The French Photographer

by Natasha Lester

  She looked at him warily and he smiled. ‘I promise it will be very chaste and proper,’ he said. ‘Although this is a turn-up for the books; you eyeing me like I’m about to jump on you rather than the other way around.’

  He made her smile so she stood up and perched on the edge of the sofa, between his legs, and he began to rub her neck the same way he did everything: lightly, softly, gently. As he massaged her neck and shoulders, he talked about Paris, about his favourite café in the city, about small and inconsequential things, which were the perfect things, because she could manage the small and inconsequential much better than the large and devastating.

  Long minutes passed, minutes of feeling her shoulders drop down from around her neck, of feeling sleepy rather than exhausted, of the sound of his voice near her ear. She should probably stand up and go to bed. He’d been rubbing her neck for at least half an hour and he must have better things to do, like getting some sleep himself.

  Then his voice trailed off. It took only a few minutes until somehow, in the silence, the heat generated by his hands intensified. The throb of whatever it was between them found expression in his fingers and even though he moved them the same way on her skin, it no longer felt like a decorous massage. His hands felt heavier, her skin almost unbearably warm. She shivered, heart skidding into a faster beat, the sound of Josh’s breath obvious in the silent room.

  She shifted a little, back into him, and his lips brushed against her hair, teasing her flesh into goosebumps. Then his mouth moved down the side of her neck and more long and lovely minutes passed as his lips fanned the fire that his hands had started. She closed her eyes when his hands ran down her arms, then all the way down to her waist, meandering, exploring her body and when at last he stroked her breasts, D’Arcy couldn’t bear it any more.

  She spun around to face him, straddling his lap, reaching behind to her zipper, letting her dress puddle at her waist so he could touch her without a screen of fabric between them.

  And he did touch her, did bring his hands back to her breasts, running his fingers over her naked skin, tracing a line down from her shoulders before coming to rest on her nipples. She shuddered as his fingers caressed her gently, then harder, and she kissed him to stop herself from crying out at the rush of sensation that was taking over her whole body.

  Their kiss deepened to match the intensity of what his hands on her breasts were doing to both of them and he shifted his weight and lay her back on the sofa. He took his mouth away from hers for just a moment to search out her eyes. The way he looked at her made her want to turn her head away, to reach down and pull up her dress to cover herself because she’d never before felt so vulnerable beneath everything that he told her in his gaze.

  Which was crazy because just a minute ago she’d been prepared to give him everything. No, that was a lie. She’d been prepared to give him her body. That was all. But she could see in his eyes that he only wanted her body if she was prepared to give him the rest of her: her heart, her mind, her soul.

  She had no idea how he read what she was thinking but after just a moment of eye meeting eye, he did what she’d wanted to: reached down and pulled up her dress. He brushed his lips against her forehead, then stood.

  ‘Goodnight, D’Arcy,’ he said and in his voice she heard hurt or disappointment – she couldn’t be sure – and she knew it was because she’d just proven herself to be less than he’d hoped she was.

  PART SEVEN

  Jess

  It is awful to die at the end of summer when you are young and have fought a long time and when you know that the war is over anyhow.

  – Martha Gellhorn

  Twenty-five

  MUNICH, APRIL 1945

  The next day the war floundered on, Dan hurrying back to his men at dawn, cursing at having to send them out on a patrol that none of them wanted to make. It would take just one sniper and the end of the war, so close, would become something unreachable; they’d be in heaven or hell instead.

  Jess returned to the press camp, keeping the incredible secret of her engagement to Dan more closely guarded than the papers in the Reichstag. She was unable to concentrate on anything, so she set out with Marty, driving through nearby towns, purposeless except that sometimes, they both knew, the best stories came from the most unexpected places.

  In one tiny town, a German woman raced over to their jeep, calling out, ‘Soldier women! Help me! Please!’

  Jess stopped the jeep and both she and Martha jumped out. ‘Is someone hurt?’ Jess asked, thinking they’d need an ambulance, or a medic, wondering how far they were from the nearest hospital.

  Then the sound of terrified screaming tore through Jess’s ears and the woman pointed desperately at a locked door. Behind the door, a sharp American voice commanded, ‘Stop clawing, you little bitch, or I’m gonna break your bloody neck.’

  Jess and Martha banged on the door in unison, their cries matching the intensity of those coming from behind the door. It flew open and a GI peered out, gun raised, a girl sobbing in the bed behind him.

  ‘I’ve got a pistol and there ain’t nobody going to stop me having her or any other German gal I want.’ He continued to rant, claiming the girl was simply the spoils of victory and Jess knew that she didn’t have the stomach to photograph his foul mouth or his splenetic, hostile face because there was no humanity whatsoever in this moment and therefore nobody would ever be able to look upon it.

  What had seemed so momentous in Paris in August last year had become a pyrrhic victory as the victors proved every day that their morals were often little better than those they had defeated.

  The GI slammed the door shut.

  ‘You stay there,’ Jess said to Martha. She sprinted back to the jeep, speeding on until she found an officer. She filled him in through her panting breath, pointing to where he should go to stop what was happening.

  He stared at her for a long moment, long enough for Jess to start shouting, as if he were deaf and hadn’t heard her. The noise attracted a crowd and that was the only thing that seemed to make the major react. He called for a jeep but before he climbed in, he leaned down close to Jess and said viciously, ‘The most stinking part of this whole stinking war business is that there should be women anywhere near it.’

  He drove off in the right direction, Jess screaming after him, ‘Damn you! It’s not the women who are the problem!’

  ‘Are you okay, ma’am?’ one of the nearby soldiers asked.

  She shook her head. ‘What’s his name?’ She pointed in the direction of the officer’s jeep.

  ‘That’s Major Thompson.’

  Major Thompson. The same man who’d thrown away the note Dan had given him about his soldiers helping themselves to what they thought they had a right to. She jumped into her own jeep and tore off after him, arriving in time to see the soldier, not looking at all chastised, hopping into the car with the major and pulling away without a backward glance.

  Martha appeared, cursing. ‘They won’t do a damn thing to him. Meanwhile that poor woman …’

  That poor woman. Who could be pregnant, injured, mentally ruined by a man with a gun and the terrible power conferred on him by victory.

  ‘What does it make us if we don’t write about it?’ Jess asked in a whisper.

  ‘Smart,’ Martha said firmly. ‘Damn smart.’

  ‘I need a drink,’ Martha said when they arrived back at the press camp.

  ‘I do too,’ Jess said feelingly, hating herself for it. As if a drink would ever make that woman feel better. Jess had the power – not of justice, but of revelation – in her hands and she wasn’t using it. She was blaming Warren Stone and the censors and everyone but herself. ‘I’m supposed to be meeting Dan though. Will you be okay?’ she asked, squeezing her friend’s hand.

  ‘I’ll find Lee and a bottle of whiskey and I won’t remember any of it. Until tomorrow.’ Martha grimaced.

  ‘I’ll stay with you.’

  ‘No. Go enjoy the one good thing th
ere is. And don’t you dare feel guilty about it.’ Martha embraced Jess, which she supposed was Martha’s way of telling Jess she knew what was going on with Dan and Jess blinked, hard.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered.

  On her way out, Meg, the WAC coming off telephone duty, jumped up. ‘Say, are you going into town? I need a ride.’

  ‘Sure,’ Jess said. ‘I’m having a drink with Dan – Lieutenant Colonel Hallworth.’ She tried to lighten her own mood by adding, ‘I can’t quite believe it’s possible to do something so normal in Munich.’

  Meg laughed. ‘I’m meeting someone as well. Who knows, maybe we’ll all go back to dating sometime soon rather than …’ Her voice broke off as she searched for the right words to describe the way relationships developed in the cut and thrust of war.

  As they climbed into the jeep, Meg said, ‘Lieutenant Colonel Hallworth sure is popular. Someone else called looking for him earlier. I told her she should join the queue behind you but she didn’t see the joke. She was very insistent about finding him so I put her through to HQ and told her this was a press camp, not a command post. Sorry,’ Meg said, genuinely contrite when she caught Jess’s stare. ‘I didn’t mean anything …’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Jess said, pulling the jeep onto the road. Everyone seemed to know that she and Dan were some kind of item. Maybe that was okay. It took the power away from Warren; his revelation about Jess and Dan would be very anti-climactic if it was already accepted rumour. Maybe that was why he hadn’t said anything, why he’d left her alone lately. He’d run out of ammunition at last.

  Jess pulled up near the bar she and Dan had chosen because it was small and quiet and not frequented by press hounds. She said goodbye to Meg, went inside and ordered a drink while she waited. Half an hour later she ordered another one, and some food, unperturbed because arrangements in wartime were as flexible as elastic. After two more hours she gave up, knowing something had happened and he’d come to see her whenever he could.

  She arrived back at the press camp a little subdued, only to run into Meg, also returned. ‘Your night didn’t work out either, I take it?’ Jess said ruefully.

  Meg shook her head. ‘He was a jerk. And I know why yours didn’t work out.’ She passed Jess a scribbled note which read, Message for Jessica May: Lieutenant Colonel Hallworth in hospital. Jeep accident.

  The note fell to the floor, swaying gently down as Jess turned and ran back outside, cursing herself. She never should have said yes to Dan. This was what happened in a war zone when you made someone a promise.

  Twenty-six

  She’d never been more relieved in her life than when she saw Dan on his feet at the main desk of the hospital.

  ‘Dan!’ Her cry echoed loudly and he whipped around, revealing a black eye with a bandage above, most likely obscuring a nasty cut, and minor scratches on his face and arms, but nothing more as far as she could see.

  All her desire of concealment fled as she ran to him and he folded her in his arms, holding her so tightly she could barely breathe. After a moment he bent his head down to kiss her and Jess vaguely heard Anne’s voice behind them say, ‘About time.’ Heard a GI’s voice say, ‘Well done, Sir,’ and another say, ‘Ten bucks is mine.’

  Jess drew back a little, unable yet to smile at the jesting around them until she’d made certain of one thing. ‘You’re all right?’

  He nodded. ‘I am. But …’

  His voice trailed off and Jess’s stomach squeezed with dread. Not Jennings. Not now.

  ‘Your friend Amelia …’ He began to talk and the dread inside her twisted into foreboding.

  Dan spoke haltingly about spending the afternoon clearing out a village where there’d been reports of sniper fire, of a band of rebels still fighting for their now dead Führer. Amelia had been there too; somehow the Major General had got it into his head that she was a fluent German speaker and she’d come to translate but they’d all discovered very quickly that the few German words Dan and his men had picked up in the last month made them better speakers of the language than Amelia.

  The Major General had been disgusted, Amelia’s legs and smile not being enough to placate him, and he’d roared off soon after they’d discovered that the reports of sniper fire were false and the whole mission had been a waste of everyone’s time. But the Major General had brought Amelia with him to the village, which left her without a ride back to the ATS lodgings. Dan had been in his jeep with Jennings, about to drive off, when Amelia appeared, simpered at Jennings, and asked if he would give up his seat for her and squeeze into another jeep instead. Of course Jennings, being Jennings, had stuttered, blushed and jumped out of the jeep before Dan could stop him.

  Dan knew he was going to be late to meet Jess, and the ATS camp where Amelia was staying was out of his way. So he’d taken a shortcut.

  ‘If you’d been in the jeep with me, Jess, there’s no way I would have taken that shortcut,’ he said. ‘But I just wanted to see you. I wanted to hold your hand and ask you if you’d really said yes or if it had all been a dream. I thought I knew the road well enough to avoid anything …’

  He’d had his helmet and goggles on and had refused to leave until Amelia put hers on, even though she’d complained bitterly about the effect on her hair. What he hadn’t realised, because his thoughts were on Jess, was that Amelia had slipped off the protective equipment sometime after they departed, most likely when he’d been distracted by the demands of navigating and keeping alert to any danger outside the vehicle. And the Germans, as so many times before, had strung a wire from tree to tree across the road, a wire that was almost impossible to see in the dusk and without an experienced navigator beside him like Jennings or Jess.

  Dan saw it at the last minute, had yelled out to duck, which anyone else would have done without question but Amelia didn’t know that when a Lieutenant Colonel yelled duck, you ducked. He’d swerved, with his head down, meaning his neck had avoided the wire. But the jeep had hit a tree. He didn’t know how badly Amelia was hurt, but suspected it wasn’t a matter of cuts and scrapes. That the wire, the God-awful wire might have …

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ Jess said, squeezing his hand, trying not to think about the stories of guillotined bodies left by the Germans’ infernal wires. ‘She shouldn’t have been out there in the first place, let alone without a helmet. The Major General shouldn’t have left her behind. And you would never have taken a road that you thought was unsafe.’

  ‘But I did,’ he said, his face stricken and she led him to a chair and sat him down and kept her arms around him while they waited to find out what had happened to Amelia.

  Hours later, Anne called them over. ‘She’s resting now. They had to …’ she paused.

  ‘Tell me,’ Dan said grimly.

  ‘They had to amputate her arm. It was crushed when the jeep crashed.’ Anne paused and Jess knew there was more, that the amputation was the best news. Her heart skidded and she felt like cramming her hands over her ears but she kept her arms around Dan.

  ‘Tell us,’ she said to Anne.

  ‘The wire sliced into her face,’ Anne said. ‘She’ll have scars, bad ones, for the rest of her life. I’m sorry.’ Anne gave Dan a sympathetic look and moved away.

  ‘What have I done?’ Dan said, face dropping into his hands.

  ‘You’ve done nothing,’ Jess insisted. ‘Let’s go see her. She’ll say the same.’

  But Amelia didn’t say anything; she was sleeping. It was impossible to see how badly hurt she was but, judging by the size of the bandages swathed over her face, it was perhaps worse than they could imagine.

  Jess stayed with Dan that night in his room in Hitler’s apartment. If they were caught, there’d be trouble, but Jennings helped as usual; one look at Dan’s face told him that Jess needed to be there for his CO.

  Before dawn, she woke to find that Dan was already up and dressed and about to go back to the hospital to see Amelia.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said.
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  But he shook his head. ‘I need to do this on my own. I need to make it right.’

  So she let him go and, later, when Jennings asked her, ‘Is he all right?’ she shook her head too and said, ‘I don’t know.’

  It was late afternoon when Dan came to find Jess in the clack and buzz of the press camp.

  ‘She said I had to marry her,’ Dan said faintly.

  ‘What?’ The word exploded from Jess’s mouth.

  ‘I’ve made her unmarriageable. The doctors say her face will be scarred for life. Horribly scarred. Impossible to hide. She only has one arm. Nobody will want her now, she says. It’s the only way I can make amends.’

  ‘What did you say?’ Jess asked, incredulous that Amelia would propose something so preposterous.

  ‘I told her I was engaged to you,’ he said simply. ‘That I’d do anything I could for her but I was marrying you and nobody else.’

  ‘Dan …’ Jess reached across the table and took his hand and the oafs at the other end whistled as if they’d never seen a man and a woman hold hands before. ‘Let’s go outside,’ she said.

  And there, beneath an optimistic blue sky, with Warren Stone – goddamn it, why was he always there? – watching on, Dan kissed her.

  ‘I’ll go and see Amelia tomorrow,’ Jess said. ‘I’m sure I can talk her round.’

  But Amelia wasn’t to be talked around.

  ‘I have one arm, Jessica,’ she spat. ‘And scars where I once had a face. Part of my nose is gone.’

  Jess flinched.

  ‘If you’re wincing at the mere thought of it, the sight of it will be a million times worse,’ Amelia continued relentlessly. ‘If I know one thing it’s that there aren’t enough men to go around, not now half of them are dead. Nobody will choose me over a smooth-skinned debutante with full use of her limbs. I came over here to find a husband – because God knows there are no men left in England – and Dan has made that impossible.’