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

fingers of the concert pianist are freer than the enslaved heart of the music lover can ever be. I suppose this explains why great artists can be such dreadful and disappointing people. Life rarely offers sufficient time or opportunity to be free in more than one way.

We arrived at the town in good time, and ate our sandwiches sitting on the seawall, and then at the appointed hour went down to the port to find L. We stood in the arrivals area and asked what boats were scheduled to arrive, but no one seemed to know about anything that sounded like it might have L on board. We settled down for a long wait: since we weren’t quite sure how he was arriving, we didn’t expect much in the way of punctuality.

I ought to try to describe to you, Jeffers, what we looked like, so that you can imagine this arrival from L’s point of view. Tony, at least, is not a usual-looking person at all! He is very big and tall, and strong from all the physical work he does, and he has long white hair that would never be cut unless I occasionally took the scissors to it. He says his hair turned white when he was still in his twenties. It is quite fine and silky, almost womanish, and has a faintly blue tint to it. He is dark-skinned, the only dark-skinned person for miles around, having been adopted as a baby by a marsh family. He has no idea what his origins are and has never tried to find out. His parents didn’t tell him he was adopted, and no one else ever referred to it, and since they lived a life of considerable isolation he says it wasn’t until he was eleven or twelve that he worked out what it meant that he was a different colour to them! I have seen photographs of Native Americans, and more than anything he looks like one of them, though how that could be I don’t know. He is more of an ugly than a good-looking man, with the permanence and dignity of ugliness, but he makes a handsome entity overall, if you see what I mean. He has a big face with heavy prominent features, except for his eyes, which are small and hard and look like they’re focused on something very far away. His teeth are crooked, from lack of visits to the dentist in childhood. He remembers his childhood as perfectly happy. He grew up near the house we live in now, and he didn’t really go to school, since his parents had certain beliefs about education and taught him at home themselves. They had another, biological child, a boy the same age as Tony, and these two boys grew up side by side, one white and one dark. I have never met Tony’s brother and know next to nothing about him, except that he left the marsh when he turned eighteen and hasn’t come back. I sense that a falling-out happened between them, but I don’t know what. I think Tony must have been his parents’ favourite, from the few details he’s given me. I wonder what it feels like, to adopt a child and then prefer it to one’s own. It seems, somehow, completely understandable. The parents died, both at the same time – they drowned, Jeffers, in one of the tidal surges that sometimes burst along our coast and can wrong-foot even people entirely familiar with the terrain. It was summer and they were out on their boat together, and the sea rose up and swept them away. Tony is always out on the water in his boat too, fishing or setting crab and lobster traps, but I believe that deep down he is afraid of it.

Tony has never – as far as I’m aware – purchased an item of clothing, since his adoptive father and grandfather happened to be big men also and left behind them such a sufficient store that Tony has rarely opened the wardrobe and found himself lacking anything. It does, however, make for some eccentricities of dress: on this particular occasion – the drive to collect L – he was wearing one of his grandfather’s three-piece suits, complete with tartan waistcoat and watch chain. With his enormous size and his long white hair and his dark, rough-hewn face, he must have looked quite uncanny – I’m so used to him I can’t always tell. I myself was presumably dressed as I always am, in either black or white, I can’t remember which. I like to wear soft, draping, shapeless clothes which I can add or remove in layers, depending on the weather. I have never understood clothes terribly well, and have found the element of choice especially unmanageable, so it was a great day for me when I realised I could just wear everything all at once, and that by limiting the colours to black and white I need never think about the aesthetics again.

You know what I look like, Jeffers, and I looked then much as I did before and do now. I’ve always felt rather fatalistic, looks-wise, as though I were shuffling and reshuffling the same old set of cards, though in the difficult years before I met Tony I did lose a proportion of the deck in weight, which has never come back to me. That day at the harbour, the cards were dealt in the pattern of my fiftieth year. I had some creases on my face, but not all that many: the oily skin that plagued me in my youth has defended me at this stage of life from wrinkles, a rare instance of fairness in the human lot. My long hair had some grey in it, a horrible, witch-like combination, I always think, but Tony’s one wish as far as my appearance goes has been for me not to cut or dye my hair, and he’s the one that has to