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

We had a cocktail of some sort in a big jug which we were sharing around, but L didn’t drink his: he accepted a portion, so as not to draw attention to himself, I suppose, and I found it afterwards, untouched. He never drank alcohol in the time that I knew him, at least that I saw. We always like to have a good drink at the day’s end, Jeffers, and go to bed sleepy and not too late, along with the birds – it seems to suit our way of life here. So L’s alertness in the darkness was unnerving. I was happy, though, to be in his presence, or more accurately, it was pleasant for an hour or two not to have to puzzle over what his absence meant. But then after that first time he didn’t come again. He stayed at home, while Brett came tripping and calling through the glade to sit in a circle with us every night, usually next to Justine. Kurt, after his day spent with the hosepipes, would be nodding in sleep in front of the brazier before he was halfway through his first cocktail: we woke him up to eat his dinner but he mostly crept off to bed by nine. This left Justine at a loose end, and Brett was right there to pick it up. And so the fire by which I had hoped to summon what I wanted ended by summoning the very thing I didn’t want, which was more of Brett’s company!

After the incident with the bedlinen I had treated Brett with a cordial wariness whenever we chanced to meet, but now she began to spend more time in the main house and I saw that I would have to find a more serviceable manner for dealing with her. One afternoon I was passing Justine’s room, and behind the closed door I heard the two of them talking and laughing inside. When I saw Justine later, her short hair was done in a new – and far more flattering – style, and she wore a bright scarf tied around her head that framed her pretty face quite strikingly.

‘Brett’s persuaded me to grow my hair,’ she said, slightly shamefaced, for I had been dropping hints on that score for weeks.

And indeed she did grow out her hair, Jeffers, all through the spring and summer, and by the autumn her lovely dark curls were falling almost to her shoulders, though by then Kurt was no longer there to see them.

Soon she and Brett were always together, and since they weren’t, I reasoned, all that far apart in age, I somewhat grudgingly supposed it was natural for them to become friends, despite being such different characters. In fact Brett was considerably older, as I discovered later, which might explain why Justine fell under her influence, rather than the other way around – to good effect, I must admit, at least as far as her appearance was concerned.

‘What on earth is this?’ Brett would say, as I myself didn’t dare to, when she discovered Justine in one of those sack-like garments she had taken to wearing. ‘Did it come from Mother Hubbard’s cupboard?’

A ‘Mother Hubbard’ was that loose kind of dress certain Victorian ladies used to wear that covered them from top to toe, to avoid having to put on a corset – Brett’s comparison was an exaggeration, but it wasn’t far off! Brett herself, of course, showed off her lovely figure at every opportunity. I believed, I suppose, that Justine’s concealment of herself and her embracing of the cult of plainness and comfort was the result of her shame and self-dislike, and the reason I believed it was because it was what I had always felt myself. At heart I feared I had failed to do something vital with respect to Justine’s womanhood, or worse, had inadvertently done to her the same thing that had been done to me. I had grown up disgusted by my physical self, and regarding femininity as a device – like the corset – to keep the repellent facts from view: it was as impossible for me to accept what was ugly in myself as to accept any other kind of ugliness. A woman such as Brett, therefore, unnerved me deeply, not only because she relished self-exposure but because I sensed she was thereby capable – without especial malice – of exposing other people. So when one day in the kitchen she crept up behind Justine and, laughing, grabbed her smock by the hem and whipped it over her head, so that there in the kitchen my daughter’s young body was revealed in its underwear for all the world to see, I was rather too ready to prove that Brett’s game was up.

‘How dare you?’ I cried, which was what I had wanted to say to her since the day we had met. ‘Who do you think you are?’

Justine was emitting muffled shrieks, which I soon understood were indicative of laughter, but all the same I was furious and upset, just as if it had been my own flesh that Brett had unveiled so mercilessly.

‘I’m sorry,’ Brett said, putting her pretty, remorseful face too close to mine and her conciliatory hand on my arm. ‘Was that too high-spirited?’

‘We’re not all exhibitionists here,’ I said, spitefully.

Justine, however, wasn’t angry with Brett at all after that incident, and even allowed herself to be called Mother Hubbard on occasion, which I privately fumed at until I realised one day that the sackcloths were no longer in evidence and that my daughter was undergoing a transformation. I came out of the house into the bright sunlight one afternoon and saw two figures sitting on the grass, and for a moment I didn’t seem to know either of them – two fresh and laughing young women, their limbs bared to the sun, like a pair of nymphs in the dawn of the world who had alighted