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

no, I wanted to keep it there, because it seemed to me that to love someone is to be prepared to obey them, to obey even the smallest child, and that a love that makes no promise of relenting or of acquiescence is either an incomplete or a tyrannical love. Most of us are perfectly happy to give our obedience without even thinking about it to almost any tin-pot thing that sets itself up over us as an authority! I promised to obey Tony and he promised to obey me, and what I didn’t know, as I sat there looking through the window at the rain, was whether this vow – as some vows are – was entirely dishonoured by being once broken. In my heart I was asking him to obey me and come back home, and it almost made me feel powerful to ask it, because by asking it I was forced to understand how he had felt that night when I ran away from him into the glade. I was asking, in other words, as a more knowledgeable person than the person I had been then, and this felt like a kind of authority, and I hoped he would hear it and recognise it.

It rained for five days straight, and the earth got darker and the grass got greener and the trees drank with their heads down and their branches bowed. The gutters once more dripped into the water butts, and everywhere you went you could hear the constant ticking sound the drops made when they fell. The marsh lay sullen in the distance, cloaked in cloud, although sometimes a bar of cold white light would appear there and frozenly burn. It was a mysterious sight, this opalescent form far, far out and all coldly alight. It did not seem to emanate from the sun, and there was a frigid godliness to it that things lit by the sun do not possess. I stayed mostly in my room, and saw no one but Justine, who sometimes came and sat with me. She asked me whether I thought Tony had left because of L.

‘He left because I made him look ridiculous,’ I said. ‘L just happened to be the cause.’

‘Brett wants to leave too,’ Justine told me. ‘She says L is a bad influence on her. She says he takes too many drugs, and sometimes she takes them with him and they’re affecting her. I don’t know how she can stand it,’ she said, shuddering. ‘He’s so old and dried up. There’s nothing he can give her. He’s just a vampire on her youth.’

I felt very bad, Jeffers, hearing this description of L – it made the whole business of his presence here seem sordid, a sordidness for which I was responsible and in which I had implicated us all. I decided then and there that I would ask him to leave. There was something so small and suburban in this decision that I hated myself for it straight away. It made me unequal to L, the inferior of his own base acts, and I could easily imagine him laughing in my face for it. He could refuse, and then I would have to compel him to leave, by physical force if necessary – that was where that kind of decision got you!

I asked Justine whether she’d been over to the second place and seen what they’d done there and she looked at me guiltily.

‘Are you very angry?’ she said. ‘It wasn’t Brett’s fault, not really.’

I said I wasn’t especially angry – it was more that I was shocked, and shock is sometimes necessary, for without it we would drift into entropy. It was true that my conception of the second place had been irreversibly altered by the sight of L’s horrible mural, and could never go back to what it had been, even if every trace of paint were to be buried beneath layers of limewash. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to turn it back to look exactly as it had been before, yet in that process it would somehow have become fake. A kind of forgetting – a betrayal of the truth of memory – would have been enacted, and this is perhaps how we become artificial in our own lives, Jeffers, by our incessant habit of deliberate forgetting. I thought of how much Tony would hate the mural, especially the snake wound around the tree in the middle – snakes being the only thing Tony is frightened of. The painting of this snake suddenly seemed to represent an attack on Tony by L, an attempt to defeat him. Was Tony defeated? Was that why he had gone away? I remembered how L had stood and stroked my hair and said ‘There, there’ to me while I cried my sorrow out. The memory made me falter, and for a moment I stopped talking to Tony in my heart. I wasn’t sure, in that moment, whether Tony had ever stroked my hair and said ‘There, there,’ nor whether he even could or was likely to do such a thing, and it seemed just then that it was the only thing I had ever wanted a man to do for me. This, in other words, wasn’t L’s attack on Tony – it was really my attack, made possible through L, who had enabled me to doubt him!

‘Oh Tony,’ I said to him in my heart, ‘tell me what the truth is! Is it wrong to want things that you can’t give me? Am I fooling myself into believing that it’s right for us to be together, just because it’s easier and nicer that way?’

For the first time, Jeffers, I considered the possibility that art – not just L’s art but the whole notion of art – might itself be a serpent, whispering in our ears, sapping away all our satisfaction and our belief in the things of this world with the idea that