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

‘Tony, shall we rake over the beds down by the orchard? I’ve noticed the weeds are starting to come through,’ he would say, when Tony was sitting reading the paper or otherwise unoccupied.

‘Not now,’ Tony would reply, completely unperturbed.

You see, Jeffers, Tony refuses to see anything as a game, and by being that way he reveals how much other people play games and how their whole conception of life derives from the subjectivity of the game-playing state. If it sometimes means he can’t altogether join in the fun, it doesn’t matter: the needle always swings back in his direction, because in the end living is a serious condition, and without Tony’s common sense and practicality the fun would run out fairly quickly in any case. But I like fun and want to have it, and I’m not practical the way Tony is, and so I have often found myself with nothing to do. Nothing to do! It has been my cry ever since I came to live at the marsh. I seem to spend a lot of time simply – waiting.

I decided to try to get to know Kurt, and found myself meeting an insurmountable obstacle straight away.

‘Kurt, what is your home like?’

‘I am lucky enough to come from an unbroken home.’

‘What does your mother do? How does she spend her time?’

‘My mother is at the top of her field, as well as having successfully raised a family. I admire her more than anyone else I know.’

‘And your father?’

‘My father has built his own business and is now free to do the things he enjoys.’

And so on, Jeffers, ad infinitum – all these positives, each one with a tiny shard inside that felt like it had been put there just for me. Justine was surprisingly propitiatory and little-womanish toward Kurt, and would drop whatever she was doing and rush around at the merest word from him. Sometimes, watching them walk together through the glade or down toward the marsh, their heads inclining, they looked to my eyes almost elderly, a little old man and woman taking stock on the far shore of life. She even took him tea in bed in the mornings! But they had both lost their jobs, and they needed money, and however much we liked to have them there, until they came up with a new plan they were living off our land and off our dollar – and we all knew it.

L wrote to say that he would be arriving by boat! We were somewhat mystified by this announcement, since most of the long-distance passenger boats still weren’t running in that period and we had imagined he would come some other way. But there it was – he said he would be arriving at the harbour town about two hours’ drive south of us, and were we able to pick him up?

‘Must be a private boat,’ Tony said with a shrug.

The day came and Tony and I got in the car, leaving Justine and Kurt to their own devices until evening, when we would be back. They agreed to have dinner ready for us, and I wondered what that dinner would be like with L there. The ‘car’ isn’t really a car, Jeffers, more of a truck – a box-like old thing with enormous wheels that can go through or over anything and that is therefore very practical, except on the open road, where it starts to shake and judder as soon as you go more than forty miles an hour. Also the back seat is tiny, barely more than a bench, and I had already decided I would take it myself for the long drive home and allow L to sit in front with Tony. It was slow going, driving that distance, and Tony and I made sure to stop every now and then and get out, so that our shaken-up brains could settle down again. The road more or less sticks to the coast and the scenery is astounding from there, plunging and swooping all around, the great rounded green hills running right down to the sea with the ancient copses in their folds. It was the loveliest spring weather and when we got out of the truck the breezes coming up off the water were positively balmy. The sky was like a blue sail overhead and the waves crashed on the shore below and the water had that coruscation of the surface that is the surest omen of summer. How fortunate we felt to be there together, Tony and I – the debt of our isolation is paid back in an instant by times such as these. That vertiginous green landscape so full of movement and light is a great contrast to the low-lying subtlety of our marsh, though it is just to the south of us: it always lifts us and energises us to go there, yet we don’t go as often as we could. I wonder why not, Jeffers? The pattern of change and repetition is so deeply bound to the particular harmony of life, and the exercise of freedom is subject to it, as to a discipline. One has to serve out one’s changes moderately, like strong wine. I had very little awareness of such things in my existence before Tony: I had no idea at all why things turned out the way they did, why I felt gorged with sensation at one minute and starved of it the next, where my loneliness or joy came from, which choices were beneficial and which deleterious to my health and happiness, why I did things I didn’t want to do and couldn’t do what I wanted. Least of all did I understand what freedom was and how I could attain it. I thought it was a mere unbuttoning, a release, where in fact – as you know well – it is the dividend yielded by an unrelenting obedience to and mastery of the laws of creation. The rigorously trained