Jenny didn't have a chance to ask to be replaced. Instead, the enraged PRO from Naples, the one who had told her to make sure she wasn't responsible for any shit landing on him, arrived at the hospital in a furious spray of mud, telling her she had completely disregarded his directives when she waltzed onto a battlefield.
"It was a little tricky to think about you while I was in a ditch being shot at," she retaliated angrily, sounding more like her old self than she had for the past two days.
Somehow, word had spread, quicker than lice in a foxhole, that there had been a woman at the Italian front, which was a violation of the terms of her accreditation and was also, apparently, a crime worse than slaughter. She was put on a plane in Naples and sent back to London. She thought she wanted to get out of the hell that seemed to have temporarily left the underworld and landed on a mountain in Italy, but the way she'd been yelled at and ordered away had made her seethe and she refused to give anyone the satisfaction of telling them that she didn't want to be in Monte Cassino anyway.
She was collected at the airfield by Warren Moore much to her dismay. He did at least have the good grace to admit that a mistake had been made.
"Exactly," Jenny said, relieved that at least now he seemed to understand she hadn't purposely gone out looking to photograph a firefight. "I was told I'd find a hospital there, which is what I was supposed to be writing about, not a battle."
Warren gave her a tight-lipped smile. "I can get you a more suitable assignment," he said. "I'd like the women to focus on women's interests, for the women's pages. I have no idea why they sent you to Italy. Like I said, now that I'm looking after you, it won't happen again."
Somehow Jenny didn't quite like the wolfish expression behind his words. "I was sent to Italy because I asked to go to Italy," she said quietly, while her mind processed both what he had said and the way he had said it, as if he were her protector, ready to guide her, with his sharp white teeth, toward the things seemingly for a woman, rather than the unladylike.
"But now that you've seen Italy, you'll know you made a mistake," Warren said confidently.
Jenny hated to admit the experience in Monte Cassino had shaken her. But to tell him, with all his condescension, that yes, she couldn't face all that again and would rather report on something frivolous she found herself unable to do. Instead, with her pride still intact, she said, "I wouldn't have been sent back to England if I was a man who had been driven to a battlefield would I? So, it's not just that I took photographs that were beyond the scope of my orders to report on the hospital, is it?"
"Women are not permitted in combat zones. I told you that before, Miss Snow. But I can get you plenty of other assignments," Moore said in an annoyingly cajoling voice. He reached over and touched her lightly on the arm, giving her a smile which suggested he was used to having some kind of potent effect on women when he flashed his teeth.
Jenny realized that, as well as wanting to relegate her to the kind of reporting she could just as easily do for Vogue back in America, he was flirting with her. And doing it with such assurance, as if he really thought she would bat her eyelashes at him, be grateful that he had rescued her and be only too happy to let him take her out to dinner, so long as the restaurant wasn't on the same land area as the war that was forbidden to her by that same femaleness he claimed he wanted to protect.
"So, you think I should limit myself to victory gardens and cosmetics?"
"Maybe just cosmetics," he said, taking his eyes off the road, raking them over her face and then her body and grinning at her as if she'd appreciate the joke. "I believe that's your area of expertise."
He knew who she was then. Jenny gritted her teeth. "I'm here because I possess other kinds of expertise as well."
"That sounds like something we could talk about over a drink," Warren suggested.
And there it was. "I just want to do my job," Jenny said formally, as if it wasn't a personal rejection; it wasn't a good idea to get the PRO offside although she had no idea if she still had work, if she even wanted to do the work or if this uncomfortable meeting in a car was the end of it all.
"Women don't belong in the European theater." His voice was harder now and his eyes carried a warning: she should back off and accept his interest, his veiled offer of, not a date, but an assignation.
She imagined that the women he allowed into the cosmetic arena of the European theater must fall for his smile and his offers. Or at least pretend to do so in order to keep the peace. But she had never been very good at pretending. The jeep pulled to a stop outside the Dorchester Hotel.
"Why not?" She wished she could just walk away, certain his answer wouldn't make her feel any better.
"Well," he said with a lascivious leer, "there's the touchy business of the latrine. Where would you use the...?"
Jenny's loud groan silenced him and she opened the car door. She got out and slammed it then leaned down to peer at him through the open window. "Don't!" she said firmly, unable to even pretend to listen to him anymore. "There are men losing their limbs and their lives over there and all you can worry about is where a woman might empty her bladder! Don't you dare talk to me about fucking latrines!"
She could tell her language and her total refusal to be cowed had startled him. Jenny turned on her heel to stalk off towards the hotel entrance but as she did, she could hear Warren's voice shouting out behind her.
"You're confined to your room, Miss Snow, until the penalty for disobeying your orders is decided by the Public Relations Office!"
***
Jailed.
She was, she realized over the next week, effectively jailed. She had been given a chance to scramble out of this mess, to go back to New York, or to write filler pieces about frivolities but instead she had antagonized someone she would have to work with, if she stayed. That was a big if.
For days she stared out the window at London, a dismal, bombed-up mess of rubble and dismembered buildings. How is the world ever to be put back together again? London felt trapped in an eternal night; no sooner had the sun struggled to rise and it was dark by four in the afternoon, a darkness unrelieved by blackout conditions.
At her window, she watched as two little girls dressed in homemade nurse's uniforms buried their dolls in the crumbling brick and concrete remains of a house and then dig them out, put them in prams and administer to their wounds. They were playing at war, as if it were a game, as if it were the only reality they knew how to mimic. What happened to children who had been born while the fighting was on, who didn't understand that it wasn't always like this? That it wasn't normal for bombs to fall from the sky? Children who believed that streets were comprised of both intact buildings and desecrated ones? Children who had never seen a night lit up with electricity?
Jenny sat at her chair before her desk, pen poised over paper, thinking to write down her thoughts and then perhaps type them up when she was able to replace her typewriter that had been blown up in the jeep. But Warren Moore's obvious belief that women should only write about decoration made her both unable to write and unwilling to prove his theory that women and war didn't mix.
A knock at the door roused her and she opened it to find a member of the hotel staff with a telegram for her.
Sorry darling, she read, none of your photographs made it through, not even the ones at the hospital. The War Department censored them all. What can I say, better luck next time? Viv xx
Next time. Was there even going to be a next time?
Jenny crumpled the telegram in her hand, feeling as if her heart was crumpling with it. It had all been for nothing. Worse than nothing; her one attempt at getting a story had resulted in her being confined to a hotel room, waiting to be fired. She hurled the telegram at the wall, then stormed over to the dressing table and stared at herself in the mirror.
You are not a coward, she told herself. So what if she wasn't talented enough to take the photos she saw in her head? It was her job to make herself that talented. Nobody else would take those pictures. A male photojournalist would never think nurses worthy of any interest besides the prurient. And of course the War Department wouldn't let Vivian have Jenny's pictures because then everyone would know that a woman had been in a combat zone and that, apparently, was the real problem. Not the death and dying and undocumented bravery of that small tent full of women in Monte Cassino.
Jenny return to her window, watching the girls outside wrapping lengths of white fabric around their doll's heads, their faces serious, adult. Her mind was in a whirl. The photos she had taken in Italy, the photos she should keep taking if only she stayed on, were not like other journalists' pictures from Europe: soldiers in trenches with guns, pictures declaring that war was about men and battles and bullets. Her pictures from Italy would have been clarifications. Miniaturized explanations that these were the consequences of that war. Jenny slowly picked up the Rollei, pressed it to the glass and captured on film exactly what child's play had now become.
It was at that moment Jenny decided she had to go back to Italy. She would put her case to the public relations office. Because she had to go back.
A knock at the door had her putting her camera down. When she opened it, she cried out in surprise.
"Martha!"
"I thought you might could use these," Martha Gellhorn marched into Jenny's apartment. In her arms was a large bottle of whiskey, and a new Hermes baby typewriter. "I heard what happened." She put the typewriter down with a huff and settled into a chair pouring out two whiskeys, glasses full to the brim. "Cheers. Here's to breaking the rules."
"You mean this has happened to you too?" Jenny took the whiskey and propped herself up on the bed. To look at Martha, legs crossed louchely, glass held casually her fingertips, one would never think it.
"I'm thirty-five years old and I've covered four theaters of war, darling," she replied. "Yet all I'm allowed to do is sit on the sidelines. I spent the week at bomber command, but nobody will take me up in a plane. I watched two male correspondents go up though." Martha took a long sip of whiskey. "I was at a press conference while you were in Italy and I asked, as I always do, if I could get a posting to a press camp. They're right near the front. The delightful Warren Moore leered at me like I was a piece of meat and said, 'The last time I checked, Martha, you were a woman.' and every single person in that goddamn room laughed as if it was the funniest thing they had ever heard."
"And you didn't think to tell me any of this when you were so busy convincing Viv to send me here?" Jenny asked. "What will they do to me? I don't want to go back to New York."
"Depends if someone speaks up for you and says what really happened," Martha said sagely, clearly the veteran of many a battle with the rules and those enforcing them.
Jenny shook her head and reached for her glass of whiskey. "Nobody will do that. It was my first day. There's nobody..." She paused, thinking of a pair of serious dark eyes and large, capable hands steadying her. She shook her head dismissing thoughts of the captain. He had his own shit to deal with. "There was nobody."
"Maybe they'll let you off for naivete," Martha suggested. "Don't be afraid to wear skirts; beg, borrow or steal a pair of silk stockings, cross your legs and bat your eyelashes. You can soap off your principles later."
Jenny stood up, a little unsteadily. The large glass of whiskey has found its way into her bloodstream quickly. She made her way over to the typewriter Martha had brought her and gently stroked the top of it. "Do you ever get scared?" she asked, her voice low.
Martha lit a cigarette and offered one to Jenny along with a smile. "Do you remember that piece I wrote years ago about the hospital in Barcelona?"
Jenny thought for a moment, then she nodded, accepting the cigarette while Martha lit it for her. She remembered Martha had written a piece about seeing a ward full of injured children, one boy sobbing for his mother. She'd been asked if she wanted to see the medical ward and in her article she had written: "Well, no. But I did anyway." Martha had wanted to run away too.
Jenny looked up and caught the same look in Martha's eyes that she could feel at the back of her own. Trepidation, which was, she supposed, somewhat different to fear or cowardice.
"It just means you're human," Martha said gently. "Not that you're incapable of doing your job. Channel it into your pictures. And your words."
It was good advice. Before she could say so, before they could both get caught any further in the sticky emotions of war, Martha turned the conversation. "Here's something to make you smile. I heard that Warren Moore didn't get the promotion he's been hankering after. Which maybe means there's going to be some more good news for you."
Jenny's eyebrows went up in surprise, but before she could respond to that, there was another knock at the door. Jenny went to open it and her heart sank at a sight of the tall officer in dress uniform, his cap held under his arm. "Have you come to escort me to my doom?" she asked, dejected.
The officer shook his head. "You don't remember me, do you?"
Jenny studied his face. There was something familiar about him. Those eyes, those soft, sensitive lips...and a pair of large, very prominent ears.
"Shit, it's you," she said when she realized it was the captain from the foxhole in Italy. Captain Jack Delaney. Then she winced. "Forgive me."
"I seem to remember that my language in the ditch was probably more colorful than it should have been. So, I'd say we're even," he said, with that now familiar flicker of a smile.
"I didn't recognize you without all the mud," Jenny said grimly. Now, in the light and without rain, she could see that his hair was actually dark even minus the dirt. His eyes were the same soft, light golden brown she remembered, his gaze intense and direct, meeting hers with no trepidation and his face was serious. Her heart sank. "I really am doomed if they brought you into bear witness."
"Actually, I did come to bear witness." His mouth turned up a little more and she felt herself stiffen at the thought that he would enjoy ruining her career as a correspondent before it even began.
"And?" She asked despairingly. She felt Martha step up behind her.
"And I told them it wasn't your fault. That you had no choice but to be there because the US Army brought you there. I told them that you put no one in danger and that you got out the minute you could."
"You did?" Jenny's eyes were wide with surprise and she wrapped both her hands around the now empty glass of whiskey to stop from flinging herself into the arms of Jack Delaney. She was frozen to the spot in shock. "What did they say?"
"That you should keep out of trouble in future. But," he added, looking at Martha, "I can see that's probably not going to happen. How are you, Gellhorn?"
"I'm damned fine, Captain...no Major Delaney. Look at that," she said, reaching out to finger the golden oak leaf insignia on his uniform. "You outrank me now."
He smiled at Martha. "I should have known you two would join forces. You even look like sisters."
Martha touched her hair, which was short and blonde like Jenny's, but much curlier. "If I was ten years younger, perhaps."
"Do you know everyone?" Jenny asked, turning to Martha in surprise.
"Just the ones worth knowing." Martha winked at Major Delaney. "I met Jack in Italy a few months back. He took the time to explain to me how fast our men are dying around Cassino."
"Nothing's changed," he said, then looked at Jenny. "You're allowed back to Italy. I think your PRO is coming to tell you. But I know from Gellhorn that you ladies don't get a jeep, so I thought I'd pick you up here at 0700 on Tuesday. We'll be back in Purple Heart Valley by the end of the week."
Jack turned to go.
"Purple Heart Valley?" Jenny asked, stopping him.
"They've given out more Purple Hearts in Italy than ever before," Jack said, turning to look at her with a wry twist of his lips that might have been a smile if the subject hadn't been so sobering.
"It's a beautiful name for a terrible place," Jenny observed, her voice soft as her eyes dropped from Jack's face to his newly won gold oak leaf insignia.
Before Jack could reply, Jenny saw Warren Moore striding down the hallway toward her room.
"I guess I better leave you to it," Jack said replacing his cap on his head.
"Thank you, Major Delaney," Jenny called to his departing back.
"Officer Moore," Martha drawled, blowing her cigarette smoke directly into Warren's face. "Always such a pleasure."
Warren blinked rapidly at the onslaught of cigarette smoke. "Cut the shit, Martha," he said irritably.
"I bet if I was in a nurse's uniform you'd be a lot friendlier," Martha replied, raising an eyebrow.
Jenny drew strength from Martha's lack of fear. "So, I'm off to Italy again?"
Warren grimaced. "Apparently you are. And I've been given the job of keeping you in line. So, if you do as you're told this time, then I won't have to take the blame for your mistakes again."
Something in his tone, a mortification when he said the words "take the blame" made her wonder if Martha had been right. If there was some link between him not getting his promotion and her victory. She tried for appeasement; perhaps they could start again.
"Officer Moore, it was never my intention to go to a battlefield..."
"But then you did photograph it and send those photos to the censors for everyone to see," he interrupted her accusingly. This time his voice was hard, and Jenny sensed there was definitely something more going on. He had decided that she was the one at fault and that whatever had made him angry, he was channeling it into resentment toward her.
It would be best, she knew, to end the conversation before things deteriorated even further. "I promise to avoid all battlefields from now on," she said before she shut the door. "What an ass," she said to Martha after she had heard his footsteps fade away.
"I think you're being kind, Jenny. Like I said, he's been after a promotion. When you met him, did he spin you a line about being able to get you whatever assignments you wanted? And did he ask you out to dinner?"
Jenny nodded.
"He did the same to me and I, like you, was keen enough to be wary. He can't action press assignments; he can only administer them. With a promotion, he'd be able to do more. But thankfully he hasn't got it and I suspect it might be because Jack Delaney, a CO who has seen more than enough battles and actually knows what the hell he's talking about, as opposed to Warren who's never seen a battle, has come here and told them that they were wrong you were right." Martha smirked as if she relished the chance to see fireworks erupt between Jenny and Warren. "Sounds like not only did Warren not get his promotion, but his punishment is to look after you. He hates the idea of women doing this job. Apparently, it goes against nature, unless the women also agree to sleep with him."
"I'm not sure knowing that I am Warren Moore's punishment makes me feel any better," Jenny replied frankly, her thoughts straying to the handsome, stoic Major Delaney who had taken the trouble to come to her defense. In spite of the awkward position in which she now found herself with regards to Officer Moore, she couldn't help but smile at the little flicker of amusement she had seen in the warm, dark depths of the major's eyes.
As if she could read Jenny's thoughts, Martha went on. "Getting a CO like Jack on your side is exactly what you need. Some people call it an unfair advantage. I said that if you're lucky enough to find one of the few men in the US Army who couldn't care less if you were a woman or a flamingo...and they do exist; the French are much less concerned about women at the front...then use it against the PRO. Besides," Martha added, "he's very easy on the eyes."
"Easy on the eyes!" Jenny exploded. "I think being a first-rate ass precludes anyone from being attractive."
Martha clicked her tongue impatiently. "Not Warren, you goose! Your Major Delaney! And we all need a little love, or bodily comfort, in the midst of war."
Bodily comfort. It was what she had craved that first night in Italy. But Jennifer Snow could stand on her own two feet; witnessing the horrors of war had broken her hard enough without needing to involve herself with a man again. She shook her head firmly.
"He's not my Major Delaney. He's just proven himself a friend. And I'm going to need a few of those if I want to last more than a month over here."