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 welclass="underline" 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, perfectly 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.
Part of the trouble is that she’s kept right on drinking, the extra bottle behind the Weck jars empty now and replaced with one she ferreted away in the back of the pantry. She’s drunk so much that for once she can feel it: her nose gone numb and her fingers slick as sticks of butter. It is just so easy to keep topping up her glass, and there’s no way to know how many times she’s done it. Drinking makes her forget that Audrey is her lifeline to all she used to care about in the world: photography, writing, her old beautiful self. When Lee can fight off the urge to just curl up in bed and fall asleep forever, she wants to be the person she used to be, alive and hungry. But every time she hears Audrey’s voice from the other room, that posh London accent, she keeps picking up her glass for one more swallow.