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

he filled one with the dreadful suspicion that there is no story to life, no personal meaning beyond the meaning of any given moment. Something in me loved this feeling, or at the very least knew it and recognised it to be true, as one must recognise darkness and acknowledge its truth alongside that of light; and in that same sense I knew and recognised L. I haven’t loved very many people in my life – before Tony, I never really loved anyone. I was only now learning to love Justine with something other than the usual mother-love and to see her as she actually was. True love is the product of freedom, and I’m not sure a parent and child can ever have that kind of love, unless they decide to start over again as adults. I loved Tony and I loved Justine and I loved L, Jeffers, even though the time I spent with him was so often bitter and painful, because he drew me with the cruelty of his rightness closer to the truth.

Brett and Justine sang their song together very charmingly, and then they sang it again since I begged them to, and when that was over Kurt stood up in his black velvet housecoat and came to stand in front of us beside the fireplace to read. He had a block of pages an inch thick which he placed solemnly on a table beside him, and he began to read without introduction, in a loud and doleful voice, lifting one page after another from the top of the block and afterwards placing them facedown on the other side, until we realised he must be intending to read the whole thing! We all sat without moving or speaking, a captive audience, as this knowledge dawned on us – I couldn’t understand how he had managed to produce so much writing in so little time. It was set in an alternate world, Jeffers, with dragons and monsters and armies of imaginary creatures interminably fighting one another, and great lists of names like in parts of the Old Testament, and pages of oracular-sounding dialogue which Kurt spoke out very slowly and solemnly. After an hour or so of this I sort of came to and began to look around out of the corner of my eye. The fire had gone out, and Tony was asleep in his chair, while Brett and Justine sat with glazed faces, their heads leaning together. Only L appeared to be paying attention: he sat very still in his chair with his hands folded in his lap and his head cocked slightly to the side. Finally, after nearly two hours, Kurt had read his way through the whole block and he laid down the last page, heaving a great sigh with his arms hanging by his sides and his head thrown back, while we roused ourselves to applaud.

‘That’s it so far,’ he gasped. ‘What do you think?’

It was one o’clock in the morning by then, and whether or not any of us had anything to say, I for one was reluctant to prolong the evening much further! I tried to think of a comment to make for politeness’s sake, but I wasn’t sure I remembered anything at all about what he’d read. I expected Justine at least to contribute something, but she just sat with Brett’s head on her shoulder and an air of abstraction, as though whatever it was she might have said couldn’t be uttered out loud. Tony had opened his eyes, but that was all. L appeared quite composed, remaining very erect and wide-awake in his chair, with his fingers laced beneath his chin. The silence extended until I felt sure it would snap, and just before that happened L spoke.

‘It’s really far too long,’ he said, in his quiet, unhurried voice.

I guessed that Kurt had never once considered length to be a matter of concern in the production of literature – on the contrary, he had probably taken it as a sign that things were going well!

‘It has to be,’ he said, rather stiffly.

‘But it’s over now,’ L said. ‘So why does it? Why does it have to take up time?’

‘It’s how the story goes,’ Kurt said. He looked rather confused. ‘That was only the first section.’

L lifted his eyebrows and gave a small smile.

‘But my time belongs to me,’ he said. ‘Be careful what you ask people to endure.’

And with that he calmly stood up and bid us all goodnight and vanished into the darkness! For a few moments Kurt just stood there, white-faced and stricken. Justine stirred herself and embarked on some propitiatory comment or other, but he put up a hand to silence her. He began to cast terrible glances around the room, as though it were full of enemy assailants closing in on him. Then he grabbed the sheaf of paper and tucked it under his arm and bolted out into the darkness too! Justine told me later that Kurt’s novel was in fact quite a faithful copy of a book the two of them had read a few months earlier: she believed he hadn’t really been aware of what he was doing, and that when the ideas had come into his head he had thought he was imagining them himself rather than simply remembering them. The next day he was no longer to be seen in the study window. He appeared in the kitchen wearing his normal clothes, and kept at a distance from everybody. I saw him wandering forlornly in the garden and I went out to find him, since I felt sorry for him by this point and wondered whether I should have done more to look after him. How guilty a man like that can make you feel, Jeffers! The truth was that in another compartment of my mind I was considering making him disappear altogether by marching him down to the train station, buying him a ticket and sending him straight