Whitney Scharer - The Age of Light

Hot July. The downs have greened up from the past week’s rain and rise into the sky like mossy breasts. From the windows in Lee Miller’s kitchen she sees hills in all directions. One straight gravel road. Stone walls made long before she got here that divide up the landscape and keep the sheep where they belong, calmly chewing. Her husband, Roland, with his walking stick, wends his way along the bridle path. He has two of their houseguests with him, and stops to point out a mole’s burrow that could break an ankle, or a cowpat that might be a little too much country for some visitors.

Lee’s herb garden is just outside the kitchen and about as far as she ever chooses to walk. Roland stopped asking her to join him on his constitutionals years ago, after she told him that until he puts a sidewalk on the downs and lines it with café bars, she’s not going to be wasting her time tromping through the hillsides. Now she thinks he welcomes the time apart from her, as she does from him. Each time she watches him leave, the hand that’s clenched around her throat loosens a little.

Of all the rooms at Farley Farm, the kitchen is where Lee is most content. Not happy, but content. No one goes in here without her, and if they did, they could never find what they were looking for. Spice jars teeter in uneven towers, pots in various states of filth cover the counter and fill the sink, containers of vinegar and oil stand open on the shelves. But Lee knows where everything is at every moment, just like she used to know in her studio, the clutter confounding to everyone except her. When Dave Scherman, her photography partner during the war, used to come into her room at the Hotel Scribe, he’d always have some cocky comment ready—“Ah, making an installation piece out of used petrol cans, are we, Lee?”—and she thinks of him when she’s in her kitchen and wonders what he’d say to her now. Dave is one of the few of her war days friends who hasn’t made the trek out here to see her. She’s glad of it. The last time she saw him, back when they were all still living in London, Lee overheard Dave say to Paul Éluard that Lee had gotten fat and lost her looks and that not being pretty was making her angry. Which isn’t true, of course. There is so much more that’s making her angry than the stranger who greets her in the mirror each morning, burst blood vessels blooming across her puffy face.

Lee trained at the Cordon Bleu a few years ago, and now she makes multicourse dinners almost every weekend and writes about them for Vogue. She is the magazine’s domestic correspondent. Before that she was its war correspondent, and before that she was its fashion correspondent, and before that she was its cover model. In 1927, an Art Deco sketch of her head, cloche pulled low like a helmet, ushered in an era of new modernism in women’s fashion. A remarkable career, everyone always says. Lee never talks about those days.

Vogue is on Lee’s mind because Audrey Withers, her editor, is coming to dinner tonight. Audrey is most likely coming to fire her and making the journey to Farley to do it in person. Lee would have fired herself long ago, after the twentieth missed deadline or the tenth familiar pitch about entertaining in a country home. She’s loyal, though, Audrey, and the only fashion editor who ever tries to tell women about something more important than the latest trends in evening wear. Audrey will be buffered by some other guests: their friend Bettina, and Seamus, the Institute of Contemporary Arts’ curator and Roland’s right-hand man. Lee thinks that Audrey will not be able to fire her in front of Roland’s friends. Maybe she can feel her out, turn things around, find her way back in.

Tonight’s menu is a variation on one Lee has served before. Ten courses. Asparagus croûtes with hollandaise, scallop brochettes with sauce béarnaise, tots of vichyssoise, Penroses, mini toad-in-the-hole, Muddles Green Green Chicken, Gorgonzola with walnuts, beer-braised pheasant, a ginger ice, and bombe Alaska served flambé-style with the lights turned low. If Lee can’t work for Audrey, she will kill her with butter and cream and rum-soaked meringue.

When Lee was reporting back from Leipzig and Normandy during the war, Audrey was often the only person she would contact. Lee sent her those first photos of Buchenwald, and Audrey ran them with the story Lee had pounded out on her little Hermes Baby, fueled by Benzedrine and brandy and rage. Audrey ran her words exactly as Lee had written them, with the headline “Believe It” and the photos full bleed, huge on the page in all their gruesome glory. Didn’t care that somewhere in Sheffield a housewife turned from one shiny page advertising the latest Schiaparelli gloves to a bruised and beaten SS guard on the next, his nose broken and his pig’s face covered in thick black blood.