The Wild Rose (58 page)

“Should be quite a contest,” Devlin said, watching Sam and Katie disappear down the street. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, groaning a bit. “Arthritis,” he said, shaking his head. “Plays up a lot more now than it ever did before. Glad it’s the young ones fighting it, I must say.” He pushed his hat back on his head. “Wouldn’t miss it, though.”

Joe smiled. “Nor I, Dev,” he said. “Not for all the world.”

CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT

“Hold still, Oscar,” Willa said. “Just a few more and I’ll let you get up. I promise. The light’s so amazing right now and it won’t last much longer. The days are far too short in December. Look out the window, will you?”

Oscar Carlyle, a musician, crossed his hands over his trumpet, turned, and gazed out of the window.

“That’s it . . . perfect!” Willa said.

His eyes widened, just as Willa knew they would. A smile played upon his lips. The light from the sunset, streaming in through the giant windows of Willa’s west-facing atelier, did that to people. It captivated them. Enchanted them. It softened them, made them drop their guard, opened them up for a few seconds, just long enough for her to capture the breathless surprise, the sense of wonder, on their faces. Just long enough for her to snatch a tiny bit of their souls and affix it to film forever.

“The sun going down over Paris. What an incredible sight,” Oscar said, in his hard Brooklyn voice. “How do you get any work done here? I’d be staring out of the windows all day.”

“No talking!” Willa scolded. “You’ll ruin the picture.”

She took shot after shot, working as rapidly as she could in the last few minutes of light left to her. She wanted something magical out of this sitting, something extraordinary.

The sitting had been commissioned by
Life
magazine; they were doing a piece on Oscar, a young, avant-garde composer, and they wanted an equally avant-garde photographer to shoot him.

The war had ended a month ago, and the world was beginning to pick itself up and dust itself off. Already people were starting to clamor for news of something other than death, disease, and destruction. Some of Willa’s recent assignments had included portraits of the Irish writer James Joyce and of the fiery Spanish painter Pablo Picasso.

When
Life
’s editors heard that Oscar was traveling from his home in Rome to Paris to perform there, they immediately wrote Willa to schedule the sitting. She’d only been in Paris about two months—since early November—and already she’d made a name for herself.

After another thirty-odd frames, the sun dipped beneath the city’s rooftops; its last golden rays disappeared, and Willa put her camera down.

“That’s it,” she said. “We’re done.”

“Thank God,” Oscar said, standing up to stretch.

“I think I got some good shots. You have an amazing face. Sensitive and intense. It’s a photographer’s dream.”

Oscar smiled. “Well, let’s hope my pretty face can sell out a few music halls,” he said. “God knows my agent isn’t.”

“Have a seat on the divan,” Willa said. “Make yourself comfortable. I won’t be a moment.”

“The very last thing I want to do is sit down again,” Oscar said, walking over to a wall where various black-and-whites were tacked up. “I’d much rather look at your work. I’ve been wanting to nose around ever since I arrived.”

Willa lived and worked in what used to be a milliner’s atelier in Montparnasse, on Paris’s Left Bank. She’d just moved in a fortnight ago from the flat she’d had near the river. The atelier was at the top of a dingy, rundown building, but the space was much larger than her old flat, filled with light, and quite cheap.

“Suit yourself,” she said.

She carried her camera to her darkroom—a small alcove she’d made by hanging blankets around the atelier’s lone, cold-water sink—and carefully set it down on the counter. She would develop the film later, when she was alone. Next to the sink was a syringe, a length of rubber tubing she used as a tourniquet, and a vial of morphine. She would attend to those later, too. When Oscar was gone. When the film was developed. When she’d got back from haunting the late-night cafes with her friend Josie. When there was nothing else to do and nowhere to go and she was all alone with her ghosts and her grief.

A doctor had given her the morphine when she’d first arrived in Paris. She told him she needed it to control the pain in her damaged leg. It was true, sort of. The leg didn’t pain her so much anymore, but other things did. It was peacetime now, but there was no peace, not for her, and there never would be.

Willa took a half-empty wine bottle down off a shelf, tugged the cork out of it, and filled two glasses. “Cheers,” she said, as she reemerged from the darkroom. “Thank you for being such a wonderful subject.”

Oscar seemed not to hear her. He was walking around her flat, peering at the photographs on the wall. She walked up to him and handed him one of the glasses. “I came to your concert, by the way. The one you gave two nights ago at the Opera. I loved it,” she said. “What are you working on now?”

“A new symphony. A new musical language for a new world,” he said absently.

“Is that all?” Willa joked, sipping from her glass.

Oscar laughed. “I sound like a jerk, don’t I?” he said, turning to her. “Sorry, I was distracted. How could I not be? This is incredible,” he said, pointing at a silvery black-and-white nude.

Willa glanced at the shot. It was a self-portrait. She’d taken it about two weeks ago and had exhibited it, along with a few other photographs, at a local gallery. It had caused quite a stir. Titled
Odalisque,
it showed her sitting on her bed, without her artificial leg, completely bare, her body taut and scarred. She had not modestly turned her gaze away from the camera, but instead had stared into it nakedly and challengingly. It had been called “shockingly brazen” and “subversive” by the mainstream press, but other, more forward-thinking critics had called it “brilliantly symbolic,” “wrenching,” and “a modern, war-torn Odalisque for our modern, war-torn world.”

“Weren’t you afraid? To be so naked? So vulnerable?” Oscar asked her.

“No, I wasn’t,” Willa said. “What’s left to be afraid of? I’m scarred. Damaged. I’m missing pieces of myself. After the last four years, aren’t we all?”

Oscar smiled sadly. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, we are.”

He kept walking from one shot to the next. Some were framed. Some were simply pinned to the wall. More were fastened with clothes-pegs to a length of rope stretched from one end of the room to the other.

“I’ve never seen anything like these,” he said quietly.

“No,” Willa said. “Most people haven’t. Which is the whole point, I suppose.”

The shots Willa had taken were not pretty images of children and parks and bourgeois Parisians out for a Sunday stroll. They were photographs of prostitutes and pimps. Shots of armless and legless soldiers, begging on the streets. A drunk man lying in the gutter. A skinny, dirty girl singing for pennies outside of a restaurant. They were ugly, many of them, harsh, raw, and utterly compelling.

They showed the souls of a war-weary people, and they showed her own soul, for Willa poured everything inside her—her emotion, her passion, and her sorrow—into them. Her art was the only solace she had, the only thing that allowed her to express the inexpressible—the sadness and anger she felt at having survived the great war and its horrors, only to wish she hadn’t.

“There are so many,” Oscar said quietly. “You must never sleep.”

“No, not if I can help it,” Willa said. “I’m sitting down, even if you’re not. I’m knackered,” she added, flopping down on a cracked and torn leather divan.

Oscar sat down in a battered old armchair across from her, and Willa refilled their glasses.

“What happened to you? During the war, I mean,” he asked, giving her a searching look.

“I rode with Lawrence, in the desert. I photographed him and his men.”

“It sounds exciting.”

“It was.”

“What else happened? Something must have. These pictures . . .” His voice trailed off as his eyes lit on even more prints, stacked haphazardly on the table between them. “You must have experienced a very great sorrow to be able to so easily recognize it in others.”

Willa smiled sadly. She looked into her wineglass. “I lost the person I loved most in the whole world,” she said. “He was a naval captain. His boat was sunk in the Mediterranean.”

“I’m so sorry,” Oscar said, visibly moved.

Willa nodded. “So am I,” she said.

She remembered that day now, the day she’d learned Seamie was dead. She’d been in Lawrence’s camp, recovering from cholera. She’d been lying in her bed, eating some soup, when Fatima suddenly came into her tent, talking excitedly.

“Willa, you have a guest,” she said. “He’s tall and handsome and says that he knows you.”

Willa put her soup bowl down. Was it Seamie? she wondered. Could he have come back? Her heart began to race.

The flap to her tent opened again and her brother came inside. His face was tanned. He was wearing a uniform. He took off his hat and held it in his hands.

“Hello, Willa,” he said. “I’ve come to see you. And to bring you back to Haifa. To stay with me there. In a house. A rather nice one. If you’d like to come.”

“Albie?” Willa said. “My goodness, this is a surprise! I thought . . . I thought that—”

“You thought that I was Seamie,” he said, then quickly looked down at his hat.

“Yes, I did,” she said awkwardly. “But I’m very glad to see you, Albie. I really am. Sit down.”

Albie sat on the cushion next to her bed. He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “It’s good to see you, Wills. It’s been yonks, hasn’t it. I’ve heard all about your exploits,” he said. “How are you?”

“Much better. Getting stronger every day, in fact. My food and drink stay in me now. It doesn’t sound like much, but believe me, it’s a huge achievement.”

Albie laughed, but his eyes were sad. Willa knew her brother well. They hadn’t been on the best terms, hadn’t even seen each other for years now, but it didn’t matter—she knew him. And she knew when something was wrong.

“Albie, what is it?” she said.

“Oh, Willa,” he said. “I’m afraid I’ve got some very bad news.”

Willa grabbed his hand. “Is it Mother? It is, isn’t it? Albie, what’s happened to her?”

“It’s not Mother. I received a letter from her just last week. She’s fine.” Albie stopped speaking. Willa saw that his throat was working. “It’s Seamie,” he finally said.

Willa shook her head. “No. No, Albie. Please.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“When? How?” Willa asked.

“A few days ago. Off the coast of Cyprus. His ship was broadsided by a German U-boat. It burned and then sank. No survivors were found.”

Willa let out a long, trailing moan. She felt as if her heart was being ripped from her. He was gone. Seamie was gone. Forever. The pain of it was beyond bearing.

As she wept, she remembered what Seamie had said while he nursed her. She remembered how he’d asked Fatima to pray for Willa. She’d heard his voice in her fevered dreams then, and she heard it still—in her nightmares.

Talk to Him, Fatima. He listens to you. Tell Him if He wants a life, He can have mine. A life for a life. Mine, not hers. Tell Him, Fatima. Tell Him to let Willa live.

God had listened. And God had taken him.

“And you came here after the desert? Right to Paris?” Oscar said now, breaking in upon her sad memories.

“No,” Willa said, shaking her head. “I stayed with my brother for a few days. He was stationed in Haifa. Then I went home to England. I stayed with my mother in London, but London was gray and sad and full of ghosts. Everywhere I looked, someone was missing. That, too, only lasted a few days and then I came to Paris, where the ghosts all belong to other people, not me.”

She didn’t tell Oscar how unhappy her mother was that she’d gone to Paris, or that she’d sent Albie to fetch her after he’d arrived home from Haifa. He’d come to her flat, taken one look at her, and said, “Still trying to kill yourself, eh? Only this time it’s with a needle.” He’d returned to London without her.

Oscar picked up a print of an actress painting her face. Willa had shot it as the woman was looking into her dressing room mirror. Her hair was twisted up in pin curls. Her enormous breasts were nearly popping out of her black corset. Her expression, as she rubbed white greasepaint onto her skin, was searching and intense, as if she’d hoped the mirror might tell her who she was.

“Josephine Lavallier,
l’Ange de l’Amour,
” Oscar said.