The French Photographer

by Natasha Lester

  D’Arcy knew then that she would take great care with her next words. If Victorine said nothing, D’Arcy would look for more answers without involving her mother. Because it might all be easily explained away, somehow, and she would never do anything to deliberately cause Victorine pain.

  ‘You were so busy before I left that I didn’t get a chance to tell you what I was coming to France for,’ D’Arcy said slowly. ‘The gallery is exhibiting the works of The Photographer. It’s the first time they’ve ever been in Australia and it’s such a coup to get them. I’m doing the art handling so I get to touch them. They’re amazing. It’s the photographer’s chateau I’m staying at, Lieu de Rêves.’ D’Arcy lay back and closed her eyes, sun dancing over her face, expecting Victorine to say – which the picture of her mother picnicking before one of the enchanted trees proved – I went there when I was a child.

  Complete silence met D’Arcy’s words. At last her mother said, ‘Sorry, someone just brought in some papers for me to sign. I should go. You’re not there much longer, are you?’

  ‘Home next week.’

  ‘Wonderful. I’ll see you then.’

  As she hung up the phone, D’Arcy’s mind circled around her mother’s omission. The silence. The rush to get off the phone. Of course she might actually be busy. Why then had she called?

  D’Arcy jumped to her feet and began to pace. What were her options? To ask Victorine. But it was clear Victorine was not going to, willingly, reveal anything about her connection to Jess or the chateau. She could always ask Jess directly, but Jess had cut her off that morning when she’d tried and D’Arcy didn’t think it was accidental. Besides, if Jess knew everything and D’Arcy knew nothing, it put D’Arcy at the disadvantage of simply having to believe what Jess told her. She didn’t know Jess well enough to be able to ascertain if she might omit details or present a biased version of events. If D’Arcy had more information, then she would be better equipped to decide who to ask and what to ask them. Which meant she’d have to find out more from another source. But what source?

  A crazy idea started to form, one she hardly knew how to put into practice, but one she felt she had to, nonetheless. She hurried back to the chateau and threw some things into an overnight bag.

  She found Josh in his office, talking on the phone, his voice so different to how it had been when he’d told her about his past, now rushed and clipped as if he was under pressure and didn’t like it. She waited for him to finish his call, then indicated her bag. ‘I need to take the train to Paris.’

  He frowned and she hastened to reassure him that she wasn’t doing a runner. ‘I need to go there just for the night. It means I’ll miss a day of work but I’m confident I can catch up. I’ll work late tomorrow. I won’t miss any deadlines.’

  ‘Why are you going to Paris?’ he asked.

  ‘I want to …’ She hesitated, aware it would sound strange. ‘I want to visit the school my mother attended. It’s the one place I’ll be able to find out more about her childhood.’

  And rather than remind her that she was in France to work, not to run off on wild goose chases, Josh just nodded and said, ‘I’ll give you a ride to the station.’

  Eighteen

  At her favourite hotel in the Marais that night, D’Arcy opened her web browser and typed: Victorine Hallworth and Dan Hallworth.

  Everything she expected to find came up. Their jobs, the World Media business, their distinguished reporting and management careers, nothing she didn’t already know and nothing proving that there was any kind of connection beyond the fact that Victorine worked for Dan.

  Then she typed in the name Jessica May and again found what she expected to find: information about May’s shift from model to photographer, mentions of her work as a photojournalist in World War II, the iconic images she’d shot, her mysterious disappearance after the war.

  It was only as she scrolled down further, to oblique references and articles that had no bearing on the Jessica May she was interested in, that she found one that caught her attention. It was a piece about women in journalism, and it put forward a theory that a writer reporting on the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, and who had been tipped to win a Pulitzer, was actually Jessica May using a male pseudonym. It was also the year, the article said, that Dan Hallworth won a Pulitzer. The author suggested that May had lost because somebody had found out she was a woman. In its final paragraph, she saw the words: The night of his Pulitzer win, Dan Hallworth established the Jessica May Foundation, designed to encourage women artists to pursue their calling despite the myriad obstacles.

  Dan Hallworth had established the Jessica May Foundation? D’Arcy heard her surprised ‘Oh,’ echo through the room. She navigated to the Foundation’s website and read through the history of the fellowships. Yes, Dan Hallworth had indeed set up the Foundation in 1946 in honour of a woman I met in Europe who was lion-hearted. That short extract from the speech he gave on the night the Foundation was established made her shiver.

  It forged yet another link between Dan Hallworth and Jessica May. But the missing link was still Victorine, D’Arcy’s mother.

  She decided to tackle Dan Hallworth’s name alone next, something she’d been delaying out of fear, she knew, of what she might find. His bio details confirmed his war service, which made it seem even more likely that her mother’s boss and the man she was embracing in the famous photograph were one and the same.

  The rest of the information was less relevant to her search, being only a long list of his newspaper holdings, estimates of his wealth, a précis of his family background, which included marriage to an Englishwoman named Amelia in 1945, a son from that marriage, and a subsequent divorce. She was about to give up when she found a very old and out of copyright biography of America’s newspapermen reproduced in full, with an entry on Dan Hallworth. She sat up straight and almost knocked over her coffee cup when she read the information it contained about his family background. It was different to everything else that had been published later. Two children, this one said: a daughter Victorine Hallworth, born 1940 – her mother’s birth year – and a son, James Hallworth, born 1946. D’Arcy snapped her laptop shut.

  Was it possible that D’Arcy had a grandfather she’d never known?

  D’Arcy’s preparations for visiting Victorine’s boarding school were aided somewhat by the cognac she’d drunk in order to forget what she’d read on the internet. Her eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep and her skin was much too pale for an Australian who spent so much time outside. It gave her the appearance of someone who was suffering, which was the effect she’d thought she’d wanted, but now that the suffering was real, she wished she could think of another plan. She stepped gingerly, as if her pain were physical, into the most demure things she owned, a black velvet YSL blazer she’d picked up for a steal at a charity shop in Sydney, and a pair of slim black capri trousers. She assembled her face to look distraught, which wasn’t all that hard, and then she walked through the doors of the Parisian boarding school her mother had once attended.

  ‘May I help you?’ the lady at the front desk asked.

  D’Arcy fumbled in her handbag for a tissue, which she dabbed to her nose. ‘Excuse me,’ she said in a thin voice. ‘I’d hoped to be able to get through this without tears but it’s become a struggle to get through even an hour without crying.’

  The receptionist stepped out from behind the desk and offered her a box of tissues, from which D’Arcy gratefully extracted a handful. ‘Please, sit down,’ the woman said, ushering D’Arcy to a chair.

  Once D’Arcy was seated, she began. ‘It’s my mother. She …’ D’Arcy had planned to pause here for another dab of the tissue onto her face but she felt a real tear leak from the corner of each eye. Then she told the lie. ‘My mother recently … died.’

  The woman mumbled something sympathetic and volunteered to find D’Arcy a glass of water.

  D’Arcy shook her head. Then she began to tell the lady about her mother, Victorine Hallwor
th, who attended the boarding school from a young age and who had been unexpectedly taken from D’Arcy’s life. ‘We were estranged, you see,’ D’Arcy said, her voice strangled with the fear of this ever happening, but how could it not given what Victorine had most likely hidden from her? ‘Now I can see that everything I thought about her was wrong.’ Another truth amidst the lies. ‘I have to make it up to her, or I think I might go mad. Do you understand?’

  The woman nodded, clearly far from understanding where this was all going.

  ‘I’ve been trying to gather as much information about my mother as I can; I want to get to know her properly at last. I want to start at the beginning of her life, from when she was a child, and I hoped that perhaps the school might have records of her time here and that you might let me look over them. It would mean the world to me.’

  D’Arcy wasn’t sure if her tale was convincing, or her tears, but she found herself being ushered into a quiet meeting room, a couple of folders placed before her, and then she was left in peace to read about her mother’s life. She opened the first folder.

  On top was a letter, dated early November 1944. It was an enquiry about whether a place could be found at the boarding school for a little girl called Victorine Hallworth. The writer explained that he was fighting with the American army and that he wanted to be sure his daughter would be looked after while he carried out his duties. The name typed at the bottom was, of course, Dan Hallworth. Unarguable proof that the famous photograph of the man embracing the little girl was a photograph of D’Arcy’s mother and grandfather.

  D’Arcy pushed the folder away. Why was she doing this to herself? She didn’t need to know any of this. She’d been perfectly happy, her mother had been perfectly happy, until now. There was no point in ruining that happiness for a search into a past that had happened so long ago it no longer mattered. But what if it did matter? What if D’Arcy wanted a grandfather?

  She buried her face in her hands and rubbed her forehead. She was so bloody selfish. Her mother had always been enough, just as she’d told Josh. She didn’t need a grandfather. And what if Dan Hallworth wasn’t the ideal clichéd grandfather: soft and warm and endearingly grey-haired and always losing his glasses. There had to be a reason why Victorine had disowned him.

  D’Arcy’s hand betrayed her. It crept back to the folder and sifted through the papers. There were several letters from Dan Hallworth to the school, confirming Victorine’s placement there in 1944. There was a list of approved visitors for the child, which comprised a few soldiers – privates Sparrow and Jennings – and the name of one woman: Jessica May. But nowhere was there any correspondence from Victorine’s mother, nor any mention that Jessica May was the mother.

  D’Arcy opened the next folder with a feeling of trepidation. It bore dates later than the first, and would account for Victorine from age ten to sixteen. But there were only copies of school reports, plus more correspondence from Dan Hallworth, this time typed on a letterhead for the New York Courier and then World Media Group.

  Then one final, catastrophic letter. It looked benign, black letters on white, correspondence from a Parisian hospital. Victorine had had an appendectomy when she was sixteen. D’Arcy almost didn’t bother to read past the opening paragraph because what could a record of an operation tell her about her mother?

  But the letter said that the child had not complained about the pain in her stomach for several days and that, by the time the pain became so acute it couldn’t help but be noticed, Victorine’s appendix had perforated, sending infection out into her body. She’d been deathly ill in hospital for weeks, had undergone several operations to clean up the mess, had multiple abscesses from the infection.

  It was the penultimate paragraph, before the polite closing, that D’Arcy wished never to have read. It said that the scarring from the subsequent infections had blocked Victorine Hallworth’s fallopian tubes so badly that she would be unable to bear children.

  Unable to bear children. D’Arcy stood up, the words shuttering before her every time she blinked, like a relentless slideshow. She stared at the wall, eyes stretched open but she saw the words flash there too, filmic and devastating in their scope, casting everything that she had thought to be true into the black and stygian realms of falsehood.

  PART FIVE

  Jess

  When I looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feeling started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying.

  – Susan Sontag

  Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

  – H.L. Mencken

  Nineteen

  BELGIUM, JANUARY 1945

  As Jess drove into Bastogne with Martha, they passed tanks that had been torn apart, trucks pulverised into the ground, and lorries dragging trailers with neat stacks of dead bodies that looked, from a distance, like firewood. The siege of Bastogne had lasted for a week and, from what Jess could glean, the siege meant that Dan’s division had been encircled and ceaselessly bombed and shelled and shot at by the Germans who had four times the number of soldiers. It meant that the men, against all the odds and sustained only by prayers and a stubborn implacableness of spirit, fought their way out and the Germans fell back and Bastogne, a stew of blood and bodies, surrounded by snow stained pink with the life-force of Americans and Germans alike, was back in Allied hands and the press were allowed to return.

  But what were they returning to? Make sure you come back alive. Jess had repeated those words to herself every day since the party at the chateau and now she was to find out if they had come true. That was if they ever found the battalion headquarters. When at last they did, Jess’s legs almost ceased to function. Because in that building with only two walls and half a roof was Dan, alive. Thank God!

  He was standing beside a wall map scribbled with red and blue marks signifying areas of heavy mortar, or panzers, or ferocious small arms fire, and relaying orders on the phone to his men out in the field. She watched him ask a team of engineers to signpost and clear a road studded with mines, heard him say in a soothing voice to someone on a field phone that Company B were on their way in to help, and at last she smiled.

  Every man who conferred with Dan did what Dan asked of him willingly. Every man spoke to Dan with respect, even a little hero-worship. That was what had kept Bastogne in Allied hands: the leadership of men like Dan, who knew not just how to manoeuvre companies and battalions, but how to make men believe that what they were doing meant something when, all around, the evidence of obliteration suggested otherwise.

  Marty waltzed over and kissed his cheeks. ‘I know someone who’ll be glad to see that you made it,’ she said, indicating Jess, who hung back awkwardly, fiddling with her cameras as if they needed her attention, unable to follow Martha’s lead and kiss him too even though it was all she wanted to do.

  ‘Sir.’ Sparrow appeared from behind them and claimed Dan’s attention before he’d had time to offer Jess more than a smile. ‘You’re needed out there.’

  ‘Coming?’ Dan asked Marty and Jess, who both nodded eagerly, knowing they couldn’t venture out to the front without someone who knew exactly where the front was and how hot the hotspots were.

  ‘Jess!’ Jennings’ voice broke into the conversation and Jess turned to find her cheek kissed by the perennially smiling Jennings, wearing new insignia – now adjutant, Dan’s administrative assistant.

  Jess’s eyes met Dan’s at last and she knew he’d found a more permanent solution to his personal mission to keep Jennings alive and her heart hurt as if it wasn’t quite big enough to contain everything she felt in that moment. Now she wished she had kissed his cheek because Dan deserved at least that much.

  ‘This way, Sir.’ Sparrow led the way to the jeep, more serious than Jess had ever seen him, more corporal now than joker – a promotion he’d gained since Bastogne too, as well as landing the job of Dan’s d
river. Which only served to underscore just how many had died and how lucky Jess was to find these three men had dodged, not just a bullet, but some pretty heavy damn artillery.

  ‘Where are we off to?’ Martha asked Jennings as they pulled onto the road, following Dan and Sparrow’s jeep.

  ‘Something I thought our CO would want to deal with,’ Jennings said quietly.

  But how could anyone deal with what they found?

  In the forest, surrounded by shell craters, trees splintered like matchsticks or disfigured with bullet holes, and foxholes lined with snow in which men had been living in groups of three of four for warmth for weeks, was an injured man. He’d been lying in the snow for three days after stepping on a mine. He’d been lucky, Jennings said grimly as they drew near; if you stood on a mine in a particular way, it pushed the veins and arteries up into the leg, closing them off somewhat, staunching the bleeding from the severed foot.

  ‘The medics tried to get to him,’ Sparrow added as they walked closer, ‘but they got shot at every time. The Krauts have pulled back now so we can reach him.’

  Jess could see that the injured GI was still, somehow, through losing a foot and lying in the snow between two opposing sides for three days, conscious. His lips were moving. Dan dropped down beside him.

  Jess took a picture of Dan, sitting in the snow and lighting a cigarette for the injured man who was telling Dan that he’d been set upon by Germans under cover of darkness on the first night. The Germans had booby-trapped him, rigging up a device under his back that would explode the moment he was lifted up by the medics or someone like Jennings from his platoon, killing them all.