The French Photographer

by Natasha Lester

  ‘So you have two children who aren’t really yours,’ Victorine said softly, imagining she and James were the ‘others’ to whom he had referred, and on whom he would prefer to invest his emotions.

  ‘But who I love as if you are,’ Dan finished.

  Both Victorine and James reached out at the same time to hold their father’s hands.

  They all went for a drive the next day. The hotel manager had marked on a map for Victorine the less touristy places, the ones with more character, he’d said, and told her to visit the region’s several beautiful chateaux before they distracted themselves with the champagne caves. The first chateau was, indeed, lovely and then, opposite a sharp bend, just as the hotel manager had said, lay the entrance into the second.

  The long driveway promised nothing, which was why Victorine was so surprised when she saw it. Untamed and unruly gardens that held the bones of something beautiful, tumbling down to a fairytale palace.

  ‘Look!’ Victorine cried, as if everyone’s attention wasn’t already drawn to the chateau. ‘I hope it’s open to the public. Let’s go and see.’

  She turned to the others. All the lines on Dan’s face were discomposed and the colour had fled from his skin. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked at the same time as she felt the butterfly wings of memory flutter at the edge of her mind. The sensation quickly vanished in her concern for Dan.

  ‘Did you come here during the war?’ she asked, knowing that Dan loathed to visit war museums and the like. ‘You were posted near Reims at one point, weren’t you?’ she said slowly, wondering if that was why he’d hesitated when she’d first suggested beginning their holiday in this part of France, cursing herself for not having thought more about it.

  ‘No,’ Dan said firmly, cheeks pinking up a little at last. ‘I don’t know this place at all.’

  Victorine threw a puzzled look at James, who shrugged, pulled up near an actual drawbridge and said jokingly, obviously wanting to change the mood in the car, ‘Do you think there are any princesses inside?’

  As he spoke, the door opened. A woman stepped out, a beautiful woman, her hair long and dark, her limbs elegant and lithe beneath a white cotton summer dress, sprigged with embroidered flowers.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she called out in French.

  ‘We were hoping to see inside the chateau. It’s breathtaking,’ Victorine said. ‘Monsieur Clement from Chateau du Lac said we should visit.’

  The woman smiled and even Victorine felt herself gape at how stunning she was.

  ‘Most people miss the turn-off,’ the woman said, ‘but I think Monsieur Clement is sweet on my mother and he often sends people here so he has something to discuss with her whenever we visit his bar for a drink. I don’t mind showing small groups through at all. We can start inside and then I’ll show you the gardens, such as they are.’ She gave a rueful smile. ‘If you come back in a year or two, I promise they’ll be spectacular. It’s a work in progress.’

  ‘The inside sounds like a good place to start,’ James said.

  ‘You’re American. I’m so sorry.’ The woman switched to perfect English, with the hint of an American accent herself. ‘I’m Ellis. But everyone calls me Ellie.’

  ‘That’s an unusual name,’ James said, stepping in beside Ellie.

  ‘It’s my godmother’s middle name. Martha Ellis Gellhorn. You might have heard of her?’

  Victorine took Dan’s arm – she’d felt him stiffen by her side – as James smiled at the idea that they mightn’t have heard of Martha Gellhorn.

  ‘Oh yes, we’ve heard of her,’ James said to Ellie. ‘She’s a wonderful journalist.’

  ‘I used to know Gellhorn,’ Dan said, surprising Victorine – but of course, being in the newspaper business, her father would have met someone like Martha Gellhorn. ‘In fact I knew one of her friends very well. But you wouldn’t have met her. She … she died a long time ago.’

  Victorine heard Dan’s voice catch and his face had paled once more. Ellie said something sympathetic as Victorine leaned in closer to Dan. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ Victorine whispered. ‘We can go back to the hotel if you’re not feeling well.’

  He shook his head but his face was grim. ‘No. I suppose I just hadn’t realised how it might feel to be out in the French countryside after all this time.’

  James and Ellie moved on ahead, talking earnestly together, Ellie pointing out some of the features of the chateau. Victorine hurried forward to hear, bringing Dan with her.

  They wandered through the interior until they reached a stunning room near the back, so grand it must once have been a ballroom. The walls were a soft grey and it appeared that some images painted on the wood of an unearthly forest were being restored. The salon opened out onto a terrace and to gardens that had been tamed a little more than the front. The gardens led down to a canal, which seemed to beckon one to step out onto the lawn and revel in the sun and the scent of flowers and the dappled patches of shade.

  ‘Who takes care of all this?’ Victorine asked in wonderment.

  ‘I’m a botanist,’ Ellie answered. ‘This is my, and my mother’s, challenge. Like a naughty child, if you like. She bought the chateau for a song back in the fifties when nobody wanted a chateau ruined by the war. We’d come down here every summer from Paris and camp on the grounds and have a marvellous time. A few years ago, we decided to try to restore some of its splendour – it’s called Lieu de Rêves, after all – while keeping the wildness that we both loved about it. She’s upstairs, but she’s working, so she asked me to look after you.’

  ‘Can we walk down to the canal?’ James asked.

  ‘Of course.’ Ellie and James set off across the garden but Dan didn’t move.

  ‘I think the jet lag might have got to me,’ he said at last. ‘Perhaps I’ll wait in the car.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Victorine said.

  They waited near the car for a long time, Victorine wandering off a short way every now and again to inspect a flower or to pick strawberries for Dan or to marvel over the peculiar stunted trees that were dotted about or to listen out for James and Ellie, who finally returned.

  On the drive back to the hotel, Victorine watched Dan, who didn’t speak. James was oddly reticent too.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind if I have dinner elsewhere tonight,’ James said, once they reached the cool fans in the hotel lobby. ‘There’s a friend nearby who I’d like to see.’

  ‘Sure,’ Victorine said. ‘It will give me a chance to catch up properly with Dan.’

  The next few days were strange. They would all begin the morning together and then James would vanish for large parts of the day. Dan was as skittish as a kitten and Victorine honestly didn’t feel as if he was enjoying himself. Then, one night when she couldn’t sleep, she sat in the lounge of the hotel drinking espresso and she saw James come in through the doors with an expression of such misery on his face that her impulse to call out his name died on her lips. Instead, she watched him walk blindly across to the elevators, not noticing her at all.

  The following day, they were to leave the area and drive to the Loire. On their way to the highway, James turned off at Lieu de Rêves, muttering something about having perhaps left his hat there. But the house was closed up, and it looked to have been vacated. He hardly spoke on the way to Amboise, where he dropped off Dan and Victorine and then departed early for Paris, and then New York.

  It all became clear nine months later. As Victorine sat in her office in Paris, she received a phone call from Jessica May, a woman she’d never really forgotten, a woman who’d been hiding in her unconscious since the last time she’d seen her, when Victorine was almost six years old.

  ‘Let me explain who I am,’ the woman, Jess, said.

  ‘I know who you are,’ Victorine whispered, feeling it all now – the love and the joy and yes, the terror.

  ‘I know it’s a lot to ask but I need you to come and see me,’ Jess had said.

  And she gave Vic
torine an address: Lieu de Rêves.

  Thirty-five

  Victorine left work and caught the train to Reims as soon as she hung up the phone from Jess. At the station, a woman she would have recognised anywhere waited for her. Nostalgia and the remnants of childhood love made her throw herself into Jess’s arms. As she did so, the past – everything she’d entombed in her mind’s most secret grotto since the morning Dan had appeared at breakfast with bloodshot eyes and whiskey-breath and told her that she would soon have a baby brother or sister and that they should remember Jess inside them but never speak of her again – was finally disinterred.

  ‘It’s so good to see you,’ Victorine said at last, wiping her eyes and studying the older woman’s face.

  ‘I hope you still think that when we get to the house and I tell you why I’ve asked you to come,’ Jess said in reply.

  Which sounded ominous.

  To Jess’s credit, she didn’t put it off. As soon as they reached the fairytale castle, Jess took Victorine straight upstairs to a bedroom and pressed a finger to her lips before opening a door. Both women tiptoed in. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, Victorine made out a cot. Inside the cot was a baby, asleep. Victorine’s hand flew to her mouth.

  They stepped back outside the room and the pieces began to fit together in Victorine’s mind. ‘Ellie is your daughter,’ she said. ‘The baby is Ellie’s.’

  ‘Yes. But of course there’s more, otherwise I wouldn’t have dragged you all the way here,’ Jess said.

  They seated themselves downstairs on the terrace that overlooked the canal. Jess told Victorine that she’d been working upstairs and had seen them all from her balcony when they’d come to the chateau, had watched them step out of the car and had known she couldn’t face them, except through her camera. Because there was the fact of Ellie to explain and that was still, even after almost thirty years, unexplainable.

  ‘That night,’ Jess said, ‘James returned to the chateau and took Ellie out for dinner. The next day, Ellie and I had the worst fight of our lives when I told her she couldn’t see James again. The excuses I used were pathetic. That he was from America and was just having a holiday romance. That he couldn’t possibly be serious. Anything other than tell her the truth.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Victorine said. ‘Even if they did go out a few times, why was that such a big deal?’

  Instead of answering her directly, Jess said, ‘Luckily I’m a poor sleeper. I came downstairs one night to make some tea and I found her with her luggage, on her way to meet James. They’d been seeing one another in secret for days, not telling you or your father because Ellie didn’t want it to get back to me. They were in love. They were going to run away and get married. Ellie cried and said she wanted a proper wedding with me by her side but I’d been so unreasonably opposed to James that she hadn’t told me of her plans. Now that I knew, she wondered if I would relent. Would understand that marry ing James didn’t mean she was leaving me. She thought that was why I was so upset with her, so against the idea of James. She looked so very hopeful.’ Jess’s voice cracked and tears began to drip relentlessly from her eyes, staining her trousers. ‘I had to tell her the truth. Part of it anyway.’

  ‘Which was?’ Victorine was aware that her heart had started to beat faster, as if she knew what the revelation would be somewhere in her subconscious, even though her thinking mind hadn’t yet located the right pictures and arranged them in the proper order.

  ‘That she and James were quite possibly half-brother and sister. That I couldn’t be sure. That there were two possibilities as to whom Ellie’s father was. Dan Hallworth or …’ She stopped speaking.

  The page in Victorine’s head finally turned to the picture she’d forgotten: Jess with her back against a tree. A man holding Jess’s neck so the red flush caused by the pressure of his fingers stained Jess’s skin like blood. The noises the man had made. The look of anguish on Jess’s face. ‘You were raped,’ she whispered.

  Jess closed her eyes. Then she nodded.

  ‘How can you ever tell your own daughter that she might be the outcome of rape?’ Jess stood up and stared at the gardens. ‘Instead I told Ellie that I’d been foolish and had slept with another man at the same time so I had no way of knowing if Dan was her father. Regardless, she couldn’t marry James because of the possibility that they were related. She was furious with me. She left the house that night anyway. But not with James.’

  A long silence filled the room, then Jess finally spoke again. ‘I don’t know where Ellie went; she never told me. Somewhere to try to mend her broken heart. She returned here the day before the baby was born, just last week. She was ill and sad and I don’t think she’d been looking after herself. But that wasn’t the problem. She haemorrhaged in labour. Her placenta wasn’t in the right place, but because she hadn’t had proper pre-natal care nobody knew.’ Jess’s tears were falling freely now, a ceaseless flood.

  ‘Where is Ellie now?’ Victorine asked fearfully.

  ‘She died,’ Jess said, looking upwards into nothing, a Mater Dolorosa asking the world to tell her why this had happened, searching for an explanation for that which was beyond understanding.

  Victorine was unable to speak. Because the explanation she could offer wouldn’t fix anything. Ellie, that beautiful woman, heartbroken by something that had happened back in 1945, would still be dead. How could she tell Jess that none of it needed to happen. Because James wasn’t Dan’s son. Which meant James and Ellie could not possibly be half-brother and sister, even if Ellie was Dan’s daughter.

  Victorine stood up and walked over to the doors. She leaned one hand against the frame, not seeing anything, mind racing with questions. Surely Jess would be relieved to know that Ellie and James weren’t related? Or would that only make her blame herself for having kept the lovers apart needlessly?

  Jess joined Victorine, both women staring down towards the canal, unspeaking. Then Jess reached out to take Victorine’s hand, holding it tightly, painfully so, but Victorine didn’t pull away. Instead she felt her own hand grip Jess’s just as tightly, holding on to one another, to this secret, to loss and the past and the bitter legacy of a long-ago war.

  ‘I had to separate them,’ Jess whispered at last. ‘But in doing so, I killed her.’

  As Jess spoke, Victorine’s eyes fell upon two trees, trees she remembered skipping gleefully around when she was a child, a child who had seen but didn’t yet understand that all around her flourished the merciless. She’d named those trees, she recalled now; had named the one holding aloft its skirt of leaves ‘the child’, had named the one with its interwoven branches ‘the mother’.

  And so that last terrible sentence, and the anguish Victorine heard in Jess’s voice, decided her. She made a choice in that moment, one she would keep to for all the years following, never knowing if it had been the right thing to do, hoping only to prevent more hurt. She could not possibly tell Jess that James and Ellie could have married and raised their child. Because she was sure that Jess, as Ellie’s mother, would not survive the knowledge that the whole awful tragedy – perhaps even Ellie’s death, for if Ellie had been with James, she might have looked after herself properly – had been preventable, if only everyone had known the truth. Instead she would take the child and be its mother and she would remain silent, as Jess would, forever, the distant trees the only ones who knew what had really happened.

  PART THIRTEEN

  D’Arcy

  Thirty-six

  When Victorine finished speaking, D’Arcy was unable to do anything other than stare at her mother for several long minutes. Then she said, ‘Jess asked you to take the baby, didn’t she? I’m the baby.’

  ‘You are.’ Victorine kissed her forehead. ‘I asked Jess if I could have you. I think that’s perhaps what Jess was hoping for when she asked me to visit her in the first place, even if she didn’t know it at the time. She was so grief-stricken over Ellie that she couldn’t think straight, knew only that she
suddenly had a baby to care for, and wasn’t sure she had the strength right then to do it. She was so convinced that, because she’d ruined Ellie’s life, she’d also ruin yours if she kept you. And she couldn’t bear to tell Dan any of it, couldn’t bear to burden him with a baby who might be the grandchild of Warren Stone, the man who’d raped her, the man he would rightly hate. So I told her about what had happened to me at school – that I couldn’t have children – and said I’d take you somewhere far away, where tragedy and the past wouldn’t find us.’

  Victorine paused. Her lips quivered and her eyes misted with tears. It was the first time D’Arcy had ever seen her cry. She waited, knowing her mother would speak again once the pain had diminished to a less brutal degree.

  ‘Jess would never tell Dan about the rape,’ Victorine said at last. ‘Nobody spoke about such things back then. Except in that one article she wrote and was condemned for. And I’d unknowingly blocked out, like a nightmare, the memory of her being raped and all I could think was that if I’d been able to tell Dan about it back when it happened, then the whole relentless future we’d been subjected to could have been changed.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ D’Arcy cried, holding her mother close to her as Victorine’s words were eclipsed by her sobs. ‘None of it is your fault. It’s not anybody’s fault. Except perhaps Warren Stone’s,’ she said grimly.

  Victorine touched D’Arcy’s cheek, which was wet also. ‘I wonder if he even knows how much grief he’s caused. So many men did so many terrible things to so many women during the war and all of those things had consequences nobody ever imagined or even knows of.’ She sighed. ‘Jess and I agreed it would be best if we had only minimal contact thereafter, as if that could assuage our own individual guilts. But every year I sent her photos of you, which she always wrote and thanked me for. And then she called me last week, said she’d been feeling her age and that she’d just wanted to see you. To know you a little. I understand why.’ Victorine paused again, swallowing. ‘Hence her agreeing to the exhibition here in Australia and requesting for you to be the art handler. She hadn’t actually intended for all this to come out though. But I’m glad it has.’