The office always felt smaller when I returned from an assignment, the staffers’ and secretaries’ lives having shrunk a little while mine had expanded in a fog of Gauloises cigarettes and petite dogs and irate perfumers. How could they bear to sit there, day in, day out? Where was their sense of adventure? An egg sandwich, rather than the usual meat paste, was change enough for some, but not for me. I grew restless if I sat still for too long, and with Teddy at the desk beside me, it was perhaps inevitable that his outlook on life had started to rub off on me. While I did my best to forget about the war, Teddy preferred to talk about it. “The fact that we came home in one piece is a lesson,” he’d say, “that life should be absolutely and irreverently lived, not tolerated and—God forbid—secretly loathed.” Teddy had a knack for saying just the right thing to prick at my conscience.
“Morning, Jim.”
“Morning, Walsh.” I threw my jacket over the back of my chair and sat down to check my calendar of appointments. It was empty. “What mood is he in?” I asked, leaning around the desk to see George “Bulldog” Sanders prowling around his office.
“A bad one,” Walsh whispered, as Sanders opened his office door.
“Henderson!” he bellowed across the row of desks.
As I stood, I did a double take at Walsh, who still looked dreadful. It seemed the bad oysters had done a real number on him. He was noticeably thinner, dark circles ringed his eyes, and his hair had taken on a slightly greasy tinge. “You sure you should be here?” I asked. “You look bloody awful, and I mean that in the nicest way possible.”
“Henderson, now!” Sanders shouted again, his face going slightly purple.
Walsh shrugged and wished me good luck.
I walked, as casually as I could, into Sanders’s office. “Morning, boss.”
“What the hell happened to you?” he barked as I sat down in the chair opposite his, the teak desk narrow enough that he felt unpleasantly close. Within punching distance, certainly.
“Boss?”
“In Cannes?” The thing with Sanders was that you could never be sure if his question needed an answer, or needed you to shut up and let him keep talking. I guessed correctly. This was the latter type. “First you spectacularly miss the Kelly money shot of her arriving at the festival,” he continued, “and then you give me these?” He pushed the photographs of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier toward me. I was quite proud of them, pleased to have caught some of the more honest moments of informality between the posed shots: Miss Kelly fixing her hair, the prince adjusting his tie. “Whose bloody stupid idea was this?”
“The movie editor at Paris Match,” I explained. “A terribly French chap called Pierre Galante.” My exaggerated French accent as I pronounced his name was a misjudged attempt at humor. Sanders glowered, clearly not in the mood for facetiousness. “His wife is Olivia de Havilland. The actre—”
“I know who she is.”
“Of course you do. Anyway, apparently Galante and de Havilland set up the meeting between Kelly and the prince after meeting her on the train from Paris to Nice. The magazine wanted an angle for the film festival that would appeal in France, as well as abroad. America, more specifically. Make hay while the Hollywood sun was shining. That sort of thing.”
Sanders rubbed the back of his hand across his lips after he drained a mug of coffee. “Who the hell is this Prince Raymond, anyway? I didn’t know France had a prince.”
“Rainier,” I corrected, copying the pronunciation I’d heard in Monaco. Ran-yey. “He’s the Prince of Monaco, actually. It’s a principality. Like the Vatican City.” I picked up one of the photographs. “He was awkward as hell. According to the chap I traveled to the palace with, he’d never met an American woman before. I don’t think he had the faintest idea what to say to her.”
I thought about the American nurses I’d met during the war. If I’d had any sense, I’d have asked one of them to marry me and I’d be going home to a hot dinner and hotter kisses instead of warmed-up leftovers and dodgy heating. But life had blown me in a different direction.
Sanders wasn’t really listening. He flicked irritably through the photographs spread out across the desk. “Why is Kelly wearing her grandmother’s curtains? She looks a fright. Her hair’s a mess. Even I can tell that, and I’m a man.”
I lit a cigarette, offering Sanders one as an olive branch. He declined. I already knew the conversation wasn’t going to end well.
“The meeting with the prince was shoehorned into a tight schedule,” I explained. “There was some problem with a power outage at her hotel that morning. She couldn’t style her hair properly, or iron the dress she’d planned to wear. Something like that.”
Sanders waved me on, bored of Miss Kelly’s fashion dilemmas. “You seem to know an awful lot about her.”
“I’m a good listener.”
He laughed mockingly and stood up, his chair legs scraping against the floor, setting my teeth on edge. “You’re paid to be a good photographer, Jim, not a good listener.” He sighed and ran his hands through his hair. “And what about Kelly? Was she impressed by this prince?”
“I don’t think she could have cared less about him to be honest, boss. I got the distinct impression she’d have preferred to be back in Cannes with that French actor she’s friendly with. Aumont?”
“And, of course, you didn’t get any photographs of her with him?”
I shook my head.
Sanders leaned forward, pressing his palms against the desk. The smell of stale sweat from a shirt evidently in need of a wash made my eyes water.
“Jesus, Jim. I wanted red carpets and diamonds, gossip and Hollywood glamour, not this stuffy formal claptrap with a prince nobody’s ever heard of. They look like a pair of hostages let out on a day trip to the park.” He shoved the photographs roughly back across the desk toward me. “I’m sorry, Jim. You’re not a bad chap, or a bad photographer come to that, but I honestly don’t know what’s wrong with you lately. Whatever it is, it isn’t helping me sell bloody newspapers!” He sighed and slumped into his chair. I knew what was coming. “I’ll pay you to the end of the week.”
I took a long drag on my cigarette. “So, that’s it?”
He nodded. “That’s it.”
The phone rang. He made a shooing gesture as he picked up the receiver.
That was it, then. Even Grace Kelly and a prince couldn’t save me this time.
I skulked back to my desk and flopped down into my chair.
“Well?” Walsh leaned back in his chair, pencil behind his ear, talent and ambition oozing out of his well-constructed genes.
I made a slicing gesture across my throat. “I’m done.”
“Really?” He glanced toward Sanders’s office. “What did he say?”
“That my photographs of Kelly and the prince looked like a hostage crisis.”
I could tell Walsh wanted to laugh, but he was diplomatic enough to save it for the pub after.
“I’m sorry,” he offered.
“So am I.” Ten years brought to a screeching halt. Just like that.