The French Photographer

by Natasha Lester

  I was out on a raid last night and I thought perhaps I would die and that would be good because then I wouldn’t feel like this but I know you left because of my men and to throw it in your face by dying would be too cowardly. Besides, I know how you’d feel if I died and I can’t do that to you.

  Be happy, Jess. I can bear this if I know you’re happy. Otherwise my life has nothing in it at all.

  Jess sank to the floor, brought to her knees by Dan’s letter, as Warren Stone had intended her to be. It took her a long, long time to stand up, to splash her face with water, to pour herself a whiskey and light, then stub out a cigarette, unsmoked.

  Because the other surprise, she knew now, was that she wasn’t going to New York alone. She was taking a child with her, inside her womb. A child whose father was unknown. She and Dan had always been careful but she wasn’t dumb enough not to know just how many rubbers had failed in wartime. And then there was Warren. He hadn’t bothered with a rubber.

  Only a couple of days separated the last time she was with Dan from that awful night with Warren. She would never know. And she would never want Dan to find out what had happened. He would kill Warren with his bare hands and then he really would be court-martialled.

  All of which made it more important that Dan marry Amelia, if he hadn’t already, and forget about Jess. Love, she thought wearily as she stared out at the bombed husk of London. War makes us monsters or angels, but so too does love. And now she would leave behind in Europe the love that Dan had made for her out of the ashes of war, a love ruined finally by monsters.

  ‘You’re back!’ Bel folded Jess into her arms when she appeared in her office two weeks later, skinnier than when she’d left, older – so much older – knowing too much and not as good at pretending as she used to be.

  Bel held her at arm’s-length after the initial hug and cast her eyes over Jess critically. ‘Thank goodness,’ she said, seemingly satisfied, sitting down to light a cigarette. ‘You need to eat, Jessica May, get your curves back, but I don’t see why we can’t have you back on the cover in a couple of months. Nobody remembers Kotex now.’

  Kotex. Even Jess struggled to think what on earth Bel was talking about. The dimmest memory of a field in upstate New York, a cow bellowing in the background, Bel stepping out of a car to speak to her, a conversation with Emile – God, she’d all but forgotten Emile too.

  Jess fiddled with a cigarette and then put it away.

  ‘We’re doing a feature on Stella Designs and their patriotic dresses soon. You’d be perfect for it. I’ll set it up.’ Bel smiled as if it were just like old times; she hadn’t even mentioned the war.

  But how could anyone pick up the life they’d once lived, like a gown that had been tucked away in a forgotten cupboard, slip it back on and resume the smiling and the laughing?

  ‘I thought I’d keep reporting for you,’ Jess said.

  ‘Reporting?’ Bel tapped ash off her cigarette. ‘I don’t need any more war reports. Bar the Pacific, it’s all but over. Paper supplies will be back to normal soon. You’ve done your job. You can have some fun.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can,’ Jess said honestly.

  ‘Of course you can.’ Bel was adamant. ‘No good comes from moping. Everybody wants to start afresh, to kick up their heels, and they need to know what to wear while doing it.’

  Kick up their heels. Dance on the graves of the fallen. Whoop over the bodies of the living dead from the camps. Grind out their cigarettes on the memories of the missing. Jess shook her head. ‘I might see what else I can pick up. Thank you though,’ she added, resurrecting her manners from the place they’d been stowed, unneeded in war.

  ‘Well,’ Bel said, looking a little miffed. ‘My offer will stand. I’m proud of what you did over there. But you don’t have to do it any longer.’

  Jess kissed Bel’s cheeks and walked out onto the street, to an assault of buses and cabs and horns and neon signs and intact buildings and people wearing colours other than khaki and carrying purses instead of weapons, unhelmeted, not a gas mask in sight, or a jeep, or a drop of blood.

  And so, for the next two months, Jess tried. Yes, everybody had heard of her, yes they all thought that her skill behind the camera and her ability to put words together was outstanding. They would be happy to have her. Except …

  Except that the male correspondents were coming back. And the men in the US Armed Forces. Those men needed jobs more than she did, she was told, because they either did or would soon have a wife and children to support. She’d have someone to support her. She was a knockout! What man wouldn’t want to support her? Wink, wink. In fact, why didn’t they go out together and get a drink that very night?

  ‘No, thank you,’ Jess said. No thank you, no thank you, no thank you, over and over again.

  In a city plastered with propaganda posters of red-lipsticked women in aprons cooking roast dinners, posters that exhorted women to lay down their tools and their pens and their minds and leave their jobs to the more deserving returned soldiers, Jess soon heard the news about Betty Wasson. Betty had been a CBS correspondent throughout the war and had returned, imagining she’d be employed by CBS in the States now that the war was over. They turned her down. And so Betty Wasson, who’d put together five broadcasts a day from Greece, who’d been wrongly detained as a spy and who’d kept her cool even under questioning from the Gestapo in Berlin, had returned to her pre-war job as an assistant to the food editor at women’s magazine McCall’s. Dorothy Thompson, former European bureau chief for the New York Post, was back writing fluff for Ladies’ Home Journal. What hope did Jess, a mere reporter for Vogue, have in finding serious work when women like this couldn’t get any?

  Then she saw a piece in the New York Courier that said the brave and much-decorated Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Hallworth of the United States Army was returning to New York with his wife, Amelia. He would be taking up his position as Editor in Chief of the newspaper. And Jess, telling no one besides Martha what she planned to do, knew that she and the child she carried inside her had to get out of New York forever.

  PART TEN

  D’Arcy

  Thirty

  After she stepped away from her embrace with Jess, D’Arcy went upstairs and did a lot of thinking in her Buly-perfumed tub. A lot of doubting. And quite a lot of hoping.

  She knew Jess wouldn’t answer a direct question. She’d made it clear that D’Arcy must ask Victorine. So, instead, the next morning, D’Arcy asked Célie to prepare another dinner in the folly and to deliver an invitation to Josh. She spent the entire day, her last at the chateau, tying up loose ends, terrified that he wouldn’t come.

  She dressed early, in a startlingly pink 1960s Miss Dior mini-dress with a high-buttoned neckline and elbow-length sleeves, and sat alone in the folly with her thoughts for half an hour before Josh arrived at the appointed time.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said with a smile that wasn’t teasing or flirtatious or anything other than just plain old D’Arcy. She poured him a wine, and refilled her own glass, already long since drunk.

  ‘Will I need to catch up to you?’ he asked, nodding at her glass.

  Her stomach flipped and her heart squeezed at both the gentle humour and the note of worry she could hear in his words, at the way she could interpret him so much better than just last week when she’d have thought he was issuing a reprimand. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said as Célie brought out plates of steaming, buttery dorade once more, along with crazily shaped, garden-fresh honeyed carrots and leaves of salad so green that even fine arts-trained D’Arcy couldn’t name their precise shade.

  D’Arcy waited until Célie had left before she began. ‘I asked Jess this morning if she would come to the exhibition in Sydney.’

  ‘What did she say?’ he asked, thankfully not pointing out that, as Jess’s agent, he really should have been involved in the conversation.

  ‘I want her to see Victorine, my mother, again. Jess wants to as well. But she said s
he’d have to ask you to accompany her; that while she’s done a lot of uncomfortable travelling in her life, age was rather limiting her adventuring now.’

  ‘And you asked me to dinner to see if I would?’ He sipped his wine.

  As D’Arcy sat across the table from Josh, surrounded by beauty, the air between them thickset with something else entirely, she gathered her courage to her like a favourite dress. ‘No,’ she replied.

  Josh frowned.

  ‘Sorry!’ she stuttered. ‘I did mean what I just said but it came out wrong. God, I’m shit at this,’ she added with a wry smile and he finally looked at her as if she’d piqued his interest and perhaps he didn’t despise her.

  ‘I know it’s a lot to ask,’ D’Arcy said, choosing her words carefully, very aware that he might say no and go back to the chateau, ‘but could we go for a walk? I want to say something but it’s hard enough with us both just sitting here …’ It was hard enough just to say that, to admit she felt vulnerable and awkward and unwilling to resort to witty repartee.

  Josh nodded and stood. They walked towards the canal, the last frantic rustlings of small animals and the buzzing of insects gathering their last supper agitating the air. In D’Arcy’s muddled thoughts, one clamoured more loudly than the rest: that choosing what seemed to be the path of least hurt did not always have the intended consequences, if Jess and Dan and her mother were anything to go by.

  She could just say that it was important for Jess to come to the exhibition, that it would only be possible for Jess to come if Josh came too; to put him in a position where he couldn’t say no. But he needed to choose and she needed to ask. But first, she needed to explain.

  ‘I found out that Victorine couldn’t have children. And I’ve been so mad … no, that’s a lie. I’ve been so … sad,’ she made herself say it, ‘… because if Victorine’s not really my mother, I thought that meant I had no one. Which is why I’ve been a bit of a bitch,’ she finished. ‘Finding out about her has made me feel a little lost.’

  She stopped walking, realising they were beside the tree she’d sat beneath with Jess. The tree that had, like Jess, tried to tell her what she needed to know. The tree that unwound serenely to the floor of the little wood now and D’Arcy smiled. Because she knew the answer. She wasn’t lost. In beginning to unravel the mysteries, she had found someone else inside her who was worthy of being freed.

  Josh gave her the smallest and briefest smile in return. ‘Thanks for telling me. You haven’t been a bitch. But no matter what’s happened, I’m not interested in a one-night stand.’

  Are you still interested in anything else? D’Arcy wondered. But there was more she had to confess before she could address what he’d said. ‘I sent an email to Dan Hallworth, inviting him to the exhibition too. I told him that Jessica May was still alive, and that she would be there.’ Josh was back to frowning. It wasn’t a good sign but D’Arcy kept going anyway. ‘Just like I need to talk to my mother, Jess needs to talk to Dan. I think she thinks she did something he won’t forgive her for but, like she said, forgiving someone is the bravest thing you can do. She needs to forgive herself. And she’ll only do that if she speaks to Dan. You probably think I’m meddling but I feel as if Jess and Dan aren’t finished yet. I’d like them to finally have that promised kiss from the photograph. But if you want to tell her not to come because of it, I’ll understand.’ Her voice finally trailed off.

  ‘That’s very …’ Wrong. Interfering. Presumptuous. She waited for him to condemn her. ‘Romantic,’ he finished.

  A flicker of hope. It gave her the strength to keep going. ‘Everything that’s happened made me think that if the woman I’d believed to be my mother could hurt me so much, I couldn’t imagine what kind of hurts might come from a person – a lover – who wasn’t required by the bond of family to be always there and always kind.’

  She dared to look at his face, which was surprised at best, unreadable at worst. ‘I’d like you to come to Australia, not for Jess, but for … me.’ The last word was a whisper that D’Arcy spoke to the ground, a far cry from her usual directness. ‘I know that’s probably not much of an incentive. And I need to say that it’s a risk for you, coming. I don’t know when I’ll truly be un-lost. Which means I could easily be sad and grumpy and like I’ve been for the past week. You said you wanted a slower life, a more relaxed life. What’s happening in my life right now isn’t exactly relaxing.’

  Josh hesitated, then asked, ‘D’Arcy, how old are you?’

  Which meant he wondered too. Would that make everything far too complicated for him? ‘The right age to be Jess’s granddaughter,’ was all she said.

  She felt his finger touch her under the chin and lift up her face so he could see her properly. ‘Go back to Australia tomorrow like you’d planned to. Talk to your mother. And …’

  And it was nice knowing you. She closed her eyes against the sound of his next words.

  ‘And perhaps I’ll see you next month,’ he finished.

  Perhaps. Which meant it might not all work out. But then again it might.

  The things we do for might and for hope, Jess had said. D’Arcy had just been truly honest about the things that mattered for the very first time and, in return, she’d received a shard of hope. It was worth the discomfort and trepidation it had cost.

  PART ELEVEN

  Dan

  Thirty-one

  NEW YORK, 1946

  The hallways of a newspaper office were always busy and noisy but Dan didn’t hear any of it. The clack-clack-clack of typewriters; the shrill peal of telephones; the shouts as somebody received a tip-off and jammed their hat on their head and their notebook and pencil in their pocket before charging out into the streets, a newshound on the trail of a story; it was all muted compared to the battlefield. Here, the sounds were steady, unpunctuated by mortar explosions or screams or white phosphorus. Nobody dropped down dead beside him or lost their legs or spilled their intestines onto the ground. Everyone was alive and unhurt at the end of each day.

  Dan kept the radio in his office turned up so loudly that everyone who came in to see him complained about it. But he couldn’t tell them why he was afraid of silence. Jess would know. He could tell her. Except he hadn’t a damn clue where she was.

  He’d been to see her editor at Vogue, who was equally mystified. ‘I haven’t seen her for months,’ Belinda had said. ‘Do you want to offer her a job? I’m afraid you’ll have to duel it out with me. I’m still hoping she’ll return to adorning my pages with her face and her smile.’

  Dan flinched, knowing how Jess would feel about being asked to model again after everything she’d done over in Europe.

  ‘She was looking for something more serious,’ Belinda continued. ‘The kind of job I imagine a newspaper like yours would be able to provide.’

  He knew Bel was fishing, wanting to know why he’d come looking for Jess but he had no intention of telling her. ‘Can I leave my card? Please ask her to call me if you speak to her.’ His card. Like Jess was a business acquaintance. God, it almost destroyed him handing over that piece of paper to Bel. At least he knew she’d been in New York, which was something.

  He’d also tried to speak to Martha, but she was doing a very good job of avoiding him. Too good. She knew something, and she obviously had no intention of telling him.

  So he’d heard nothing more. It was, he supposed, unsurprising, but also as painful as having gas in your lungs, a kind of searing agony that left invisible scars, scars that burned in the middle of the night, that ached in the cold, that stung every time he had to leave the office and return to his home.

  ‘Mr Hallworth?’ His secretary, Constance, a sensible woman whose instincts he’d grown to trust over the past few months, opened the door after a quick tap.

  He turned from his usual place by the window, staring out at skyscraper spires, bayonets of steel tearing into the sky. ‘Yes,’ he said, pulling his mind back into the present, to his role as Editor in Chief of one of New
York’s biggest daily newspapers, a role his father had gladly handed to him the moment Dan stepped back onto American soil.

  ‘This came in over the wire,’ Constance said. ‘Addressed to you. I don’t recognise the sender’s name. Have we put on a new stringer to cover Nuremberg? Apparently there are pictures too.’

  Dan held out his hand, frowning. ‘As far as I know, Gareth Hogan’s still our stringer. But he doesn’t send pictures.’ He glanced at the sheet of paper in front of him, expecting it was a mistake, that the cable operator had entered the wrong number and he was about to read a dispatch meant for the New York Post or the New York Times. But the page clearly stated both his name and the name of his newspaper. His frown deepened as he read the piece.

  ‘This is good,’ he said at last. ‘Gareth is always too concerned with everyone’s name, rank and serial number to get to what the story is all about. Who did you say it’s from?’

  Constance consulted her notepad. ‘An I. Durant. Do you know him?’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  Dan re-read the page in front of him. Monsieur I. Durant was well informed and had thought to speak to the spectators, the people who filed into the courts at Nuremberg to watch the trials, had thought to ask them why they were there, for whom they mourned, and whether any kind of retribution would be enough. There was even a direct quote from one of the Nazis on trial. He was a lesser personage than Goering or Hess for sure, but still. A quote from one of those to be tried was gold.

  ‘Can you get Gareth on the line?’ he said to Constance. ‘I need to find out what’s going on.’

  ‘Sure.’ Constance disappeared and, by some miracle, it only took her half an hour to locate their stringer.

  She put him through and Dan didn’t waste words. ‘Why am I getting high quality stories from a Monsieur I. Durant, with quotes from former Nazi officials, when I haven’t seen anything from you all day?’