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

of course, in that lovely morning light, none of it seemed quite as bad as I had felt it to be. I walked down through the shining wet grass to the point at which the trees give way to a wide view of the marsh and where the old boat stands with its prow lifted, yearning out toward the sea. There was a high tide and the water had stretched out to cover the land, in that silent and magical way of the tides here, that is somehow like a body turning and stretching and opening in sleep.

There, standing beside the boat and looking at the same thing I was looking at, was L, and I had no choice but to go to him and greet him, despite the fact that I was not at all ready for an encounter and was still wearing my nightclothes. But I had already understood that this was to be the keynote of my dealings with him, this balking of my will and of my vision of events, the wresting from me of control in the most intimate transactions, not by any deliberate act of sabotage on his part but by virtue of the simple fact that he himself could not be controlled. Inviting him into my life had been all my affair! And I saw suddenly, that morning, that this loss of control held new possibilities for me, however angry and ugly and out of sorts it had made me feel so far, as though it were itself a kind of freedom.

He heard my approach and he turned and spoke to me. I have not mentioned, Jeffers, how quietly L spoke: it was a murmur, like the sound of voices in a next-door room, something halfway between music and speech. You had to concentrate to hear him. Yet while he spoke, that arresting light from his eyes kept you riveted to the spot.

‘It’s lovely here,’ he said. ‘We’re very grateful.’

He was all fresh and clean-shaven, in a well-ironed shirt with another colourful scarf knotted at the throat. His mention of gratitude filled me instantly with shame, as though I had offered him something by way of a bribe which he had politely declined. It made the fact of his presence here entirely my responsibility, as I have said. I was used to our visitors either finding or feigning their own independence very quickly, and making it clear there was something – egotistically speaking – in it for them. L, by contrast, was behaving like a well-brought-up child who had been taken somewhere against his will.

‘You don’t have to be here,’ I said, or rather heard myself say, since it was the kind of thing I never usually said.

He looked startled, and the light in his eyes went out for a second and then came back on again.

‘I know that,’ he said.

‘I don’t want gratitude,’ I said. ‘It makes me feel dowdy and ugly, like a consolation prize.’

There was a silence.

‘All right,’ he said, and a mischievous smile came over his face.

I stood there in my crumpled nightdress, with my hair unbrushed and my bare feet growing cold from the dew, and felt I would like to have burst into tears – such strange, violent impulses were coming over me, one after another. I wanted to lie down and hammer my fists on the grass – I wanted to experience a complete loss of control, while knowing that I had lost control, in my exchange with L, already.

‘I thought you would be coming alone,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ he said softly, ‘that’s right, you did,’ as though there were nothing more to it than that he had forgotten to inform me. ‘Brett’s all right,’ he added.

‘But it changes everything,’ I wailed.

It is hard to convey to you, Jeffers, the sense of intimate familiarity I felt with L from that very first conversation, an intimacy that was almost kinship, as though we were brother and sister – almost as though we shared the same root. The desire I had to cry, to let myself go in front of him, as though my whole life until that moment had merely been a process of controlling myself and holding things in, was part of this overpowering feeling of recognition. I felt acutely conscious of my own unattractiveness, as I would in all my dealings with L, and I believe this sensation has some significance, painful though it is to recall it. Because I was not in fact unattractive, and certainly no more so then than at any other time of my life: or rather, whatever my object-value as a woman, the powerful feelings of ugliness or repulsiveness that beset me were coming not from some outward scrutiny or reality but from inside my own self. It felt like this inner image had suddenly become visible to other eyes, specifically L’s, but also Brett’s – the thought of her invasiveness and her suggestive commentary, in that state, was unbearable! I realised that I had had this ugliness inside me for as long as I could remember, and that by offering it to L, I was perhaps labouring under the belief that he could take it from me, or give me some opportunity to escape it.

Looking back on it now, I see that what I was experiencing might simply have been the shock of being confronted by my own compartmentalised nature. All these compartments in which I had kept things, from which I would decide what to show to other people who kept themselves in compartments too! Until then, Tony had seemed to me like the least divided person I had known: he had at any rate whittled it down to two compartments, what he said and did, and what he didn’t say and do. But L felt like the first entirely integrated being I had encountered, and the impulse I had was to catch him, as though he were a wild creature that needed to be ensnared, while at the