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

look at it, after all. That day, the day of L’s arrival, I do remember being unusually aware of the feeling that I had never once lived in the moment of my beauty, to the extent that I possess any. It had always felt like something I might find, or something I had temporarily lost, or something I was pursuing – it had felt, occasionally, immanent, but I had never had the sensation of holding it in my hand. I see that I am suggesting, by saying that, that I believe other women do have that sensation, and I don’t know whether that is really true. I have never known another woman well enough to know, with the internal kind of knowledge a girl might have, for instance, of her mother. I imagine, somehow, the mother handing it to the girl, the pearl of her particular beauty.

To return to the business of L’s arrival: there we were, sitting in our plastic chairs in the arrivals area, when a man and a woman walked in through the main doors. Since we were expecting L to come from the other direction we didn’t take much notice of them, but then I did look, and realised the man must be L! He came over and said my name enquiringly, and I stood up all flustered to shake his hand, and at the same moment he stepped aside and brought the woman forward and said:

‘This is my friend Brett.’

So I found myself shaking hands not with L but with a ravishing creature somewhere in her late twenties, whose air of poise and fashion was entirely unequal to her surroundings, and who offered her varnished fingertips as blithely as though we were meeting not at the ends of the earth but at a cocktail party on Fifth Avenue! She began to talk, gushingly, but I was so wrong-footed I couldn’t really hear what she was saying, and I kept trying to look at L but he had sort of hidden himself behind her. Tony had by then got to his feet. Tony is never any help in that kind of situation – he just stands there and says nothing. But I can’t bear any form of social awkwardness or tension: I become blank inside, so that I’m no longer aware of precisely what is being said or done. So I can’t tell you, Jeffers, what exactly was said by us all in those moments, only that when I introduced Tony to the young woman – Brett – she seemed astonished, and gave him the most frankly assessing, up-and-down look I had ever seen in my life! Then she turned to me and gave me the same look, and I saw that she was imagining me and Tony together sexually, and trying to work it out and see what it was like. She had a curious mouth that hung open in a kind of letterbox shape – the mouth of a comic-book gunman, I often thought afterwards. I caught little, piercing glimpses of L in those frantic moments, hiding and dodging there behind her. He was quite wiry and small – smaller than me – and seemed dapper and goatish, in white trousers rolled up at the cuffs and leather deck shoes and a fresh blue shirt and a colourful scarf tied around his neck. He was very well groomed and cared for, which surprised me. Also he had a kind of light, capering demeanour, when I had imagined him swarthier and heavier, and his eyes were nuggets of sky blue from which the most arresting light came. They shone out at me like two suns whenever they happened to meet mine.

Somehow I got them all out of the arrivals area and up the hill to the truck, in the course of which they managed to communicate that they had come not by boat but by private plane, Brett’s cousin being some billionaire or other who owned one, and who had dropped them off the day before and then buzzed off somewhere else. They had spent the night at a hotel in town, which accounted for their fresh, groomed appearance that had so caught me off guard, since people usually arrive in our part of the world draggled at least to some degree by the effort it takes to get here. It also explained their lack of luggage, which they had stored at the hotel and which we agreed we would collect on our way. I found it strange to think that they had been here a whole day and night without my being aware of it – I don’t know why, Jeffers, but it seemed to give them some kind of power or vantage point over us. We arrived at the truck, which is usually such a dependable and friendly sight, and I looked at it, and looked at Tony standing in his three-piece suit next to it, and a great misgiving went through me, the way lightning can pierce all the way through a tree from top to bottom and hollow out its core. Oh, it wasn’t at all how I’d planned it! I feared, suddenly, that my belief in the life I was living wouldn’t hold, and that all I’d built up would collapse underneath me and I’d be unhappy again – I didn’t know, in that moment, how I was going to manage. The first thing, obviously, was the presence of the woman Brett, which had come as a complete surprise to us and which was already creating a second difficulty, by increasing the elusiveness of L. I immediately saw that he would use her as a foil and a shield, and had probably brought her along for that purpose, to protect himself from the unknown circumstances he was travelling into, which was tantamount to protecting himself from me!

I should add, Jeffers, that I didn’t generally need or expect any special attention from my visitors, not even from L, in whom I’d