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

obliged to let you go,’ I said, once I’d thought about it, ‘but if that doesn’t work out, I believe I am obliged to remain responsible for you forever.’

She sat silently for a while and then she nodded her head and said:

‘Good.’

Because of events in our shared history I had come to see Justine as vulnerable and wounded, when in fact her key characteristic is her dauntlessness. As a small child she had shown this quality, and so perhaps it is truer to say, Jeffers, that we can consider our job as parents to have been accomplished without fatal error or wrongdoing when the small child becomes visible once more in the fully grown being. I have often considered the survival of paintings, and what it means for our civilisation that an image has survived across time undamaged, and something of the morality of that survival – the survival of the original – pertains, I believe, to the custody of human souls too. There was a period in which I lost Justine and during which I will never know precisely what happened to her, and it was for signs of damage from this time that I was always on the alert. I told her this, around the time that we had the conversation about obligation. I told her that she had lost a year of the care she was owed by me, and that she could consider it a formal debt, to be reclaimed at any time. I even wrote an IOU out for her on a piece of paper! She laughed at me for it, though not unkindly, and I was never handed back that piece of paper, but when she and Kurt returned from Berlin to live with us, it did occur to me that she was perhaps calling in what I owed her.

She had become somewhat of a stranger to me in her time away, and just as a familiar place can seem smaller and clearer when you return there after an absence, and any changes quite shocking at first, I found her somehow distilled, as well as in certain ways startlingly altered. Change is also loss, and in that sense a parent can lose a child every day, until you realise that you’d better stop predicting what they’re going to become and concentrate on what is right in front of you. In that period her small, sturdy physique had suddenly matured, and acquired a density and agility that brought an acrobat to mind: she seemed full of a pent-up but expertly balanced energy, as though at any minute she might whirl exultantly up into the air. Yet likewise when she had no direction or nothing to do she could assume an awful flaccidity, like an acrobat who has somehow got herself stranded down on the ground. She had dismayed me by cutting off all her hair, and had taken to wearing squarish smocks and workaday clothes that stood in stark contrast to her physical ebullience, as well as to the splendour of Kurt’s own wardrobe. I suspected that she was engaged in the pointless squandering of her femininity, and perhaps because I secretly feared I was somewhere to blame for it, I was tempted to lay this wastage at Kurt’s door. The image of middle-aged dullness they formed seemed like something he, rather than she, had summoned up and was doing rather well out of, and I was frequently shocked by little put-downs and criticisms he would deliver to her in a quiet voice, the way parents sometimes lower their voices to criticise their children in front of other people, as a way of burnishing themselves. Yet Justine was slavish in her treatment of him, and would become quite frantic if his needs or expectations were frustrated by a particular turn of events, which meant that I was always slightly nervous while living at close quarters with them in the main house, lest I inadvertently be the cause of the frustration.

Privately, I interpreted Justine’s conduct as the unmediated product of her feelings about her father, around whom I myself had once been nervous and slavish too, and in fact I had found myself beginning to substitute Kurt for him quite naturally. One morning I was sitting beside Justine while she was looking for something in her purse, and a small photograph fell out. I picked it up and saw a close-up image of her with her father, whom I had not seen in person for several years. Their heads were resting together and their arms were around one another’s necks and they both looked very happy, and I was so astonished that I couldn’t even feel envy or insecurity, just simple admiration!

‘What a lovely picture of you with your dad,’ I said to her, and jumped out of my skin when she screeched with laughter in my ear.

‘That’s Kurt!’ she said, cackling and stuffing the photo back in her purse.

Later she told Kurt about it and they laughed again over the idea that I had mistaken him for her father, though I was gradually becoming aware that the misapprehension ran deeper in me than either of them realised. Whenever Tony asked Kurt to help outside, for instance, I would feel a protest leap immediately into my throat, as though I believed that Kurt should be shielded from discomfort and labour. I had believed the same thing of Justine’s father, at one time, which shows how little we are able to truly change ourselves. Yet Justine herself didn’t object to these requests, and the reason she didn’t was because it was Tony who had made them, as I discovered when I myself once casually asked Kurt to help clear the dishes from the table and was treated to flounces and glares from Justine. I’m generally suspicious when people are said to ‘adore’ other people, especially when they’ve been given no choice over who those people are, but Justine did always seem to have taken to Tony right