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

anyone went to town. I said he could use the little downstairs study if he wanted, since it was quiet and no one else needed it. It had a good-sized desk that faced away from the window – I believed most writers agreed, I said, that it was better not to have anything to look at.

As a choice of costume for his new career, Kurt decided on a long black velvet housecoat, a red tam-o’-shanter jammed far back on his head, and to top it off, rope-soled espadrilles on his bare feet. He walked fatefully off to the study in those espadrilles, carrying a block of paper under each arm and the pens in the pocket of the housecoat, and closed the door. Later, walking past the window, I saw that he had moved the desk to face the garden and the glade, so that he could see, and be seen by, everyone who passed. He was there in the window when you went out, and he was there when you came back in again. He wore a very doleful expression, looking into the far distance, and appeared not to know you if you happened to meet his eye. I wondered whether part of his intention – far from hiding himself away – was to attract attention, specifically Justine’s, while at the same time keeping her under surveillance, since she was now spending a lot of her time outdoors with Brett. They did all sorts of things together, exercises, watercolour painting, even archery, using a beautiful old wooden bow Brett had apparently found in the junk shop in town and had repaired and polished up, and since the weather continued to be windless and warm they did most of it outside on the lawn or in the shade of the trees in the glade, all beneath the baleful gaze of Kurt. A few times they took Tony’s boat out for the day, while Kurt remained at his window, though they had invited him to go with them. He had become a sort of icon fixed in a frame, reproaching us all for our triviality and wasted time.

By spending most of the day in the study, Kurt had effectively declared himself occupied with matters of a higher order than fence-mending or mowing, and so his affiliation to Tony quickly receded. It was now L he appeared to identify as his natural ally. I sometimes saw them in the early evening, walking in the glade and talking, though I don’t know how these conversations had come about or who had initiated them. I heard Kurt say to Justine that he and L had discussed their respective crafts, and I was quite surprised to hear it, since it was difficult to talk straight with L on any subject in an ordinary way, let alone his work. Tony didn’t care that Kurt no longer followed him around: what he couldn’t stand was the idea of him having nothing to do.

In a way I admired Kurt’s change of direction, since at least it was some sort of constructive response to the change in Justine and to her unwillingness to content herself with playing the little wife any longer. Who knew, perhaps he was writing a masterpiece! Justine asked me, shyly, if I thought that was the case. I told her it was impossible to tell from the outside. Some of the most interesting writers could pass as bank managers, I said, while the wittiest raconteur could become dull once he had recognised the necessity of explaining his anecdotes piece by piece. Some people write simply because they don’t know how to live in the moment, I said, and have to reconstruct it and live in it afterwards.

‘At least he’s sticking to it,’ I said.

‘He’s used up one whole block of paper already,’ she said. ‘He asked me to get him some more in town.’

I was concerned about Justine’s future, and something in her recent blossoming and her growing independence tore at my heartstrings – it almost felt like the less I had to worry about, the sadder I became. She had applied to do a further course of study at university in the autumn, and been accepted. She didn’t say whether Kurt would be going with her – it didn’t seem to be one of her considerations.

‘She’s starting to go out there,’ Tony said to me, when I confessed these feelings to him in bed at night. He was pointing at the dark window, by which I understood him to mean the wider world.

‘Oh Tony,’ I said, ‘it’s as if I wanted her to get married to Kurt and spend the rest of her life dowdily waiting on him and being held back by him!’

‘You want her to be safe,’ Tony said, and that was exactly right: by revealing her true beauty and potential, she was somehow less safe than she had been before. I couldn’t bear the thought of the hopes and possibilities that might come from this revelation, and what their crushing might do to her. Safer to go around in a Mother Hubbard, not risking anything!

‘She’s safer out there,’ Tony said, still pointing at the window. ‘As long as she has your love. You should practise giving it to her.’

He meant give it to her as something belonging to her, that she was free to take away. What was the significance of this gift? The truth was that I questioned the value of my love – I wasn’t sure how much benefit it could be to anybody. I loved Justine as it were self-critically: I was working, somehow, to free her from myself, when it appeared that what she needed was to take some of me along with her!

I realised, once I thought about it, that my main principle in bringing up my daughter had been simply to do the opposite with respect to her of what had been done to me. I was good at finding those opposites and at recognising