The French Photographer

by Natasha Lester

  Besides, the only thing she could think about on the way to the hospital was Dan’s too-stern face after she’d yelled about sleeping with him at the top of her voice to Warren, ensuring everyone in the vicinity could hear. What would Dan think of her now?

  Thirteen

  But she had no chance to find out what Dan thought because Rennes was taken soon after and it began again: the pre-D-day sequestering of the women. They were all rounded up, taken out of their hospitals or WAC encampments, a dozen of them, and kept in the custody of Stone and another PRO in a tiny hotel in Rennes until Paris was back in Allied hands and safe. They had to sign in and sign out every day. They had to get a leave pass to have lunch outside the hotel. One of the other female correspondents actually reported two of their number, claiming they’d got away and were making for Paris, which was proved false when they returned to the hotel after the dinner for which they’d been given a pass into town.

  ‘Goddammit!’ Jess exploded when she heard. As if it wasn’t bad enough having the men in charge treat them like imbeciles, now the women were turning their backs on each other too. If only she hadn’t gone to Rennes in the first place. If only she’d done what Lee Carson of the International News Service had done and gone AWOL. Of course an order had been put out on Lee but so far she’d been missing for a week and nobody had managed to locate her.

  Jess was only allowed out of Rennes after Paris fell. She and Iris Carpenter hitched a ride to the Hotel Scribe, designated point for all correspondents in Paris. As they came over the hill to the north, Jess could see the city bathed in sunshine, white and innocent, waiting peacefully as if nothing had ever been the matter and they’d all taken too long to arrive. Once through the Porte d’Orléans, a group of women and girls bearing fresh flowers ran up to Jess and filled her arms with blooms, calling her la femme soldat.

  ‘Oh no, I’m just a correspondent,’ she protested, until Iris grabbed Jess’s Leica and took a picture of her, blushing, laden with flowers, the beaming Frenchwomen in the background. She would send the photo to Victorine, Jess decided. Victorine would like the idea that her people thought Jess was a soldier.

  It took a while to navigate the Parisians, who were cheering every vehicle on every street, but they finally reached the hotel, standing orderly and Haussmanian just across from the ornate and undamaged splendour of the Opéra. The dead geraniums in the window-boxes were the only visible sign that something of significance had happened in the city.

  Over the next few days, the Hotel Scribe filled every corner, every crevice, with correspondents and their associated gear. The Rue Scribe was lined with jeeps and bedrolls, and gas masks and duffel bags lurked in piles in the lobby. The press office took over the entire first floor, where the censors scribbled out all the words they didn’t want read and correspondents haggled and begged to keep their stories intact. The transportation room was stacked to the ceiling with jerry cans of gasoline. The mess had nothing but K-rations and coffee but also, somehow, champagne.

  As soon as she could, Jess took to the streets, knowing she could find her own damn story rather than waiting for one of the PROs to tell her what to write about. The male correspondents, on the other hand, didn’t seem in much of a hurry to hunt down their words, not when the ladies of Montmartre required no hunting down whatsoever and needed little persuasion to give up their wares. Jess lost count of the number of times she witnessed correspondents entering or leaving brothels. The Hotel Scribe was almost as bad – women hurried into elevators under the guise of being someone’s cousin even though the correspondent in question had no French blood in his body. Sex, it seemed, was easier to procure than nylon hose, and a hell of a lot cheaper.

  So Jess looked for stories of women who, through the occupation, had done remarkable things without thought of consequence – resistance came from the heart and not from the head, they said – things that in her previous life in Manhattan, Jess could never have imagined women might have to do. A group of resistance fighters from the French Forces of the Interior showed her their hideout in the underground sewer system from where they’d planned the rebellion that led to the fall of Paris. She spoke to ordinary women who stole guns from the Germans to help arm the resistance. Those guns fired the shots that had rung out on the day of the rebellion to announce to the city that they should put up their barricades and take back their streets.

  She knew Vogue would love it, especially the pictures of the Parisians in exotic hats laughing and showing off the guns they’d swiped from under the noses of the Germans. But then the men of the FFI – boys really – took her out to the damp tunnels at Ivry in which the Germans had locked up resisters. Within half an hour of being underground, Jess’s bones were frozen; not even a fingernail of light reached down there. The Germans, she discovered, left the men and women they’d captured in the wet and blackly dark tunnels until they died. Through a beam of torchlight, she was shown the fingermarks clawed into the walls as the prisoners tried to dig their way to freedom.

  Jess returned to the Hotel Scribe a different person from the one who’d left that morning. To witness both matchless barbarism and matchless desperation in the one day left her incapable of speaking. But the atmosphere at the hotel didn’t make her feel any better. She was greeted by Iris Carpenter and the newly arrived Lee Carson with the news that the women were to be locked up. Again. Not allowed out of Paris, and only permitted to report on the stories their PRO allocated them.

  ‘Apparently it’s for our own safety,’ Lee – who was tall and blonde and whose fluttery eyelashes had caused Major Mayborn, the SHAEF public relations man in charge, to forgive her escaping Rennes – said.

  ‘Every goddamn time,’ Jess said between gritted teeth.

  ‘Your pal Warren told me to tell you that he’s given you approval to cover the fashion shows that are starting up again,’ Iris added dourly. ‘He thought it fitted nicely with your “expertise”.’

  ‘Did you hit him?’ Jess asked.

  ‘I wanted to.’

  ‘Say,’ said Lee with a sudden smile. ‘Let’s use that expertise.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Jess asked.

  ‘Have you looked at yourself lately?’ Lee asked, casting her eyes over Jess. ‘If I can get out of a court martial by smiling nicely at the major, then a former model, showered, made-up and appropriately attired, could probably do a hell of a lot more.’

  Iris nodded in agreement.

  Jess caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror; she was filthy as usual but she also carried with her the distinct odour of the sewers she’d visited that day. Nothing about her betrayed the fact that her face and body had once been used to sell dresses. That didn’t bother her but the thought that she might be stopped from collecting more stories and more pictures did. What she’d seen in just a few days meant there must be many unreported and unrecorded horrors that had to be brought out of the tunnelled darkness and into the light of words and photographs.

  ‘If this works, you owe me a hell of a lot more than a drink,’ she said to Lee and Iris before she left the mess.

  She slipped up to her room and bathed. She washed her hair. She applied powder, rouge, lipstick and mascara. She put on her unworn olive drab skirt. She left the gloriously comfortable but decidedly unflattering paratroop boots behind. And then she made sure to bump into Major Mayborn in the lobby.

  ‘Oh, excuse me,’ she said to the major after colliding with him. ‘I’ve spent the day interviewing the men from the FFI and my head’s full of the story I’ll write for Vogue.’ She smiled, standing like a model with her hand on her hip, showing off the figure that had been hiding beneath trousers and dirty shirts for too long, transforming herself into the Jessica May from the pages of a magazine. ‘I wish I could interview some American soldiers about their role in the liberation of Paris otherwise the women who read Vogue might start to think their men had nothing to do with it: that it was a French victory rather than an American one.’ It was a gamble; he was eithe
r going to be furious, which was likely, given that the fight over who won the fight for Paris was ongoing, or he’d see that she was right.

  ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I can get you interviews with as many soldiers as you like by tomorrow if you just tell me what you need.’

  ‘Oh, but you can’t,’ Jess actually pouted. ‘I’m not allowed out to the front to talk to the men because apparently women are better than men at attracting enemy gunfire. Which is strange, since I managed to survive Italy and Normandy, and get myself all the way to Paris without a scratch.’

  ‘Italy? You’ve seen Italy?’ The major sounded impressed and Jess pounced.

  ‘Yes I have. I believe I’m one of the most experienced female correspondents in Paris. Why don’t I buy you a drink and tell you more?’

  He agreed with relish and so Jess, in the bar at the Scribe, with the beseeching eyes of Lee and Iris looking on, and beneath the hard gaze of the few men who hadn’t bothered to seek fleshly comforts, dropped the names of field hospitals she’d worked out of. And she reminded him that she was the one who’d taken the photograph of one of his majors holding a little French girl, a photograph that had come, she understood, to represent the acts of charity the army was capable of, even under fire from the most brutal enemy the country had ever known.

  ‘You’re the gal Stone’s been talking about,’ the major said once she’d finished her tale. ‘I can see why.’

  Jess kept her smile on, made it wider even, dropped her chin a little as if a photographer had just told her to seduce his lens. She overheard one of the correspondents at the poker table say her name and all the men laughed and she knew it would be all over the Scribe tomorrow that Jess was sleeping with the SHAEF PR man in charge, but she no longer cared.

  Well, that wasn’t true; she did care. She cared deeply that she had to behave like this to get what she wanted. She cared deeply that Stone had laid such a solid foundation of rumour and innuendo that all it took was one smile and a drink with a man and everyone would think she was doing what they all did – sleeping around – but only when she was accused of it did it become a crime; the men were free to be as openly promiscuous as they chose. She’d tried letting her photographs speak for her and it wasn’t working. Time to unleash a different weapon.

  After two whiskeys, Major Mayborn was laughing as she told him about Jennings’ misfortunes; after three, he was congratulating her for having done so much to keep the women of America behind their men. After four, she stood up and flashed the smile that had once adorned magazine covers. ‘Thank you so much for listening. I really should go and write my story, one-sided as it might be. If only someone would let the women go where the men are allowed.’ Leaving him with that final thought, she turned and sashayed through the lobby as if it were a catwalk and she its star.

  The next morning in the mess, Jess, Iris and Lee sat together, praying that Jess’s conversation with Major Mayborn had had an effect. But then Warren moved in, and allocated Jess a fashion show to cover and Lee and Iris a puff piece on how the Allied forces were helping the people of Paris to rebuild – and they knew she’d failed.

  ‘I can’t even flirt properly anymore,’ Jess said dismally. Her prospects of being anything more than a woman who’d once taken one or two good photos seemed as luridly disappointing as an over exposed negative.

  ‘Give it some time,’ Iris said, but time was the one thing they didn’t have. The war was marching on without them. Their male counterparts were the only ones reporting anything worth reading.

  For two long weeks Jess grouched around Paris, drinking and complaining with Lee and Iris. Every night, she remembered how Dan’s face had looked the last time she’d seen him, when she’d exploded so publicly in front of his entire battalion. She had no idea if she’d ever see him again.

  She was never so glad as when, one evening upon returning to the Scribe, she found herself engulfed by a set of arms.

  ‘Marty!’ she cried when she realised who it was. ‘You must have heard my prayers.’

  ‘Couldn’t let you have all the fun,’ Martha replied with a grin.

  Their greeting was interrupted by the sound of a band striking up in the lobby. A young blonde girl in a very low-cut dress began to sing for the appreciative audience of correspondents who couldn’t take their eyes off her cleavage. Warren Stone was leading the chorus of cheers. Someone – probably Major Mayborn – had thought to prop a sign on the piano saying: ‘Anyone caught fraternising with the singer will have his head shaved!’

  ‘I’m sure that will deter them,’ Jess said, arms folded. ‘And I’d hazard a guess that my extra $4.75 weekly payment for food supplies and entertainment has gone into her pocket.’

  ‘I’d say you’re right,’ Martha replied, shaking her head. ‘Don’t tell me it’s worse? Maybe I should have stayed in Italy.’

  ‘No!’ Jess said, taking Marty’s arm and leading her upstairs. ‘I need someone to mope with. Lee’s got Iris. You can share my room. Unless you’ve got your accreditation papers back? Or reunited with your husband?’

  ‘Nope on both accounts. I’m not really here. I’ll be sneaking around and doing my best to remain unnoticed. By Hem, too. Let’s not talk about him now, though.’

  Once the women were in Jess’s room, surrounded by paper, the typewriter, cameras, lenses, films, cosmetics and cognac, they both let out a breath.

  ‘It’s like a frat party without rules down there,’ Martha observed.

  Jess filled her in on what she’d witnessed since arriving in Paris. ‘But I’ve heard worse things are happening,’ Jess added.

  She began to tell Martha what a number of Parisiennes had hinted at over the past few days: that US Army soldiers were raping Frenchwomen and nobody was doing anything about it. Who would believe a young French girl over an Allied soldier, one of the men who’d helped free their city? ‘Chanel is giving away perfume to any Allied soldier. So the men take their perfume, find a girl, show her the bottle and tell her what she needs to do to get it. And that’s the best-case scenario,’ Jess finished bitterly.

  ‘You going to write about it?’ Martha asked, eyebrows raised as she lit a cigarette.

  Jess shook her head. ‘The censors would never let it through. Besides, I need more evidence first.’

  ‘It’s a story that needs to be told.’

  ‘Like so many others,’ Jess sighed. ‘You know that nobody planned beyond Paris? In the original invasion plan, we were meant to take Paris by D-day plus seventy-four. We made it by D-day plus seventy-five. But that’s it. Apparently the Germans were supposed to capitulate after Paris. So getting a briefing on the army’s next move, although impossible for us gals anyway, is now about as easy as finding a Nazi in Paris.’

  Cognac solved nothing, so the next morning she and Marty took the elevator down to breakfast as gloomy as the night before.

  ‘Any word of my husband?’ Martha asked on the way, not looking at Jess.

  ‘I heard he’s at the Ritz,’ Jess said. ‘Apparently the Hotel Scribe isn’t able to withstand his reputation.’

  ‘I know I have to go there and see him,’ Martha said, with a hesitancy that wasn’t at all her ordinary way of speaking. ‘I know I have to ask him for a divorce. But at the same time …’

  ‘It will hurt to end it,’ Jess finished for her. ‘You know that if I could do it for you, I would.’

  Martha gave her a small and desolate smile. ‘It’s just so hard to say that a love like mine and Hem’s failed after all.’

  ‘I wonder what actually survives a war?’

  Martha shook her head as the elevator doors opened.

  ‘You’ll definitely need breakfast if you want to face off with mon general,’ Jess said, fixing on the practicalities. ‘Hemingway’s attracted a band of followers and you’ll want something to line your stomach before you fight your way through them to be admitted into his presence.’

  Her words came to an abrupt halt when they reached the mess and Emile, with sh
aven head, pushed past them into the room and was greeted with cheers and applause. He looked back over his shoulder at Jess, face triumphant.

  ‘On second thought, breakfast might make me sick,’ Jess said, turning away, nausea rising in her throat as if her body wanted to purge itself of her past with Emile, knowing that while she hadn’t done anything wrong, she felt ashamed of herself for ever having loved him. ‘How are we going to stand any more of this?’ she said quietly.

  ‘You know he shaved his own head,’ Martha said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. They all think that having sex with a woman is a joke they must share with the world.’ Jess shook her head. ‘They’re never going to let us out of here, are they? Every morning I wake up and think, today will be the day, and Iris and Lee agree and then it doesn’t happen and we all drag our heels off to a story nobody cares about. What are we doing? Should we just quit?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Martha said, uncharacteristically short of a perky comeback. ‘I just don’t know.’

  After covering another fashion show, Jess returned to the Scribe late in the evening, more than ready for a drink – but nothing as bubbly as champagne – her words from that morning echoing in her head like the concussion of shell bursts: Should we just quit? She was doing nothing of use and every day that she took pictures of fashion shows her self-respect and her dignity withered a little more; people were dying and that was what mattered, not what dresses might be in fashion next season. Soon she would have no pride left. Warren would have prevailed and Jess would be just someone who’d once had something important to say.

  ‘Anyone got whiskey?’ she muttered to Martha, who was at their usual table in the bar with Lee and Iris.

  ‘We’re going to be alcoholics by the end of the war at this rate,’ Iris said glumly as Martha organised the drinks for what felt like a funeral and they all began to drink steadily and not at all slowly.