The last word was desolate and this time she came into his arms gladly. He wrapped them around her and felt her cling to his back.
‘Once.’ His voice was a kind of animal moan. ‘I slept with Amelia once. I didn’t think I would ever see you again. Victorine was unhappy and I wanted her, more than anything, to know what it was like to have a loving family. So I thought I’d try …’ He couldn’t speak for a moment but made himself go on. He’d hurt Jess yet again so the least he could do was be man enough to confess. ‘It was awful. How could anything have come of it?’
He felt her hold him more tightly, felt her forgiveness for him open up around him as she spoke into his chest. ‘But it did.’
‘It doesn’t change anything,’ he insisted. But he knew it did. How could he give another child the instability of beginning its life without a family, like Victorine had had to endure? Amelia would never let him have their child if they divorced.
‘But this will.’ He felt the effort it took for her to pull away, for her to speak while the tears were still wet on her cheeks.
‘You haven’t ever told Victorine about her parents, have you?’ she asked.
Dan shook his head emphatically. ‘I don’t plan to tell her. Perhaps when she’s grown up. But the last thing she needs right now is to know that she isn’t even related to me. That she’s the offspring of two French people whose names nobody knows.’
‘I thought Amelia knew about Victorine. She’s your wife so I just assumed …’
Dan reached out and stroked Jess’s face. ‘I have had possibly a dozen conversations with Amelia. I’m married to her yes, but she’s not really my wife. She knows that. She knows we don’t have anything.’
Jess drew in a sharp breath. ‘I think she would disagree with you. You see, I was watching Victorine skip away to have her bath and she looked so clean and grown up and different to the girl in Italy and in France that it just came out. I said, I wonder if her parents would recognise her if they were ever able to trace her? Amelia said that was obviously impossible because they were dead. And I said, unthinkingly, that I meant her real parents, not your brother and his wife. Her birth parents.’
Dan’s stomach twisted brutally. ‘She said she’d tell Victorine, didn’t she?’
Jess nodded. ‘Only if you divorce her.’
He felt the locks snap shut. Amelia was carrying his child. Amelia would ruin Victorine if she told her that Dan wasn’t even her uncle, let alone her father.
‘Goddammit!’ He swore loudly and pressed his fingers against his temples.
Rather than talking about it more, rather than trying to help him work out a way to stop Amelia – as if she’d already given up – Jess stepped back and fumbled in her purse. ‘I have a favour to ask you.’ She passed him a folded sheaf of typewritten papers.
He read over her words about all the things she’d wanted to write about in Europe but that Warren Stone would have obliterated with blue censors’ ink. She’d even spoken to women in East Germany, some of the estimated three hundred thousand, she said, raped by packs of Russian soldiers, most women by more than one man.
It was the best thing she’d ever written. Despite the fact that she wasn’t just singling out the US Army, she’d be hated for writing it. He didn’t want anyone to hate her. He couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t publish it. He shook his head.
She gave a little shrug as if she’d expected him to refuse. Then she reached up and kissed him gently, far too gently, on the lips. It was the lightest of touches, brushing against him the same way his thumb had swept over her back the night they’d danced at the chateau, but its effect was such that it almost brought him to his knees.
When she drew away, she gave him the smile he remembered as being particularly and especially Jessica May’s. ‘One day, when your heart is mended, and you think of me, raise a glass for me, won’t you?’ she said. ‘We’re worth remembering.’
He stepped forward then, both hands on her tear-soaked cheeks, and his lips met hers far from gently. He felt her whole body sigh into him as she opened her mouth and kissed him the way she’d always done. As if she trusted him. As if she loved him. As if she was him. ‘This is not the end,’ he whispered against her lips.
She gave him a sad smile that seemed to say, Yes it is. Then she said, ‘Congratulations. You deserved to win,’ before she disappeared.
He had no idea for how long he stood outside after Jess had gone. His father eventually found him and dragged him inside. The awards had been announced. His secretary was on the telephone at the club right now taking down the names of the winners of each category. And he vaguely heard, through the clamour in his head, his father say, ‘The right man won,’ as Dan’s name was read out from the list. But not Monsieur Durant’s.
Dan’s eyes focused then, taking in his father before him, taking in that especial emphasis on the word man. And Jess’s words. Congratulations. You deserved to win. Not you deserve to win as if it was something still in the future that hadn’t yet been decided. But as if it had already happened, or as if she knew the outcome.
‘You found out she was a woman,’ he said to his father, his voice barely controlled, aware that all eyes were on him, wondering why he wasn’t smiling.
‘Your wife pointed out that Durant was not who he seemed. It’s preposterous, posing as a man,’ Walter sniffed. ‘I informed some people of the deception.’
‘She didn’t pose. We all just assumed, because that’s what we do. Assume that anyone who does anything that makes a difference is a man.’
‘Pulitzers only go to men.’
Dan looked at the papers in his hand, Jess’s story, the one he’d thought he wouldn’t publish for her sake, but now he knew what he would do. He heard his name called again; he had to say something even though all he wanted to do was howl, loud enough that the windows might shatter, a loud and brutal noise that probably wouldn’t make him feel any better.
Instead he pulled himself together, drew in a breath and, as the club quieted, began to speak. ‘Thank you. But I’m not accepting the prize money in my own name.’
Dan felt his father’s glare on him as he continued. ‘I’m giving it to the people I’ve been writing about. I’m starting two endowment funds, one for the wounded and the damaged, for those who aren’t the same anymore. It will be called the Sparrow fund, in honour of Mr and Mrs Sparrow and their son. The money will be used for the men you’ll see on the streets tonight and who you might cross the road to avoid, and for the families of the men you won’t see because they are no longer with us. The second fund is for the women who fought in their own way, as bravely as any man, and who now make chicken dinners. It will be called the Jessica May Foundation, in honour of a woman I met in Europe who was lion-hearted.’ He paused for a long moment, almost undone by his own words. But he owed it to Jess to keep going.
‘Jess wrote those stories, the ones you all admired,’ he continued at last. ‘She is Monsieur I. Durant. She should be writing for any of us, under her own name. So this fund is for women artists and writers and photographers and its purpose is to enable them to do the work that we all do unthinkingly, that we’ve never had to fight or struggle to be allowed to do.’
As he spoke, he heard the whispers. Of course most people suspected that he and Jess had done more than share a jeep in Europe. Journalists were the worst gossips and he was standing in a room full of them, naming a foundation after her.
But he didn’t care. He had plenty of money and it was about time he did some good with it. About time he honoured Jess the way she should be honoured.
As he spoke, he caught a glimpse of blue silk swirling like a furious ocean right down the back of the club, almost hidden from view. Shoulders emerging from the blue, shoulders he’d kissed and caressed and held and loved. Jess’s face. She smiled at him, raised her glass and mouthed the words, I love you – three words she’d never said to him before, three words he’d only said to her once – before disappearing.
&
nbsp; He left the club as soon as he could and was unsurprised to find Amelia waiting for him in his study at home.
‘I hear congratulations are in order,’ he said stiffly.
Amelia stroked her stomach, expertly robed and decorated, the facade of the poor maimed wife still holding. ‘I hoped you’d be glad.’
He laughed mirthlessly and his hand stretched out for the whiskey decanter but he caught himself just in time and lit a cigarette instead. ‘Glad about your threat to tell Victorine about her parents or glad about the fact that I’ve realised my wife is such an expert in blackmail she should probably be a politician?’
‘The world is different now, Dan. You shot men in order to survive. At least my bullets aren’t deadly.’
Oh, but they are, he wanted to say. Except that would make him vulnerable, would show Amelia that his heart was so raw right now it was a wonder it was still keeping him alive.
‘So there won’t be a divorce?’ she asked and in her voice he heard the slightest quiver, as if she wasn’t sure, as if she was worried that, despite everything he’d done for Victorine, he would do no more.
‘There won’t be,’ he said shortly, looking out the window, blowing smoke in a long, thin stream, knowing he couldn’t blame Amelia for falling pregnant – he was certainly as much to blame for that as she was – but he could blame her for dragging Victorine into the whole damn mess and for making sure Jess didn’t get anything she deserved.
He waited until he heard her leave. Then he sat down and poured himself a large whiskey. He remembered that last terrible question Jess had asked of him outside the club: One day, when your heart is mended, and you think of me, raise a glass for me, won’t you? We’re worth remembering.
And his reply: This is not the end.
‘It’s not,’ he repeated now, stubbornly. How could it be? How could what they had ever be finished, ever be over. It was a denouement, that was all. And he would wait all the rest of his life for the resolution.
PART TWELVE
Victorine
Thirty-four
The minute the artworks were handed over to the gallery, D’Arcy went straight to Victorine’s apartment. And as soon as she saw her mother, eyes the same sad, luminous blue they’d always been, face fearful, D’Arcy sank onto the sofa and swept Victorine into her arms. There was no question about whether Victorine was her mother; in every way that was important, she absolutely was, no matter if they shared no blood tie.
‘Will you tell me?’ D’Arcy asked when she thought she could speak.
‘I think I’m overdue to tell you.’ Victorine kissed D’Arcy’s cheek, folded her hands in her lap, hesitated, and then began to speak.
In October 1973, Victorine stepped off the train at the station in Reims and ran like a three-year-old – even though she was more than thirty years old – to Dan, flinging herself into his arms. They embraced for a long, long moment. When at last they drew away, Victorine openly wiping her eyes, Dan surreptitiously doing the same, Victorine laughed.
‘Needless to say, I missed you,’ she said.
‘And I missed you.’ He kissed her forehead. ‘I’m glad you could get away.’
They’d been planning this for a year so that everyone’s busy schedules could align – Victorine was publishing director of a French magazine conglomerate and James, Dan’s son, was working at World Media learning the business from Dan – and now at last they were to spend two weeks travelling around France. Dan had insisted on them all getting together; family should know one another, he said, and they didn’t, not anymore. Victorine, knowing that Dan would declare all of Normandy off-limits because of wartime memories and wanting to begin the holiday not too far from Paris to minimise travel after his plane journey, had suggested they begin in the Champagne region. After what she’d thought was a momentary hesitation in Dan, he’d agreed that it might be nice to look at champagne caves and castles and forests and gardens.
‘Here’s James. You probably don’t recognise him.’ Dan gestured to the man beside him, blond and therefore unlike his father.
‘James!’ Victorine exclaimed. ‘It can’t possibly be.’
‘I promise it is,’ he said teasingly, just like the child he’d always been, able to find the funny side in any situation.
The two of them had always played together as young siblings, but had not known each other as adults. Victorine had insisted to Dan that she be sent to boarding school in France when she was ten years old – James had been four at the time – in order to maintain her French identity; she missed the country of her birth, she’d said. She’d really wanted to escape Amelia, although she hadn’t put it like that and she knew Dan understood.
After she’d finished at school, Victorine began working in France, refusing Dan’s offer of a place in the business in New York because she felt that it wasn’t rightfully hers, although she hadn’t said that to Dan; he’d told her about her true parentage when she was eighteen and while she still loved him as much as ever, she’d wanted to make her own way in the world and had done so. He visited her every year, including one trip to accompany her on an exhaustive and fruitless search to try to find out anything she could about her parents, but there had been so many lost children and lost families in the exodus from Paris, so many records destroyed in the war, that the mystery of Victorine’s parentage would remain forever unsolved.
It suited her, a life consumed by work; she’d always been a grave and earnest person, never a true child, as her teachers used to say. Some people, she knew, mistook that seriousness for humourlessness, thought she was dour, but it was just that there was an impossible-to-shift weight pressing on her, one she’d borne ever since she could remember having feelings, one that seemed to push down all the more if she had moments of unoccupied time.
‘How’s your mother?’ she asked James now, politely.
James looked across at Dan and quirked up an eyebrow.
Dan picked up Victorine’s suitcase. ‘Let’s find our hotel and then we can sit down and talk about that over a drink,’ he said.
Victorine couldn’t help rolling her eyes at the thought of what Amelia might have done now and she thanked God for possibly the thousandth time that her father had finally divorced his wife when James turned sixteen and could look after himself. She followed them to the car and, once they’d driven to the hotel, checked in, unpacked and washed off the journey, they all sat on the terrace and watched the sun take a long and leisurely time to set, while drinking Kir Royales.
‘You were right,’ Victorine said to Dan as she sipped her drink. ‘We should have done this years earlier.’
‘Do you think we’ll manage to drag ourselves away from here and do any sightseeing?’ James asked, glancing up at the majestic autumn sky, tinged pink and gold, at the waiter approaching with fresh Kir Royales, at the ancient but lovely hotel in which they were staying.
‘Yes,’ Victorine said determinedly. Even on holiday, it was best to keep busy.
‘It’s not worth arguing with her,’ Dan said lazily. ‘I’ve lost every fight I’ve ever had with her from the time she could talk. As evidenced by her spending the first years of her life on a battlefield and now having lived in France for longer than she’s lived in America.’
Victorine placed an affectionate hand on Dan’s arm. He hardly ever mentioned the war, or her early years, of which she held memories like fog: opaque but leaden. ‘You know why I did it though,’ she said. ‘And I don’t love you any the less for mostly not having been in the same country as you.’
‘I know. But I do miss you.’ He sipped his drink. ‘You asked about Amelia before. There’s something I probably should have told you a while ago, but …’ He sighed. ‘I guess I’ve become tired of explaining Amelia. Do you want to tell her,’ he asked James, ‘or will I?’
‘Let me do it,’ James said.
Victorine steeled herself. If it involved Amelia, it wouldn’t be good.
James began to speak. ‘The day Dad told
Amelia he was moving out, on my sixteenth birthday, Amelia shared something with me. She said Dad wasn’t my father; she’d had an affair not long after they were married to make herself feel better about her injuries.’
Dan grimaced and Victorine knew it was because he didn’t believe Amelia’s motivation for one minute; if she’d had an affair, it was for selfish pleasure not to soothe her soul.
James continued. ‘I was born early, which Dad had always jokingly said was because I’ve been in a hurry about everything all my life, but it was actually because the date she’d given him wasn’t the right one. Then when Dad told her he was done with her, that I was old enough to be my own person and not be affected by her character, she thought I should be told the truth. I’m sure she told me because she thought I’d hate Dad if he wasn’t my father. But it just made me dislike her all the more.’
Victorine stared at Dan. How a wonderful man like him had ever let himself get mixed up with Amelia … The fog of memory lifted a little and she remembered a woman, Jess, telling her that Dan had to marry somebody else. Some things hidden in the back of a cupboard in a box labelled ‘War’. A span of time when there was only noise and bandaged men who kissed her cheek and called her Vicki. A woman sobbing beside a tree at night. The weight pressed down like a headache, making her feel both sad and afraid.
She shook her head and the memories retreated and her fists clenched with the effort of keeping them back where they belonged, in the past. ‘That’s terrible. How must you have felt?’ she said to Dan.
Dan shrugged. ‘James has been my son in every way that’s ever mattered. And when James told me he wanted to live with me after the separation, rather than staying with Amelia, I knew that we were as much father and son as any two people connected by blood. It’s too exhausting to loathe Amelia. She doesn’t deserve for me to expend so much emotion on her, not when there are others …’ He stopped.
The French Photographer Page 36