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

the place where he would destroy her rather than be revealed, and I had no intention now of being destroyed in that way – I would sooner destroy myself, I said, if Justine was capable of understanding my reasons for doing it. What I wanted instead was for L to meet me on the basis of that recognition I had felt that day in Paris – I wanted to be recognised by him, because grateful as I was for Tony and Justine and for my existence at the marsh, my individuality had tormented me my whole life with its demand to be recognised.

‘All right,’ he said quietly, after a long silence. ‘Come across later and let me look at you. Wear something that fits,’ he added.

Well, Jeffers, I grabbed my bag of sea leaves and I leaped to my feet and I ran back up to the house in a state of pure joy – I felt all at once so light and unburdened, I thought I might just fly up to the sun! Everything seemed transformed, the day, the landscape, the meaning of my presence in it, as if it had been turned inside out. I was like a person who walks for the first time without pain, after a long, long illness. I ran up the lawn and along the flower beds and as I came around the corner to the house I bumped into Tony.

‘Isn’t it a wonderful day?’ I said to him. ‘Isn’t everything just wonderful?’

He gave me a lengthy and very beady look.

‘Looks like you need to go and lie down for a while,’ he said.

‘But Tony, don’t be ridiculous – I’m full of energy!’ I cried. ‘I feel like I could build a house or chop down a whole forest or – ’

I couldn’t keep still any longer and I ran into the house and through the kitchen, where Justine and Kurt were standing quietly at the counter, shelling the mountain of peas that had just come in from the garden.

‘Isn’t it beautiful outside?’ I said. ‘I feel so alive today!’

They both lifted their faces and stared dumbly at me and I left my bag of leaves on the counter and ran on, up the stairs and into my room, and I closed the door behind me and dropped down on the bed. Why didn’t anyone want me to be happy? Why were they all so disapproving, the minute I showed any excitement and high spirits? My mood began to deflate a little with these thoughts. I sat there on the bed and went back over my conversation with L, and thought again about the feeling his attention had given me, which was a golden feeling of health. Oh, why was living so painful, and why were we given these moments of health, if only to realise how burdened with pain we were the rest of the time? Why was it so difficult to live day after day with people and still remember that you were distinct from them and that this was your one mortal life?

After all I found that Tony was right, and that I did need to lie down quietly, and I lay there and breathed and savoured the marvellous feeling of lightness, as though some great malevolent lump had been removed from inside me. In the end, it wasn’t anyone else’s business that the lump had been there, nor that it was gone – the whole point was that I had to learn to live more in myself. Everybody else, it seemed to me, lived perfectly happily in themselves. Only I drifted around like a vagrant spirit, cast out of the home of myself to be buffeted by every word and mood and whim of other people! Sensitivity all at once seemed to me like the most terrible curse, Jeffers, foraging for truth in a million pointless details, when in fact there was only one truth, and it lay beyond the power of description. There was only this lack or lightness that words fled away from, and I lay on the bed and felt it, and tried not to think too much about what it was and how one could describe it.

But we live in time – we can’t help it! Eventually I had to get up and go downstairs, and there were all the usual chores to do and all the enacting of oneself that living with other people requires, and one way or another it was late afternoon before I was able to contemplate going across to the second place for my assignation with L. All through those hours and those chores I was aware that a great change had taken place in me, and I kept hoping someone else would notice it. The thought of L looking at me had made me look at myself, and because I could see myself I expected the others to see me too! But they acted as usual, even Tony, and when I slipped away upstairs to get changed it all seemed so normal that I remained convinced that what I was doing was normal as well.

I opened my cupboard of clothes and felt a sudden qualm at the prospect of trying to find what I wanted, so sure was I that what I wanted wasn’t there. As I have already said, Jeffers, I had at some point given up on the attempt to learn the language of clothes, and if someone had given me a uniform I would gladly have worn it every day, but instead I had devised a sort of uniform of my own, in that everything I possessed was more or less the same. But none of it answered to L’s description, which was to wear something that fitted, and as I rummaged hopelessly in the cupboard I remembered that before I came to the marsh my clothes had been more fitted, and that perhaps the last day on which I had worn something fitted was the