The French Photographer

by Natasha Lester

  A rustle from the bed made her whip around. Dan had rolled over, had stretched out his arm, searching for her, had shifted his body across to her side of the bed when his arm didn’t find her. The gesture, that he remembered she was supposed to be lying beside him, that he would scour the bed for her, made her eyes fill with tears. Before she could stop it, one of them rolled down her cheek.

  Dan’s eyes opened. ‘Jess?’ he mumbled.

  ‘Here I am,’ she said, wiping her cheeks and slipping back beneath the sheets, letting herself be drawn into his arms.

  She kissed him, not wanting him to see her face but he must have felt it, that something had shifted, and he drew back and said again, ‘Jess?’

  He studied her face and she knew her eyes were too damp to pretend she’d been doing anything other than crying. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘You don’t regret …’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head firmly. Their night together was the one beautiful thing in the whole damn mess of war.

  He kissed her gently, so gently she almost couldn’t feel it. He continued to kiss her that way, lightly, softly, his lips a breath on the skin of her cheek, her neck. His fingers light too, tormentingly so, following his lips down her body. She could do nothing other than lie back, eyes closed, breath coming faster and faster as he made a slow and reverent path over every inch of her skin, from her toes to her calves, to her knees, to her thighs, then up to her belly. Then her breasts, taking an agonisingly long time over her nipples, then back along her stomach.

  He reached her hips and she shivered, unable to stop herself tilting her pelvis towards him. His hand moved first between her legs and then his mouth and the moment she felt him kiss her, she cried out his name, feeling nothing other than the sensation of being, for once, truly adored.

  ‘We should go out,’ she whispered a while later when they had both recovered and were lying wrapped in one another’s arms.

  ‘Or we could just stay here.’ Dan grinned lazily at her.

  ‘I have to admit it’s tempting.’ Jess smiled too. ‘But I feel as if I need to see what life is like out there. To find something that says it really will be okay.’

  ‘Where should we go?’ he asked.

  She hesitated, knowing where she wanted to go but feeling foolish for such a fanciful wish.

  ‘Tell me. Please?’ he said.

  ‘I imagine it’s impossible but I’d like to go back to Lieu de Rêves.’

  ‘Nothing’s impossible. You have a jeep.’

  ‘And a balcony full of fuel.’

  He laughed. ‘I forgot about that. Let’s do it. Let’s just do something crazy and not about the war and that might even be fun.’

  ‘Fun?’ Jess mock-gasped. ‘I’d forgotten such a thing existed.’

  ‘You mean last night wasn’t fun?’ He shifted his chest over hers, smiling.

  She laughed. ‘It was terrible. We definitely need more practice.’

  He leaned down to kiss her expertly, in no need of practice. ‘So are we practising or going to a castle?’

  ‘As tempting as it is to stay here, I think we should go. Besides,’ she said, sliding out from underneath him and hopping out of bed, ‘we can practise when we get back. This way, we get to spend the whole day thinking about how much fun we can have tonight.’

  Dan groaned and lay on his back, watching her walk, naked, across to the bathroom. ‘I hope you don’t expect me to concentrate on anything today.’

  ‘Just on me,’ she called over her shoulder before she shut the door and ran the bath.

  Twenty-one

  As Jess drove off in the jeep, Dan raised an eyebrow at her. ‘You’re going the wrong way.’

  ‘We have to make one stop,’ she said.

  ‘Okay,’ he smiled. ‘I’m in your hands.’

  ‘Don’t tempt me,’ she said and he laughed.

  His laugh turned to silence and she became aware of the tight clenching of his jaw when she pulled up outside Victorine’s school.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked. ‘I saw her yesterday afternoon. I can come back and see her later.’

  ‘I’m sure.’ She didn’t elaborate, didn’t explain that she knew how much he missed the girl, that she knew he wrote to her twice a week and that he constantly questioned whether he’d done the right thing in putting her into boarding school so young. She didn’t say that she knew he would ordinarily be spending the day with Victorine and that, after the night they’d had, the joy they’d found in one another’s arms, it didn’t seem fair to keep that joy to themselves.

  But she knew he understood when he leaned over and kissed her. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  He jumped out of the jeep and returned a few minutes later with Victorine, who had her arms wrapped around his neck as if she would never let him go.

  ‘Jess!’ she cried, wriggling out of his arms and scampering over to the car to wrap her arms around Jess’s neck as well. ‘You both came!’

  ‘We did,’ Jess smiled and knew she’d done the right thing.

  ‘A whole day with you and Papa!’ Victorine beamed.

  Jess’s throat hurt and Dan caught her eye. ‘She’s been calling me that since she came to Paris,’ Dan said, voice husky. ‘The teachers say it’s because she’s with lots of other girls who talk about their papas.’

  ‘And because you’re more like a father to her than anyone else,’ Jess said, squeezing his hand and taking the opportunity, while Dan settled Victorine on his lap in the front of the jeep, to wipe her eyes.

  There were few vehicles on the road and it took only a couple of hours to reach the chateau. They never once ran out of things to say, especially Victorine, who filled them in on every minute detail of each day that had passed since she’d started at school.

  ‘With a memory like that and such attention to the particulars, she’ll be following in your footsteps before you know it,’ Dan said to Jess. ‘Then I’ll have two reporters to contend with.’

  ‘And you’ll love every minute of it,’ Jess said with a grin and if Victorine hadn’t been in the car, she would have pulled over and kissed him, such was the way he looked at her.

  At Lieu de Rêves, they bumped along the once sweeping drive. It was overgrown, as it had been last year, with angelica and soapwort, wild pansies and wild orchids painting colour into the landscape. The typical formality of a chateau garden had been lost through wartime misuse and neglect but Jess liked it all the more for the profusion of wildflowers and the wild plum and white mulberry trees, the oaks and sweet chestnuts that had been allowed to flourish untamed.

  She pulled over and, as she cut the engine, the song of a nightingale could plainly be heard, its trill echoing on without the force of a shell or an ack-ack bomber, simple and rhapsodic. It made them all stop, the sound of a bird now something remarkable and worth their tribute.

  ‘You were right,’ Dan said to Jess. ‘Coming here is just what we all needed.’ He put his arm around her and kissed the top of her head, and if Victorine thought there was anything strange about these signs of affection, she didn’t say so.

  They climbed out of the jeep. Without the expanse of olive drab tents and vehicles and soldiers to mask it, the chateau rose into view from behind a screen of plane trees as if they were meant to come upon it suddenly and be astonished. All three of them said a wondrous ‘Oh,’ at the same time.

  Victorine ran forward to the fairytale castle before them. Medieval in style, it had a keep, a drawbridge and round towers at each corner with slit windows from which archers must once have shot their arrows. Red and green ivy crawled unchecked over the stone walls. It looked so different to the place they had stayed with an entire division in the month before Christmas 1944, although the fields to one side were still marked with the ashy remains of wood fires and the rutted tracks of jeeps and heavy vehicles.

  ‘Look, there’s a butterfly!’ Jess said to Victorine, who dashed off after it.

  That afternoon, they lazed on a blanket, watching magni
ficent Queen of Spain butterflies, the nacre on the underside of their wings flash lunar in the sun, the rows of black spots on the other side of the wings as smooth and soft as velvet. The day was pleasantly noisy, filled with the chirrups of field crickets, the hum of damselflies, and the cries of the plovers and kingfishers, punctuated occasionally by the hoots of mallard ducks on the canal beyond. They lay almost hidden by the swathe of orchids grown up all around – spider orchids, monkey orchids, lady orchids – which gave way to a mass of ferns closer to the canal. Black beetles scurried busily around, rosemary perfumed the air and Jess found some early wild strawberries and wild currants for Victorine to eat.

  In between, they laughed at Victorine’s stories and Jess took photographs: of Victorine’s face haloed by flowers; of Dan lying on his back, awake but unmoving because Victorine was sleeping on his chest; of the Wood White butterfly, like an angel or a ghost, come to rest for the briefest moment on Victorine’s shoulder and Victorine calling out, ‘Look Papa!’; of the crown of yellow water primrose that Victorine made for Dan, transforming the flower that most thought was invasive and alien into something fleetingly beautiful.

  Victorine took some photographs too, of the plump strawberries, of the castle towers, of the serenading nightingale that flew out to bid them good day before taking its song elsewhere. She was especially fascinated by the dwarf beech trees and she named them all: the teacher was the one that looked, according to Victorine, wise, its head bent over its raised boughs; the little girl was the one that looked as if it might pick up its skirt of leaves and dance down to the water; the mother was the one whose crossed branches formed a cradle in which sat a richness of greenery.

  And one final photograph of Dan leaning over to kiss Jess, the look on his face so tender and fierce that Jess’s breath caught, and she wondered if Victorine had managed to freeze that moment on film, or whether Jess would only be able to recall the sense of it later, blurred by passing time, but still precious.

  At long last Victorine began to yawn and the sky to lose its brilliance, discoloured by dusk. Reluctantly, without saying they were leaving, Jess collected their things and Dan picked up Victorine, lying her across the back seat where she sleepily protested that she wasn’t tired, only to fall instantly into slumber. Before he climbed into the jeep, Dan pulled Jess towards him and began to kiss her with promise, all her senses stirred at the touch of his lips on hers.

  ‘I cannot concentrate on anything, least of all driving, if you do that,’ she murmured. ‘Let’s get back to Paris, drop Victorine at school and then …’

  She stopped because the longing in Dan’s eyes was too much.

  He leaned his forehead against hers until his breath steadied. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  A sleepy Victorine kissed Jess goodbye once they reached the school and seemed happy enough to let Dan go, the unexpected joy of spending an entire day with him enough to satisfy her for a time. Jess’s heart ached for the little girl whose life was so far from normal, and to whom the gift of a few hours with the man she now called Papa was all she wished for – not Christmas presents or candy or a puppy or any of the other things a girl her age might ordinarily dream of.

  ‘So, my place or yours?’ Jess asked when Dan returned. ‘Who are the biggest gossips, GIs or journalists?’

  ‘GIs,’ they both said at the same time, laughing.

  ‘It’s not that I’m ashamed of this,’ Jess hastened to add. ‘I just like that nobody else knows, so they can’t give us their commentary or analysis on what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and –’

  ‘I know,’ Dan said, leaning across to kiss her again, even more intensely than before and desire swept through her so fiercely that she could do nothing other than return the kiss and wish they could click their fingers and be alone together in her room at the Scribe.

  ‘I thought I told you to stop that,’ she said against his lips. ‘Perhaps we should talk about how exactly I’m going to get you through the lobby without anyone noticing. That might make you behave for a minute.’

  He smiled. ‘Maybe for a minute. Why don’t we just have a drink at the bar – everyone knows we’re friends so no one will think that’s strange – and then I’ll sneak up to your room first under the pretext of talking to one of the SHAEF PROs and you can come up after me when it’s safe.’

  ‘But that means I have to sit through an entire drink with you when all I want to do is –’

  Dan touched a finger to her lips. ‘Stop talking. The quicker we get there, the quicker I can take you back to bed.’

  Jess used all her willpower to resist the urge to kiss his finger. Instead, she drove, not daring to look at Dan until they reached the hotel, which was buzzing more than usual.

  ‘Something’s going on,’ Jess said and Dan nodded before they both heard someone call, ‘Sir!’

  Jennings leapt on them. ‘Thought you’d be here, Sir.’ Then he blushed and stammered, ‘I just meant …’

  So Jennings had figured it out. Jess stiffened, unwilling to allow whatever was between her and Dan to be subjected to the ribald commentary of the army.

  ‘Spit it out,’ Dan said to Jennings, obviously as annoyed as she was although she knew it wasn’t Jennings’ fault that he’d shown, for once, such perspicacity.

  ‘We’ve been recalled,’ Jennings said. ‘We’re going into Munich. They’re saying it’s almost over. And we have to leave in half an hour if we’re going to make it to the muster point on time. That should give you time to … ummm.’ Jennings blushed again.

  Half an hour. No time to worry about gossip and scuttlebutt, then. ‘I promise I’ll return him in half an hour,’ Jess said, which made Jennings flush so extravagantly it was impossible to tell he had freckles anymore.

  Jess took Dan’s hand and they hurried to the elevator, mostly unnoticed in the general hubbub about Munich. They restrained themselves until they reached the door of Jess’s room where, once safely inside, they turned to each other at the same time. As their mouths met, their hands worked furiously at clothes, she unbuttoning his trousers, him lifting her skirt and pulling down her knickers, both so ready that the instant she could, she wrapped her leg around him and he lifted her up, pressing her back into the wall.

  He slid into her, moving so quickly that she gasped at the overwhelming rush of sensation and she shook her head vigorously when he misunderstood her gasp and he said, ‘Sorry, I’ll slow down.’

  ‘No,’ she could barely say the words. ‘Please don’t.’

  After they’d recovered enough to be capable of speech, they both laughed.

  ‘We’re worse than sophomores at a frat house party,’ he said.

  ‘We are,’ she agreed. ‘I blame you entirely.’

  ‘Yes,’ he grinned. ‘My fault of course.’

  He lowered her to the ground and kissed her, then moved off to the bathroom to sort out the rubber and the smile fell off Jess’s face. He had to go. And she’d miss him, of that she was certain.

  She pulled down her skirt and put her knickers back on, only to have him say, when he re-emerged from the bathroom, ‘Can I take off all of your clothes?’

  ‘Surely you’re not capable of doing that again already?’ she asked incredulously.

  He laughed. ‘No, you’ve finally worn me out. But we still have fifteen minutes and I want to lie down beside you for all of those minutes.’

  He drew her in, not kissing her now, undoing her blouse and her skirt, slipping off her underclothes. Then he lay her on the bed, removed all of his clothes and held her as close as he could, as if he wanted to sweep her inside him, one of her legs threaded between his, one of his arms wrapped over her and one wrapped under her, braided together.

  ‘Dan,’ she said hesitantly, shy in a way she’d never been before, because there seemed, in this moment, to be so much at stake. ‘That night in the ballroom …’ Her voice trailed off.

  He kissed her and repeated her words. ‘That night in the ba
llroom …’ It was his turn to pause. ‘I don’t want you to take this the wrong way but I’d always just assumed the rumours I’d heard of you sleeping with this man and that were true. I didn’t think any less of you for it,’ he hastened to add as she pulled away, his arms firm, not letting her withdraw from the embrace.

  ‘You’re a gorgeous woman,’ he said, eyes searching out hers and holding them while he spoke. ‘God knows we all need to feel good from time to time but it made me think there was this divide: the men you would sleep with, and then me, who you’d never shown any interest in beyond friendship. Which was fine, because I valued our friendship more than one night of infatuation. But when you told me none of it was true, that you hadn’t been with anyone, the divide disappeared. That night in the ballroom, I couldn’t think about anything else but you, a woman I’d known as a friend, a woman who was the most beautiful thing from the inside out. When we danced,’ he whispered into her ear, ‘and I touched your back, it was like walking into a fire and all I could do was curse myself for ruining our friendship because I knew, after feeling that, it would be impossible just to sit next to you on a sofa on a balcony ever again.’

  God, he was going to make her cry and she didn’t want to spend the last five minutes with him sobbing. ‘Why didn’t you say something?’ she asked, voice husky with emotion.

  ‘Jess,’ he said, and his voice had changed.

  It was as if he was preparing her. She was used to that certain inflection; she’d heard it throughout the war as officers told the men which of their number had died, or what suicidal target they were to attack next, or any other of the myriad pieces of news one didn’t want to hear.

  No, no, no, she thought, unable to stop her eyes from filling with tears now. What had he said? A night of infatuation. That’s all it could be in France in April 1945 with the war still firing on. He was going to tell her that it was time to go back to being friends. But that was unthinkable.