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

there was something higher and better within us which could never be equalled by what was right in front of us. The distance of art suddenly felt like nothing but the distance in myself, the coldest, loneliest distance in the world from true love and belonging. Tony didn’t believe in art – he believed in people, their goodness and their badness, and he believed in nature. He believed in me, and I believed in this infernal distance in myself and in all things, in which their reality could be transmuted.

Tony had told me, a few days before he left, about a strange encounter he had had with L in the glade. Tony had just shot a deer there, since deer were breaking in and eating the tree bark, which would cause the trees eventu-ally to die. Tony was glad he had managed to cull this deer, which he intended to skin and prepare for us to eat. He was walking through the glade carrying the dead deer over his shoulders when he met L on the path, and far from congratulating Tony on his catch, L had become angry, even after Tony had given him his reasons for shooting the deer.

‘I won’t have killing done near me,’ L apparently said, and he had gone on to say that as far as he was concerned the trees could fend for themselves.

He didn’t seem to recognise that this was Tony’s property and that Tony could do what he wanted here, and I believe the reason he didn’t was because L’s conception of property was as a set of inalienable rights attached to himself. His property was the radial sphere of his own persona; it was the environs of wherever he happened to be. He was defending his right not to be trespassed on by whoever might choose to come and let off a gun right next to his ear – or so I was able to surmise. What I said to Tony was that perhaps it was because L had grown up in a slaughterhouse and had an aversion to the deaths of animals.

‘Maybe,’ Tony said. ‘All he said was that what I did was worse than what the deer had done. But I don’t think so. There are some things you have to be able to kill.’

I thought about this story, while I sat on the bed and stared at the rain, and what I thought was that Tony and L were both right, but that Tony was right in a way that was sadder and harder and more permanent. Tony accepted reality and saw his place in it as something he was responsible for: L objected to reality and was always trying to free himself from its strictures, which meant that he believed himself responsible for nothing. And my own desire to be stroked and comforted and to have the bad things that had happened atoned for lay somewhere between the two, and that was the reason I had run away from Tony in the glade.

On the evening of the fifth day the door to my room opened and there on the threshold stood Tony, as large as life! We looked at each other, and both of us were remembering the last time we had looked at each other, Tony from the window and I from down below in the trees, and I saw that we each knew we had spent some part of ourselves in that moment that would never be restored to us, and that we were going to walk on in this humbler and more depleted condition.

‘Did you hear me?’ I said, holding my breath.

Slowly he nodded his big head, and then he held out his arms and I flew into them.

‘Please forgive me!’ I said. ‘I know that what I did was wrong. I promise never to make you go away again!’

‘I forgive you,’ he said. ‘I know you only made a mistake.’

‘Where have you been?’ I said. ‘Where did you go?’

‘To the cabin at North Hills,’ he said, and I bowed my head sadly, because the cabin at North Hills is my favourite place in all the world, and is where Tony took me when we first fell in love.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Was it very lovely?’

Tony was silent, and so I thought I would never know whether North Hills was still lovely if I wasn’t there, and it seemed right that I shouldn’t know, because I had hurt Tony and there was no point pretending that I hadn’t, or hoping that things had been ruined for him as a result. But then he said, stating what ought to have been obvious to me:

‘I came back.’

Well, we were very happy, and then we went downstairs and were happy some more, and Justine cooked a dinner for us, and even Kurt perked up a little at having Tony home with us again. North Hills is four or five hours’ drive from the marsh, a lot of it on mud tracks, and it was late and I knew Tony must be tired, so when there was a knock at the door I told him just to go off to bed and went to answer it myself. There on the doorstep in the dark stood Brett, coatless and shivering and wild-eyed. I asked her what the matter was, and when she opened her mouth she shook so hard I could hear her teeth knocking together through the gash of her lips. She told me L was dead, or might be, she didn’t know – he was lying on the bedroom floor and he wasn’t moving, and she had been too frightened to go near him and check.

We all rushed up through the rain to the second place, and found L lying as Brett had described, except that now he was making great groans that showed at least he was alive, though they were the strangest and most terrible inhuman sounds I had ever heard. So Tony, after all his