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

this need for inactivity in sleep and in mental passivity. I always sprang out of bed in the morning, careening around full of energy and will and quite capable of building Rome in a day, only this other part of me wouldn’t let me do it. Tony slept deeply and long, and when he rose he carried the balance of his pleasures and his duties along with him, so that he never strained any one part of himself with too much of either. I would watch him in fascination, Jeffers, trying to learn. He made and ate his breakfast with excruciating slowness, while I wolfed mine down like an animal, so that it was gone long before I had stopped feeling hungry. He would go to an immense amount of trouble over certain things that filled me only with impatience, like the broken old radio I had wanted to throw away but he was determined to fix, even though we had replaced it with a new one. He spent the longest time over it, and for a while our kitchen table was covered with all the parts, and then just as we had started to argue over it, it disappeared. A few days later I had to go and tell him something while he was down at the field on his tractor, and as I approached across the grass I distinctly heard an aria from Handel’s Alcina pealing out over the noise of the engine. He had installed the machine in his tractor, so that he could listen to music while he drove up and down!

Tony believed that I had done more than my fair share of work, and that what was required of me now in my life with him was to enjoy myself, but what he hadn’t reckoned with was the difficulty of finding pleasure and enjoyment for someone who has never really valued them. He thought I should take pride in what I had survived and what I had achieved, and go around like a sort of queen bee, but meanwhile I had come to view the world as far too dangerous a place in which to stop and congratulate myself. The truth was I had always assumed that pleasure was being held in store for me, like something I was amassing in a bank account, but by the time I came to ask for it I discovered the store was empty. It appeared that it was a perishable entity, and that I should have taken it a little earlier.

What I wanted now was work or distraction of a meaningful kind, but try as I might, I couldn’t find meaning in those seedlings! Nonetheless I put on my old boots and found the trowel and rake, and with much sighing I trudged down to the vegetable beds to begin my task. Just as I was unloading the trays of little green shoots from the wheelbarrow, who should appear by my side but Brett, all fresh and lovely in a primrose-yellow dress, with silver sandals on her feet that offered the greatest possible contrast to the muddy, ogreish affairs on mine.

‘Need a hand?’ she said cheerfully. ‘L’s in a foul mood this morning, so I thought I’d better make myself scarce.’

Well, Jeffers, with all my irritation over Brett’s presence and my feeling of being imposed upon, I admit I hadn’t thought once about how it might be for her to be stuck out here among strangers, sharing a confined space with a man of famed intractability to whom her relationship was unclear. I’m not the kind of woman who intuitively understands or sympathises with other women, probably because I don’t understand or sympathise all that much with myself. Brett had seemed to me to have everything, and yet in that moment I saw in a flash that she had nothing at all, and that her intrusive and uninhibited manner was simply her means of survival. She was like one of those climbing plants that has to grow over things and be held up by them, rather than possessing an integral support of her own.

‘That’s good of you,’ I said, ‘but I wouldn’t want your nice clothes to get dirty.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ she said. ‘It’s a relief to get dirty sometimes.’

She picked up the trowel and squatted down beside the trays of seedlings.

‘If we dig a little trench,’ she said, ‘it will make it easier.’

I was quite happy to let her take charge, and I sat back on my heels while she made a low trench very deftly and neatly all along the bed. I asked her whether L was often bad-tempered, and she stopped what she was doing to throw her head back melodramatically and laugh.

‘Do you know what he says? He says he’s going through the change!’

‘The change? Like a woman?’

‘That’s what he says. Except I don’t think women actually use that word any more.’

I found this idea quite interesting, Jeffers, despite Brett’s laughing at it: it seemed to me like something that might well happen to a creative artist, where a loss or alteration in the sources of potency had occurred. Oh, the bitter feeling of release from one’s service to blood and fate! To be led and then discarded by one’s urges: why should an artist not feel it more than anyone?

‘If you ask me,’ Brett said, ‘it’s everything else that’s changing, not him. He preferred it like it was before. He’s sulking, that’s all. He wants back all the things he pretended to take for granted.’

The art market had completely collapsed, she went on, after years of crazed overvaluing, so there were a lot of people in the same boat as L – and far worse, because they didn’t have his pedigree. But there were others – a small number – whose reputations and fortunes were surviving unharmed.

‘Some of them happen to be younger than him,’ she said, ‘and a different colour, and a couple of them are actually women, which adds