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

waters, and he and the men were taking their boats out every day and then selling the catch. It meant we had fresh mackerel for dinner, and also that Tony was gone from dawn till dusk.

A parcel arrived for L, a large tattered box covered with foreign stamps, and since Brett and Justine had driven off to town together, I took it across to him myself. I hadn’t set foot over there in all this time, and hadn’t seen L alone since that first morning when we had stood by the prow of the boat and talked. It’s hard to say exactly what I felt, Jeffers, except that there was a numb kind of disappointment inside me for which I could find no justifiable cause. Perhaps it was simply that although L and Brett had been with us for three weeks or so by then, we had absorbed their arrival without feeling any increase from it. Brett sailed gaily on the surface, while L had sunk like a stone into deep waters. I couldn’t really have said what was wrong, or expounded on my disappointment and the expectations it had come from – we were used to such visits taking all kinds of unpredicted forms – and all I could think was that it somehow came back to the question of gratitude that had arisen right at the start, in that first conversation with L. I had never, I supposed, come across such a flagrant case of ingratitude as his, and what I remembered was that he had offered gratitude in the very first words he spoke to me and that I had spurned his offer.

The box was really quite an awkward and heavy thing to haul up the rise through the glade. The door to the second place stood open in the sun, and at the threshold I stopped and put the box down just inside and paused to get my breath back. From there I had a view of the windows that ran across the front of the big room, and I couldn’t stop myself from crying out:

‘My curtains!’

The curtains had vanished – just the bare poles remained! At the sound of my voice L, whom I hadn’t even noticed sitting with his back to me in the far corner of the room, turned around. He was hunched on a wooden stool, wearing a great paint-stained apron, with a canvas on an easel in front of him. He had no brush or other implement in his hand: as far as I could tell, he had simply been sitting staring at it.

‘We took them down,’ he said. ‘They got in the way. They’re quite safe,’ he added, and then said something under his breath which sounded like my curtains, uttered in an unpleasant mocking tone.

The canvas in front of him was a muddy, indistinct ground with ghostly escarpment shapes cascading down into its centre. It was very faint, as if it was only just beginning to emerge, so it was difficult to decipher much about it except that its mountainous shapes bore no relation to what could be seen through the bare windows.

‘That came for you,’ I said, pointing at the box.

His expression lifted at the sight of it, and the light in his eyes came on.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘It must have been heavy to carry.’

‘I’m not a weakling,’ I said.

‘But you’re very slight,’ he said. ‘You could have hurt your back.’

It may just have been the quiet and indistinct way he spoke, or it may have been my difficulty in accepting commentary on my person, but the instant he made that remark about my size I became unsure that he had said it at all – and remain unsure to this day! It was so characteristic of him, Jeffers, this blurring of the interface of what I can only call the here and now. Things became formless and impalpable, almost abstract, where normally they would sharpen into focus. Being with him in a particular time and place was the very opposite of being with other people: it was as if everything had either already happened or was going to happen afterwards.

‘Someone had to bring it,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘That’s inconvenient for you.’

We stood and stared at one another, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Tony it is a certain stamina for a contest of that kind. But in the end I was ready to admit defeat, and I started to say that I was going back to the house, when at exactly the same moment he said:

‘Won’t you sit down?’

He offered a stool next to his, but I went and sat in the old ladder-back chair beside the empty fire instead, a piece of furniture I have held on to throughout my adult life and that for reasons I have forgotten I had chosen to put there, in the second place. Perhaps it had reminded me too much of the life before Tony, and therefore didn’t seem to belong in our home: whatever the reason, I was comforted to encounter it again that day, and to remember that it had existed before all of the things that were happening now, and would continue to exist in the future.

‘We call that the electric chair,’ L said. ‘The shape is uncannily similar.’

‘I’ll have it taken away if you like,’ I said coldly.

‘Don’t be silly,’ he said. ‘I was only teasing.’

Unmoved, I sat there and took my first good look at L. How can I describe him to you, Jeffers? It’s so hard to say how people appear, once you’ve come to know them – far easier to say what it’s like to be near them! When the east wind blows on the marsh it makes everything feel very cool and contrary, even in the warmest weather – well, L was something of an east wind, and like that wind he fixed himself to the spot and settled in to blow. Another thing about him was