What Will Survive

by Joan Smith

  The editor raised his eyebrows. ‘Not even the Mail? Their chequebook is usually big enough.’

  ‘Not this time,’ Simon confirmed. ‘They’ve talked to some woman who used to clean for her, but it’s hardly riveting. Frankly, whatever people want to know about Aisha Lincoln, it’s not which brand of toilet cleaner she used.’

  There was general laughter, relieving the tension. Then the editor leaned towards Amanda. ‘Come on, Mandy, you’ve met the husband. That must give us an edge.’

  ‘I don’t exactly know him. I spent a day at her house and I liked her. I spoke to him for maybe five minutes.’

  ‘Surely he’ll want to talk to someone?’ It was Sita again. ‘People say it helps when someone dies, talking to a stranger. I could run it across two pages in his own words. You know — as told to Amanda Harrison.’ She glanced in Amanda’s direction. ‘You’d just have to edit it a bit.’

  ‘Come on, it’s a review front,’ someone else protested. ‘We could trail it on the skyline.’

  ‘We haven’t even got an interview yet,’ Amanda protested.

  The editor sounded triumphant. ‘Exactly, so how do you propose to get one? Shouldn’t you get yourself down there to Dorset or wherever?’

  ‘Somerset.’ She hesitated, glancing across at Simon. ‘I’ll go if you really want me to, but did you see the scrum on TV last night? I was thinking of writing him a note and getting a messenger to deliver it. Saying how sorry I am about Aisha, and he can do an interview in his own time.’

  ‘Christ, Amanda, this is a newspaper, not a counselling service.’ The editor looked at her as though she had gone mad.

  ‘Hang on,’ Simon said unexpectedly. ‘She has a point. I mean, the mob-handed tactic isn’t working, is it? Tim Lincoln seems to be holed up in his house not speaking to anyone. So if Amanda tries the softly-softly approach—’

  The editor’s eyes widened in astonishment. ‘What is this, an outbreak of truth, decency and fair play? We’re journos, for God’s sake. We — you — are paid to get stories.’

  Amanda and Simon exchanged looks, but the editor was already moving on to another victim.

  ‘Mark, you still here? What are you waiting for? Find out what’s happened to those pix. Find out who owns them. Amanda, you talk to — I don’t care who you talk to. Check the cuts, find out who her friends are. Get to the husband fast, before anyone else does. It may have escaped your attention, everybody, but I have a paper to get out.’

  Mark went first and Amanda followed, carefully avoiding catching anyone’s eye. She was at the door when the political editor excused himself and came after her, closing it quietly behind him.

  ‘Don’t take it personally.’

  Amanda rolled her eyes.

  Sabri Yusuf said, ‘He’s like that to everyone.’

  ‘Is he? I’ve never been to conference before.’

  ‘Listen, I don’t know if this is any help but I ran into her, Aisha Lincoln, at the House not long ago. She was having lunch with a couple of MPs — Stephen Massinger and that guy who’s been on the Foreign Affairs Committee for years. Jack — God, what’s his second name?’

  Amanda shook her head.

  ‘Porter, that’s it. He made a big thing of introducing us — he’s a decent bloke, but tactless.’ Sabri grinned. ‘Makes a point of being nice to brown faces. He might be worth a call.’

  ‘Thanks, Sabri.’

  The door opened and the features editor peered out. ‘Sabri?’

  ‘Gotta go.’ Sabri winked as they both heard the editor’s voice issuing loud instructions for a feature on the history of celebrities and good works. ‘Fancy a drink some time?’

  ‘Oh — sure. I mean, that’d be great.’

  ‘I’ll call you.’

  ‘Have you got my mobile number?’

  ‘I’ll get it from the newsdesk.’

  The editor’s voice was relentless: ‘Get Bono, Sting—’

  ‘Isn’t he rain forests?’

  ‘Whales?’

  ‘And tantric sex.’

  There were whoops of laughter from inside the office.

  ‘All right, Bob Geldof. Vivienne, can you help us here? Christ, Sabri, get in here. I want you to talk to the minister for what’s-it-called, overseas aid.’

  ‘International development,’ he said patiently, closing the door behind him.

  ‘Amanda?’

  The literary editor was signalling to her from the centre of the newsroom. ‘You’re very popular,’ Karen said accusingly, ‘I’ve been taking messages all morning.’

  ‘Sorry, Karen.’ When she was in the office, Amanda shared a desk with Karen’s assistant on the book pages, who came in two days a week.

  Karen held out a collection of bright pink squares, stuck together at odd angles. ‘That radio show with the rude woman — they want you on this afternoon. Something you wrote on Saturday?’

  Amanda was easing the notes apart. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Tim Lincoln called?’

  ‘If that’s what it says. I’m writing up my interview with Joanna Trollope.’

  Amanda glanced at her watch. ‘You don’t happen to remember when?’

  Karen was staring at her computer screen. ‘I’ve got to have this finished in half an hour.’

  ‘And I was stuck in that bloody meeting!’ Amanda pulled out a chair, pushed aside a stack of proof copies of forthcoming books and began dialling Tim Lincoln’s number.

  Fabrizio Terzano 1946–1997 Award-winning photographer who found solace in landscape after brush with death in Afghanistan

  Fabrizio Terzano, the Italian photographer whose unexpected death at the age of fifty-one was announced earlier this week, was one of those rare photojournalists who decided to stop working in war zones — an unusual career move that makes his death in a landmine accident in South Lebanon all the more poignant. His most famous photographs were taken in Beirut during that country’s lengthy civil war, when a picture of a young girl trying to cross the Green Line that divided the warring factions won several international prizes, notably the prestigious Prix Lafontaine in France. That picture introduced him to a new, English-speaking audience when it appeared on the front cover of Newsweek, after a long period in which his work, though much admired by his contemporaries, appeared mostly in Italian, French and German publications. It also created a paradox for Terzano, in that he was subsequently best known for an image he considered uncharacteristic of his photojournalism.

  Terzano had not visited Lebanon since the end of the war in 1990, and colleagues speculate that he may have failed to realise that the south of the country is still heavily mined. He was killed instantly when the car in which he was travelling hit a landmine in rough terrain just to the north of the area occupied by the Israelis. With him in the vehicle was the British ex-model, Aisha Lincoln, who survived the blast but died later in hospital in Beirut (see obituary in yesterday’s later editions). Their driver, a Syrian national, is being treated for his injuries in the same hospital. The deaths have led to renewed calls for a ban on landmines.

  Fabrizio Terzano was born just after the end of the Second World War in Naples, the seventh of eight children. His father was an agricultural worker who brought his family to the war-ravaged city in search of work; the family was devout, two of his brothers eventually becoming priests and his youngest sister a nun. Fabrizio Terzano’s interest in photography was sparked by an American army captain, who befriended another sister and left behind a broken Leica camera when he returned to the US.

  Film was hard to come by but the boy’s obsession with the camera impressed one of his science teachers. The teacher, Signor Varda, helped the young Terzano repair it and loaned him a precious book of black-and-white photographs — by the American Surrealist and Dadaist Man Ray, according to one version of the story, or by the French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson in another. Cartier-Bresson, who founded the Magnum picture agency, seems the more likely influence, esp
ecially as he famously taught himself to take pictures as a boy with a Box Brownie.

  Terzano was a bright child but his family was too poor for him to complete his education. After leaving school he spent some time in the countryside, working as a labourer like his father, before joining the Italian army. His photographic talent was recognised and after some training, which he later looked back on with gratitude — ‘The army turned an amateur obsession into a profession,’ he once observed — Terzano was given the job of taking pictures of Italian troops in the years when the army was doing its best to shake of associations with fascism. He carried out several assignments in the Middle East, learning Arabic — he had an affinity for languages — and developing an interest in the region which would draw him back during his second career as a photojournalist.

  On leaving the army in 1971, Terzano immediately began working for a Milan-based picture agency. His career from that time on reads like a roll call of twentieth century conflicts, including the war on the Indian subcontinent which led to the founding of Bangladesh and several small wars in Africa, as well as the protracted Lebanese conflict. More than once, Terzano’s military bearing and smartly-pressed clothes — habits he picked up in the army and couldn’t shake off, he told colleagues — got him into trouble with military commanders who suspected him of being a spy. But Terzano was not known for taking unnecessary risks and the photographer was usually able to talk himself out of trouble, even in the highly-charged atmosphere of Beirut at the height of the civil war.

  The turning point in Terzano’s life came in 1991, when he was taking pictures of the mujahidin freedom fighters — some prefer to call them warlords — who had driven the Russians out of Afghanistan. Terzano, a reserved man who often worked alone, was asked for help by a young American reporter, Frank Lomas, on his first assignment in the region. Terzano had become friends with Lomas in Kabul and agreed to work with the American, who had heard rumours that the Afghan mujahidin were secretly receiving assistance and training from wealthy backers in Saudi Arabia. The two men travelled together to an area near the border with Pakistan, where a local mujahidin commander became suspicious and held them prisoner for several days.

  Although Terzano was always reluctant to talk about what happened next, it appears that the two men quarrelled when they were released — fatally, as it happens, for when they did not immediately set out for the capital they walked into an ambush. Lomas was seriously wounded, dying in Terzano’s arms after the photographer, who had himself been shot during the ambush, managed to carry his colleague under cover of night to a nearby village. Although Lomas’s pregnant American wife publicly thanked Terzano for his efforts on her husbands behalf, journalists who had worked with him said he never fully shook of his sense of guilt — made worse, some of them believed, by his intensely Catholic upbringing.

  After making a full recovery, Terzano returned to the Indian subcontinent and spent nine months travelling in some of its remotest areas. When he returned to Madrid, the city he had made his base four or five years previously, he surprised former colleagues with an exhibition of photographs quite unlike his earlier work — collages of landscapes and architectural features notable for their lush colours and a sensibility some critics described, not always favourably, as intensely romantic. The work was an instant success, with ‘Doors’ (below) becoming a hugely popular poster, while other collages from this period are still being used in an advertising campaign by the Indian Tourist Board.

  Last year, Terzano collaborated with British Vogue, producing a striking series of portraits of Lincoln which were later sold to raise money for charity as limited-edition prints. The photographer and the model, who had set up her own foundation to raise money for projects in developing countries, had not previously worked together but were so pleased with the results that they agreed to collaborate on the book project which took them to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

  While Terzano’s dramatic change of direction introduced his work to a new and arguably bigger audience, it seems likely that he will be remembered for his eidetic war photographs. Unlike some of his colleagues, Terzano never forgot that his subjects were real people, and his pictures rarely attracted accusations of voyeurism.

  On the contrary, some critics have argued that they reveal a compassion and empathy that were an essential part of his character but which he found hard to show in real life.

  Fabrizio Terzano never married and is survived by his mother, Letizia, and six of his siblings. Candace Brett and Rob Bentley

  Candace Brett teaches photojournalism at the University of South Tyneside

  ‘I heard your car. Come in.’ Tim Lincoln gazed round the hall as if unsure where he was, opened a door to his left and swore when he saw that the room was in darkness. ‘Christ. Who did this?’

  Amanda waited in the doorway while he folded back white-painted wooden shutters on two sets of windows which looked out on to the front garden of Cranbrook Lawns. Sunlight streamed into the room, dispelling some of the gloom she had sensed when she got out of her car and looked across at the blank facade of the house. A big squashy sofa and armchairs were grouped around a stone fireplace at the far end of the room, along with a modest TV and VCR whose wires snaked untidily across the floor. There were unwashed plates in the hearth, discarded newspapers on the sofa and a florist’s bouquet of dyed carnations stuffed into a vase on the mantelpiece. Another container, left on a windowsill as if someone had started to take it elsewhere and been interrupted, was full of wilting flowers — stargazer lilies, love-lies-bleeding, feathery dill — and Amanda caught a whif of rotting foliage as she passed.

  ‘Sit, sit. Aisha wouldn’t expect us to stumble around in the dark.’ Tim was still going on about the shutters.

  Amanda moved the newspapers aside, and a men’s magazine with two half-naked women embracing on the cover slipped to the floor. She recognised it as one Patrick used to leave around their flat, as if challenging her to object.

  Tim frowned. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Just a magazine.’ Amanda sat down in the space she’d cleared on the big yellow sofa, pushing it to one side with her foot.

  Tim sat in one of the matching chairs and stared at her. For a moment, she wondered whether she should have put on more formal clothes instead of the white jeans and dark T-shirt she’d chosen for the long drive. Then he said, ‘You look different.’

  ‘Do I? Oh, I’ve had my hair cut.’ Relieved, she reached inside her bag and took out her notebook and a tape recorder. ‘Mind if I use this?’

  He waved the question away. ‘Coffee or something?’

  She propped the recorder on the sofa. ‘No thanks, I’m fine.’

  Tim looked dreadful. Amanda could see from his bloodshot eyes that he hadn’t had much sleep but he was also unshaven, with tufts of hair sticking out from his scalp. His shirt was creased and there was dried mud on his trousers, and her mind jumped ahead to the photographer who was coming to the house later that afternoon. Tim hadn’t seemed to care whether he was photographed, when Amanda mentioned it on the phone, and she tried to think of a tactful way of suggesting he should smarten himself up.

  ‘Staring at the wreckage?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your face is as good as looking in a mirror. Sorry, but there’s not much I can do. I haven’t slept much — no appetite either. Iris brought some stuff over — Iris Benjamin, Aisha’s friend. Ricky’s been sticking it in the microwave.’ He touched a dinner plate with his foot. ‘Don’t know why he’s been eating in here — to get away from me, maybe. Is it too bright for you?’

  ‘No, but could you open a window?’ The room was stuffy and the smell of stale food and decaying flowers was making Amanda feel slightly sick.

  ‘Oh. Yes. Course.’ Tim got up and fumbled with the catch of the nearest window. ‘I haven’t been in here for days — been on the phone most of the morning. The Foreign Office is still being secretive about anything to do with the body. Not just the body — you’d
think it involved national bloody security.’

  Amanda grimaced, glad Tim was facing away from her, but there was at least a welcome draught of fresh air. She looked down at her notebook, where she had made several pages of notes the night before while speaking to Ingrid Hansson in Beirut. Tim had offered an interview in return for Amanda passing on anything she could learn about the accident, and at that point she hadn’t known the dreadful details: that while Aisha initially looked in better shape to the paramedics than the driver, with fewer external injuries and not much loss of blood, appearances were misleading. Her only immediately visible wounds were on her cheek, which had been cut by flying glass, and a gash on one of her hands, but internally she had suffered ‘serious haemorrhagic shock’, a term Ingrid had had to spell and explain for Amanda. The blast had ripped the pulmonary artery from Aisha’s heart, causing her chest to fill up slowly with blood, after which she suffered a series of heart attacks; the paramedics struggled to stabilise her but her condition was critical when the helicopter delivered her to the hospital in Beirut. Worse, she had probably been semi-conscious after the blast, although Ingrid doubted whether she would have understood what was happening to her. Fabio, Ingrid said baldly, was obviously dead at the scene and Amanda hadn’t pressed her for details of his injuries.

  Tim had resumed his seat and now he said wearily: ‘So tell me the worst.’ Amanda started to speak, then stopped. She felt unreal, sitting in this barn-like room with Tim Lincoln while Aisha lay in a morgue thousands of miles away. It was almost exactly a year since she’d been here before and on that occasion it was Aisha who came to the front door, wearing a summer dress and the prettiest shoes Amanda had seen in ages, to welcome her into a house that seemed to be filled with warmth and the scent of roses. They had done most of the interview in Aisha’s office, a comfortable room at the top of the house where the walls were covered with photographs: Aisha’s sons, smiling women in Africa and Asia, and a handful of pictures — one of them showed Aisha with Jean Paul Gaultier, Amanda remembered — taken at fashion shows. There had also been a framed black-and-white photograph of a striking dark-haired woman, posing on a chaise longue in the kind of suit often worn by Jackie Kennedy, who was almost certainly Aisha’s mother. Amanda had been about to ask when Aisha looked at her watch and excused herself to make a couple of phone calls before lunch.