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

to his feeling that the world is against him. The trouble is, he feels impotent.’

‘But he is somebody,’ I said.

Brett lightly shrugged her shoulders.

‘I think he was settling in for a long and luxurious retirement as an artistic eminence. He has a lot of rich friends,’ she added, in a low voice. ‘It would have taken him a whole year just to visit them all, and by the time he’d finished he’d be ready to go back and see the first one again. Most of them were heavy investors in his work, and if he paid them a call now, they’d all be sitting staring at walls that have had ninety per cent of their value wiped off them. I believe,’ she went on, nimbly lifting the seedlings from their trays and starting to stand them in a line down the trench, ‘this might be the best possible thing for him. To be stripped down to nothing again. He’s too young just to sit drinking martinis by someone else’s swimming pool.’

I asked her how old she was herself.

‘I’m thirty-two,’ she said, grinning, ‘but you have to swear not to tell anyone.’

She told me that she had met L through her rich cousin, the same one who had flown them here.

‘He’s an awful creep,’ she said. ‘He used to shut me in a cupboard at family parties when I was little and put his hands up my dresses. He looks like a sea monster now. But he became a collector, as they all do. They have so little imagination, they don’t know what else to do with their money. It’s funny, isn’t it, how determined they are to prove that the thing that can’t be bought can in fact be bought after all. I actually first met L at his house, and then later I persuaded him to buy a whole tranche of sketches L had sitting around in his studio, and since he knows nothing about art he was happy to pay far too much for them and then fly us here into the bargain. That’s all the money L has,’ she added, ‘for now.’

‘And what about you?’ I said, rather aghast at all this.

‘Oh, I’ve always had money. A lot of it’s gone, of course, but I have enough. That’s been my problem. No motivation.’ She grimaced and made quote marks with her fingers as she spoke the words. ‘I was drawn to L because he seemed so bitter and angry and rebellious, and I hardly ever meet people like that in the world I live in. I didn’t ask myself what he was doing there in that world himself!’

She told me how much she liked Justine.

‘She has so much honesty,’ she said. ‘Did you make her like that?’

I said I didn’t know. I’d certainly always been honest with her, but that wasn’t quite the same thing.

‘People can get tired of too much honesty,’ I said. ‘It makes them want to cover things up again.’

‘It certainly does!’ Brett said. ‘By the time I was eleven, I was so tired of people showing me things they pretended weren’t for my eyes, I decided to become a nun! I was always deciding to be things – I think I did it in the hope of finding something I couldn’t do.’

She asked me how I’d met Tony and come to live out here, and I told her the story and about how it had happened entirely by chance. It was a strange thing, I said, to live a life that had no connection whatever to anything you’d ever done or been. There was no thread that led to Tony, and no path between here and where I was before, and so my knowledge of it and of him had to come from an entirely different source. There was a place not too far away, I told her, a sort of archipelago where the sea has made these great fissures into the land, and on opposite banks of one of these very long and narrow bodies of water there are two villages that face one another. It would take literally hours to get by road from one to the other, going miles and miles inland and then coming back out again, yet they can see one another so clearly, right down to the clothes hanging on each other’s washing lines! Something of that separation, I said, which was composed not of distance but of impassibility, illustrated my own situation: I was more familiar with what I looked at than with where I actually was, and so I knew exactly what it would have been like to be over there, looking across at here. What I wasn’t so sure of was what here looked like. But I knew I was lucky to have met Tony.

‘It’s frightening to live on luck,’ Brett said, somewhat wistfully.

Then she asked me, straight out, if I thought I was in love with L!

‘No,’ I said, though the truth was, Jeffers, that I had been starting to wonder the same thing myself. ‘I just want to know him.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I wondered what it was.’

‘Are you in love with him?’ I asked.

‘I’m just a pal,’ she said, dusting the earth off her hands and putting the empty trays back in the wheelbarrow. ‘He was really crazy about me for a while. I think he thought I could fix him sexually, but I can’t. He’s all finished in that department. Instead I’m getting him to teach me to paint. He says I’ve got some ability. I think that’s going to be my next career!’

Tony surprised me very much by saying that he was going to sit for L. He went across to the second place on a bright fresh morning, and returned several hours later.

‘I don’t know why that man doesn’t just kill himself,’ he said.

He gave L two more sittings, and after that he had too much work to do. Large shoals of mackerel had suddenly arrived in our