The French Photographer by Natasha Lester

Author:Natasha Lester [LESTER, NATASHA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Australia
Published: 2019-03-26T04:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

At her favourite hotel in the Marais that night, D’Arcy opened her web browser and typed: Victorine Hallworth and Dan Hallworth.

Everything she expected to find came up. Their jobs, the World Media business, their distinguished reporting and management careers, nothing she didn’t already know and nothing proving that there was any kind of connection beyond the fact that Victorine worked for Dan.

Then she typed in the name Jessica May and again found what she expected to find: information about May’s shift from model to photographer, mentions of her work as a photojournalist in World War II, the iconic images she’d shot, her mysterious disappearance after the war.

It was only as she scrolled down further, to oblique references and articles that had no bearing on the Jessica May she was interested in, that she found one that caught her attention. It was a piece about women in journalism, and it put forward a theory that a writer reporting on the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, and who had been tipped to win a Pulitzer, was actually Jessica May using a male pseudonym. It was also the year, the article said, that Dan Hallworth won a Pulitzer. The author suggested that May had lost because somebody had found out she was a woman. In its final paragraph, she saw the words: The night of his Pulitzer win, Dan Hallworth established the Jessica May Foundation, designed to encourage women artists to pursue their calling despite the myriad obstacles.

Dan Hallworth had established the Jessica May Foundation? D’Arcy heard her surprised ‘Oh,’ echo through the room. She navigated to the Foundation’s website and read through the history of the fellowships. Yes, Dan Hallworth had indeed set up the Foundation in 1946 in honour of a woman I met in Europe who was lion-hearted. That short extract from the speech he gave on the night the Foundation was established made her shiver.

It forged yet another link between Dan Hallworth and Jessica May. But the missing link was still Victorine, D’Arcy’s mother.

She decided to tackle Dan Hallworth’s name alone next, something she’d been delaying out of fear, she knew, of what she might find. His bio details confirmed his war service, which made it seem even more likely that her mother’s boss and the man she was embracing in the famous photograph were one and the same.

The rest of the information was less relevant to her search, being only a long list of his newspaper holdings, estimates of his wealth, a précis of his family background, which included marriage to an Englishwoman named Amelia in 1945, a son from that marriage, and a subsequent divorce. She was about to give up when she found a very old and out of copyright biography of America’s newspapermen reproduced in full, with an entry on Dan Hallworth. She sat up straight and almost knocked over her coffee cup when she read the information it contained about his family background. It was different to everything else that had been published later. Two

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