The French Photographer

by Natasha Lester

  ‘Easy on the eye!’ Jess exploded. ‘I think being a jerk precludes anyone from being attractive.’

  Marty laughed. ‘Not Warren. Your Major Hallworth. And we all need a little love – or bodily comfort – in the midst of war.’

  Bodily comfort. It was what she’d craved that night in Italy. But Jessica May could stand on her own two feet; witnessing war broke her heart enough without needing to involve herself with a man again. She shook her head firmly. ‘He’s not my major. He’s just proven himself a friend. And I’m going to need a few of those if I want to last more than a month over here.’

  As much as she wanted to, on the day she was due to leave for Italy, Jess wasn’t able to avoid Warren Stone. He met her in the lobby at six in the morning and she tried to deflect anything he might say or do with an apology.

  ‘I’m sorry about your promotion,’ she said honestly. ‘If I can speak to somebody to let them know that, as much as it wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t your fault either, then I will.’

  As soon as she said it she knew she’d made a huge mistake. His face contorted, at first surprised, and then anger flared, covering up what might have been embarrassment, or indeed humiliation. Of course he wouldn’t want a woman to know of his failures, or for that same woman to then hurtle in and offer assistance in rectifying them.

  ‘I don’t need help from a model,’ he said slowly.

  ‘I know,’ she said quickly, wanting to leave.

  ‘Go to Italy,’ he said suddenly. ‘And just so you know, I didn’t lose. I let you stay. It’ll be more fun to watch you leave in disgrace later, just when you think you’ve settled in.’

  ‘I don’t intend to do anything disgraceful.’ Jess drew herself up to modelish height, despite knowing that the best course of action would be to collect her bags and go.

  ‘I read over the War Department’s screening notes. You won’t be able to help yourself.’

  ‘Nothing in those notes was true.’

  He laughed. ‘Well, that’s a shame. Because I may have drunk a little too much last night and my loose tongue may have let a few details about your fondness for bedtime activities slip to some of the other correspondents.’ And then, before she was able to let the full blaze of her fury unleash itself upon Warren Stone, his demeanour changed and he began to recite, blandly, a list of rules. ‘Gal reporters must never put themselves closer to the front than the nurses in the field.’

  Jess stared at him, bewildered by the swift shift of the conversation.

  ‘Good work, Stone,’ another PRO said approvingly as he passed.

  ‘Thank you, Sir,’ Warren replied obsequiously, falling into step with his superior and following him out of the lobby.

  Jess gathered her belongings and sat down to wait for Major Hallworth, riled by everything Stone had said, but trying not to be.

  Thankfully Dan soon arrived and greeted her cordially as she seated herself in the jeep. He introduced her to the two men in the back, Private Sparrow and Private Jennings – one blond and tall, the other red-headed and short – and both as green as her. ‘They’re replacements,’ Dan said.

  Jess winced at everything the term implied.

  The two men gaped at her, then Sparrow, obviously the bolder of the two, gave her a suggestive hello and started to ask, ‘Say, aren’t you …’ before Dan quashed the flirtation with a look.

  As they pulled out onto the road, Jess asked, ‘Shouldn’t they be driving you? Don’t majors get drivers?’

  ‘As you found out in Italy, just because someone’s driving a jeep, it doesn’t mean they know where they’re going. Those two haven’t a clue.’ Dan lowered his voice when he said it and she knew he didn’t mean they were unsure of the route, but that they wouldn’t be able to conceive of what awaited them in Italy.

  She turned back to the two privates and gave them a smile; it was all she had to offer. Jennings looked like the kind of man she didn’t realise still existed: innocent, a newly baptised babe who blushed furiously at her. Sparrow, on the other hand, took the smile as if it were his due, leaning back in the seat, arm casually outflung, but then a car backfired nearby and she could have sworn she saw him jump and whiten. He immediately reached for a cigarette, no longer meeting her eye.

  Jess returned her attention to Dan and decided to risk asking a few questions. ‘You were a captain. Now you’re the major of a … what? And are you infantry?’ She tried to see his division patch. ‘I’m still coming to terms with army structures and ranks and, at the risk of sounding stupid, I need some education.’

  ‘It’s not stupid,’ Dan said. ‘The US Army is a world unto itself. I’m a paratrooper. Airborne division.’ He pointed to the AA on his sleeve. ‘In charge of a company.’

  A paratrooper. The Italian campaign was the first time paratroopers had ever been used, an elite squad of men trained within an inch of their lives to be dropped by plane behind enemy lines to wreak havoc and provide land support to an amphibious assault, such as that at Sicily. Jess was impressed but she only asked, ‘What were you doing in London? I don’t imagine you came all the way here just for me.’

  ‘My company had been in combat for sixty-nine days. Mightn’t sound like a lot but in those conditions it’s too much. We got leave and I didn’t have the patience to jitterbug around the dance floor at the Orange Club in Naples, which is crawling with VD anyway …’ It was his turn to wince. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be.’ Jess shook her head. ‘When I was in Naples, I heard that one in ten GIs has VD. That you can buy a woman in exchange for a ration box.’

  ‘Women and typhus are the cheapest and most plentiful things in Italy. There’s hardly any food for the locals. The women have children they need to feed. The GIs have the only currency worth anything – rations. And some of them spend it any chance they get.’

  He spoke quietly, and Jess knew from his tone that he wasn’t one of the GIs trading his rations for women. ‘What a mess,’ she said.

  ‘A mess I was happy to escape from for a week,’ he finished. ‘When I landed in England, I heard you needed a hand. Then I had meetings about …’ He shrugged. ‘Forward planning.’

  ‘Invasion plans?’ Jess guessed. An invasion was being talked about more and more. Everyone knew it was coming but nobody knew when or how.

  ‘Yes. Now I need to say,’ he veered off the subject, ‘that I have some rules.’

  ‘My God!’ she snapped. For the last half hour she’d started to think he was an ordinary person but now he sounded just like Warren Stone. ‘I’ve been told the rules so many times, I could recite them backwards. I’m to stay out of combat zones. Not flirt with any of your men or act in any way befitting my reputation as a model who has, for the past three years, lived with a man in a scandalously unmarried state and slept with at least half of America. Is that about it?’

  ‘No,’ he said evenly.

  ‘What have I forgotten? Oh, of course, bat my eyelashes and wrap my legs in silk stockings so you all have something to look at besides the mud?’

  She realised, once her outburst was over, that the two men in the back had gone completely silent. So had Dan.

  ‘Your past doesn’t mean a damn out there in Purple Heart Valley,’ Dan said eventually. ‘It’s the present that’s going to get you blown up. Which is what my rules are about, if you’d let me finish.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were a model or … anything else.’ The tough paratrooper actually blushed.

  Jess couldn’t help it. She began to laugh. To have finally found someone who didn’t know or care who she was and to have blurted it all out was not one of her finest moments.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said between gasps of laughter. ‘I think I might sit quietly and not say anything for the rest of the trip. I was mad with Warren Stone and I paid you the discourtesy of thinking you were just like him. Tell me your rules and I promise to listen.’ She tried to compose her face but she knew the corners of her mouth were st
ill twitching.

  He laughed too and his eyes caught the light, glinting silvery blue in the sunshine. ‘I know you’re pissed off. I can’t help that. My only rule is that the safety of my men comes first and if you jeopardise that, I’ll boot you back to New York quicker than Warren Stone will. Fair enough?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ she agreed.

  ‘Just so you know, I have the same rule for everyone, male or female.’

  ‘Thank you. And perhaps you could forget everything I said a moment ago?’

  ‘I’m not very good at forgetting.’ He grinned. ‘But I won’t tell anyone.’

  ‘And I’ll pray they’re all as ignorant as you were.’

  Which of course they weren’t. The minute she stepped out of the jeep and into the crowd of men waiting to board the troopship to Italy, she felt eyes on her. She heard whispers. One GI elbowed his friend in the ribs and said loudly, ‘A model and not a virgin. This ship just got a lot more fun.’

  Fear. There it was again. She’d thought bullets were the only things to be scared of in a war zone. But her reputation was proving to be the one obstacle she couldn’t surmount. She couldn’t help the hand that strayed to her face. The face she’d never truly understood. Of course she knew, when she looked in the mirror, that her features were good. That she’d been gifted with blonde hair, deep brown eyes, well-honed cheekbones, full lips, skin that never spotted, and a figure that didn’t look out of place in a bathing suit on a beach. But, being a model meant that she’d also seen many other girls similarly gifted, all pretty, but somehow lacking a quality that only a few had. A quality difficult to understand or explain; it was more a feeling than a solid fact. A face that was entrancing, one you could stare at all day and never grow tired of, one that attracted a crowd at a party, or a chorus of catcalls on the way to a field hospital in Italy. Even over here, she was still window dressing, of the kind they’d obviously all like to handle. It was time, again, to fight.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said to Dan. ‘I need to borrow your jeep.’

  Before he could reply, she climbed onto the bonnet, stood up and whistled for quiet.

  ‘Yes, I’m Jessica May.’ Jess’s voice rang through the air, clear, unwavering, not betraying the fact that her stomach had dropped to the floor and she wondered what they’d all do right now if she fainted. ‘Yes, I was a model. Yes, I lived with a man I wasn’t married to. Like a very wise man recently said to me, none of it matters to the Germans. Over here, I’m a photojournalist. I intend to take pictures and write words that will be published in Vogue; words and pictures that will tell your mothers and sisters and girlfriends and wives back in America your stories.’

  She jumped down from the jeep and picked up her bags, pretending that she was simply on a stage at a fashion showing, albeit the subject of more intense eyeballing than ever before.

  A voice broke through the silence. ‘I think you can probably all close your mouths and board ship.’ Dan’s words were a command, and they were instantly obeyed.

  Jess obeyed too. And she was surprised to hear, as she stepped across the gangplank, Private Jennings say to her shyly, ‘Say, do you think they’d ever put my face in a magazine?’

  Sparrow guffawed, but good-naturedly; the idea of any of them adorning the pages of Vogue a ridiculous fantasy.

  In reply, Jess unslung her camera from her shoulder, dropped her bags, focused and snapped a picture of Jennings and Sparrow, whose names should have been exchanged. Sparrow’s height and build made him look distinctly un-bird-like, whereas Jennings was lean and not even as tall as Jess, as if he were still young enough that he hadn’t yet finished growing and mightn’t ever finish if the war had its way.

  Then a flurry of men descended on them and it became clear that something she’d taken for granted – her face in a magazine – was a novelty, a moment of whimsy, an unbelievable possibility. All the way to Italy, the men asked her to take their picture and she tried her hardest to capture the sense of them, incongruously young in their uniforms, setting off to war, but caring only if their mothers might see them and be proud of them if Jess got their faces into the pages of Vogue.

  Five

  At the port in Naples, she disembarked and was about to try sweet-talking her way into a truck going north when she felt a tap on her shoulder. ‘I’ll give you a ride,’ Dan said. ‘Anything to stick it to Warren Stone, who wants nothing more than for you to have to mope around Naples waiting for days for transport.’

  ‘Jeez, a few months ago in Manhattan, I had a line of men offering to take me for a ride at the end of a party. Now it’s a form of retaliation? How the mighty have fallen,’ she said with a smile.

  Dan laughed.

  Jess eyed the overfull trucks lined up behind the command cars and officers’ jeeps. ‘You don’t have to drive me around. I know you have better things to do.’

  ‘Climb in,’ Dan said. ‘I have to stop at the field hospital anyway.’

  ‘You don’t look sick,’ Jess said doubtfully.

  He leaned his arms on the jeep as he spoke, his cropped dark hair almost hidden by his helmet, but the light of an Italian morning showed plainly his youth – he could only be a couple of years older than Jess – and his handsomeness. Not like Warren Stone, who looked too perfectly put together, almost a simulation. Dan was a man who knew himself, self-assured but without hubris, the hint of a smile at her words charismatic rather than leering.

  Suddenly, she understood; he probably had at least one or two nurses chasing after him. ‘Someone special you’d like to see at the hospital?’ she asked.

  ‘Something like that,’ he replied.

  At the receiving tent of the hospital, a nurse smiled at Dan as they walked in. ‘She’s been asking for you,’ the nurse said. ‘I think she’s with Anne.’

  ‘That’s where I’m headed,’ Jess said, eyeing Dan appraisingly as they threaded through a maze of tents and guy ropes. First Flick, now a woman in Anne’s quarters; he really did seem to take Martha’s philosophy – that you needed love, or at least bodily comfort, in the midst of war – to heart.

  After a few minutes they stopped at one tent from which Jess could hear, incongruously, a child’s laugh. She picked up the Rollei, feeling a prickle of alertness creep over her skin, and readied it.

  ‘Victorine?’ Dan called and Jess heard an excited gasp, followed by the tent flap opening and then a little girl tore out and into Dan’s arms.

  Jess had the camera in the perfect position to catch the moment of their embrace, Dan’s back to her, the girl’s smiling, ecstatic face full to the camera.

  ‘You’re back!’ the little girl cried.

  The faces of the two nurses who’d emerged from the tent reflected everything Jess felt: that the ordinary moment of an embrace had been transformed by war into something precious. And she was so glad that she’d come back to Italy. These were the stories she could tell, the pictures she would take: of the humanity behind the guns. The compassion beyond the bloodshed, and the fact that, as a counter balance to evil, charity, mercy and love still existed and could therefore triumph.

  ‘I am Victorine,’ the little girl announced to Jess. ‘What is that?’ She slithered out of Dan’s arms and pointed to Jess’s camera.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Victorine,’ Jess said. Then she switched to French, detecting the girl’s accent. ‘It’s my camera. Would you like to see?’

  Victorine clapped her hands. ‘You speak like Papa,’ she said, also in French, and Jess wondered who the hell her papa was and why he’d left her in such danger.

  Jess squatted closer to the ground, held out the camera and pointed to the viewing lens. ‘You look through here,’ Jess said, ‘and then this here,’ she pointed to the lens that would capture the image, ‘will copy a picture of what you see when you press the button. But the picture will stay inside the camera until I go back to London and have it printed out for you. I promise I’ll bring it back next time I’m here. It’ll probably take a few weeks.’r />
  ‘Everything takes a long time,’ Victorine said with a sigh of resignation well beyond her years.

  Jess looked up at Dan. What was a child doing in a field hospital? Was she his? She’d said her papa spoke French, and Dan was about as French as the Empire State Building. But the way Dan and the girl had greeted one another; it was as intimate as a father and child.

  ‘Where’s Vicki?’ Jess heard another voice shout and two soldiers appeared. ‘We got you some chocolate, Vicki,’ one of them said, holding out a white packet emblazoned with the words, ‘US Army Field Ration D’.

  ‘It’s Victorine,’ the little girl said crossly. ‘But thank you.’ She stood on tiptoes to kiss each soldier on the cheek, all the while never letting go of Dan’s hand.

  ‘Are you boys discharged?’ Dan asked them and they nodded.

  ‘Yes, Sir. That’s why we needed our kisses,’ one of them said, indicating Victorine.

  ‘Thought we could get a ride back with you, Sir,’ the other one added.

  ‘Sure,’ Dan said. ‘Give me five minutes.’

  ‘Thanks, little Vicki,’ one of the soldiers said. The other added, ‘Bye Vicki!’ before they both moved off in the direction of the jeep.

  ‘Victorine,’ the girl called after them. ‘I’m French!’ Then she turned her attention back to Jess. ‘Are you Dan’s friend?’

  ‘I think so,’ Jess said.

  ‘You can be my friend, too. But Dan is my best friend.’

  Dan crouched down beside Victorine. ‘I have to go. I’ll come back whenever I can. I promise.’

  The little girl’s face crumpled. ‘I want you to stay.’

  ‘What about if I show you my camera some more?’ Jess said, with a smile.

  Victorine nodded, her eyes tear-filled. Dan used the moment to unravel himself from the girl, who kissed his cheeks.

  ‘Let me walk Dan back to the car and then we’ll look at the camera, okay?’ Jess said, before she hurried after Dan, scrambling over the mud and slime to keep up. ‘Who is she?’