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

life for anything other than a tragedy,’ he said softly. ‘In the end I’m nothing more than a beggar, and I never have been.’

I didn’t see it that way at all, and I said so. Not to have been born in a woman’s body was a piece of luck in the first place: he couldn’t see his own freedom because he couldn’t conceive of how elementally it might have been denied him. To beg was a freedom in itself – it implied at least an equality with the state of need. My own experiences of loss, I said, had merely served to show me the pitilessness of nature. The wounded don’t survive in nature: a woman could never throw herself on fate and expect to come out of it intact. She has to connive at her own survival, and how can she be subject to revelation after that?

‘I’ve always thought you didn’t need revelation,’ he murmured. ‘I thought you somehow already knew.’

There was something sarcastic in his tone when he said that: in any case, I do recall him trying to make a joke out of this idea of women possessing some divine or eternal knowledge, which was tantamount to saying he didn’t need to bother about them.

He said he was thinking of trying his hand at portrait-painting while he was here. Something about his change in circumstances was making him see humans more clearly.

‘I wanted to ask,’ he said, ‘if you thought Tony would sit for me.’

This announcement came so much out of the blue and was so contrary to what I was expecting that I took it almost as a physical blow. There we stood in front of the very landscape I had looked at through his eyes and seen his hand in for all these years, and he turns around and says he wants to paint Tony!

‘Also Justine,’ he went on, ‘if you think she’d play along.’

‘If you’re going to paint anyone,’ I cried, ‘then surely it ought to be me!’

He looked at me with a faintly quizzical expression.

‘But I can’t really see you,’ he said.

‘Why not?’ I asked, and I believe it was the utterance that lay at the furthest bottom of my soul, the thing I had always been asking and still wanted to ask, because I had never yet received an answer. And I didn’t receive an answer that morning either, Jeffers, because just then the figure of Brett could be seen approaching across the grass, and my conversation with L was thereby brought to an end. She was holding a bundle in her hands, which turned out to be all the linen from the bed in the second place, and she tried to offer it to me as I stood there in my nightdress on the wet grass.

‘Would you believe it,’ she said, ‘but I can’t sleep against this fabric. It irritates my skin – I woke up this morning with a face like a broken mirror! Do you have anything softer?’

She stepped closer, across the line that generally separates one person from another, when they’re not intimately acquainted. Her skin looked perfectly fine even at close quarters, glowing with youth and health. She wrinkled her little nose and peered at my face.

‘Do you have this fabric on your bed too? It looks like it might be having the same effect on you.’

L ignored this basic piece of effrontery, and stood with his arms folded looking at the view, while I explained that all our bedlinen was the same, and that its slight roughness was the result of it being an entirely natural and healthful product. I could not, I added, offer her anything else, unless I were to drive all the way back to the same town from which we had collected them the day before, where there were shops. She looked at me imploringly.

‘Would that be completely impossible?’ she said.

Well, somehow I got myself away – it was amazing how Brett could make you feel physically trapped, even in the most open of spaces – and ran back up to the house and threw myself into the shower and washed and washed, as if in the hope I’d be all gone by the time I was finished. Later I sent Justine and Kurt over to them, to get a list of any supplies they might need that could be bought in the small town closest to us, and if the subject of the bedlinen came up again, I never got to hear about it!

Justine was twenty-one years old that spring, Jeffers, the age at which a person begins to show their true colours, and in many ways she was revealing herself to be not at all who I had believed her to be, while at the same time reminding me unexpectedly of other people I had known. I don’t think parents necessarily understand all that much about their children. What you see of them is what they can’t help being or doing, rather than what they intend, and it leads to all kinds of misapprehensions. Many parents, for instance, become convinced that their child has artistic talent, when that child has no intention whatever of becoming an artist! It’s all so many stabs in the dark, the business of trying to predict how a child will turn out – I suppose we do it to make bringing them up more interesting and to pass the time, the way a good story passes the time, when all that really matters is that afterwards they’re able to go out into the world and stay there. I believe they know this themselves better than anyone. I was never very interested in the concept of filial duty, or in eliciting maternal tributes from Justine, and so we got to these essentials fairly quickly in our dealings with one another. I remember her asking me, when she was thirteen or so, what I believed the limits of my obligation to her were.

‘I believe I am