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

voyaging, got back in his truck and drove the two hours’ distance to the hospital, with L on the back seat where we had packed him in with cushions and blankets, and Brett up front. He returned at dawn, with Brett but without L, who the doctors said had had a stroke.

They kept him there at the hospital for two weeks and then Tony and I drove to get him. He was very thin and frail, though he could walk, and he seemed in those two weeks to have become an old man – he was utterly crushed, Jeffers, and he walked with a sliding kind of step, and his bent legs and hunched-over shoulders made him look cowed, as though he had been frozen in the act of flinching. But it was his eyes that were most shocking, those lamp-like brilliant eyes that had seemed to cast revelation wherever they looked. They were blackened now, like two bombed-out rooms. The light in them was extinguished and they were filled with a horrifying darkness. The doctors spoke to us about his condition while L kept his head strangely alert, as though he were listening, but not to them. And this other-worldly attentiveness, while his ghoulish eyes seemed to stare at nothing, remained a characteristic of his new self, even once he was able to talk and move around freely. His physical recovery, in fact, was quite rapid, except for his right hand, of which he would never regain full use. It was very large and red and swollen, as though it were engorged with blood, and it hung horribly from his thin arm, lurid and inert.

We talked a lot, in that time – Tony and Justine and Brett and I – about what could or should happen, and when, and how. The first days of summer had come, full and warm, with big beneficent breezes blowing in from the marsh, but we barely noticed. We were a household of anxious ministers, pondering the strange disaster that had befallen us. There were countless phone calls and enquiries and practical investigations, and many, many discussions late into the night, but the end result of it all was that L stayed exactly where he was, in the second place, because there was nowhere else for him to go. He had no family and no home, and very little money, and although by then it had become easier for people to travel, we could find no one among his friends and associates prepared to accept responsibility for him. You know how fickle that world is, Jeffers, so there’s no need for me to go into it here. In the end there was Brett and there was me, and while I acknowledged that these events had occurred on my soil, and that L had come here under my aegis, Brett struggled to see her own commitment to the situation as anything more than to a jolly escapade that had gone wrong. She had come along with L on a whim, not as a plan for life!

I often thought, Jeffers, during those days, of the importance of sustainability, and of how little we consider it in the decisions and actions we take. If we treated each moment as though it were a permanent condition, a place where we might find ourselves compelled to remain forever, how differently most of us would choose the things that moment contains! It may be that the happiest people are those who broadly adhere to this principle, who don’t borrow against the moment, but instead invest it with what could acceptably continue into all moments without causing or receiving damage and destruction – but it requires a great deal of discipline and a degree of puritanical cold-heartedness to live in that way. I didn’t blame Brett for her unwillingness to make a sacrifice of herself. It was evident by the second or third day after L’s return from hospital that she had never taken care of anyone or anything in her life, and that she didn’t intend to start now.

‘I hope you don’t think I’m a terrible scab,’ she said, when she came to find me one afternoon to tell me that her cousin – the sea monster – was willing to fly up to get her and take her home.

I realised I didn’t know where Brett’s home actually was, and it turned out she didn’t really have one – or rather, she had many, and therefore none at all. She lived in one or other of her father’s houses around the world, and he would always give her a week or so’s notice before he was due to arrive so that she had time to pack up and leave, because her stepmother didn’t like to see her. Her father was a famous golfer – even I had heard of him, Jeffers – and very rich, and the one thing Brett had never learned to do was play golf, because her father had never taught her. So it goes, among our species! I hugged her while she cried a little, and said I thought it was exactly the right thing that she should go back to her life. Yet in my heart I knew that it was really only that she was running away from L and his misfortunes, and that for all her accomplishments and beauty she had no better grasp of life’s meaning than to consider it for what did or didn’t suit her. And what, in the end, was so wrong with that? It was Brett’s privilege to run away, and by convincing myself it was also her misfortune I was probably just trying to cover up my envy of her. Abused as she was, she was nonetheless free – she didn’t have to stay there and puzzle it out like the rest of us!

There was a dividend to her departure, however, which was that she offered to take Kurt with her. Her cousin was looking for a