to a nurses’ training camp. She has no passport or accreditation papers. She’s not going anywhere.’

  ‘And I don’t suppose I should bother asking if I can see her?’

  ‘Only if you want to hear me say no to you one more time.’

  ‘Well, that’s just another in a long line of shitty decisions,’ Jess said. ‘Martha’s got more experience reporting war than anybody. But she gets locked up for trying to do her job? Exactly how long am I, and every other female correspondent, going to be stuck here? What started out as a ridiculously sexist notion of imagining we might swoon at the sight of war simply because we’re women has become a stubbornly entrenched dictate that nobody in SHAEF wants to relinquish, just to prove a point. It’s childish illogic, especially now that the female nurses are finally going to France.’

  Jess felt someone step up behind her. She was just about to whirl around, thinking it would be someone come to defend Warren from the deranged and wanton Jessica May, when she heard a woman’s voice say, ‘Yes, we’d all like to know that.’ It was Iris Carpenter from The Boston Globe. Not one of the novices.

  Someone else joined them. Ruth Cowan from Associated Press, another woman with experience. Soon there was a group of women around Jess, all of them staring implacably at Warren Stone, wanting Jess’s question answered.

  ‘If you don’t answer,’ Jess said quietly, ‘we might think you don’t have the authority to do so.’

  ‘I don’t take kindly to being ambushed,’ he replied.

  Despite the steel in his voice, despite knowing it would only strengthen his resolve to do whatever his obscure threat had promised the other night, despite knowing that she was once again starting a fire that Warren would do anything to extinguish before his superiors felt its heat, Jess made herself say it. ‘Then it’s a good thing there are better men than you fighting in France.’ As she spoke, Jess could feel the held breath of every woman around her, all of them wanting to applaud while at the same time wishing Jess could take it back because what would Warren Stone do now?

  Jess didn’t wait for his reply. ‘Back when you quarantined us, you said we’d be able to go when the nurses did. They’re going next week but we still don’t have our orders. We’ll put our concerns in writing,’ she continued. ‘We’ll expect a reply within twenty-four hours. If that reply says anything about our delicate vaginas, then we will, every single one of us, publish it.’

  She turned away and walked over to an empty table. Iris dumped her typewriter in front of Jess. Ruth bought the drinks. And Jess bashed out their words. At the end they had a letter to SHAEF, signed by every single female correspondent who’d been in Europe for more than a month, demanding they be allowed into France.

  Eleven

  Two days later, Jess and Iris Carpenter were on their way to Omaha Beach on a plane. The first women into France – besides Martha’s unscheduled expedition – after D-day. They had thirty-six hours. No more. While SHAEF might be well aware that The Boston Globe wouldn’t print any military communication about women’s unmentionables, Jess knew they weren’t so sure about Vogue. And so her threat had worked. But it had come at a price. More new rules for ‘girl reporters’ arrived from SHAEF as thick and fast as bombers in an invasion sky and any breach would result in court-martial. And she’d also heard that Warren Stone had been bawled out by his boss once again for his inability to keep the gals quiet. Which would only make him hate Jess all the more.

  But as she and Iris flew in lower towards the minuscule Saint Laurent airstrip, between Easy Green and Easy Red, Jess forgot about all that and wondered instead how anyone could land on or take off from the beach. Indeed the pilot looked taut enough to snap as they came in low over Dead Man’s Gulch through ashen bulges of smoke.

  ‘Do you think we’ll make it?’ she said to Iris.

  ‘It’d certainly be the definition of irony to have finally been allowed to come, and then to crash land on the beach,’ Iris replied.

  ‘Maybe I’ll just close my eyes and pray,’ Jess said.

  In the end she prayed, but she couldn’t make herself shut her eyes. The sea, a beautiful holiday blue, was full of battleships and tugboats, all flying silver barrage balloons above like misshapen moons, the sunlight dancing off the silver, off the water. Here and there, drowned tanks and derricks could be seen among the ruins of bombed-out boats. The hulking grey of the Mulberry harbour fingered the ocean and bulldozered piles of metal hedgehogs spiked menacingly from the sand. Foxholes, which just days ago had sheltered men, gaped out of the cliff.

  They landed safely and Jess and Iris hopped out, sharing a relieved grimace to find themselves alive and intact and in France. On the beach beside them, medics prodded the sand with spades, removing the bodies that had, until now, been temporarily covered over in the rush. Row after row of sticks marked each resting place, and from each stick wafted a canvas bag. Jess walked among them, in the European Theatre of Operations, a place where the actors would not come back to life once the curtains came down, focusing not on the things one would ordinarily admire on a beach – the colour of the water, an unusual shell – but on the things one should never behold by the seaside.

  Worst of all was the tideline. The beach was so wide, the difference between high and low tide so marked, that the high watermark had become the most poignant reminder that what lay now on the beach had once been the living. Yardley hair tonic, bibles, a baseball mitt. Razors, letters from home, pistol belts. Sticks of camouflage cream, a guitar, shoe polish. The remainders of men who would no longer polish their shoes.

  Jess made herself walk across the beach. All you have to do is take photographs, she told herself. Your job is the easiest of anyone’s in France. And so she snapped the tideline, knowing she would ask Bel to run a wide-angle shot across a bifold, four pages in all. It would be her attempt to say, without words, that while the official rhetoric was that casualties were lower than expected – which everyone in America would take to mean that few had died – ‘lower’ still meant thousands and that nobody could sit on Omaha Beach and feel anything other than devastated.

  Five days later, Jess was still in France. As usual it wasn’t her fault; she hadn�
��t been able to get a ride back to London on a plane or a ship as they were full of wounded GIs whose need was greater than hers. She’d lost Iris Carpenter. Warren Stone was probably standing at port in England ready to lock Jess up the moment she returned. But she’d been smart enough to have the pilots and medics sign a paper attesting they had no room for her, which she looked forward to handing to Warren once she reached England.

  She was beyond filthy; when she’d been told thirty-six hours, she hadn’t bothered to bring a change of clothes, thinking it would only weigh her down. She was almost out of film and she’d had to send all her used films back to London in a press bag despite her misgivings that it might end up in the censors’ trash can.

  Now, she was picking her way across the sand, towards the cemetery, where she could see someone studying the graves, silent. His stance was familiar – back unbending, the air of command apparent – although his helmeted head and uniform made him look much the same as every other soldier in France.

  The figure turned around slowly, face altering when he saw her.

  ‘Major Hallworth,’ she said, only just raising a smile.

  ‘Captain May,’ he replied, his expression matching hers.

  She felt it before it happened, the press of tears at the back of her cowardly eyes, all the goddamned tears she’d refused to allow herself to shed for the past five days because a woman was not allowed to fall to pieces if she ever wanted to be allowed back into France. She didn’t say anything, willed her eyes to dry out but they refused to listen and so at last she said, her voice wobbly, ‘I think there’s a good chance I’m going to cry.’