She knew as he finished speaking that the man he’d told her about was someone completely removed from who he was now—other than the consequences had made him an unusual and, she had to admit, rather beguiling man. “Thank you for telling me. I’ll stop behaving like a teenager who’s just discovered sex,” she said apologetically.
He propped himself on his elbow so he could look at her. “You shouldn’t change anything. You’re candid and unafraid and happy to ask for what you want and that’s great. I’m pretty sure I’ve never talked about sex with anyone as much as I’ve talked about it with you in just two days.”
It was a gamble, asking the next question. But, as she’d said to Josh, life generally worked better when spiced with a little risk. “Is that why you’re so abrupt on first encounters? Not wanting to lead anyone on? Not wanting to be who you used to be?”
Josh’s cheeks pinked. “Was I abrupt?” He glanced across at her. “What? You’re staring at me.”
It was her turn to laugh. “I was actually thinking you were rather gorgeous.” He blushed even more and D’Arcy added, “You were probably no more abrupt than I was tired and grumpy.”
“But we still had the best debate about photography that I’ve had in ages.”
“We did,” she said, smiling.
“See?” He returned the smile. “You be you and I’ll be me and, I don’t know, maybe we’ll—”
D’Arcy’s phone rang, startling them both. It was her mother. She frowned.
“Your mom?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He reached over and pressed the call answer button for her. “You should talk to her.” He stood up. “I’m going back to the house. I’ll collect everything when you’re finished.”
Just like that he was gone, leaving her to talk to Victorine.
“Hello, darling. I know you’re working. But I miss you.”
The familiar voice, a French accent altered only slightly by her years in Australia, the words soaked through with love, made D’Arcy’s eyes fill with tears.
“I miss you too,” D’Arcy said. “I wish you were here with me. You’d love it. You really would. It’d be impossible to have bad memories in a place like this. And, for an added bonus, there’s a rather handsome man here too.”
Victorine laughed. “Don’t tell me France’s romantic powers are working on my determinedly single daughter? I don’t believe it!”
D’Arcy laughed too. “I said he was handsome, not that I want to marry him.”
“But you don’t normally tell me about the handsome men you meet overseas until after the fact, once you’re safely home and out of their reach.”
D’Arcy knew her mother was right, but this time she really wanted to talk about Josh. She hesitated, before the words rushed out. “He’s different to anyone I’ve met. He’s…” D’Arcy searched for the right word “…unhurried. Steady. I don’t know; those aren’t attributes I’d ordinarily find appealing. In him, they are. But he lives in France. So I’ll spend a week or so admiring his looks and then come back to Australia and that will be that.”
“Or you could let yourself see what happens if you stop thinking about the reasons you want it to be impossible.” Her mother’s voice was gentle.
Just as she’d told Josh, for her whole life it had only been D’Arcy and her mother; they understood everything the other was thinking and feeling with just a glance. And D’Arcy thought that, right now, her mother was telling her daughter to choose a different life to the one Victorine had chosen, that even though her mother had never seemed interested in taking up anything serious with a man—she dated occasionally and distractedly, she loved her work and her daughter—and she constantly told D’Arcy she was happy, D’Arcy no longer believed her.
D’Arcy knew then that she would take great care with her next words. If Victorine said nothing, D’Arcy would look for more answers without involving her mother. Because it might all be easily explained away, somehow, and she would never do anything to deliberately cause Victorine pain.
“You were so busy before I left that I didn’t get a chance to tell you what I was coming to France for,” D’Arcy said slowly. “The gallery is exhibiting the works of The Photographer. It’s the first time they’ve ever been in Australia and it’s such a coup to get them. I’m doing the art handling so I get to touch them. They’re amazing. It’s the photographer’s chateau I’m staying at, Lieu de Rêves.” D’Arcy lay back and closed her eyes, sun dancing over her face, expecting Victorine to say—which the picture of her mother picnicking before one of the enchanted trees proved—I went there when I was a child.
Complete silence met D’Arcy’s words. At last her mother said, “Sorry, someone just brought in some papers for me to sign. I should go. You’re not there much longer, are you?”
“Home next week.”
“Wonderful. I’ll see you then.”
As she hung up the phone, D’Arcy’s mind circled around her mother’s omission. The silence. The rush to get off the phone. Of course she might actually be busy. Why then had she called?
D’Arcy jumped to her feet and began to pace. What were her options? To ask Victorine. But it was clear Victorine was not going to, willingly, reveal anything about her connection to Jess or the chateau. She could always ask Jess directly, but Jess had cut her off that morning when she’d tried and D’Arcy didn’t think it was accidental. Besides, if Jess knew everything and D’Arcy knew nothing, it put D’Arcy at the disadvantage of simply having to believe what Jess told her. She didn’t know Jess well enough to be able to ascertain if she might omit details or present a biased version of events. If D’Arcy had more information, then she would be better equipped to decide who to ask and what to ask them. Which meant she’d have to find out more from another source. But what source?
A crazy idea started to form, one she hardly knew how to put into practice, but one she felt she had to, nonetheless. She hurried back to the chateau and threw some things into an overnight bag.
She found Josh in his office, talking on the phone, his voice so different to how it had been when he’d told her about his past, now rushed and clipped as if he was under pressure and didn’t like it. She waited for him to finish his call, then indicated her bag. “I need to take the train to Paris.”
He frowned and she hastened to reassure him that she wasn’t doing a runner. “I need to go there just for the night. It means I’ll miss a day of work but I’m confident I can catch up. I’ll work late tomorrow. I won’t miss any deadlines.”
“Why are you going to Paris?” he asked.
“I want to…” She hesitated, aware it would sound strange. “I want to visit the school my mother attended. It’s the one place I’ll be able to find out more about her childhood.”
And rather than remind her that she was in France to work, not to run off on wild goose chases, Josh just nodded and said, “I’ll give you a ride to the station.”
Eighteen
At her favorite hotel in the Marais that night, D’Arcy opened her web browser and typed: Victorine Hallworth and Dan Hallworth.
Everything she expected to find came up. Their jobs, the World Media business, their distinguished reporting and management careers, nothing she didn’t already know and nothing proving that there was any kind of connection beyond the fact that Victorine worked for Dan.
Then she typed in the name Jessica May and again found what she expected to find: information about May’s shift from model to photographer, mentions of her work as a photojournalist in World War II, the iconic images she’d shot, her mysterious disappearance after the war.
It was only as she scrolled down further, to oblique references and articles that had no bearing on the Jessica May she was interested in, that she found one that caught her attention. It was a piece about women in journalism, and it put forward a theory that a writer reporting on the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, and who had been tipped to win a Pulitzer, was actually Jessica May using a male pseudonym. It was
also the year, the article said, that Dan Hallworth won a Pulitzer. The author suggested that May had lost because somebody had found out she was a woman. In its final paragraph, she saw the words: The night of his Pulitzer win, Dan Hallworth established the Jessica May Foundation, designed to encourage women artists to pursue their calling despite the myriad obstacles.
Dan Hallworth had established the Jessica May Foundation? D’Arcy heard her surprised “Oh” echo through the room. She navigated to the Foundation’s website and read through the history of the fellowships. Yes, Dan Hallworth had indeed set up the Foundation in 1946 in honor of a woman I met in Europe who was lion-hearted. That short extract from the speech he gave on the night the Foundation was established made her shiver.
It forged yet another link between Dan Hallworth and Jessica May. But the missing link was still Victorine, D’Arcy’s mother.
She decided to tackle Dan Hallworth’s name alone next, something she’d been delaying out of fear, she knew, of what she might find. His bio details confirmed his war service, which made it seem even more likely that her mother’s boss and the man she was embracing in the famous photograph were one and the same.
The rest of the information was less relevant to her search, being only a long list of his newspaper holdings, estimates of his wealth, a précis of his family background, which included marriage to an Englishwoman named Amelia in 1945, a son from that marriage, and a subsequent divorce. She was about to give up when she found a very old and out-of-print biography of America’s newspapermen reproduced in full, with an entry on Dan Hallworth. She sat up straight and almost knocked over her coffee cup when she read the information it contained about his family background. It was different to everything else that had been published later. Two children, this one said: a daughter Victorine Hallworth, born 1940—her mother’s birth year—and a son, James Hallworth, born 1946. D’Arcy snapped her laptop shut.
Was it possible that D’Arcy had a grandfather she’d never known?
* * *
D’Arcy’s preparations for visiting Victorine’s boarding school were aided somewhat by the cognac she’d drunk in order to forget what she’d read on the internet. Her eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep and her skin was much too pale for an Australian who spent so much time outside. It gave her the appearance of someone who was suffering, which was the effect she’d thought she’d wanted, but now that the suffering was real, she wished she could think of another plan. She stepped gingerly, as if her pain were physical, into the most demure things she owned, a black velvet YSL blazer she’d picked up for a steal at a charity shop in Sydney, and a pair of slim black capri trousers. She assembled her face to look distraught, which wasn’t all that hard, and then she walked through the doors of the Parisian boarding school her mother had once attended.
“May I help you?” the lady at the front desk asked.
D’Arcy fumbled in her handbag for a tissue, which she dabbed to her nose. “Excuse me,” she said in a thin voice. “I’d hoped to be able to get through this without tears but it’s become a struggle to get through even an hour without crying.”
The receptionist stepped out from behind the desk and offered her a box of tissues, from which D’Arcy gratefully extracted a handful. “Please, sit down,” the woman said, ushering D’Arcy to a chair.
Once D’Arcy was seated, she began. “It’s my mother. She…” D’Arcy had planned to pause here for another dab of the tissue onto her face but she felt a real tear leak from the corner of each eye. Then she told the lie. “My mother recently…died.”
The woman mumbled something sympathetic and volunteered to find D’Arcy a glass of water.
D’Arcy shook her head. Then she began to tell the lady about her mother, Victorine Hallworth, who attended the boarding school from a young age and who had been unexpectedly taken from D’Arcy’s life. “We were estranged, you see,” D’Arcy said, her voice strangled with the fear of this ever happening, but how could it not given what Victorine had most likely hidden from her? “Now I can see that everything I thought about her was wrong.” Another truth amidst the lies. “I have to make it up to her, or I think I might go mad. Do you understand?”
The woman nodded, clearly far from understanding where this was all going.
“I’ve been trying to gather as much information about my mother as I can; I want to get to know her properly at last. I want to start at the beginning of her life, from when she was a child, and I hoped that perhaps the school might have records of her time here and that you might let me look over them. It would mean the world to me.”
D’Arcy wasn’t sure if her tale was convincing, or her tears, but she found herself being ushered into a quiet meeting room, a couple of folders placed before her, and then she was left in peace to read about her mother’s life. She opened the first folder.
On top was a letter, dated early November 1944. It was an inquiry about whether a place could be found at the boarding school for a little girl called Victorine Hallworth. The writer explained that he was fighting with the American army and that he wanted to be sure his daughter would be looked after while he carried out his duties. The name typed at the bottom was, of course, Dan Hallworth. Unarguable proof that the famous photograph of the man embracing the little girl was a photograph of D’Arcy’s mother and grandfather.
D’Arcy pushed the folder away. Why was she doing this to herself? She didn’t need to know any of this. She’d been perfectly happy, her mother had been perfectly happy, until now. There was no point in ruining that happiness for a search into a past that had happened so long ago it no longer mattered. But what if it did matter? What if D’Arcy wanted a grandfather?
She buried her face in her hands and rubbed her forehead. She was so bloody selfish. Her mother had always been enough, just as she’d told Josh. She didn’t need a grandfather. And what if Dan Hallworth wasn’t the ideal clichéd grandfather: soft and warm and endearingly gray-haired and always losing his glasses. There had to be a reason why Victorine had disowned him.
D’Arcy’s hand betrayed her. It crept back to the folder and sifted through the papers. There were several letters from Dan Hallworth to the school, confirming Victorine’s placement there in 1944. There was a list of approved visitors for the child, which comprised a few soldiers—privates Sparrow and Jennings—and the name of one woman: Jessica May. But nowhere was there any correspondence from Victorine’s mother, nor any mention that Jessica May was the mother.
D’Arcy opened the next folder with a feeling of trepidation. It bore dates later than the first, and would account for Victorine from age ten to sixteen. But there were only copies of school reports, plus more correspondence from Dan Hallworth, this time typed on a letterhead for the New York Courier and then World Media Group.
Then one final, catastrophic letter. It looked benign, black letters on white, correspondence from a Parisian hospital. Victorine had had an appendectomy when she was sixteen. D’Arcy almost didn’t bother to read past the opening paragraph because what could a record of an operation tell her about her mother?
But the letter said that the child had not complained about the pain in her stomach for several days and that, by the time the pain became so acute it couldn’t help but be noticed, Victorine’s appendix had perforated, sending infection out into her body. She’d been deathly ill in hospital for weeks, had undergone several operations to clean up the mess, had multiple abscesses from the infection.
It was the penultimate paragraph, before the polite closing, that D’Arcy wished never to have read. It said that the scarring from the subsequent infections had blocked Victorine Hallworth’s fallopian tubes so badly that she would be unable to bear children.
Unable to bear children. D’Arcy stood up, the words shuttering before her every time she blinked, like a relentless slideshow. She stared at the wall, eyes stretched open but she saw the words flash there too, filmic and devastating in their scope, casting everything that she had thought to be true into th
e black and stygian realms of falsehood.
PART FIVE
Jess
When I looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feeling started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying.
—Susan Sontag
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
—H. L. Mencken
Nineteen
BELGIUM, JANUARY 1945
As Jess drove into Bastogne with Martha, they passed tanks that had been torn apart, jeeps pulverized into the ground, and trucks dragging trailers with neat stacks of dead bodies that looked, from a distance, like firewood. The siege of Bastogne had lasted for a week and, from what Jess could glean, the siege meant that Dan’s division had been encircled and ceaselessly bombed and shelled and shot at by the Germans, who had four times the number of soldiers. It meant that the men, against all the odds and sustained only by prayers and a stubborn implacableness of spirit, fought their way out and the Germans fell back, and Bastogne, a stew of blood and bodies, surrounded by snow stained pink with the life-force of Americans and Germans alike, was back in Allied hands and the press were allowed to return.
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