The French Photographer

by Natasha Lester

  Dan listened without sympathy to his stringer’s tale of a broken leg from a drunken jeep accident which would put him out of action for at least a month. ‘I survived an entire war without a drunken jeep accident,’ he said curtly to Gareth. ‘Someone who can’t survive a couple of months in a hotel room covering a trial isn’t someone I need on my service. You can make it up to me by finding out who Monsieur Durant is and I’ll give you a reference that’ll get you another job.’

  After he’d hung up the phone, Constance knocked again. ‘The pictures just came in on the wire,’ she said. ‘You’ll want to take a look.’

  She was right. The pictures hadn’t been taken by a hack; they were the work of an artist. An artist who hadn’t wanted to send film, but prints. The photographer had caught American Judge Francis Biddle with his head turned towards the man before him, one Otto Ohlendorf, who was admitting to having presided over the murder of ninety thousand Jewish people. But the judge’s eyes were not fixed on the man. Instead they were turned unknowingly towards the camera and they shone with staunched tears as Ohlendorf spoke dispassionately about his concern for the welfare of those who’d had to administer the killings. Where is your concern for all those who died? the image seemed to say, through the suddenly unshielded face of the judge.

  The next photograph was of Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier; a member of the French Resistance, she had somehow survived both Auschwitz and Ravensbrück and was the first survivor to tell her story to the court. This time, the photographer had caught the judge with the same damp eyes but they were fixed on the woman before him, honouring her by refusing to look away no matter how affecting her words were.

  Dan let out a breath. ‘Let’s get everybody into the conference room to finalise the news budget. This is going front page tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s some Pulitzer-grade reporting you’ve got on your front cover this morning,’ Walter Hallworth said to his son as they drank their coffee and ate their eggs with all of the city’s morning newspapers spread out before them.

  There had been no time for Dan to look for a home of his own; he’d returned from the war one day and started work at the newspaper the next so the old family home on the Upper East Side was where he now resided. The arrangement perfectly suited his father; Walter Hallworth might have retired but he still liked to know what was happening in the world of journalism and he still liked to have breakfast with his son, no matter that Dan was out the door by six, ready for the day ahead.

  ‘Where’d you find your stringer?’ his father asked now.

  ‘He found me,’ Dan said, and proceeded to tell his father as much as he was able to. Gareth had been next to useless, unable to find out anything, except that someone had told him that Monsieur Durant was American, but maybe had a French father, had reported sporadically throughout the war, and lived in France.

  The bio note that had come with the images said much the same thing. Short of going to Nuremberg, Dan was at a loss, so he’d sent a message to the hotel Durant was staying in, arranging to pay him and to make him their official correspondent. No more drunken stringers stuffing things up.

  ‘Gareth was a good man,’ Walter protested mildly. ‘Always up for a whiskey.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Dan said. ‘He’s a dinosaur. Does everything drunk and hopes we’ll be too busy with national news to read his sloppy reports properly.’ He stood up, putting his napkin down on the table, stopping at the running sound of tiny feet.

  ‘Papa!’ Victorine called.

  Dan kissed her cheeks, soft and warm from her bed. No matter how early he left in the morning, Victorine had a sixth sense about it and would always wake up to kiss him and hug him before he was gone.

  ‘Come here, princess,’ Walter ordered.

  Victorine walked dutifully over and placed a delicate kiss on each of her grandfather’s cheeks, still reserved, Dan noted, even after all this time. Not that she saved her reserve for Walter; she regarded everyone with a graveness and reticence that was completely out of place on someone not quite six years old, never relaxing into friendliness the way she’d done with Jess.

  Jess. Dan winced as he did every time he so much as caught himself about to think of her.

  ‘Did you swallow an elephant, Papa?’ Victorine asked mischievously, having noticed his grimace.

  ‘Something like that.’ He grinned at her.

  ‘Can I come with you today?’ Victorine wheedled.

  ‘You’ll be bored,’ Dan said automatically, then relented as he always did. ‘But you can come and have lunch with me.’

  Victorine clapped her tiny hands and then sat herself at the table to start her breakfast with her grandfather, who would always try to clear the newspapers away, deeming them unfit for children. Nobody ever said that everything Victorine had seen up to that point in her life had been unfit for children.

  That night, when Dan returned home, he stopped in at Victorine’s bedroom. As always, she lay awake waiting for him and he tried to remind himself to be home by nine so she would get more sleep, except that he had strong reasons for staying out late. The light in the hallway wasn’t on, as it should be, and he reached around for the switch, snapping it on, and crossing to Victorine’s side when he saw her face. It bore the red and unmistakable mark of a hand slapped on it.

  ‘What happened?’ he said, lifting her out of the bed and tucking her into his lap, burying her head against his shoulder, stroking her hair.

  ‘I was naughty,’ Victorine sniffed.

  He didn’t ask her anything else. ‘Never say that you’re naughty,’ he whispered, kissing her forehead and holding her tightly to him until her limbs relaxed and her breath evened out into sleep. He tucked her back into bed and then made himself walk to the room at the other end of the hallway. He opened the door.

  From where he stood, it was impossible to tell that anything was awry. Lamps, carefully chosen for the quality of their shades and the low, soft light that pooled at the stand without casting more than a faint glow into the room, made it seem as if she were simply a wife, and a beautiful one at that, waiting for her husband. Her face was assiduously painted with powder and colour and all manner of creams and lotions, the dress selected to draw attention to her legs and her cleavage. It was only when she turned to his voice, asking, ‘What did you do?’ that she revealed a tumescent ridge of scar tissue, crawling like a worm over her face, and the sleeve from which nothing hung.

  ‘What did I do?’ Amelia replied. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘To Victorine.’

  Amelia’s face changed, becoming suddenly as unlovely as the scar. ‘She’s a brat. She hates me. All she does is talk about Jess. Her maman.’ She spat the word at Dan as if it were the filthiest thing she could say.

  ‘She needs time.’ Dan gave a compressed smile because what was at stake was Victorine and he would do whatever he had to do for her. ‘It’s strange for her, what’s happened. It’s strange for me too. As it must be for you.’

  ‘What is strange about getting married?’ Amelia enquired. ‘I believe it’s something that men and women all over the world do. It’s actually rather ordinary.’

  Dan sat in a chair opposite his wife, his body sinking into the plushness. Everything in the room was soft and sumptuous and so very English: brocades and swags and dark wood and velvets and shades of pink and red that Amelia insisted he must call rose. He pressed down the nausea that clogged his throat every time he stepped foot into her bedroom and reminded himself that rose was simply a colour and had nothing whatsoever to do with blood.

  He shifted, trying to get comfortable, and eventually stood and sat on the edge of her bed, which was still cushiony and lush but at least it didn’t envelop him, draw him down the way the chair did with its upholstered arms and back.

  ‘You know that nothing about this is ordinary,’ he said quietly, trying not to provoke a fight.

  ‘It could be if you made a little more effort. Or are you so repulsed by me?’

 
‘Don’t,’ he said sharply. ‘I am not repulsed by your face or your arm.’

  ‘But you are repulsed by what I did to get myself here.’ Amelia filled in the subtext he wouldn’t say. ‘Don’t you think it’s time to forgive me for that and make the most of the situation we’ve landed ourselves in? Surely it’s better for Victorine if we get along.’

  Dan used all his strength to keep his face neutral. How could he ever forgive her for what she’d done? He studied her, her dark brown hair almost the same colour as his, shiny and clean and perfectly styled. Her blue eyes, large and soft and pleading, eyes that she was so good at having her maid enhance with her dressing table of tools. Eyes that she was so good at turning on people, who would be immediately charmed by her limpid and innocent gaze and her pitiful scars and her heartbreakingly missing arm. Her dress, he was sure, had cost him a fortune and it certainly flattered her figure. He wished he could see all the effort, all the polish, as a simple attempt to make the most of the features that were still undamaged, to assuage the pain of remembering what she’d once looked like. But all of it felt calculated, strategic moves to advance her position, or perhaps everything he saw about her was sabotaged by what she’d done to get here.

  So yes, she was right. He hadn’t forgiven her. And he realised now that his lack of forgiveness was there in everything he did and said, the tone of his voice, the rigid stance of his body whenever Amelia appeared in the room, the way he tried never to really look at her as if that might make her disappear. How must it feel to live like that? How must it make Victorine feel to witness his barely masked loathing? And what kind of man did it make him that he couldn’t find even a grain of compassion in him for a woman he’d damaged?

  He couldn’t stop the sigh escaping and Amelia’s face twisted. Even though he knew that, given her temper, he shouldn’t ask this now, he did. ‘What happened with Victorine?’

  Amelia stared at him for a long moment and he waited, braced, for the lie. For the accusations that would be levelled at Victorine about her naughtiness, her wilfulness. For the demand that she be sent to boarding school in Europe. Instead, Amelia’s face rearranged itself and, for the briefest instant, Dan thought he saw a trace of honest emotion, a sadness in her eyes.

  ‘What happened is that Victorine would like me to be Jess,’ Amelia said flatly. ‘And I’m not. I can never be. So I became angry and I hit her. It was not, obviously, my finest moment.’ She turned away to pick up her diamond-adorned, gold cigarette case.

  Her candidness made his words come out honestly too. ‘I’m sorry. Which is useless, but I am.’

  ‘I know you are. And I know that if saying sorry a million times would fix my face and my arm, you would do it.’ She paused and they sat, he perched on the edge of the bed, legs braced for escape, and she in the armchair by the fireplace, her cherry-coloured dress blending into the rose fabric of the chair as if she belonged there.

  She lit her cigarette, breathed in the smoke, tapped the ash into the tray. He watched her, still waiting for the conversation to escalate into the inevitable argument.

  ‘What will we do?’ she asked instead.

  ‘What will we do?’ he repeated, surprised. It was the first time she’d asked for his opinion. Until now, she’d pushed and demanded and he’d resisted and ignored and he winced to think of all the quarrels, loud and hostile, all the accusations, all the shame, all the sorrow. ‘What would you like to do?’ he asked.

  ‘I’d like for Victorine and I to get along. Every day that we don’t, you hate me a little more.’

  He began to protest, to say that he didn’t hate her but she put up her hand. ‘All right, you’re not capable of hatred. You’re too fine a man for that.’ Her voice was wry. ‘But you hate this situation a little more. Am I right?’

  He nodded.

  ‘So, I’m going to retreat,’ she said. ‘I won’t expect you to take me to parties and hold my hand and wrap your arm around me. I won’t take dinner with you. I’ll stop insisting that we find somewhere to live that’s far away from your father. I’ll leave you alone. I will try not to hate myself because you can’t bear to touch me …’ Her voice faltered and she ground out her cigarette.

  He imagined her sitting in this room every night while he worked late or went out without her and he realised she was wrong; he was capable of hatred and he hated himself right now. ‘The most important thing is that Victorine be happy,’ he reiterated. ‘Her life, up till now, has been a shambles. She’s had nothing that could be called stability or consistency and she’s seen things that children shouldn’t know anything about.’

  ‘And you’ll do anything for her, won’t you?’ Amelia spoke to her hands folded in her lap and he knew she understood perfectly well that yes, he would do anything for Victorine, but he would certainly not do anything for his wife.

  ‘I will,’ he said.

  ‘Well then.’ She looked up and met his gaze and he realised she’d flung the incendiary right back at him. It was up to him, what happened now. He’d been blaming everything on her and sure, some of it was her fault but he was an adult and he’d made a decision and he had to accept the consequences of that decision. Right now, the consequences were hurting Victorine.

  And Jess had vanished. It seemed she had no intention, ever, of coming back. So should he blow up everything, continue arguing with and shrinking from Amelia, keep exposing Victorine to a household empty of love, keep loathing himself for what he’d done to Amelia and what he’d done to himself? Or should he do what he could to defuse the grenade before the precious remnants of Victorine’s childhood shattered forever?

  Thirty-two

  Later, as he left Amelia’s room, head pounding, wanting to lie down in the dark and – yes, he could admit it – cry, he knew that in trying to fix it, something had shattered after all. His soul.

  ‘Damn you, Jess,’ he muttered for the millionth time since Germany. One day, this will fade. You once told me that everything does. Why should this be any different? But he’d been wrong. Like the coal seam fires burning beneath the earth’s surface for thousands of years, flameless, persistent, the slow burn making them almost impossible to extinguish, what he felt for Jess would never fade.

  He would have to pretend, for Victorine’s sake, that he was happy. But he didn’t know if he could ever do again what he’d just done with Amelia.

  ‘Papa!’ The cry made him swivel and turn into Victorine’s room. Her face was wet with tears and he held her and shushed her until she stopped sobbing.

  ‘Did you have a dream?’ he asked.

  And, not for the first time, she nodded and said, ‘The man was there again.’

  ‘What man? What did he do?’

  But Victorine just shook her head as she always did, unable to articulate anything more about the man and why he had frightened her so. He slid her back down onto her pillow and straightened her sheets, frowning at a noise like rustled paper.

  ‘What do you have in there?’ He expected to see one of her many war souvenirs, the ribbons and peg dolls and scraps of khaki that she’d collected from nurses and soldiers alike but what he found were sheets of newspaper. He couldn’t help smiling at her peculiar and endearing ways and he lay down on the bed beside her, wanting to keep her safe from dreams. He fell asleep himself, only to be plagued by dreams of his own, dreams about Jess.

  Dan was at the breakfast table early as usual, having slunk out without waking Victorine, or so he’d thought until she appeared not ten minutes later, clutching the newspaper he’d found in her bed last night, the newspaper with the pictures from his new correspondent on the front cover.

  Victorine’s eyes were round and serious as she turned them on Dan. ‘You saw Maman,’ she said inexplicably.

  Walter eyed Dan over his eggs.

  Dan ignored his father and spoke to Victorine. ‘I haven’t seen Jess,’ he said, picking up his hat even though he hadn’t eaten anything.

  ‘But she took these.’ Victorine pointed to the
photographs in the newspaper.

  ‘A man called Monsieur Durant took them,’ Dan said.

  Victorine frowned at Dan as if she was disappointed in him. ‘I’m not hungry,’ she announced, slipping out of the room.

  ‘She sure is a funny kid,’ Walter said, studying Dan, who set his face into the most inscrutable expression he could muster. ‘But do you know what I think?’

  Dan didn’t respond, which didn’t prevent Walter from continuing. ‘That whoever this Jess is, it’d be best if Victorine stopped mentioning her. A child can only have one mother.’ Walter wiped his mouth on his napkin and threw it onto the table.

  I’d have to cut out her heart to stop her from talking about Jess, Dan wanted to shout. Instead he turned on his heel and strode out the door.

  That afternoon, another story came in. And more pictures.

  As Dan studied them, he could see, now that Victorine had lifted the blindfold, that the pictures were taken either by Jess or a very skilled copycat. One was solarised perfectly, a technique that so few photojournalists would bother with, but which had always been one of Jess’s trademarks. He read over the article and now he knew why yesterday’s had punched him so hard in the gut: her phrasing was everywhere, the whisper of her voice in his ear as he read.

  And so it went on, every day. Each time he went out for a quick drink at the bar down the road where newspapermen congregated, he was asked about his new correspondent. Everyone assumed the mysterious stringer was a man. Nobody suspected it was Jess.

  Someone I met in the army, Dan would answer, and the person he was talking to would groan and slap him on the back and curse Dan’s good fortune: to have survived the war unscathed, and to have unearthed a photojournalist from the rubble of that war who had lifted the bar so high, the rest of them could do nothing but walk underneath it.