Second Place

by Rachel Cusk

  We talked a lot, in that time – Tony and Justine and Brett and I – about what could or should happen, and when, and how. The first days of summer had come, full and warm, with big beneficent breezes blowing in from the marsh, but we barely noticed. We were a household of anxious ministers, pondering the strange disaster that had befallen us. There were countless phone calls and enquiries and practical investigations, and many, many discussions late into the night, but the end result of it all was that L stayed exactly where he was, in the second place, because there was nowhere else for him to go. He had no family and no home, and very little money, and although by then it had become easier for people to travel, we could find no one among his friends and associates prepared to accept responsibility for him. You know how fickle that world is, Jeffers, so there’s no need for me to go into it here. In the end there was Brett and there was me, and while I acknowledged that these events had occurred on my soil, and that L had come here under my aegis, Brett struggled to see her own commitment to the situation as anything more than to a jolly escapade that had gone wrong. She had come along with L on a whim, not as a plan for life!

  I often thought, Jeffers, during those days, of the importance of sustainability, and of how little we consider it in the decisions and actions we take. If we treated each moment as though it were a permanent condition, a place where we might find ourselves compelled to remain forever, how differently most of us would choose the things that moment contains! It may be that the happiest people are those who broadly adhere to this principle, who don’t borrow against the moment, but instead invest it with what could acceptably continue into all moments without causing or receiving damage and destruction – but it requires a great deal of discipline and a degree of puritanical cold-heartedness to live in that way. I didn’t blame Brett for her unwillingness to make a sacrifice of herself. It was evident by the second or third day after L’s return from hospital that she had never taken care of anyone or anything in her life, and that she didn’t intend to start now.

  ‘I hope you don’t think I’m a terrible scab,’ she said, when she came to find me one afternoon to tell me that her cousin – the sea monster – was willing to fly up to get her and take her home.

  I realised I didn’t know where Brett’s home actually was, and it turned out she didn’t really have one – or rather, she had many, and therefore none at all. She lived in one or other of her father’s houses around the world, and he would always give her a week or so’s notice before he was due to arrive so that she had time to pack up and leave, because her stepmother didn’t like to see her. Her father was a famous golfer – even I had heard of him, Jeffers – and very rich, and the one thing Brett had never learned to do was play golf, because her father had never taught her. So it goes, among our species! I hugged her while she cried a little, and said I thought it was exactly the right thing that she should go back to her life. Yet in my heart I knew that it was really only that she was running away from L and his misfortunes, and that for all her accomplishments and beauty she had no better grasp of life’s meaning than to consider it for what did or didn’t suit her. And what, in the end, was so wrong with that? It was Brett’s privilege to run away, and by convincing myself it was also her misfortune I was probably just trying to cover up my envy of her. Abused as she was, she was nonetheless free – she didn’t have to stay there and puzzle it out like the rest of us!

  There was a dividend to her departure, however, which was that she offered to take Kurt with her. Her cousin was looking for a personal assistant, apparently, to manage his affairs for him, which seemed to consist mainly of flying around in his plane and living a life of idleness and wealth. Brett believed there were even some writing opportunities involved, since he was engaged in compiling a history of the family and probably needed some help with it.

  ‘He’s not terribly bright,’ she said to Kurt, ‘but he owns a lot of shares in a publishing house. He’d take very good care of you. He might even be able to get your novel published.’

  Kurt seemed to accept all this as his due, and since L was so reduced, his self-assigned role as my protector had become somewhat obsolete. Even Justine admitted it was for the best, though she was a little scared, now that the prospect of separation was actually here. I told her she would always be able to find a white man to be obliterated by, if that was what she decided she wanted. When I said that she laughed, and much to my surprise said:

  ‘Thank God you’re my mother.’

  And so, Jeffers, that chapter of our life at the marsh concluded, and another – much more opaque and uncertain – would have to begin. What did I feel, in that moment, about the drama I had provoked, as it moved into spheres that were beyond my control? I had never consciously thought that I could or would have to control L, and this had been my mistake, to underestimate my old adversary, fate. You see, I still somehow believed in the inexorability of that other force – the force of narrative, plot, call it what you will. I believed in the plot of life, and its assurance that all our actions will be assigned a meaning one way or another, and that things will turn out – no matter how long it takes – for the best. Quite how I had staggered along so far still holding on to this belief I didn’t know. But I had, and if nothing else it was what had stopped me from just sitting down in the road and giving up long before this. That plotting part of me – another of the many names my will goes by – now stood directly counter to what L had summoned or awakened within me, or what in me had recognised him and thereby identified itself: the possibility of dissolution of identity itself, of release, with all of its cosmic, ungraspable meanings. Just as I was tiring of the sexual plot – the most distracting and misleading of all the plots – or it was tiring of me, along comes this new spiritual scheme for evading the unevadable, the destiny of the body! It was for L himself to represent it, to embody it – his was the body that had dissolved and given way, not mine. He had been frightened of me all along, and he had been right to be, because for all his talk of destroying me, I, it seemed, had destroyed him first. Though I didn’t take it personally, Jeffers! What I think I represented to him was mortality, because I was a woman he couldn’t obliterate or transfigure with his own desire. I was, in other words, his mother, the woman he had always feared would eat him and take away his form and life just as she had created it.

  The image that remained in my mind through these tumultuous days was of Tony, on the night Brett came to tell us that L was lying on the floor of the second place. Once we had got there and taken a look at L and realised he needed to go to hospital, Tony had lifted L up into his arms and calmly carried him out of the bedroom. How L would have hated it, I thought, to see himself majestically carried by Tony like a broken doll! I had gone ahead of Tony into the main room to switch on the lights, and so I was watching him when he came through the doorway with L in his arms and saw for the first time the painting of Adam and Eve and the snake. He took it in, Jeffers, without hesitating or pausing, and it was as though he were walking unhesitatingly and calmly through a blazing fire from which he was rescuing the arsonist. I felt myself singed by that same fire in those moments: it flamed close to me, close enough to lick me with its hot tongue.

  It is of course well known, Jeffers, that L’s late work brought about the renaissance of his reputation and also earned him real fame, though I believe a part of that fame was simply owed to the voyeurism that always crops up around the aura of death. His self-portraits are veritable snapshots of death, aren’t they? He met death the night of his stroke, and he lived with it – if not happily – ever after. Yet I personally still find too much of the iconography of self in those portraits, inevitably, I suppose. They harken back to the person he had been; they radiate obsession, and disbelief that this could happen – to him! But the self is our god – we have no other – and so these images met with great fascination and favour out in the world. And then there were the scientists, poring over this evidence of a neurological event, so beautifully and accu
rately described by L’s brushstrokes. Those brushstrokes illuminated some of the mysteries that had taken place in the darkness of his brain. How useful an artist can be in the matter of representation! I have always believed that the truth of art is equal to any scientific truth, but it must retain the status of illusion. So I disliked L himself being used as proof of something and dragged, as it were, into the light. That light was indistinguishable at the time from the limelight, but it could just as easily become the light of cold-hearted scrutiny one day, and those same facts used as proof of something entirely different.

  But it is the night paintings I want to talk about, and there the power of illusion is not surrendered. Those paintings were made at the marsh in a remarkably short period of time, and I want to say what I know of the conditions and process of their making.

  After Brett had gone away and L was left alone at the second place, the question of how he should be cared for quickly arose. I knew that it would not be good for my relationship with Tony if I took on the role of L’s nurse and was always at his beck and call: I had been to that precipice and looked over the edge, and nothing was going to drag me back there! Tony himself had to do a great deal for L in the early days, since his physical strength was required to lift him and move him around, and L was quite dependent on Tony for necessities, though he treated him with a high hand. He had returned from hospital with quite a peevish, fussy little manner, and also with a slight stutter, and one would hear him ordering Tony about like a veritable dauphin.

  ‘T-t-t-tony, can you move the chair so it’s f-facing the window? No, that’s too c-c-close – further back – yes.’

  I got used to the sight that had struck me so forcibly the first night I saw it, of Tony carrying L in his arms, sometimes all the way down to the bottom of the garden if there was something in the view L wanted to see. But as I have said, L recovered command of himself quite quickly, and Tony made him a pair of beautiful walking sticks out of sapling branches, and soon he could hobble around the place on his own. He was quite unable, however, to cook or care for himself, and when he began to work and needed to select and access his materials, it became clear someone would have to be on hand to assist him. Justine, to my surprise, volunteered for the role, and so Tony went back to his normal duties, and I found myself with just a little more to do than my usual nothing, looking after them both.

  Does catastrophe have the power to free us, Jeffers? Can the intransigence of what we are be broken down by an attack violent enough to ensure we are only barely able to survive it? These were the questions I asked myself in the dawn of L’s recovery, when a new and raw and formless energy began to emanate from him quite perceptibly. It was a jet of life spurting out of the great hole that had been blown through him, and it had no name and no knowledge and no direction of its own, and I watched him begin to grapple with it and try to take its measure. He made his first self-portrait three weeks after his return from hospital, and Justine described to me the agonies he went through, endeavouring to hold the brush in his deformed and swollen right hand. He preferred to paint standing up, she said, with a walking stick in his left hand and a mirror to the side of him. She held his palette for him, and selected and mixed the paints where he told her to. The movements of his arm were unspeakably slow and arduous, and he groaned continually, and was constantly dropping the brush because of the violent tremor in his hand. It can’t have been very pleasant to assist him! That first picture, with its great diagonal sliding line of sight, the world pouring in at the top right corner and pouring out down at the bottom left, was shockingly crude – shocking because the accuracy of the moment could still be perceived through and behind it. It was mauled but still alive, in other words, and this dissonance between consciousness and physical being – and the horror of seeing it recorded, which was much like the horror of seeing a dying animal – became the signature characteristic of the self-portraits and the reason for their universal appeal, even when L was able to execute them with more control.

  Soon, L was wanting to go outside, and Justine had the idea of hanging a toy horn she had found in her old toy box around his neck on a piece of string, so that he could squeeze the rubber balloon and honk it wherever he was if he needed her. I feared L would consider this an affront to his dignity, but in fact it seemed to delight and tickle him, and I was always hearing that faint honking sound coming from one place or another on the property, like the call of a bird as it makes its rounds in nature unseen. It was very useful, since he was starting to roam quite far, Justine said, and would sometimes find he couldn’t get back, or would drop something and be unable to pick it up again. I could see that his destination was the marsh: he got a little closer to it every day. One afternoon I came upon him standing by the prow of the landlocked boat, just as he had been the day of our very first conversation, and this coincidence led me to exclaim, somewhat absurdly:

  ‘So much has changed, and yet nothing has!’

  When of course, Jeffers, it would have been as true – and as meaningless – to say that nothing had changed and yet so much had. One thing that hadn’t changed was the repudiating, indifferent look that L so often bestowed on me and that I never, nonetheless, had got used to. Weak as he was, he bestowed it on me now, and said, falteringly:

  ‘Y-you don’t change. You never will. You won’t let yourself.’

  I was still public enemy number one, you see, even after all that had happened!

  ‘I always try,’ I said.

  ‘Only a r-real emotion can change anyone. You’ll be swept away,’ he said, by which I understood him to mean that my unchangingness would be my doom, like the tree that breaks in the storm because it cannot bend.

  ‘I have a protection,’ I said to him, lifting my head.

  ‘You have gone far but I have gone further,’ he said, or I thought he said, for he spoke more indistinctly now than ever, ‘and I know a destruction that passes over your protection.’

  And this was more or less the tone of all my dealings with L from this point on. He was unfailingly hostile to me in the period of his recovery. It was as if the state of illness had offered him some ultimate opportunity for disinhibition. Another time he said to me:

  ‘All the good in you has come out in your daughter. I wonder what is there now, where the good used to be.’

  He got it into his head that I was always staring at him, and sometimes he would startle me by snapping the fingers of his left hand in front of my eyes.

  ‘Look at you, staring at me like a hungry cat with your green eyes – well, I snap my fingers at you.’

  Snap!

  It all suddenly became too much for me, and one day when I was lacing my shoe I fainted and remember nothing of what happened for the next twenty-four hours – it seemed I was on holiday, lying on the bed with a smile on my face, while Tony and Justine took turns sitting anxiously beside me, holding my hand. When I got up, I discovered that a friend of L’s had written to me asking whether he could come to visit. He was concerned about L, he said, whom he had known for many years, and even more concerned about me, and the predicament I had been put in by L’s falling ill on my property. He also had some money from L’s gallerist to give me, to set against whatever expenses I had run into on L’s behalf. So I returned from my little sojourn in the underworld to find the world above was a bit saner than when I had left. I wrote back and said he could come when he liked – his name was Arthur – and a week or so later a car pulled up in the drive and there he was!

  Arthur was a delight, Jeffers, a tall, handsome, debonair-looking fellow with a splendid shining mane of dark hair, who greatly surprised me once he had bounded out from his car and introduced himself by bursting into tears, something he was to do frequently over the course of his stay, whenever his sympathy and compassion were aroused. He often kept talking and even smiling while he wept, as though it were a completely normal and natural phenomenon, like a rain shower. Tony was so amused by this habit that he would burst out laughing
whenever Arthur did it.

  ‘I’m not really laughing,’ he would say to Arthur, his shoulders shaking with mirth. What he meant was that he wasn’t laughing at him. ‘It’s just very nice.’

  These two became very good friends and they are still close to this day, and call one another brother, so that it is almost as though Tony has regained the relative he lost in his youth. It makes me happy to attribute this gain in some way to L, from whose presence Tony had otherwise not profited. But sitting between them that first afternoon with one weeping and the other laughing, I did wonder what latest strange harbour my ship had weighed anchor in!

  Arthur was keen to get across and see L, and while he was gone I made up a room for him in the main house. He came back a couple of hours later, his face aghast and his handsome hair standing on end in affront.

  ‘It is quite shocking,’ he said. ‘You must not be expected to bear the responsibility.’

  He had known L for more than twenty years, Jeffers, and probably knew more than anyone about his life. As a much younger man – he was now somewhere in his forties – Arthur had been L’s studio assistant, when L was still successful enough to require such a thing. He had gone with L to openings, and watched him be touted around in front of collectors like an increasingly unmarriageable daughter, and realised he himself wanted nothing more to do with the art world, though he had hoped at one time to become a painter. Nonetheless he had stayed in touch with L through the years. It was true that L’s circumstances were very much reduced, he said, as a lot of people’s were in the light of recent events, but L’s decline had been going on for a long time before that and he was now at the very bottom of the barrel of cash and goodwill. And he had no family he was prepared to recognise, but Arthur had managed to find a half sister of his who he thought might be persuaded to take him in. She still lived in the place where L had been born. His half brothers were all dead. If nothing else, the state there would have to take care of him, and Arthur was prepared to make the necessary arrangements.