The French Photographer

by Natasha Lester

The photographer nodded and D’Arcy noticed another smile settle on her lips. ‘He is kind. People don’t think so because he seems like such a serious person but sometimes you just have to be patient with people and let them reveal themselves to you. The same way you wouldn’t rush past a photograph in an exhibition; you’d take time to consider it and study it from every angle before you made a decision.’

  D’Arcy didn’t know what to say in response. Was the photographer asking her to take her time before she did anything rash? Or saying that Josh was worthy of time? It didn’t matter though; D’Arcy didn’t have time because she was leaving at the end of next week. ‘Josh said I could come to see you,’ she said instead.

  The photographer nodded. ‘I want to photograph you.’ She said it as if that were the subject of their meeting. ‘I thought I needed to do it formally. But I’ve changed my mind. I might take some shots of you every now and again when you’re working, or in the garden. If you don’t mind.’

  ‘But why …?’ D’Arcy began.

  ‘Call it a whim. A beautiful young woman who’s at the age when she has the whole world ahead of her, when the decisions she makes will either be the best or hardest to live with in the years to come.’

  The words settled on D’Arcy like a fur coat in summer. ‘That sounds ominous.’

  ‘Only if you make the wrong decisions.’

  ‘Did you?’ D’Arcy couldn’t stop herself asking.

  The photographer nodded. ‘They were both the worst and best decisions I could have made.’

  It was the moment to ask. And the words came out in a rush. ‘Are you Jessica May? The Children series has definite echoes of her work and –’

  ‘I have an attic full of Jessica May’s photographs. Of course I’m Jessica May.’ She said it as though it had never been in question. ‘But you can call me Jess.’

  D’Arcy gaped, just as she’d worried she might, but it was more at the casual way the revelation had been disclosed. After taking so much trouble for so many years to hide who she was, Jessica May was, in just a couple of offhand sentences, giving up the secret of the photographer’s identity. ‘Wow,’ D’Arcy managed at last. She shook her head. ‘Sorry, it’s just … incredible.’

  ‘I doubt that many people would care. Not anymore.’ The photographer – Jess – pulled herself out of her chair, gripping the arms for support, and walked carefully over to the window.

  ‘Are you kidding? Of course people will care. I care.’

  ‘That’s very sweet of you.’

  She spoke as if D’Arcy were being polite, or doing her a favour. Not as if D’Arcy was reacting with genuine excitement about meeting a woman who was a hero of the art world, if the art world could ever be thought of as having heroes. ‘But why me?’ D’Arcy blurted. ‘And why now? Why would you choose a complete stranger to tell that to?’

  ‘I told Josh this morning too. Of course, he’d worked it out for himself after a night spent searching for photographs of Jessica May in the 1940s.’

  It was not an explanation, not at all. And there was still the question of the Victorine Hallworth in the photograph. So D’Arcy tried again. ‘I don’t understand why you would hide it. But there was also, among your war photographs –’

  Jess interrupted. ‘Yes, Josh tells me you know quite a bit about my war work. That you have an interest in it, even. He mentioned a documentary that you wanted to make.’

  D’Arcy would kill Josh when she went downstairs. As if Jessica May would have any interest in D’Arcy’s childish attempts at filmmaking. ‘I can’t make it now,’ she said dismissively, as if it didn’t matter. ‘I didn’t get the fellowship that I wanted. It was a fellowship named after you, actually. Another in a series of very strange coincidences.’

  This time, D’Arcy waited for Jess to say something about Victorine: I once knew your mother … But she didn’t. She appraised D’Arcy instead, as if weighing her up, seeing what she was made of. What would she find? Little of substance. Air, whimsy, fluff. All things light and fleeting.

  And D’Arcy didn’t know what came over her in that moment, a foolish desire to prove herself, to show Jessica May, photographer extraordinaire, that D’Arcy was worthy of the confidence she’d been gifted. ‘Can I … can I …’ D’Arcy almost clamped her mouth shut – Josh would kill her this time – but out it came. ‘Can I film you? Even though the fellowship people didn’t think so, I actually can make documentaries; I can give you my résumé if you like. My degree is in art and media; media because of my mother, art because of me. I took every unit in filmmaking that I could at uni and I used to crew on documentaries occasionally and I loved it. I haven’t made a documentary for a very long time but I’d like to make one of you. If you’ll let me.’

  D’Arcy expected the woman in front of her to laugh. How preposterous was it that D’Arcy, an amateur, would suggest making a documentary about a woman who would have film crews the world over salivating at the prospect? She’d done no research, no planning, would be extremely limited by the little equipment she had with her for sound and production quality. ‘I’d love to ask you questions, to tell your story,’ D’Arcy finished falteringly. ‘I bet it’s worth telling.’

  ‘It would mean revealing to the world who I am. I’ve rather liked being someone else for the past sixty years.’ Jess turned to face D’Arcy, the expression on her face indecipherable.

  D’Arcy almost smacked her palm to her forehead. Why did she speak before thinking through all the issues? All she’d been focused on was the filming and the putting together of a narrative. Not on what would happen to it after she’d finished. ‘I don’t have to show it to anyone if you’d prefer …’ Her voice trailed lamely away. Then she shook her head. ‘This …’ she waved her arm around to signify the chateau and Jess’s work and the larger truth of who Jess was ‘… and you are extraordinary. Why wouldn’t you want to tell everyone?’

  There was a long silence, the buzz and hum of the garden below them the only sound in the room. Jess eventually spoke. ‘There are some people I should speak to first.’ Then Jessica May turned a smile towards D’Arcy that was striking, but it also held a kind of sadness that made D’Arcy move suddenly to her side and touch her hand. ‘I suppose I can’t very well expect to photograph you if I won’t return the favour,’ Jess finished, then she waited as if she expected D’Arcy to say something, but D’Arcy didn’t speak.

  ‘You’re supposed to say, Oh, you don’t have to if you’d rather not,’ Jess said, smiling more naturally this time. ‘But I can tell that you don’t do false politeness. So yes, you can film a documentary. But, as I said, there are others I would need to talk to before you could show it to anyone. Would you give me some time?’

  ‘Of course.’ D’Arcy grinned at last and tried not to bounce up and down like a child. ‘If I say this is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me would you think I was completely ridiculous?’

  Jess laughed. ‘I would be very flattered. Thank you for coming to see me. If you do notice me around with my camera, try to ignore me. And come back when you want to interview me. You have free rein to film anything you choose in the meantime.’

  She was dismissed. Which was just as well because she wasn’t sure how much longer she could be so demure in the face of something so incredible. As D’Arcy walked out of the room, her eye caught a photograph propped on a table, directly in Jess’s line of sight. Two people, the moment before they kissed, love for one another caught as recognisably on their faces as the fact that they had eyelashes or noses. It was an imperfect photograph of an intensely private moment, real beyond anything D’Arcy had ever seen in all of the posed and photoshopped and cropped pictures that dominated contemporary life. It was the kind of picture that made D’Arcy want to reach into the frame and extract the two people so that they could have the kiss the photographer had forever prevented them from sharing. At the same time, she wanted the draught from the door to tip the frame over so it would fall face down and D’Arcy wo
uld no longer be able to see it – the man was the same one from the photograph with Victorine. Dan Hallworth. And the woman was Jessica May.

  D’Arcy walked back down the stairs slowly, exhilaration flooding out of her like a waterfall. There, in front of her eyes, where there had been the photograph of moments before, was the question Jess had so carefully not answered: why, after all this time, would Jessica May reveal herself to D’Arcy? And the realisation – that D’Arcy hadn’t actually asked about Victorine – carried like deceit in her stomach.

  D’Arcy stopped walking and held on to the banister. There was something linking D’Arcy to Jess, a link that began in that photograph of D’Arcy’s mother and continued on to Dan Hallworth. She knew it as surely as she knew that Jessica had somehow bewitched her – with discussions about being photographed, with permission to film documentaries – into not asking about Victorine. And she also knew that her mother had once had a black-and-white photograph on her dresser of a woman wearing a khaki uniform, arms heaped with flowers, the city of Paris just discernible in the background. The photograph had mysteriously vanished one day after D’Arcy had asked her mother about it but D’Arcy now knew that the woman sitting atop Victorine’s dresser had been Jessica May.

  D’Arcy felt as if she were being lured little by little into a forest, as if a trail had been laid for her the moment she stepped foot into the chateau and she could do nothing but continue inexorably on into the gloaming. It was impossible for her to see the image of Dan Hallworth and Victorine Hallworth embracing as depicting anything other than the closeness of a father and daughter. And the photograph on Jess’s dresser showed that same Dan Hallworth with Jessica May, both clearly in love. Were they Victorine’s parents? And why would Victorine have kept it a secret, why would she have become so estranged from her own parents?

  D’Arcy shivered and opened her eyes. She would work some more, and she would think. And then she would make a decision, one way or another, about what, if anything, she should ask her mother.

  Seventeen

  Working and thinking consisted of not doing any actual work or any thinking at all. Instead, she studied the Children series once more until Josh walked outside and caught her. It was the first time she’d seen him since her meeting with Jess and she didn’t know what to say. So she prevaricated. ‘I suppose I should apologise for slacking off,’ she said, ‘but I could honestly sit and look at these all day and continue to find something new. Aren’t you ever tempted to do that?’

  He came to stand beside her, eyes resting on the photographs. ‘I guess I’ve made the mistake of taking this all for granted,’ he said. ‘Of getting the business done because the emails and the phone calls always seem to be the most urgent. I can’t honestly remember the last time I stopped to look at any of the pictures for more than a minute.’

  ‘You know that’s sacrilege and therefore punishable by having to spend the whole of tomorrow in a T-shirt and shorts instead of a business shirt and trousers,’ she teased, trying to lighten the load she felt pressing on her heart from her conversation with Jess. ‘Or do you not own anything else?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure that sawing wood while wearing a dress like yours isn’t exactly normal,’ he said, his tone a statement rather than a jest. ‘So I’m not sure that my wardrobe choices should be the only ones coming under scrutiny.’

  ‘Oh, this old thing?’ she said, flipping the skirt a little to show off more of the amazing polka-dot petticoats underneath. ‘It’s at least fifty years old so if it hasn’t given up the ghost by now, I don’t think a little sawing is going to harm it.’

  But it wasn’t Josh’s style to let her get away with flirty evasions. ‘So,’ he said. And she knew he meant: So, you know that the photographer is Jessica May.

  ‘So,’ she repeated.

  Then Célie appeared with a picnic basket. ‘Everything you need should be in here,’ she said, smiling at Josh.

  ‘Who are you picnicking with?’ D’Arcy asked, voice light as if she didn’t care. Maybe he had a girlfriend? Someone coming to the chateau to picnic with him and spend the night. It would be the most romantic place to spend a dirty weekend. No wonder he hadn’t wanted to kiss her. D’Arcy felt her heart twist with what she was almost sure, even though she’d never felt it before, was jealousy.

  ‘I’m picnicking with you, I hope,’ he said. ‘Unless you’d prefer to saw. I’ll even get changed.’ He actually smiled.

  D’Arcy’s stomach contracted in response.

  D’Arcy agreed to meet Josh in half an hour, which gave her enough time to find a hat from Célie and send her mother a text to say she was busy and would call later. Because she still had no idea what to ask her, what to say. Staring at photographs all morning hadn’t made anything any clearer.

  When she met Josh downstairs, he was indeed much more casually dressed. ‘There’s a nice spot close to the canal,’ he said to her. ‘It’s only a short walk.’

  ‘I feel like a child skipping school,’ she said as they started out on the gravel path. ‘As if someone from the museum is going to ring at any moment and catch me sipping wine under a chestnut tree rather than crating fragile photographs and talking to customs agents.’

  ‘They’ll be asleep. Besides, it’s siesta time. We’ll work late tonight.’

  Work. What if he was just being polite, would rather be writing up contracts but felt as if he had to show the Australian art handler around and be hospitable? ‘We don’t have to picnic if you’re busy,’ she said.

  ‘I know. I never do things I don’t want to do,’ he said.

  D’Arcy couldn’t resist. ‘Including having sex with women in mini-dresses when they throw themselves at you?’

  Her reward was a laugh, like the one she’d heard the first day when she’d called him dashing. ‘Do you have a single shy bone in your body?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t think I do,’ D’Arcy replied honestly as they passed a row of Judas trees in lavishly pink flower. The busy sound of woodpeckers contrasted with the lazy circling of a lone hawk, and the brusque quacking of distant ducks. The air smelled better than the Buly 1803 shop ever could, a melange of pollens so heavy and diffuse it was impossible to separate the individual scents, more dangerously heady than cognac at midnight. They passed an elfin tree, dressed in a canopy of green as rounded as a crinoline skirt, but beneath the foliage D’Arcy could see the crone-like branches whorling and winding into grotesquely beautiful shapes.

  ‘What are those?’ she asked, recognising that the panels in the salon and the tree in the negative they’d looked at that morning were of the same type.

  ‘Les Faux de Verzy,’ Josh replied. ‘Part of a forest of dwarf beech trees. Nobody really knows why they’ve grown like that. Some people say it’s witchcraft or magic.’ He shrugged as if he didn’t believe it.

  D’Arcy found she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the tree. She had that same sense that it was beckoning her closer, as if it had a secret to tell her, should she chance to seek shelter beneath its draped and elegant boughs. What was happening to her? Her imagination was soaring more spectacularly than the hawk above, conjuring spells and fairytales and hexed trees when all there was before her was a chateau with a magical name, a man with a picnic basket, an old woman with photographs and her mother with – what? Lies?

  D’Arcy talked on as if her words might break the enchantment she felt encircling her. ‘It’s my mother’s fault I’m not shy,’ she said. ‘She taught me to question everything, to say what I thought because sometimes, if you didn’t, people died. I know that sounds like a brutal lesson for a child but she’d talk about the way the Germans and even some of the French people had never said anything about what was happening during the war but that if every voice had spoken aloud, perhaps it would have ended sooner, or with a lower body count. She believed holding back was a dangerous thing that could end in sadness. Which obviously doesn’t tally with your personal code of conduct,’ she finished lightly.

  �
�Hey, I invited you to a picnic. That was daring.’

  ‘My God, what might you do by the end of the day? Hold my hand?’

  She felt the brush of warm skin against her fingers as he threaded his hand into hers.

  ‘I’m living dangerously,’ he grinned, no longer inscrutable but exceptionally charming.

  D’Arcy’s insides flipped with joy at making him both laugh and smile in the space of two minutes.

  When they reached the waterside and he let go of her hand to lay out the food, she found that she missed his touch. She wandered over to the canal, stopping at a cluster of deliciously cool and viridescent ferns beneath the regiment of plane trees lining the banks. It was hot, the sun burning down, but the shade beneath the foliage was lovely. She realised she was standing beside another of those strange dwarf trees but that this time, rather than coaxing her, its graceful arms were merely extending an invitation that she could ignore should she wish.

  So she shucked off her shoes, lifted her skirts a little and waded into the water, revelling in the chill against her legs. She stood still for a few minutes, before tossing her hat onto the bank and turning her face up to the sun, her body softening in the warmth, as if she could so easily bleed into this place and never leave.

  It shocked her a little, this sense of how simple it would be to allow her feet to sink into the mud like the roots of water lilies and remain there. Never before in her twenty-nine years had she felt any kind of urge for permanency or stability. After university in Paris and her stint at the gallery there, she’d travelled through Europe for two years, living off her wits, travel articles that she sent back to an editor of her mother’s magazines, and occasional poorly paid stints on low budget arthouse films. She’d taken a dogsbody job over summer to show tourist groups through an art museum in Rome and had an affair with a much older Italian art handler, which had given her the idea that art handling would be the perfect job for somebody like her.