The Paris Orphan

by Natasha Lester

  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 toward 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.”

  “I am too.” Then D’Arcy confessed to her mother the same thing she’d confessed to Josh. “I invited Dan Hallworth to come to the exhibition.”

  “I know.” Victorine smiled at her daughter. “He called me.”

  “Oh.” D’Arcy couldn’t meet her mother’s eyes.

  “Don’t look so worried. One of the most difficult parts of all of this has been having to lie to him. After Jess gave you to me, I asked Dan if I could set up the Australian arm of World Media, which he’d always talked about. He agreed. So I came here with you and I…” D’Arcy could see the struggle it took for Victorine to say the words. “I told him not to visit me. That I didn’t want him looking over my shoulder. That I would fly to New York once a year to see him. It was why you were always left with the nanny when I went. It broke my heart. And his. But I couldn’t tell him what had happened. I simply refused to talk about my personal life in any interviews. I suspect Dan has been subtly keeping tabs on me in between my visits through colleagues who’ve moved from here to New York or vice versa. Just as I do with him.”

  Victorine stood and walked to the dresser, picking up the newly reinstated framed photograph of Jess in her U.S. Army uniform, arms piled high with bouquets of flowers, the happy faces of Parisiennes all around her. She talked to the photograph rather than D’Arcy. “When I spoke to Dan yesterday, he told me he’d always believed that Jess was dead. That he’d tried for years to find her after the last time he saw her, in 1946, but the trail was completely cold. After I met with Jess in France, I honestly thought knowing everything might well destroy him, just as I’d thought the same about Jess. But perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps I made the wrong decision, keeping everything from them both.”

  Victorine’s voice cracked on the last sentence. And D’Arcy could feel her agony, that of having to make such a choice, of always doubting herself thereafter, but sticking to the course regardless because she’d believed that doing so would protect others. Victorine was the most selfless person D’Arcy knew. She was, in all of this, the true hero. “Your life,” D’Arcy managed to say. “Your life shrunk because of me.” Another act of selflessness.

  “My life expanded because of you,” Victorine said, turning to her with a smile. “I’ve always loved you as my own. The part of me that might have been capable of forming an attachment to a man died that night I saw Warren rape Jess. My relationship with you has always been the most important thing in my life and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  At that, D’Arcy ran to her mother and lay her head on her shoulder like a child and wept. After a long time, she asked two more questions. “Do you think that if both Jess and Dan come to the exhibition, they might…”

  “I hope so,” Victorine whispered into D’Arcy’s hair. “They deserve it.”

  And then the final question. “Did Jess never find out who Ellie’s father really was?”

  Victorine shook her head. “There was no DNA technology back then. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve always been Jess and Dan’s granddaughter. You have her elegance, his charm, and the courage of them both.”

  * * *

  The night of the exhibition, D’Arcy couldn’t remember a time she’d been more nervous. Everyone would find out that the photographer was Jessica May. Jess and Dan would see one another again. She and Victorine would be reunited with their family. And Josh…might not come.

  She’d delibe
rately asked not to be around when the exhibition was hung. She wanted to walk into it for the first time and be surprised. She wanted to see the looks on people’s faces when the truth—that every photograph there from 1943 onwards had been taken by Jessica May—was revealed.

  She and Victorine arrived right on time. D’Arcy gratefully accepted a glass of champagne and passed one to her mother, stopping when she saw the look on Victorine’s face: one of adoration. And D’Arcy realized that a man had arrived who must be Dan Hallworth, that he’d seen her mother and D’Arcy together, and that the look on his face matched Victorine’s.

  Every last shred of the worry D’Arcy had been unable to dislodge from her mind vanished. The next part of the story was finally ready to be played out. Dan and Victorine shared the true bond of a father and a daughter even though they shared no bond of blood. It was the same with D’Arcy and Victorine. And Jess could finally tell Dan about the other things that might bind them all together: Ellie, and D’Arcy. D’Arcy and Victorine had agreed that Jess should be the one to tell him that they might have had a child together.

  Dan joined them and D’Arcy could still see, in the cast of his face, the handsome soldier from last century who’d embraced her mother as if she were the most precious thing on the earth. Yes, his skin was worn with age, his hair white, his movements stiff but he still stood tall and his blue eyes held stories, and a sparkle for Victorine. He kissed her cheeks, after which she shyly introduced D’Arcy as her daughter.

  “You have quite some explaining to do,” he said to Victorine teasingly, forgiveness wrapped up in every word.

  “And we all have a lot of catching up to do,” D’Arcy added.

  “Is Jess…” Dan hesitated and D’Arcy could see both uncertainty and hope in his eyes.

  Victorine squeezed his hand. “She’s coming. You’ll be able to see her again.”

  Dan breathed out slowly. “I can’t quite believe it. After all this time.”

  “I think you’ll find she’s exactly the same person as the one you used to know,” D’Arcy said with a smile, which Dan returned, and D’Arcy felt her heart expand—that love could make another person look the way Dan did right now. Shimmering, alive; the years suddenly stripped away.

  Then she saw another familiar face across the room and her smile grew so big it almost hurt. She excused herself and went to greet Josh.

  “Hi,” she said, wondering if she was imagining it or if he was smiling a little too. “How are you? And where’s Jess?”

  “The flight knocked her around,” Josh said, eyes not leaving her face. “She’s resting. She said she’d prefer to come tomorrow when everyone won’t be staring at her. I think she’d like the news of who she is to sink in a little with the media first. I’ll bring her back in the morning.”

  “Of course she’d feel like that,” D’Arcy said contritely. “I really should have thought of it. I’ll arrange for her to come through an hour before the gallery opens tomorrow morning. I’ll organize for Dan and Victorine to come back then too. They both want to see her so much. And there’s something Jess needs to tell Dan.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “I’ll tell you everything later. The most important thing is for her to talk to Dan, and to see what she’s done; that she’s created a magnificent body of work.” D’Arcy flung her hand around as she spoke so the gesture took in not just the photographs, but also Dan and Victorine. “Let me just tell them she’s not coming tonight.”

  D’Arcy slipped back over to Dan and her mother and told them they would all see Jess tomorrow.

  Dan’s face creased momentarily with disappointment, then he nodded his head. “It would be good to rest up tonight. To see her tomorrow when we’re both less disoriented from flying. Although,” he confessed, “I’m not sure that rest is going to make me feel any less muddled when I see her again.”

  D’Arcy kissed his cheek. “I can’t wait to see you both here, standing in front of the pictures that brought you together.”

  “Me too,” Victorine said. “I’ll take you back to the hotel.” Victorine slipped her arm into her father’s.

  Which left D’Arcy able to return to Josh.

  “Shall we look around?” Josh took her hand and D’Arcy’s stomach flipped with the thought that maybe…Maybe Josh had come all the way to Australia for more than just Jess.

  Together, they made their way to the beginning of the exhibition, to the photographs Jess had taken during the war of soldiers and survivors and nurses and the condemned at Nuremberg and the rape victims she’d never been able to ignore. Then on through the years when she was establishing herself in the fifties, sixties and seventies, to the last twenty years and the peak of her fame.

  At the second-to-last room, a film played. D’Arcy’s documentary. She’d had to work on it harder and faster than she’d ever thought possible. When the gallery had seen the rough footage, understood the context of the conversations D’Arcy had captured with Jess, the pieces of the larger story of a woman trying to be both artist and the conscience of the world, they’d insisted that it be shown.

  And D’Arcy saw now that the room was almost full, that people were watching intently, some with tears in their eyes. She saw that her film had not been made by a dilettante, but by an artist too.

  “You did it,” Josh said, smiling at her. “I hope you’re as proud of yourself as you should be.”

  “I might actually be a little bit proud,” she admitted.

  “And there’s one last room we should see.” He indicated the exhibition signs.

  “No, we’ve seen it all.”

  “Jess insisted the gallery take a few extra images,” he said in a peculiar voice and D’Arcy stepped into the last room with trepidation.

  Just six images lined the walls, large images, as if there’d been no possible way to contain the depth of feeling caught in the pictures. The images were of D’Arcy and Josh.

  Josh tipping a handful of water down her back, D’Arcy’s eyes shining, laughter pouring from her mouth like the canal water spilling over her. D’Arcy with a butterfly on her head and Josh looking at her in a way that made her heart sore. D’Arcy alone, standing in front of a table of crates and tools, staring outside as if something were missing. The two of them, sitting on a sofa, heads tipped back, faces exhausted, hands resting on the couch so achingly close that all the viewer wanted to do was to pick up those two hands and entwine them. Josh and D’Arcy lying on a picnic blanket, Josh’s mouth open as if talking, D’Arcy listening intently with not just her heart, but her entire being in her eyes. The final picture was the photograph of Jess and Dan about to kiss, utterly in love, but separated for most of their lives.

  The breath left D’Arcy’s body. The D’Arcy in each picture was in love with the Josh in each picture. It was as plain to see as the love on Jess and Dan’s faces. But how did Josh feel?

  “Come with me,” she said.

  She led him to the curator’s office and shut the door behind them. Then, she made herself speak in a way she would never have spoken just two weeks ago. But what she’d learned so well over the past few days was that, in people not speaking, in the absence of words, everyone in her past had been hurt.

  “I love you,” she said, surprising herself with the strength in her voice.

  He smiled and she felt her heart turn over inside her chest.

  “It’s easier to pretend I don’t feel the way those photos show that I do,” she continued. “It will be much harder to be in love with you. Because I’m not very good at it. Because I live here and you live in Paris. Because of so many things. But I want to be with you anyway.” Please say something, she thought. Your smile says a lot but I need to hear it.

  “D’Arcy Hallworth, I’ve been in love with you ever since you strode across the drawbridge at the chateau. Since even before you called me dashing,” he said, stepping closer to her.

  She grinned and reached for him, arms winding around his neck, his hands sliding up he
r back. And then she kissed him.

  Nothing prepared her for the way it felt to kiss a man she loved, and who loved her in return. The kiss went on and on, neither willing to stop, D’Arcy content for once to do nothing other than kiss until Josh reluctantly broke it off.

  “After waiting all this time I’m not going to have sex with you in an office,” he said firmly.

  “After all this time?” she repeated, laughing. “You actually make it sound like you’ve been wanting to sleep with me.”

  “Believe me, I have.”

  The look in his eyes made her breath catch, her whole body flush. Without apologizing to anyone for their sudden departure, they hurried outside and found a taxi.

  It took too long to drive to her apartment where, the minute they were inside, he placed his hands on her cheeks, drew her in and kissed her again, not gently, not softly, not slowly, but exactly as she wanted to be kissed. At last, she thought as she searched out his tongue. At last, she thought as she felt his body pressed hard against hers.

  Thirty-seven

  The next day, after showering with Josh, which took much longer than it should have, they grabbed takeaway coffee, longing for Célie’s coffee and baguettes, and hurried back to the gallery, only ten minutes later than the time they’d arranged to meet Victorine and Jess.

  Nobody was there. Josh frowned. “Maybe I should have collected Jess.”

  They were interrupted by the clack of Victorine’s heels on the floor.

  “Mum, this is—” Before D’Arcy could introduce Josh to her mother, her words were stopped by the redness of Victorine’s eyes. D’Arcy clutched Josh’s arm. The crying was supposed to have stopped now that everyone was here at last. “What is it?” D’Arcy asked with alarm.