The Age of Light Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2019 by Whitney Scharer

  Cover design by Catherine Casalino

  Cover photograph © Daniel Murtagh / Trevillion Images

  Author photograph by Sharona Jacobs

  Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First ebook edition: February 2019

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  Excerpts from Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions by Claude Cahun reprinted courtesy of the MIT Press.

  ISBN 978-0-31652409-4

  E3-20190110-DA-PC-ORI

  E3-20190103-DA-NF-ORI

  E3-20181217-DA-NF-ORI

  E3-20170321-DA-NF-ORI

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  London, 1940

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  London, 1943

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Normandy, July 1944

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Saint-Malo, August 1944

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Paris, December 1944

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part Two

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Leipzig, April 20, 1945

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Dachau, April 20, 1945

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Munich, Prinzregentenplatz 16, May 1, 1945

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Vienna, September 1945

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Sussex, England, 1946

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Newsletter

  For my mother, with love and gratitude

  Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke

  Part One

  Prologue

  Farley Farm, Sussex, England

  1966

  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.

  It is noon and Lee starts on the Penroses, a dish she invented of thick closed mushrooms stuffed with piped pâté de foie gras and topped with paprika to look like the roses that grow at the edge of the herb garden. They are easy to do incorrectly, and the entire process takes hours. Roland often gets angry at her because she’ll say dinner at eight and it will be nine, ten, eleven o’clock and all the guests will be tired and drunk by the time she brings out the first course. Lee shrugs him off. Once she made a grilled bluefish in homage to a Miró painting and even Roland agreed that it was worth the wait.

  Tonight, though, Lee will be on time. She will emerge from the kitchen calm and regal, and dish after dish will reach the table like performers in a well-executed dance. There is magic to a multicourse meal, and on the best of days it reminds Lee of what it used to feel like to be in the darkroom, moving at exactly the right pace, no wasted effort.

  Lee finishes the Penroses and leaves them on top of the icebox. Next she makes the hollandaise, more than they’ll need, whisking the yolks with the lemon juice in a copper pot, the whisk ting-ting-tinging against the metal. Outside, Roland and the early guests crest a hill, following one behind the other like ducks in a little line, and then dip down into a valley and disappear from view.

  What will Lee say to Audrey? She has ideas for articles, none of them good. She has apologies. These feel better, more genuine. It’s been a rough few years, moving out here, only getting to London a few times a month, cut off from everything. But she knows her writing is still good. Her photos are still good. Or they would be if she could do them, if she could shrug off the stultifying sadness that she pulls around with her like a heavy cape. She will tell Audrey that she feels ready now. She will tell her that she moved the junk out of one of the bedrooms and set up her typewriter in there, the desk pushed up under a small square window with a view of the drive rolling out and away from the farm. Lee even snapped a photo, the first she’s taken in months, framing the window inside the viewfinder, a view within a view, and tacked it up next to her desk. Audrey will like to know that Lee has made a picture. That she’s sat there, running her fingers over the typewriter’s dented sides, watching the chickens peck their way across the drive. When Audrey asks, Lee will offer her sharp incisive sketches of country living. She will give her anything she wants of this life of hers, on time, with photos if she can manage it.

  By four o’clock Lee has prepped almost everything and set up her mise-en-place, the small bowls filled with chopped marjoram, sea salt, anchovies, cayenne, and all the other spices she’ll need to make the meal. She adds an ice cube to her tumbler and goes into the dining room. There is a long pockmarked trestle table, big enough to hold twenty-four people. The fireplace at the end of the room calls to mind Henry VIII, roast suckling pigs, flagons of wine. Above it hangs Picasso’s portrait of Lee, which has always been the image of herself she likes the best, the way he captured her gap-toothed smile. Around it are some of their favorite pieces from Roland’s personal collection, crowded up against one another, Ernst next to Miró next to Turnbull. Over the years, they’ve mixed in some unknown Surrealist pieces as well: a taxidermied bird lying upside down on one of the frames, a railroad tie with a giant mouth painted on it, a doodle of a woman with wild tangled hair housed in one of the most ostentatious frames they could find. Lee sits down at the table. Her feet are starting to swell. She jiggles her tumbler a little, and the ice cubes dance in the whiskey.

  Roland gets back from his walk at the same time that a low-slung Morris pulls up the drive, the loud engine growl alerting them to its arrival. He stands in the doorway to the kitchen—he often stands framed there on the threshold, never seeming to want to enter her domain.

  “Good walk today,” he says, rubbing his nose with his thin sculptor’s fingers. “We saw a bull snake on the path. Must have been five, six feet long.”

  Lee nods, not looking at him directly, moving a long-handled spoon in the pot in which she boils potatoes.

  “Smells good in here,” he says, sniffing. “Garlicky.”

  “That’ll be the chicken.”

  He sniffs again. “What time is Audrey arriving?”

  “I think that’s her now,” Lee says calmly, as if she hasn’t been on edge ever since she heard the tires crunching on the stone.

  “Do you want to greet her or shall I?”

  “You’d better.” Lee gestures to the mess. “I’m in the middle of a dozen things here.”

  Roland takes a long look at her before he walks away.

  The water is really boiling now, the steam rising up around Lee’s face as she leans over it. The rule with potatoes: start with water cold from the tap and cover them with more liquid than you think you need. Make sure they have room to wiggle. If they touch, they’ll get starchy. Lee boils them whole and cuts them while they’re still steaming. Most people don’t think enough about potatoes.

  From the front of the house comes Roland’s voice booming, “Audrey! Don’t you know friends use the back door in Sussex?,” and then Audrey’s high, refined voice in response. Quickly, Lee refills her glass from the bottle she has tucked away behind the Weck jars. She hears their feet on the gravel again, going back out to the car, and then the screech and snap of the screen door, loud as a gunshot when they return. The noise sends an electric jolt up her spine and suddenly Lee is covered with a spreading panic, blackness like a hood. There is a scorched smell in the air and she worries something is burning, but she can’t make herself move over to the oven to check. Her vision goes dark at the edges as it always does when this happens, and even with her eyes open she is back there, Saint-Malo this time, her shirt soaked with sweat, crouched in the vault, the muscles of her thighs seizing up as she waits for the echo of the bombs to fade away.

  She cannot stop the thoughts from coming. They lodge like bits of shrapnel in her brain and she never knows when something will bring one to the surface. This time, when Lee returns to the present, she finds herself huddled in the corner of the kitchen clutching her knees to her chest. She gets to her feet unsteadily and feels relieved that no one has seen her this way.

  The glass is the thing. She picks it up, puts it against her forehead so she can feel how cold it is, takes one shaky swallow and then another. The timer dings. Lee startles again, tries to compose herself, digs a potato out of the pot, and tests it with her teeth, so hot she pulls back sharply and it falls with a soggy thump to the tile floor. Another swallow from her glass, the panic growing, the room around her bending and twisting like the reflection of her face in the pot’s copper surface, and she wants to abandon the meal and go upstairs to her office, where she can look out at the sheep again, everything neat and orderly, the same as it was hundreds of years before they moved here.

  She is almost out of the room, moving toward the back stairs, when she hears Audrey’s voice.

  “Lee!” Audrey walks through the kitchen door with her arms outstretched, a smile on her face. “This is where the magic happens. I’ve seen your pictures but it’s so much more fun to see it in reality.”

  Audrey looks the same: tiny, immaculate, a fresh silk scarf tied in a bow around her neck. She has dyed blond hair that she still wears in pin curls, perfe
ctly acceptable teeth that make her look a bit like a badger, and a habit of wearing corsages to work. She wears one now. Corsages aside, Audrey is the least vain person Lee has ever met, and that’s quite an achievement for someone who’s worked in fashion for over thirty years. Lee sets down her drink, rubs her hands on the towel she has folded into her apron’s waistband, and holds out her arms. They squeeze each other tightly and Lee feels as if someone is blowing up a balloon inside her chest, pushing away the panic and making room in her. She has forgotten how much she loves Audrey.

  They pull away from each other and Lee watches Audrey taking in the kitchen. She looks at the mess, she looks at Lee’s glass on the counter, she looks—quickly, trying not to let Lee see the look—at Lee’s housecoat, her snarled hair, the lumps of her heavy body. Lee sees herself through Audrey’s eyes and it’s not attractive, but Audrey has enough tact to move her gaze across the room.

  “Are those the famous Penrose mushrooms?” she asks, pointing to the icebox. “November nineteen sixty-one. We got so many letters about them.”

  “In the flesh,” Lee says. She’s set down her tumbler, out of sight behind a bowl of lettuces, but keeps glancing at it. The panic is back, thick and suffocating, and she closes her eyes to force it away.

  “Audrey,” she says finally, gesturing to a chair, “please sit. Make yourself comfortable. Can I get you something to drink?”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’re much too busy to entertain me while you cook! Roland offered to give me a tour, but I wanted to say hello as soon as I got here.” She comes back over to where Lee is standing and gives her another quick squeeze, her eyes kind.

  Lee feels relief and doesn’t try to stop Audrey as she leaves the room. With shaking hands she picks up her glass again and finishes her drink in one huge swallow that makes her eyes water. When the tears spill over, she lets them fall.

  Nine o’clock and Lee is not done cooking. The guests are in the parlor. She hears the sound of their voices rising and falling, laughter, the clink of wineglasses. Roland has come back to the kitchen several times, saying in a low hiss that “they are waiting, they are hungry, do you have an estimate on when it might be ready?” Lee tells him no. They can wait, even Audrey, and it will be worth it.