Second Place by Rachel Cusk (ebook smartphone .txt) 📕

as gold, thought about it for a minute and then agreed that no, she supposed we couldn’t, so that Kurt’s well-brought-up-ness even had the unexpected effect of bringing out good manners in my own child – I was quite impressed. If only he would get rid of that sneaky two-faced look while he did it.

We had another short letter from L, confirming his plans and giving us a date when he would arrive. So Tony and I went over to get the second place ready, with only a little less faith this time, because after all it seemed like a boon at this point to be having a visitor. The cherry trees were foaming all pink and white again in the glade, and lances of spring sunlight stood tall among the trunks, and the sound of birdsong was in our ears while we worked; and we talked about the year that had more or less exactly passed since we had first made these preparations for L and had expected him so innocently. Tony admitted that since then, he himself had started willing L to come, and I couldn’t have been more surprised to hear it, nor more cognisant of the fatal weakness that is love, for Tony is not someone who interferes lightly in the course of things, knowing as he does that to take on the work of fate is to incur full responsibility for its consequences.

One of the difficulties, Jeffers, in telling what happened is that the telling comes after the fact. This might sound so obvious as to be imbecilic, but I often think there’s just as much to be said about what you thought would happen as about what actually did. Yet – unlike the devil – these apprehensions don’t always get the best lines: they’re done away with, in about the time it takes to do away with them in life. If I try, I can recall what I expected of the meeting with L and what I thought it would be like to be near him and to be living alongside him for a period. I imagined it, somehow, as dark, perhaps because his paintings have so much darkness in them and his use of the colour black is so strangely vigorous and joyful. I believe also that I dwelt, in those few weeks, on the dreadful years before I met Tony, which I no longer thought about very often. Those years began, so to speak, with L’s paintings and my fevered encounter with them that sunny morning in Paris. Was this then to be some stately conclusion to the evil of that time, a sign that my recovery was now complete?

These feelings led me to talk with Justine, in the days before L’s arrival, about what had happened more candidly than I ever had. Not that a parent’s candour guarantees all that much! I believe that as a rule children don’t care for their parents’ truths and have long since made up their own minds, or have formulated false beliefs from which they can never be persuaded, since their whole conception of reality is founded on them. I can credit any amount of wilful denial and self-deception and calling a spade an apple tree among family members, because thereby hangs our self-belief by the slenderest of threads. There were certain things, in other words, that Justine could not afford to know, and so she would not let herself know them, even though her twin motivations – to be close to me at all times, and to remain suspicious of me – were always contradicting one another.

I have never needed particularly to be right, Jeffers, nor to win, and it has taken me the longest time to recognise what an odd one out this makes me, especially in the field of parenting, where egotism – whether of the narcissistic or the victimised kind – runs the whole show. It has sometimes felt as though, where that egotism should have been, I had only a great big vacuum of authority to offer. My attitude to Justine has been more or less the same as all my attitudes: dictated by the stubborn belief that the truth, in the end, will be recognised. The trouble is, that recognition can take a lifetime to arrive. When Justine was younger there had been a feeling of malleability, of active process, in our relations, but now that she was a young woman it was as though time had abruptly run out and we were frozen in the positions we had happened to assume in the moment of its stopping, like the game where everyone has to creep up behind the leader and then freeze the second he turns around. There she stood, the externalisation of my life force, immune to further alterations; and there was I, unable to explain to her how exactly she had turned out the way she had.

Her relationship with Kurt, however, offered a whole new angle on the subject. I’ve said that he adopted this attitude of prior knowledge when I was there, and I took this to represent the sum total of everything Justine had told him about me that he was unqualified to know. At first he also treated Tony as a special case, a kind of exotic alien, and had the infuriating habit of wearing a tiny crescent smile on his lips whenever he watched Tony going about his business. Tony responded by dealing the card of masculinity, and forcing Kurt to take it.

‘Kurt, can you help me load up the woodpiles?’ Tony would say, or ‘Kurt, the fences in the bottom field need repairing and it’s a two-man job.’

‘Of course!’ Kurt would say, with a somewhat ironic air, scrambling out of his chair and carefully rolling up the hems of his beautifully pressed trousers.

Predictably, he soon developed a childlike attachment to Tony in this mode, and started glorying in his own handiness and practicality, though Tony wasn’t going to let him