The French Photographer

by Natasha Lester

  She sat abruptly in a chair opposite Jess. ‘I don’t have anything formal prepared,’ she said. ‘I normally would, but I tried to write down some questions and it didn’t work. Sometimes it’s best not to force it and this whole thing is a bit strange so …’ She shrugged. ‘I thought I’d wing it. Which mightn’t sound professional, but there it is.’ She knew her voice had a defiant ring to it, that she was being childishly provoking because of her suspicion that everything she’d found out in Paris could somehow be traced back to Jess, which made Jess the one to blame.

  But Jess simply nodded. ‘I winged it the entire way through the war. And it didn’t make my photographs any less newsworthy.’ She folded her hands in her lap, as if to indicate she was ready.

  Where to start? Why are you telling the world who you are now? Why did you hide who you were? Why did you tell me? Who are you to me? Trite questions, the facile investigations of a petty teenager. ‘Which of your reports from the war are you most proud of?’ D’Arcy asked.

  Jess hesitated, as if surprised by the question, which had also surprised D’Arcy. It was clear that the older woman was considering how to respond. Then Jess stood up. ‘Perhaps if I fetch it for you. Will the cord reach?’

  It was the kind of thing that would have any other documentary producer leaping up and stopping the recording, an old woman standing in the middle of the interview and pointing out the artifice of the microphone cords.

  But D’Arcy liked it, the fleeting glimpse of uncertainty, so different to the artificial way everyone now saw the world, arranged just so by stylist-directed photographs. It was why she’d gone into film in the first place, rather than photography; film caught stretches of time, rather than just the one moment, so it was sometimes possible to catch the actual truth, instead of the ideal truth that had been frozen and downsized and trapped into a split second.

  ‘It’ll reach,’ D’Arcy said.

  Jess returned with, surprisingly, a newspaper. D’Arcy had been expecting a copy of Vogue. She picked up the other camera and moved the lens over the yellowed pages of a 1946 copy of the New York Courier, one of the papers owned by World Media Group, and an article titled, ‘I’ve Got A Pistol and There Ain’t Nobody Going to Stop Me Having Her’.

  The article detailed rapes by US Army soldiers throughout World War II. It included photographs, grainy now with age, of sober women, eyes lightless, passive, as if anything they had would be gifted with resignation because they’d learned it was easier that way. D’Arcy read about a woman who’d been given what she’d thought was a pass excusing her from providing the US Army with more food and shelter because she’d done her share, but that the note, written in English and not understood by the German woman, essentially exhorted the next soldier to take from the woman what the first man had also stolen. At the next paragraph, D’Arcy stopped.

  ‘Will you read this aloud?’ D’Arcy asked, passing Jess the newspaper and focusing on Jess’s face in close-up with the camera.

  Jess didn’t respond immediately, watching D’Arcy, who hoped the camera would record exactly what she could see: a frightened woman whom age had made more arresting because her huge eyes were overcast with tragedy. Why did pathos render something more beautiful? D’Arcy wondered now.

  Finally, Jess nodded and began to read. ‘A girl’s screams came from behind a locked door and an American voice ordered, “Stop clawing, you little bitch, or I’m gonna break your bloody neck.” Banging and kicking, I bellowed, “Hey, quit that and open the door!” The door opened – just a chink – as a man peered out to demand, “What the hell do you mean, squawking orders at me.” With matter-of-fact brutality, he told me, “I’ve got a pistol and there ain’t nobody going to stop me having her or any other German gal I want. We won ’em, didn’t we?” Then he slammed the door.’

  D’Arcy put down her camera and let the silence suspend itself around them, knowing she would cut to the wide shot in the edit to take in the two of them sitting among the echo of Jess’s words, which spoke more powerfully than any narrative or voiceover would.

  ‘What was the reaction to the article?’ D’Arcy asked at last.

  ‘Outrage, of course. But not for the girl being raped.’ Jess’s voice was stark. ‘Everyone was outraged that I’d dared to report any such thing about our victorious and honourable army.’

  ‘What you did, reporting this when you must have known what the reaction would be, was extraordinary.’ It was extraordinary. Taking on a sacred institution like the army when victory was still so fresh in everyone’s minds in order to tell a truth that would not otherwise have been heard. A truth that must have been buried so deeply by the subsequent indignation that this was the first D’Arcy had seen of these photographs as part of Jessica’s body of work.

  ‘What I did during the war was also cowardly,’ Jess said tiredly. ‘It’s difficult to celebrate one without remembering the other.’

  D’Arcy knew her meaning stretched deeper, into the void gouged out by D’Arcy’s visit to Paris. The defiance returned. ‘I think I’ve had enough of riddles.’

  ‘Have you?’ Jess trapped D’Arcy’s eyes in hers and D’Arcy blanched. No, she hadn’t. She wanted to stay on the safe ground of Jessica May, the photojournalist, and not dig into the personal. She hadn’t the resources of energy to deal with any more revelations right now.

  ‘Which is your favourite picture from the war?’ D’Arcy asked abruptly.

  Jess gave out that same disarming smile and D’Arcy suddenly felt that she’d missed the point. There was something more within that article than D’Arcy had grasped, some reason why Jess had chosen it, of all the reports, to read.

  ‘My favourite picture is that one, of course.’ Jess indicated the wall behind her, on which hung Victorine Hallworth and Dan Hallworth. It wasn’t the ubiquitous image that IKEA and advertising agencies had desecrated but the other photograph D’Arcy had found in the archives in which the man was lifting the girl high into the air, the love between the two caught on their faces in touching relief to the vista of wounded men behind. ‘That one too.’ Jess pointed to the picture on the dresser, the one in which she was about to fall into a kiss with Dan Hallworth. ‘I didn’t take it, though. But it turned out to be a prophecy – that those two people, for the rest of time, would have only the echo of that stopped kiss.’

  Before D’Arcy could ask why, Jess turned the conversation. ‘You’ve been in Paris,’ she said.

  ‘I visited my moth— Victorine’s boarding school.’

  ‘I see.’ Jess stood up, moving across to the balcony railing, looking at the same tree that had caught D’Arcy’s attention earlier. ‘I didn’t mean for any of this to happen,’ she said, as if apologising to someone who wasn’t in the room.

  ‘Any of what?’

  ‘I’m winging it again.’ Jess turned back to D’Arcy. ‘I only wanted to look at you. To know you, for just one brief snapshot in your life. I never expected you to know so much about war photography, and thus about me, couldn’t believe there was anyone still alive who cared about Jessica May and now …’ Her voice shook, and trailed off, and D’Arcy’s stomach heaved. Jess looked terrified, which terrified D’Arcy in turn. What had happened?

  ‘Dan Hallworth was the love of my life,’ Jess finally said. ‘He published the article about the rapes, which was an act of bravery in itself. I sent it to him, not really expecting he would. But he was always, above and beyond everything else, a man who did the right thing, no matter how hard, no matter the fallout. I’ve tried to learn that from him but I’m not sure I’ve succeeded.’

  D’Arcy stared at the picture on the wall. Only someone who cared very deeply would take such a photo. It was a devotion apparent in each of Jess’s photographs; it was what lifted them above the work of others and why they resonated with so many people, which was what she’d argued with Josh the first day she arrived at the chateau, eager to prove that the photographer was a woman. But what she apprehended now was that the quality of em
pathy she’d always admired could only have been caught by someone who knew suffering. Unbidden, Dorothea Lange’s insistence that every photograph should become a self-portrait came to mind and D’Arcy wondered what she might discover about Jess if she were to re-see each photograph with that in mind, or what she might discover about herself if she were to watch the footage she was now recording, choosing to focus on herself rather than Jess.

  ‘What happened?’ D’Arcy asked tremulously, because she was becoming more certain that the past of everyone – Jess, Victorine, perhaps Dan Hallworth, and maybe even, unknown to her, D’Arcy – had been ruined somehow by acts for which they were partially responsible, but which had also happened regardless of what they had wished for instead. Words she had read not long ago suddenly scrolled across her mind: ‘the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins.’ At the time, her academic brain had nodded but now she understood. Something had ruined Jess, but here she was, still alive. Perhaps pathos made you grasp the wonder of endurance, that you could suffer all things but the spirit still held on. First, though, you had to look that suffering in the eye, be the spectator rather than the coward who turned away, unable to watch. Which was D’Arcy?

  ‘I can only tell you part of it,’ Jess said thinly. ‘You need to …’ Again that pause, that haunted expression. ‘You need to ask your mother about the rest.’

  Your mother. Did that mean Jess didn’t know what D’Arcy had discovered in Paris? Why then the subtle apology when D’Arcy told her she’d visited Victorine’s school?

  Then Jess began to speak, telling D’Arcy how she’d met Dan on a battlefield in Italy, about Victorine’s tumultuous early years, about the fact that Victorine was nobody’s child and so she had become Dan’s and, for a short time, Jess’s.

  Nobody’s child. Just like D’Arcy was right now. ‘Why just a short time?’ she asked.

  A knock on the door made D’Arcy jump. She stood up when Josh appeared.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, the surprise visible on his face when he saw D’Arcy. ‘I can come back later. I have some papers for you to sign,’ he said to Jess.

  But, rather than repeating her question, D’Arcy was already slipping past Josh and out the door. Which made her the coward, she knew.

  That night, D’Arcy sat in her room and, after waiting hours for it to load onto her computer, she watched the footage she’d recorded earlier. She didn’t edit it or cut it or adjust the sound or the brightness. Her hand hovered, uncertain, over the mouse, wanting to craft a film in the cinéma vérité style, to be unbiased, to let whatever truth Jess was moving towards gently and expressively declare itself on the screen. D’Arcy’s impulse to be unscripted, to have no questions prepared, to simply converse, had been the right one, she saw. Otherwise she would only be fighting against the story that wanted to tell itself, trying to impose a narrative on what was, she suspected, unnarratable.

  She rubbed her hand tiredly on her forehead. What was she thinking? That she, an amateur, could make any kind of film about Jess, let alone one that aimed for truth. Her postmodern arty friends would all be rolling their eyes at her, telling her to forget it; that whatever Jess had to say wasn’t truth, merely her own agenda. That D’Arcy was being naive, or manipulated into believing that there was something to be revealed when there was only a whimsical old woman who’d chosen to hide her identity for reasons that belonged in the past.

  D’Arcy stretched, letting the film play across her computer screen, and walked out onto the balcony, the cooler night air and the ever-present scent of the garden like a calm hand placed on her shoulders, loosening them, easing the stiffness in her neck.

  What I did during the war was also cowardly. Jess’s voice cut into the night and D’Arcy once again felt the certainty that she herself was the coward. Too afraid to do anything with the footage she’d recorded. Too afraid to have written a proper proposal to the Jessica May foundation. Too afraid to talk to Josh. Too afraid to speak to Victorine.

  But fear was not a word D’Arcy had ever associated with herself. She was bold, adventuring around the world, unshrinking when it came to asking for what she wanted both from her work and the men she amused herself with.

  She turned around, marched over to the desk, sat down in the chair and fixed her hand on her mouse. She might never be able to make herself talk to Josh; he would want her to confide in him, like he had done with her, but even thinking about what she’d discovered at the school hurt so much that she couldn’t imagine talking about it, ever. And there was only a vacancy, an emptiness before her when she contemplated telling Victorine what she’d discovered. So yes, she was fearful. In that, but not in everything. She would make this film.

  Every afternoon, she would spend time with Jess. And every night, D’Arcy would come to her room and she would edit the truth into being. What she would do with the film once it was finished she had no idea; it was preposterous to imagine that anyone might want to watch something made by her, a mere trifler. But she would make it anyway. Even if it only sat on her computer for eternity, unwatched by anyone except D’Arcy, it was worth doing.

  Her phone rang then. Victorine. D’Arcy declined the call.

  Twenty-four

  Two days passed. Days in which D’Arcy continued to ignore Victorine’s calls. Days in which she picked up her phone and had pretend conversations whenever Josh was nearby, or drilled or sawed at top volume to discourage conversation. Days in which she spoke to Jess most afternoons, filming her, then working every night on the documentary in the sanctuary of her room. Sometimes she was confident that her work was good, but mostly she felt certain she was wasting her time on a film that would show only her lack of expertise. She made herself so tired that her eyes burned but she couldn’t sleep.

  She pretended to Jess and to herself that she was simply waiting until Jess had finished telling her story about Dan Hallworth and Victorine’s childhood and the war before she called Victorine back. It was such a nice deception, compared to the arid truth, that she sometimes almost forgot the real reason she was sad and would then be jolted into hideous consciousness by an anecdote Jess might share about Victorine.

  One evening, when she realised she was far too intimately acquainted with every small crack and crevice on the ceiling of her room from the long hours of staring up at it, she threw on the black dress she’d worn at the picnic and went downstairs to make herself some chamomile tea. Earlier, she’d seen that Célie had dried and placed some fresh buds in a tin in the library, a room adjacent to the salon de grisailles, but cosier, its walls covered in old fabric and leather-bound books. In the library she would be safe; there, she wouldn’t be able to see the boiserie paintings of the salon, wouldn’t feel compelled to try to discover whether the child was running towards or running from the ancient and gnarled trees of the chateau.

  She sank onto the sofa, grateful for the way that, here, everything you wanted appeared just as you needed it. Tonight was no exception; a teapot of hot water sat next to the chamomile leaves and two china cups. She sipped, then closed her eyes.

  ‘Mind if I join you?’

  Her eyes flew open. Josh. She shrugged. ‘Sure.’

  He poured himself a tea and sat next to her, doing just as she had done, sipping and closing his eyes and resting his head back.

  ‘We look like poster children for noughties’ over-scheduled lives,’ she said ruefully.

  His eyes flicked open and he smiled. ‘Except I think your exhaustion might be to do with something more than busyness. I’m happy to listen if you decide it’s better not to bottle it up.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know what to say,’ she said honestly.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing to the folded scarf on her lap.

  D’Arcy flushed. Why had she brought it downstairs with her? As a peace offering? Or an inducement? ‘It’s a 1950s Hermès silk and angora scarf,’ she said, handing it to him. ‘It reminded me of your eyes.’

  The afternoon
she’d arrived in Paris, before that awful visit to the school, she’d stopped at one of her favourite vintage clothing stores, had seen the scarf and bought it without hesitation, knowing it belonged to no one other than Josh. She’d bought one for Célie too – a 1940s Stella Designs scarf in pale greys and soft blues, colours that reminded D’Arcy of the chateau and the people in it. While she’d already given Célie her gift, she’d kept Josh’s hidden for the past two days because D’Arcy didn’t ordinarily buy presents for anyone; they were tokens of commitment. Even she and her mother mostly indulged in something transitory – a fabulous dinner and champagne – for Christmas rather than well-chosen gifts. But being in the chateau was somehow changing D’Arcy.

  ‘Thank you.’ His fingers ran slowly over the scarf. ‘I might need scarf-tying lessons to do it justice though.’

  ‘I think you could probably just toss it around your neck any old way and it will look …’ Devastatingly handsome, she didn’t say. ‘Dan Hallworth is Victorine’s father,’ were the words that came out instead. ‘This man, who used to be just the name of the person who owned the company my mother works for, is actually her family. And she never told me any of it.’

  ‘You look so sad, D’Arcy.’

  At Josh’s words, a simple statement of truth rather than the meaningless I’m sorry she’d expected, or a jollying attempt to make her feel better, she felt her breath falter, her heart convulse, her eyes scald with white-hot tears. She pressed her lips together, the ability to speak, to tell him about the most brutal discovery, snatched away by his compassion.

  He studied her face and shifted back into the sofa. ‘Come here. I’m an expert in giving a neck rub in such a way that it will make you fall asleep.’