The French Photographer

by Natasha Lester

  ‘Where is your son or daughter now?’ Josh asked quietly, stealing the words from D’Arcy’s mouth.

  ‘She died in childbirth. Almost thirty years ago.’

  ‘Oh no.’ D’Arcy’s words were stricken and the look on Josh’s face expressed everything that she felt. ‘The baby …?’ she whispered.

  ‘Survived. The rest is for your mother to tell you,’ Jess said, standing up. ‘She’ll be waiting for you when you return to Australia. Forgiving someone is the bravest thing you can ever do.’ And then she made her way slowly back to the house before D’Arcy could ask the last question, the question Jess must want her to ask of Victorine:But what has this to do with me?

  The moment Jess had gone, Josh stood too, as if eager to get away.

  ‘You don’t need to leave. I promise you’re safe from me,’ D’Arcy said, defaulting to a wisecrack to stop herself saying the thing she most wanted to: Please stay. Help me work out what all of this means.

  The effect of her words on Josh was instantaneous. ‘Am I?’ Anger flashed in the blue-black of his eyes. ‘That night on the sofa you would have had sex with me as a distraction. A short time off from thinking about whatever the hell is going on. I don’t want to be somebody’s distraction.’

  What could she say to that? He was as stubborn as she was, and he was also right to hold fast to what he wanted, to not lose his scruples over a girl on a sofa who wanted something from him that he wasn’t prepared to give in exchange for nothing. It was almost the inverse of how she’d seen the situation the night he’d massaged her shoulders on the sofa. While she thought about this, misinterpreting her silence, he walked away.

  D’Arcy sat in the folly for a long time, the thick, pink scent of the Judas trees muddling her mind so she couldn’t think at all. Eventually, she got up and returned to the chateau, almost jumping out of her dress when a shadow moved on the terrace.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’ Jess said from the chair in which she’d been sitting, quite possibly watching the whole scene.

  ‘I expect you will anyway,’ D’Arcy replied with a half-smile.

  Jess smiled too. ‘You’re right. Do you know Josh? Really know him? Because if you do, then you don’t need hope.’

  ‘I do,’ D’Arcy replied unthinking. ‘I really do,’ she repeated, understanding at last the question.

  She knew Josh’s past; she knew he was a good man. She knew that he respected her; he’d listened to her talk about her dreams and aspirations in a way nobody ever had. Most of all, she knew now that he wasn’t disappointed in her. Rather, she’d hurt him. Because he cared about her.

  Everything she’d done since she’d arrived at the chateau ran in horrible slow-motion before her eyes. That she’d thought so much of herself and hardly ever about Josh. She may have bought him a scarf, but that was impulse rather than deliberate action. She had treated him like a distraction. She hadn’t told him her deepest hurts and secrets the way he’d trusted her with his.

  He didn’t deserve her omissions. He deserved the gift of her trust, a gift he’d given her without hesitation. And Victorine deserved the same – for D’Arcy to have enough faith in her to allow her the chance to explain. To allow for the possibility of, as Jess had said, forgiveness.

  Most of all, D’Arcy realised now, she cared for someone else besides her mother. She cared very much that she had hurt Josh. And her admiration for Jess as an artist had shifted; in working with Jess, in being taken into her confidence, D’Arcy now cared for Jess as a woman, as someone who had made mistakes and was hurting too.

  D’Arcy stepped forward, without giving Jess any warning, and wrapped her arms around her, holding her. It took only a few seconds for Jess to sag into the embrace as if she’d been waiting for it for all her life.

  And the strength of emotion in that embrace forced words to come together in D’Arcy’s mind, Jess’s words from earlier: She died in childbirth. Almost thirty years ago. The rest is for your mother to tell you.

  D’Arcy was almost thirty years old. Victorine was not biologically D’Arcy’s mother. Was that why Jess had told D’Arcy the story – was D’Arcy actually Jess’s granddaughter?

  PART NINE

  Jess

  War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.

  – Susan Sontag

  And where do they go from here – the Servicewomen and all the others who, without the glamour of uniform, have queued and contrived and queued, and kept factories, homes and offices going? Their value is more than proven: their toughness where endurance was needed, their taciturnity when silence was demanded, their tact, good humour and public conscience; … how long before a grateful nation (or, anyhow, the men of the nation) forget what women accomplished when the country needed them? It is up to all women to see to it that there is no regression – that they go right on from here.

  – Audrey Withers, British Vogue, 1945

  Twenty-eight

  FRANCE, MAY 1945

  After Dan said those words – I love you – Jess left for Paris. She sent him a note, trying to explain the unexplainable. That she couldn’t let him face a court martial, couldn’t let the leaderless men in his battalion die in Europe or in the Pacific, governed by a man like Major Thompson, just so that he could marry her. She gave him her blessing to marry Amelia in order to keep his men safe. She told him he had to do the right thing. She ended the note by saying:

  Remember how I once said that I didn’t want to live if I knew that you had died? So I want your word that you will look after yourself. But I also don’t want to live in the knowledge that you are heartbroken. One day, this will fade. You once told me that everything does. Why should this be any different?

  A stupid tear dropped onto the notepaper as she wrote the last words, smudging the letters, betraying the fact that, while she might have written them, she did not for one minute believe them. It would never fade.

  And she held onto the thought that, perhaps if she just absented herself, while Amelia might marry Dan, the marriage wouldn’t last. Dan and Amelia would be married just long enough to save Dan. Despite her scars and her arm, Amelia would find her feet; she always did. Then a divorce could be arranged, leaving Dan and Jess free to be together.

  ‘Jessica May. What a pleasure.’ Warren Stone’s smirking face greeted her as she pulled into the Hotel Scribe. ‘I heard you were coming. And just when I’m in Paris too.’

  ‘How the hell did you hear that?’ Jess hauled her bags over her shoulder and marched up the steps.

  Warren followed her. ‘Correspondents love to gossip. I was on a call to the PRO in Munich yesterday and he filled me in on all the hot topics of conversation there.’

  ‘Like the war?’ Jess glowered. ‘Isn’t that hot enough for any of you?’

  ‘All work and no play would make us a dull lot, as the saying goes. We have to take our amusements when we can. Which it seems you were more than willing to do with one Lieutenant Colonel Hallworth. Until he threw you over for an English girl. And you’ve come here to mend your broken heart.’

  ‘Excuse me.’ Jess stalked off to the elevator before she lost all of her dignity by crying in front of Warren Stone.

  Her plan was to stay one night in Paris. Surely she could avoid Warren for one night? She’d spend tomorrow saying farewell to Victorine and then she’d get herself back to London, and on to New York. Easy.

  And she wouldn’t think about Dan. Which was the hardest thing of all.

  She left early in the morning to collect Victorine, only to discover that her jeep was missing. The PRO told her that Warren Stone had borrowed it, leaving a message that Jess should take his instead.

  ‘Why didn’t he take his own?’ she growled, knowing it wasn’t the PRO’s fault and the best thing for her to do was to quit grumbling and take the jeep so that Warren wouldn’t find out he’d irked her, which was most likely his aim.

  ‘I need to log where you’re going,’ the PRO replied,
unperturbed.

  ‘Verzy today, then London tomorrow. After that I never want to see another khaki-coloured jeep again,’ she said petulantly.

  Her mood hardly improved on seeing Victorine because the little girl would not accept the news that Dan was marrying a lovely lady, and that she would soon have a mommy.

  ‘But you’re my maman,’ Victorine said sternly.

  ‘Oh, darling, I’m not,’ Jess protested, willing her goddamn eyes to stop leaking.

  ‘Yes, you are,’ Victorine said. ‘I will not have another maman.’

  Rather than discuss it, Jess drove them both to Lieu de Rêves for another picnic. They spent a sleepy and almost happy day, where they both behaved as if nothing had changed and oh, it was heaven. Jess almost began to believe it; that nothing had changed. Until just before they were about to leave and Victorine was inspecting the dwarf beech trees by the canal. Jess held her camera up, thinking to take a photograph, but the wind blew and one of the tree’s gnarled and twisted branches reached towards the little girl, like a sorceress about to cast a spell.

  ‘No!’ Jess cried and Victorine looked at her, puzzled.

  ‘The tree is lonely,’ Victorine pronounced, in that way she had of seeming far too adult for her age. ‘I was going to tell it we would be back soon.’

  Back soon. Dan and Jess and Victorine sitting beneath the lonely tree, picnicking as they had just last month. Jess blinked. Don’t cry. She forced a smile and the tree settled into benignity. It was time to go, before she found that she could not.

  She held Victorine’s hand as they walked back to the car, the tiny fingers clasping Jess’s with such confidence and such trust. It was almost impossible to let go, to allow the child to climb into the jeep, to drive towards Paris, not knowing when or if she’d ever see Victorine again.

  They hadn’t gone far when the jeep began to rattle, the wheels to slip. A flat tyre. Far from being a nuisance, Jess was grateful for the extra pocket of time she could spend with Victorine while she fixed the car. Except the spare wasn’t there. She cursed Warren under her breath. Perhaps they could keep driving to the next town. Jess checked the tyre but saw that it had a long nail in it, a slow leak that had done its work while they picnicked; they weren’t going anywhere for now.

  How long would it take for another vehicle to drive along this out-of-the-way road? Perhaps one of the workers from the nearby vineyards might come past. And it seemed her prayers were answered after not more than ten minutes by the noise of a car.

  She almost cried with relief when she saw it was a US Army jeep like her own. She held out one hand to flag it down, the other shielding her eyes from the glare of headlights. The jeep pulled to a stop. A man climbed out.

  Warren Stone.

  ‘Got yourself in trouble?’ he asked with a grin.

  Jess’s stomach twisted. No spare tyre. Warren taking her jeep and leaving her with his. The coincidence of him being the one to find her.

  ‘Who’s this?’ he asked, looking into the back of the jeep where Victorine lay stretched out, sleeping.

  ‘Dan’s niece. Lieutenant Colonel Hallworth’s niece,’ she corrected herself.

  ‘What a delightful child.’ Warren stroked Victorine’s cheek. It was the kind of gesture that might suit a doting elderly lady but coming from Warren, the gesture made Jess’s skin crawl.

  ‘Maman?’ Victorine said sleepily, stirring and yawning.

  ‘Maman?’ Warren repeated. ‘My, that is interesting.’

  ‘She’s Dan’s brother’s child. Born before I even knew Dan. She calls me that because she has no one else.’

  ‘And nor do you. Have anyone else. Just me, and a dark road and a broken jeep. Sweet child, you’ll have to excuse your maman and me for a while. We have some business to transact.’

  And Jess knew that the thing she’d dreaded since his words, spoken to her in a bar in London – One day, Captain May, you will regret this conversation very much – had finally come to pass.

  ‘No,’ she said, but even she could hear the shock in her voice.

  He shrugged. ‘Do you want me to wake the child so she can watch?’

  Jess felt her hands begin to shake. ‘You wouldn’t.’

  ‘Wouldn’t I?’

  Her Colt was in her own jeep, the one Warren had taken that morning. She didn’t have a knife. She had only herself.

  But Warren was bigger and stronger and even though terror would make her fight and kick and punch and scream, she knew he’d win in the end. And although she couldn’t believe that she would ever acquiesce to such a thing, she knew it was better to get it done quietly behind one of the trees at the side of the road while Victorine slept. She would never want Victorine to witness the violence of Jess resisting Warren, a violence that would scar Victorine for life in a way different to the scars Amelia bore, but perhaps the more powerful.

  Her stomach roiled and she thought she might be sick. She tried to breathe, in and out. She tried to separate her mind from her body, to send her thoughts elsewhere and leave Warren with only her shell. But she felt one treacherous tear roll down her cheek.

  Then she made herself nod, indicating a tree a little way down the road, hoping its carapace of leaves would screen from Victorine’s sight, should she chance to wake, what was about to happen.

  ‘Glad to find you’re so amenable,’ Warren said, excitement shining like flak in his eyes.

  Jess leaned into the car to kiss Victorine, darling child, whose eyes were soft-shuttered with sleep.

  Then she followed Warren to the tree. She tried to hold back the tears but she couldn’t and Warren reached up to wipe them away, thumbs pressing into her cheekbones. It was the worst thing of all. That he could take a gesture of kindness and turn it into something vicious made the first sob escape. He smiled.

  And so she wept as she let him kiss her and unbutton her blouse and lift up her skirt and take what he wanted from her. He groaned loudly as he moved roughly into her, breathing hard as if it was a pleasurable moment, a wanted moment, a moment to cherish.

  Jess closed her eyes. And still she wept.

  When Warren was done he sagged against her, face pressed into her neck. Jess opened her eyes at last to see a five-year-old child standing sleepily before them, having parted the low-hanging branches that Jess had thought would conceal forever what had just happened. Instead, Victorine stared in confusion at the sight of a man’s body pressed close to Jess, at Jess’s skirt lifted far higher than it should be, at the tears on Jess’s face.

  ‘Victorine,’ Jess gasped, pushing Warren off her.

  He stumbled backwards, hands fumbling with his trouser buttons and Jess caught sight of his face. The expression he wore was not one of gloating, roistering victory as she’d expected. But something else.

  He reached out a hand for her and Jess recoiled, thinking he was going to hit her now, not content with the physical violence he’d so far inflicted. But he touched her hair instead, almost tenderly, and said, puzzled, ‘It wasn’t what I thought it would be.’

  Jess backed away, tucking Victorine behind her, outrage unleashed at last – that he would think the only abomination in what had just happened was his disappointment.

  ‘Did you really believe I would fall in love with you just because you kissed me? Just because you did … that?’ Her voice was as deadly quiet as a sniper tiptoeing through a defeated village, and colder than the bitter winter of the Ardennes. She could not yell or scream; her anger was so ferocious it was almost beyond her control. ‘I loved Dan a long time before I ever kissed him,’ she hissed. ‘There is a very big difference between this …’ She shifted her eyes contemptuously to his unbuttoned fly. ‘And love.’

  She turned from Warren, picked up Victorine and carried her back to the car, the child’s sweet soapy smell pressed into her neck where Warren’s mouth had been only moments before. She prayed to God it was too dark for Victorine to have seen very much. That she was too young to comprehend, least of all to commit
to memory, what she had witnessed.

  The most appalling part of the whole appalling evening was that, in an abhorrent way, Jess had won. Warren had got what he’d obviously long wanted but had found that the way he’d obtained it had made it not to his liking. A bathetic end to the game for him and a victory for Jess as hollow as any in Europe that had cost millions of lives.

  For all of the long, silent ride back to Paris, Jess thought of three things. The US Army soldier saying ain’t nobody going to stop me having her. Dan saying, I love you. And her terror at what those words would bring upon one of them.

  The bomb, it seemed, had just gone off.

  Twenty-nine

  Jess was in London longer than she’d expected. The war in Europe finished just as she arrived. Everybody cheered and drank champagne and kissed. Jess didn’t. Instead, she lost the contents of her stomach at the thought that maybe if she and Dan had stretched Amelia out just a few more days, then Amelia’s threat would have amounted to nothing. But then she heard that Dan’s division was likely being sent to the Pacific and while it didn’t make her stomach feel any better, it reassured her that she’d done the right thing. Imagine if she’d been responsible for sending Dan’s battalion off to the unknowns of Asia with a new CO who was a stranger to both the men and to decency?

  She handed in her accreditation papers in London but it took a month to organise passage for her back to New York. Troops being repatriated had priority.

  She received two surprises in London. The first was a letter, forwarded from the Hotel Scribe and obviously opened by Warren Stone. Warren had enclosed a note that read: I couldn’t let you leave without seeing this.

  The letter was from Dan. It said:

  Jess, I know it’s a cliché that a writer like you will detest but you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Better than the best; you were the miracle.

  I keep asking myself – if I’d never gone to your party at the Scribe, would that be better? Then we’d still be the best of friends, and I’d still be able to see you. But I shake my head because half of you isn’t enough. All of you isn’t enough. None of you is unthinkable.