The French Photographer

by Natasha Lester

  A burial. Oh God! What about …? ‘Maman,’ Estella breathed, the word barely piercing the true night of a blacked-out city.

  ‘Go and see,’ he said.

  ‘And Monsieur?’

  ‘I’ll look after him.’

  She turned, fear finally unbuttoning the coat of rashness she’d been wearing until then, seeing only her mother’s face, praying that Monsieur Aumont had, in his final moments, been right. That her mother was truly safe.

  ‘Get out of France, if you can. And take care.’

  She heard the words slip through the air, the calculating tone gone now, replaced by something almost solicitous, and she held them to her as she raced for home. You take care too, Maman. I’m coming.

  Thankfully the concierge was snoring in his chair when Estella returned to the apartment and she didn’t have to explain her wild-eyed appearance, or the fact she was wearing a man’s tuxedo jacket over her dress. She curved around and around the staircase, going up and up until she reached the top floor. Relief slid over her like silk when she found her mother in the dark kitchen, sipping coffee. But the relief fell to the floor when she saw the whiteness of her mother’s face and that her coffee lapped in the cup because of the way her hands were shaking.

  ‘Tell me,’ Estella said from the doorway.

  ‘I know very little,’ her mother whispered. ‘Monsieur Aumont is working for the English, I think. He never told me exactly. He couldn’t. But he has so many cousins and nephews, all Jewish of course, in Belgium, Switzerland and Germany; he was passing on information they sent to him. The Jewish people have no love for the Nazis, Estella. Nor does Monsieur Aumont. Nor I.’

  ‘And nor do I but does that mean you should risk your life?’

  ‘What would you have me do? You’ve seen them. The children we’ve helped OSE spirit out of Germany and into France and on to safety, the ones we can give nothing more to than soup and a hug. Their mothers and fathers taken from them just because of their religion. If we can help them, shouldn’t we?’

  Of course they should and they had. To stand aside and do nothing was to give up Paris entirely, to give up on compassion, to agree that the world should be run by monsters.

  ‘How involved are you?’ Estella asked.

  Her mother sipped her coffee. ‘Not very. I’ve done nothing more than keep Monsieur Aumont’s confidence. And help him find, in the crowd at Gare du Nord, the person he’s looking for. It’s easy to overlook a red neck scarf, or a green beret when only one person is watching. He always meets me back at the station and walks me home after he’s done whatever he has to do. But tonight he didn’t come back.’

  ‘He’s dead, Maman.’

  ‘Dead?’ The word was like a dropped stitch, ruining the fabric of their lives. Estella’s mother reached for her hand. ‘He can’t be.’

  ‘I saw him. I delivered some maps for him.’

  ‘You did what?’

  Estella tightened her grip on her mother’s hand and told her what had happened. The house. The blood. The theatre. The man. That he said he’d take care of Monsieur Aumont’s body. ‘I think he meant it,’ Estella ended quietly.

  ‘But now you’re mixed up in it too,’ her mother said, terror bleaching her face of all colour. ‘There are spies everywhere. And who knows how much longer until the full force of the Wehrmacht is here.’ Her mother took a deep breath and sat up straight. ‘You have to leave France.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘You are.’ Her mother’s voice was determined. ‘You cannot stay here now. If anyone saw you tonight …’ The sentence was unfinishable.

  ‘Nobody saw me.’

  ‘If you’ve seen the maps, you could easily end up like Monsieur Aumont. And here in Paris you’ll never be anything more than a midinette in an atelier. Like me. I’m sending you to New York.’

  ‘I like being a midinette in an atelier.’ New York! How ridiculous.

  ‘No you don’t. Look at that dress. A couturier makes dresses like that. We’re in the middle of a war. Soon there won’t be a fashion industry left in Paris.’

  ‘What would I do in New York?’ Estella tried to keep her tone light, as if it was all a joke. But the image of Monsieur Aumont’s body sprawled on the ground amid the weeds, the knowledge of how close her mother had come to danger, made her voice crack. ‘I won’t go by myself.’

  ‘Yes, you will. Monsieur …’ Her mother stopped, eyes flooded with tears. ‘Monsieur Aumont asked me, weeks ago, to take over the atelier if anything happened to him. Our métier is a dying art. I must keep it alive, to honour him. I didn’t touch those maps tonight. You did.’

  ‘I’m not in any danger.’ Get out of France, if you can. She remembered the words the man had spoken to her as she’d left.

  ‘That’s what Monsieur Aumont thought.’

  Estella stood up and searched in the cupboard for a bottle of port. She poured herself a glass, and one for Jeanne, draining it quickly, unable to conceive of life without her mother. She’d been the one to first let Estella loose on a sewing machine when she was only five, who brought home scraps of fabric so that Estella could make ever more fantastical clothes for her cloth dolly, who had let Estella, during holidays and evenings when she had to work late, sit at her feet under the worktable making her own versions of flowers out of offcuts of material.

  It had always been Estella and her mother. Estella and her mother walking to Les Halles every Saturday morning to buy food for the week. Estella and her mother praying in the church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis every Sunday morning. Estella and her mother lying in their shared bed side by side, some nights talking about what Estella had been up to at La Belle Chance with Huette and Renée, other nights falling into a dreamless sleep because Estella had been up sketching until late. There was nobody else. There never had been.

  Occasionally, Estella would wish for a sister, so that she would still have the blessing of family once her mother was gone. But it was a futile wish. When Jeanne – God forbid – died, Estella would be on her own. And the absence of a father, beyond the fact that he’d died in the Great War, was the only thing her mother never spoke of.

  Estella sat back down and took her mother’s hand, searching for reassurance. ‘There are no ships,’ she said flatly. ‘Unless I can get to Genoa and that’s impossible.’

  ‘Last week, the American ambassador placed an advertisement in Le Matin urging all American citizens to go directly to Bordeaux where the very last American ship would be waiting to take them to New York.’

  ‘I’m a French citizen. How does that help me?’

  Her mother pulled away. She walked through their tiny apartment, which most people of sound mind would probably be glad to leave behind: the lack of running water and elevator, the six flights of stairs, the tiny rooms – only one bedroom, a kitchen-cum-dining room whose table was more often used for sewing than eating, a space for a sofa, nothing decorative, just the bare necessities of plates and cups and pots and wardrobes and, of course, the sewing machine. But it was all they could afford on their midinette’s wages.

  Jean picked up her boîte à couture, an antique beechwood sewing box, the most beautiful thing they owned. It was lithographed on top with an image of a stand of wild iris pummelled by wind, stems leaning away in a manner Estella had always thought of as dancelike and subversive rather than weak and bending to the storm’s will. Her mother opened the lid, took out the needle cases, the silver thimble, the spools of thread, the heavy scissors. Right at the bottom, she found a document. ‘You have American papers,’ she said, holding something out to Estella.

  ‘What?’ Estella replied.

  ‘You have American papers,’ her mother repeated firmly.

  ‘How much did you pay for those? Nobody’s going to fall for false papers, not now.’

  ‘They’re genuine.’

  Estella rubbed her eyes. ‘How can I possibly have American papers?’

  The pause stretched out until Estella could a
lmost hear it fray and then snap as her mother said, ‘Your father was American. You were born there.’

  ‘My father was a French soldier,’ Estella insisted.

  ‘He wasn’t.’

  Silence dropped like heavy jute cloth over the room, making it hard to breathe. It was her mother’s turn to drain her glass.

  ‘I went to New York once,’ Jeanne finally said. ‘To have you. I never planned to tell you any of this but keeping you safe is the only thing that matters now.’

  Estella unfolded the papers and saw her name written inside. The papers supported, without question, her mother’s story. ‘But how?’

  Tears flooded her mother’s eyes with anguish. ‘It hurts too much to talk about.’

  ‘Maman!’ Estella cried, horrified at the sight of her mother in tears. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just trying to understand.’

  ‘Understanding isn’t important now. You must leave Paris. The embassy’s last special train departs tomorrow. I went to the embassy last week to make enquiries. Just in case. Then I wasn’t brave enough to tell you. I didn’t want to lose you. But now I have to.’

  ‘How can I leave you?’ Estella’s voice faltered, unable to imagine herself getting onto a train full of Americans, travelling through a country at war until she reached Bordeaux where she would get on a ship as an American citizen and travel to New York. Without Maman.

  ‘You can and you will.’

  Estella’s response was a sob.

  ‘Cherie,’ her mother whispered, wrapping her daughter in her arms and tucking Estella’s head into her chest. ‘Don’t cry. If you cry, then I will too. And I might never stop.’

  The desolation in her mother’s words undid Estella and she couldn’t make herself obey. Instead she sobbed as she’d never sobbed before, thinking of her mother alone in the atelier, alone in their apartment, alone in their bed. Thinking of the years unspooling before them both, without one another, never knowing when, or if, they might see each other again.

  ALSO BY NATASHA LESTER

  A sweeping story of love and courage from England to the Manhattan of the 1920s and 1940s

  A deliciously evocative love story of a small-town girl with big ambitions in 1920s New York

  Discover new books and authors every month

  Books with Heart is an online place to chat about the authors and the books that have captured your heart … and to find new ones to do the same.

  Join the conversation:

  Check out our website page and sign up to our newsletter to get updates on new and upcoming books.

  bookswithheart.com

  If you would like to find out more about Hachette Australia, our authors, upcoming events and new releases you can visit our website or our social media channels:

  hachette.com.au

  HachetteAustralia

  HachetteAus

  HachetteAus

  NATASHA LESTER worked as a marketing executive before returning to university to study creative writing. She completed a Master of Creative Arts as well as her first novel, What Is Left Over, After, which won the T.A.G. Hungerford Award for Fiction. Her second novel, If I Should Lose You, was published in 2012, followed by A Kiss from Mr Fitzgerald in 2016, Her Mother’s Secret in 2017 and the Top 10 Australian bestseller The Paris Seamstress in 2018.

  In her spare time Natasha loves to teach writing, is a sought after public speaker and can often be found playing dress-ups with her three children. She lives in Perth.

  For all the latest news from Natasha visit:

  natashalester.com.au

  @Natasha_Lester

  natashalesterauthor

  /NatashaLesterAuthor

  Copyright

  The quotations on pages 1 and 121 by David E. Scherman and Lee Miller reproduced with kind permission of Palazzo Editions Limited and © Lee Miller Archives, England 2018. All rights reserved.

  The quotation on page 335 by Audrey Withers / Vogue © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd.

  The quotations on pages 47 and 307 © The Face of War by Martha Gellhorn (Granta Publications, 1993). Reproduced with permission.

  The quotations on pages 237, 298 and 335 by Susan Sontag are reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

  The quotation on page 296 is from No Woman’s World by Iris Carpenter. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of materials reproduced in this book. If anyone has further information, please contact the publishers.

  Published in Australia and New Zealand in 2019

  by Hachette Australia

  (an imprint of Hachette Australia Pty Limited)

  Level 17, 207 Kent Street, Sydney NSW 2000

  www.hachette.com.au

  Copyright © Natasha Lester 2018, 2019

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be stored or reproduced by any process without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

  978 0 7336 4002 5

  978 0 7336 4003 2 (ebook edition)

  Cover design by Christabella Designs

  Cover photographs courtesy of Muna Nazak and Shutterstock

  Author photograph courtesy of Stef King/stefking.com.au