The shoot took place in a bombed-out mansion in the East End. The blast had torn the facade clean off the building, so it now resembled a giant ruined dolls’ house. Piles of rubble and rubbish covered the grounds while, upstairs, remnants of a rose-patterned wallpaper clung to the plaster in the bedrooms. Outlines of fireplaces and pipes that had long since been pulled out for scrap were visible on the walls, along with layers of graffiti. Miraculously, some of the roof was still intact, which explained why the house had not simply rotted into a heap. 

A chain link fence surrounded the property. A sign reading: Danger – Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted was mounted at the entrance. Antoine did not consider this a problem and directed us to climb over the barricade. 

‘Do we have permission to be here?’ I asked Cindy. 

‘Probably not; but look at it.’ She studied the ruins with awe. ‘What a setting.’

Antoine’s point-blank refusal to even attempt to speak any English other than yes or no, combined with his fearsome reputation, gave him such an air of authority that even the editor of the Sunday Times Magazine couldn’t stand up to him. She’d wanted Celia Hammond for the shoot – Celia was everywhere that year; on every magazine cover. 

But Antoine refused to consider it. 

‘He told her it was you or nobody,’ Cindy told me, as we followed Antoine over the fence. 

This revelation filled me with a mixture of excitement and terror. What if I let Antoine down after he’d championed me?

It was six in the morning. Antoine thought the cold, early morning light was best for the mood he was trying to create. 

Now that we were here, he seemed happier, occasionally turning to smile at me as he nimbly prowled around the ruins working out his shots. 

In the car, I wriggled into the first outfit – a full-length white crepe halter neck dress, with a long, bare back. 

There was a chill in the air and my teeth chattered as Cindy tucked a shawl round me and swept my hair into a classic French twist. She clipped white dangly earrings on my earlobes. 

Following her instructions, I had already applied a pale foundation and drawn exaggerated eyelashes on under my eyes with dark brown pencil. When I was ready, she stood back to survey her work. 

‘My god, you look like a ghost bride,’ she said, pleased.

It was just before seven when Antoine led me carefully across the mounds of rubble into the damaged house. Without a word he pointed to where he wanted me to stand. 

As soon as he started shooting, an almost telepathic communication developed between us. It seemed to me that he wanted a certain atmosphere of longing in the shot. Longing was something I knew all about. 

‘Yes,’ he muttered to himself as he shot. ‘Yes.’

He directed me to lie in an ‘S’ shape on a slope of rubble in one of the ground floor rooms. After some time, he looked up from the camera and said, ‘Très, très bien! Fait ques’que tu veux, maintenant.’ 

I undulated on the rocks, aware that the white dress was suffering, and sharp stones were digging into my skin. The image in my mind was of a girl dressed to meet her lover during the Blitz. The force of a sudden explosion a few metres away from the house terminated her life so abruptly that she had no idea that she was dead. 

Antoine’s response was immediate. He was animated, excited. 

‘Cindeee,’ he crowed, when we returned to the car so I could change into the next outfit. ‘Vous avez trouvé une vrai gemme ici.’’ 

When we prepared for the next shot, Cindy eyed the state of the Ossie Clark dress nervously as she dabbed astringent on my grazed back. There was so much adrenaline coursing through my body that I didn’t register either cold or pain. 

This must be what love feels like, I thought. Too wonderful to question. 

We completed two more shots on the ground floor, and one in the hallway with the ruined staircase behind me. By now, Antoine was like an old friend, and I wanted to give him my best. For once, I could use my emotions in a way that was useful to someone. Everything I did seemed to be just what he was after. 

When I’d changed into the last outfit in the series, Antoine smiled gravely and pointed to the second storey of the ruined house, making a gesture as if to say, ‘Are you game?’

God, yes, I was game – until I saw the stairs up close. Held up by little more than a few stones, they were virtually collapsing. 

Fully aware of the sign out front, and the dangers it warned about, I hesitated.

Antoine went up first, testing each step as he climbed. When he reached the top, he gestured for me to keep to one side of the stairs. As I followed behind in a virtually transparent long chiffon dress, I heard Antoine’s assistant mutter to himself, ‘This is mad.’ 

But I wanted to show everyone I was worthy of their faith in me. So I climbed. The steps creaked loudly, shivering beneath me, but they held. 

When I reached the top, I exhaled, clenching and unclenching my hands as the tension left my shoulders. However, Antoine still wasn’t done. 

I watched, aghast, as he made his way to the centre of the destroyed front bedroom, moving like a tightrope walker, stepping only where floor joists bisected the supporting beams and pausing for a minute or two after each step. 

On the ground below, Cindy stood gazing up at us with her hands covering her mouth, as Antoine carefully retraced his steps and gave me a confident nod. 

‘Seulement pour cinq minutes,’ he said, holding up five fingers. 

I couldn’t see how it made any difference whether it was five minutes or two hours. It was the journey to and from the spot he wanted that would kill me. 

But it was too late to say no. 

I held my skirt in one hand as I followed the path he had taken, focussing on one step at a time, while imagining I was as weightless as a ghost, balancing perfectly on my toes. 

By the time I reached the centre, Antoine had already gone back down the stairs. He was standing on a concrete girder below me, his telephoto lens glinting in the sunlight. 

The floor beneath me seemed to sway with my every breath, as I stood straight with my head in profile and one arm bent behind me, afraid to move much at all. 

I turned to glance at Antoine. That was when I saw a police car coming to a stop on the street in front of the ruined building…