Second Place

by Rachel Cusk

  ‘I’ve always thought you didn’t need revelation,’ he murmured. ‘I thought you somehow already knew.’

  There was something sarcastic in his tone when he said that: in any case, I do recall him trying to make a joke out of this idea of women possessing some divine or eternal knowledge, which was tantamount to saying he didn’t need to bother about them.

  He said he was thinking of trying his hand at portrait-painting while he was here. Something about his change in circumstances was making him see humans more clearly.

  ‘I wanted to ask,’ he said, ‘if you thought Tony would sit for me.’

  This announcement came so much out of the blue and was so contrary to what I was expecting that I took it almost as a physical blow. There we stood in front of the very landscape I had looked at through his eyes and seen his hand in for all these years, and he turns around and says he wants to paint Tony!

  ‘Also Justine,’ he went on, ‘if you think she’d play along.’

  ‘If you’re going to paint anyone,’ I cried, ‘then surely it ought to be me!’

  He looked at me with a faintly quizzical expression.

  ‘But I can’t really see you,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked, and I believe it was the utterance that lay at the furthest bottom of my soul, the thing I had always been asking and still wanted to ask, because I had never yet received an answer. And I didn’t receive an answer that morning either, Jeffers, because just then the figure of Brett could be seen approaching across the grass, and my conversation with L was thereby brought to an end. She was holding a bundle in her hands, which turned out to be all the linen from the bed in the second place, and she tried to offer it to me as I stood there in my nightdress on the wet grass.

  ‘Would you believe it,’ she said, ‘but I can’t sleep against this fabric. It irritates my skin – I woke up this morning with a face like a broken mirror! Do you have anything softer?’

  She stepped closer, across the line that generally separates one person from another, when they’re not intimately acquainted. Her skin looked perfectly fine even at close quarters, glowing with youth and health. She wrinkled her little nose and peered at my face.

  ‘Do you have this fabric on your bed too? It looks like it might be having the same effect on you.’

  L ignored this basic piece of effrontery, and stood with his arms folded looking at the view, while I explained that all our bedlinen was the same, and that its slight roughness was the result of it being an entirely natural and healthful product. I could not, I added, offer her anything else, unless I were to drive all the way back to the same town from which we had collected them the day before, where there were shops. She looked at me imploringly.

  ‘Would that be completely impossible?’ she said.

  Well, somehow I got myself away – it was amazing how Brett could make you feel physically trapped, even in the most open of spaces – and ran back up to the house and threw myself into the shower and washed and washed, as if in the hope I’d be all gone by the time I was finished. Later I sent Justine and Kurt over to them, to get a list of any supplies they might need that could be bought in the small town closest to us, and if the subject of the bedlinen came up again, I never got to hear about it!

  Justine was twenty-one years old that spring, Jeffers, the age at which a person begins to show their true colours, and in many ways she was revealing herself to be not at all who I had believed her to be, while at the same time reminding me unexpectedly of other people I had known. I don’t think parents necessarily understand all that much about their children. What you see of them is what they can’t help being or doing, rather than what they intend, and it leads to all kinds of misapprehensions. Many parents, for instance, become convinced that their child has artistic talent, when that child has no intention whatever of becoming an artist! It’s all so many stabs in the dark, the business of trying to predict how a child will turn out – I suppose we do it to make bringing them up more interesting and to pass the time, the way a good story passes the time, when all that really matters is that afterwards they’re able to go out into the world and stay there. I believe they know this themselves better than anyone. I was never very interested in the concept of filial duty, or in eliciting maternal tributes from Justine, and so we got to these essentials fairly quickly in our dealings with one another. I remember her asking me, when she was thirteen or so, what I believed the limits of my obligation to her were.

  ‘I believe I am obliged to let you go,’ I said, once I’d thought about it, ‘but if that doesn’t work out, I believe I am obliged to remain responsible for you forever.’

  She sat silently for a while and then she nodded her head and said:

  ‘Good.’

  Because of events in our shared history I had come to see Justine as vulnerable and wounded, when in fact her key characteristic is her dauntlessness. As a small child she had shown this quality, and so perhaps it is truer to say, Jeffers, that we can consider our job as parents to have been accomplished without fatal error or wrongdoing when the small child becomes visible once more in the fully grown being. I have often considered the survival of paintings, and what it means for our civilisation that an image has survived across time undamaged, and something of the morality of that survival – the survival of the original – pertains, I believe, to the custody of human souls too. There was a period in which I lost Justine and during which I will never know precisely what happened to her, and it was for signs of damage from this time that I was always on the alert. I told her this, around the time that we had the conversation about obligation. I told her that she had lost a year of the care she was owed by me, and that she could consider it a formal debt, to be reclaimed at any time. I even wrote an IOU out for her on a piece of paper! She laughed at me for it, though not unkindly, and I was never handed back that piece of paper, but when she and Kurt returned from Berlin to live with us, it did occur to me that she was perhaps calling in what I owed her.

  She had become somewhat of a stranger to me in her time away, and just as a familiar place can seem smaller and clearer when you return there after an absence, and any changes quite shocking at first, I found her somehow distilled, as well as in certain ways startlingly altered. Change is also loss, and in that sense a parent can lose a child every day, until you realise that you’d better stop predicting what they’re going to become and concentrate on what is right in front of you. In that period her small, sturdy physique had suddenly matured, and acquired a density and agility that brought an acrobat to mind: she seemed full of a pent-up but expertly balanced energy, as though at any minute she might whirl exultantly up into the air. Yet likewise when she had no direction or nothing to do she could assume an awful flaccidity, like an acrobat who has somehow got herself stranded down on the ground. She had dismayed me by cutting off all her hair, and had taken to wearing squarish smocks and workaday clothes that stood in stark contrast to her physical ebullience, as well as to the splendour of Kurt’s own wardrobe. I suspected that she was engaged in the pointless squandering of her femininity, and perhaps because I secretly feared I was somewhere to blame for it, I was tempted to lay this wastage at Kurt’s door. The image of middle-aged dullness they formed seemed like something he, rather than she, had summoned up and was doing rather well out of, and I was frequently shocked by little put-downs and criticisms he would deliver to her in a quiet voice, the way parents sometimes lower their voices to criticise their children in front of other people, as a way of burnishing themselves. Yet Justine was slavish in her treatment of him, and would become quite frantic if his needs or expectations were frustrated by a particular turn of events, which meant that I was always slightly nervous while living at close quarters with them in the main house, lest I inadvertently be the cause of the frustration.

  Privately, I interpreted Justine’s conduct as the unmediated product of her feelings about her father, around whom I myself had once been nervous and slavish too, and in fact I h
ad found myself beginning to substitute Kurt for him quite naturally. One morning I was sitting beside Justine while she was looking for something in her purse, and a small photograph fell out. I picked it up and saw a close-up image of her with her father, whom I had not seen in person for several years. Their heads were resting together and their arms were around one another’s necks and they both looked very happy, and I was so astonished that I couldn’t even feel envy or insecurity, just simple admiration!

  ‘What a lovely picture of you with your dad,’ I said to her, and jumped out of my skin when she screeched with laughter in my ear.

  ‘That’s Kurt!’ she said, cackling and stuffing the photo back in her purse.

  Later she told Kurt about it and they laughed again over the idea that I had mistaken him for her father, though I was gradually becoming aware that the misapprehension ran deeper in me than either of them realised. Whenever Tony asked Kurt to help outside, for instance, I would feel a protest leap immediately into my throat, as though I believed that Kurt should be shielded from discomfort and labour. I had believed the same thing of Justine’s father, at one time, which shows how little we are able to truly change ourselves. Yet Justine herself didn’t object to these requests, and the reason she didn’t was because it was Tony who had made them, as I discovered when I myself once casually asked Kurt to help clear the dishes from the table and was treated to flounces and glares from Justine. I’m generally suspicious when people are said to ‘adore’ other people, especially when they’ve been given no choice over who those people are, but Justine did always seem to have taken to Tony right from the start and to have trusted him; and Tony, I believe, could not have loved Justine more had she been his own daughter. Most people are incapable of that disinterested kind of love, but Tony has no biological children and no blood relatives, and can love who he likes. He was determined, in any case, that Kurt should lend a hand and occupy himself. When I told him, mortified, about my mix-up over the photograph, he stopped what he was doing and stood as still as an alligator with his eyelids half-closed for the longest time, and I saw that the similarity between my choice of Justine’s father and Justine’s choice of Kurt had been evident to him all along.

  That first morning after L and Brett’s arrival, Jeffers, when I stood and talked to L beside the boat, marked the beginning of a period of unseasonably hot weather. It was spring, which ordinarily is a time of turbulent change, when wind and sun and rain alternate to clear away the winter and germinate the new things. Instead we received day after day of inexplicable stillness and heat, and the first flowers rushed up out of the raw earth and the trees hastily put on their foliage. Walking on the marsh, I noted dry paths that usually would have been boggy with mud, and clouds of buzzing insects everywhere, and the air shrilled and pulsed with birdsong as never before, as though all these creatures had been summoned up from the earth to some great and mysterious appointment ahead of time.

  It was so dry that Tony grew worried some of the young trees and plants might die for lack of spring rain, and so he started to build an irrigation system out of long lengths of rubber hose that he laid all around our land. It had so many circuits and junctions that it resembled a huge network of veins, and he had to pierce all the hoses with hundreds of tiny holes along their sides so that the water would come out in continuous drips. It was fiddly and laborious work and it took him many hours, and I got used to seeing him at a distance, now in one corner of the land and now in another, bent over in concentration. After a while he conscripted Kurt to help him, and then there were two tiny figures in the distance, bending and conferring, while the sun shone down on their heads. Every now and again I would bring them something to drink and it took them forever to notice I was there, while they puzzled out the mechanics of some complicated junction or tried to work out why water wasn’t flowing down a particular tributary. They couldn’t afford to be slapdash or careless: the smallest mistake would result in the failure of the whole system. Tony had planted most of those trees himself and he cared about each one. How arduous and time-consuming it is, Jeffers, to take care of every last thing and not deceive yourself and wave away some aspect of it! I suppose the writing of a poem must work along similar lines.

  Kurt was willing enough to do the work at first, but after a while I could see that he was growing bored of it. He was relying on his good manners and on the mild discipline of his privileged upbringing to carry him along, rather than on the mania of the perfectionist or the tenacity of the dutiful soldier. His character – that of a cherished, well-trained house dog – struggled to accommodate this turn of events, in which it was hard to discern a narrative wherein he played the central role, and since he was exhausted by the end of the day in any case, he retreated into a kind of dazed blankness, as though he had received a sort of concussion to his sense of self-importance. The hiatus gave Justine a desire to experiment with her own power, for which Brett was ready and willing to provide the opportunity.

  ‘Brett is such an interesting person,’ Justine said to me one afternoon, when she had gone to get supplies for the second place and taken an unusually long time returning. ‘Did you know that she danced in the London ballet, all the time that she was putting herself through medical school?’

  I had no idea that Brett had been to medical school, nor that she was a trained dancer: all I knew was that at this current moment she was lodged like a giant splinter in my life, and that I had no idea how or when I was going to prise her out again.

  Because of the unusually fine weather, in the evenings Tony would light the fire in the big brazier outside at dusk, so that we could sit and watch the sun set over the sea while the coolness of night came in. I would watch the smoke roll up into the sky, knowing that L could see it from the second place and hoping it would draw him to us. After that first conversation I had barely seen L, and any questions or requests from that household came through Brett, so that it couldn’t have been made clearer to me that he was hiding. Each night Tony built the fire bigger and bigger, as if he had read my mind and was trying to help summon L himself. On the fourth or fifth night, just as darkness was about to fall, I finally saw the two of them winding their way through the shadows of the trees toward us. We all jumped up to welcome them and made room for them around the fire. I can’t remember what we talked about, just that I was aware of L’s lamp-like eyes, growing brighter and more penetrating as the dusk fell, like the eyes of some nocturnal animal – and also that he had made sure to sit as far away from me as he could possibly get.

  We had a cocktail of some sort in a big jug which we were sharing around, but L didn’t drink his: he accepted a portion, so as not to draw attention to himself, I suppose, and I found it afterwards, untouched. He never drank alcohol in the time that I knew him, at least that I saw. We always like to have a good drink at the day’s end, Jeffers, and go to bed sleepy and not too late, along with the birds – it seems to suit our way of life here. So L’s alertness in the darkness was unnerving. I was happy, though, to be in his presence, or more accurately, it was pleasant for an hour or two not to have to puzzle over what his absence meant. But then after that first time he didn’t come again. He stayed at home, while Brett came tripping and calling through the glade to sit in a circle with us every night, usually next to Justine. Kurt, after his day spent with the hosepipes, would be nodding in sleep in front of the brazier before he was halfway through his first cocktail: we woke him up to eat his dinner but he mostly crept off to bed by nine. This left Justine at a loose end, and Brett was right there to pick it up. And so the fire by which I had hoped to summon what I wanted ended by summoning the very thing I didn’t want, which was more of Brett’s company!

  After the incident with the bedlinen I had treated Brett with a cordial wariness whenever we chanced to meet, but now she began to spend more time in the main house and I saw that I would have to find a more serviceable manner for dealing with her. One afternoon I was passing Justine’s room, and behind the closed d
oor I heard the two of them talking and laughing inside. When I saw Justine later, her short hair was done in a new – and far more flattering – style, and she wore a bright scarf tied around her head that framed her pretty face quite strikingly.

  ‘Brett’s persuaded me to grow my hair,’ she said, slightly shamefaced, for I had been dropping hints on that score for weeks.

  And indeed she did grow out her hair, Jeffers, all through the spring and summer, and by the autumn her lovely dark curls were falling almost to her shoulders, though by then Kurt was no longer there to see them.

  Soon she and Brett were always together, and since they weren’t, I reasoned, all that far apart in age, I somewhat grudgingly supposed it was natural for them to become friends, despite being such different characters. In fact Brett was considerably older, as I discovered later, which might explain why Justine fell under her influence, rather than the other way around – to good effect, I must admit, at least as far as her appearance was concerned.

  ‘What on earth is this?’ Brett would say, as I myself didn’t dare to, when she discovered Justine in one of those sack-like garments she had taken to wearing. ‘Did it come from Mother Hubbard’s cupboard?’

  A ‘Mother Hubbard’ was that loose kind of dress certain Victorian ladies used to wear that covered them from top to toe, to avoid having to put on a corset – Brett’s comparison was an exaggeration, but it wasn’t far off! Brett herself, of course, showed off her lovely figure at every opportunity. I believed, I suppose, that Justine’s concealment of herself and her embracing of the cult of plainness and comfort was the result of her shame and self-dislike, and the reason I believed it was because it was what I had always felt myself. At heart I feared I had failed to do something vital with respect to Justine’s womanhood, or worse, had inadvertently done to her the same thing that had been done to me. I had grown up disgusted by my physical self, and regarding femininity as a device – like the corset – to keep the repellent facts from view: it was as impossible for me to accept what was ugly in myself as to accept any other kind of ugliness. A woman such as Brett, therefore, unnerved me deeply, not only because she relished self-exposure but because I sensed she was thereby capable – without especial malice – of exposing other people. So when one day in the kitchen she crept up behind Justine and, laughing, grabbed her smock by the hem and whipped it over her head, so that there in the kitchen my daughter’s young body was revealed in its underwear for all the world to see, I was rather too ready to prove that Brett’s game was up.