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

where I needed to turn left instead of right, and my moral compass had frequently led me past scenes from my own childhood that filled me with frank amazement, now that I was visiting them in reverse. But there are some things that don’t really have an opposite – they need to come out of nowhere. This is perhaps the limit of honesty, Jeffers, this place where something new has to be created that bears no relation to what was there before, and it was a place I often found myself flailing in with Justine. The quality that I felt I lacked was authority, and it’s difficult to say quite what the opposite of authority is because almost everything seems to be its opposite. I’ve often wondered about where authority comes from, whether it’s the result of knowledge or character – whether, in other words, it can be learned. People know it when they see it, yet they still might not be able to say exactly what it’s composed of or how it operates. When Tony said that I didn’t know my own power, in fact he might have been saying something about authority and its role in shaping and cultivating power. Only tyrants want power for its own sake, and parenthood is the closest most people get to an opportunity for tyranny. Was I a tyrant, wielding shapeless power without authority? What I felt a lot of the time was a sort of stage fright, the way I imagine inexperienced teachers must feel when they stand at the front of the class looking at a sea of expectant faces. Justine had often looked at me in just that way, as though expecting an explanation for everything, and afterwards I felt I had never explained anything quite to her satisfaction, or mine.

In the past she had bristled and fought me off like a porcupine putting out her quills when I tried to show her physical affection, and so I had got into the habit of not touching her terribly often, in the end forgetting which of us this undemonstrative behaviour belonged to. I decided to begin there in any case, with the physical approach, in my practise of giving love. In the kitchen the morning after my conversation with Tony I went to her and put my arms around her, and for a while it was like hugging a small tree that doesn’t move or respond but is nonetheless willing to be hugged – pleasant, but with no particular structure or sense of time. The important thing was that she didn’t seem all that taken aback and she let me do it long enough for me to understand that it was something I was entitled to do. When she had decided the hug was over, she gave a little laugh and stepped back and said:

‘Shall we get a dog?’

Justine often asked me why Tony and I didn’t get a dog, since our life was ideally suited to having one and since she knew Tony had always had dogs before he met me. He kept a photograph of his favourite, a brown spaniel called Fetch, beside our bed. The truth was, Jeffers, I feared that if Tony got a dog, it would become the centre of his attention, and he would give it friendship and affection that should have come to me. I was in a sense in competition with this theoretical pet, many of whose characteristics – loyalty, devotion, obedience – I believed I already demonstrated. Yet I knew that Tony did in fact yearn for a dog, and that whatever he got from me, he did not confuse it in his mind with the rewards and responsibilities of animal ownership. I took this to mean that he was not entirely convinced of my loyalty or obedience, and perhaps even that a part of him would find it easier to fondle a dog than a grown woman, and only his stating that he personally did not any longer desire a dog would have persuaded me otherwise. But he had no intention of stating such a thing – all he knew, or would confess to knowing, was that I wouldn’t like it, and for him the subject was therefore closed.

If I were a psychologist, I would say that this non-dog had come to stand for the concept of security, and its reappearance at the scene of my hug with Justine seemed to confirm that surmise. I mention this because it illustrates how in matters of being and becoming, an object can remain itself even at the mercy of conflicting perspectives. The non-dog represented the necessity for trusting and finding security in human beings: I preferred it that way, but Tony and Justine only had to get a sniff of that proposition to take fright. Yet the non-dog was a fact, at least for Tony and for me, and we were able to agree on it, even while it meant different things to each of us. The fact represented the boundary or separation between us, and between any two people, that it is forbidden to cross. This is very easy for someone like Tony, and very difficult for someone like me, who has trouble recognising and respecting such boundaries. I need to get at the truth of a thing and dig and dig until it is dragged painfully to light – another doglike quality. Instead all I could do was suspect, from my side of the boundary, that the two chief recipients of my love – Tony and Justine – both privately yearned for something mute and uncritical to love them instead.

Justine is very musical, and she often sang to us in the evenings and played her guitar, while we sat around the fire. She has a very sweet voice and a wistful, penetrating air when she sings that I have always found affecting. She had been practising a song with Brett, for which she had written a harmony, and they decided