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

personal assistant, apparently, to manage his affairs for him, which seemed to consist mainly of flying around in his plane and living a life of idleness and wealth. Brett believed there were even some writing opportunities involved, since he was engaged in compiling a history of the family and probably needed some help with it.

‘He’s not terribly bright,’ she said to Kurt, ‘but he owns a lot of shares in a publishing house. He’d take very good care of you. He might even be able to get your novel published.’

Kurt seemed to accept all this as his due, and since L was so reduced, his self-assigned role as my protector had become somewhat obsolete. Even Justine admitted it was for the best, though she was a little scared, now that the prospect of separation was actually here. I told her she would always be able to find a white man to be obliterated by, if that was what she decided she wanted. When I said that she laughed, and much to my surprise said:

‘Thank God you’re my mother.’

And so, Jeffers, that chapter of our life at the marsh concluded, and another – much more opaque and uncertain – would have to begin. What did I feel, in that moment, about the drama I had provoked, as it moved into spheres that were beyond my control? I had never consciously thought that I could or would have to control L, and this had been my mistake, to underestimate my old adversary, fate. You see, I still somehow believed in the inexorability of that other force – the force of narrative, plot, call it what you will. I believed in the plot of life, and its assurance that all our actions will be assigned a meaning one way or another, and that things will turn out – no matter how long it takes – for the best. Quite how I had staggered along so far still holding on to this belief I didn’t know. But I had, and if nothing else it was what had stopped me from just sitting down in the road and giving up long before this. That plotting part of me – another of the many names my will goes by – now stood directly counter to what L had summoned or awakened within me, or what in me had recognised him and thereby identified itself: the possibility of dissolution of identity itself, of release, with all of its cosmic, ungraspable meanings. Just as I was tiring of the sexual plot – the most distracting and misleading of all the plots – or it was tiring of me, along comes this new spiritual scheme for evading the unevadable, the destiny of the body! It was for L himself to represent it, to embody it – his was the body that had dissolved and given way, not mine. He had been frightened of me all along, and he had been right to be, because for all his talk of destroying me, I, it seemed, had destroyed him first. Though I didn’t take it personally, Jeffers! What I think I represented to him was mortality, because I was a woman he couldn’t obliterate or transfigure with his own desire. I was, in other words, his mother, the woman he had always feared would eat him and take away his form and life just as she had created it.

The image that remained in my mind through these tumultuous days was of Tony, on the night Brett came to tell us that L was lying on the floor of the second place. Once we had got there and taken a look at L and realised he needed to go to hospital, Tony had lifted L up into his arms and calmly carried him out of the bedroom. How L would have hated it, I thought, to see himself majestically carried by Tony like a broken doll! I had gone ahead of Tony into the main room to switch on the lights, and so I was watching him when he came through the doorway with L in his arms and saw for the first time the painting of Adam and Eve and the snake. He took it in, Jeffers, without hesitating or pausing, and it was as though he were walking unhesitatingly and calmly through a blazing fire from which he was rescuing the arsonist. I felt myself singed by that same fire in those moments: it flamed close to me, close enough to lick me with its hot tongue.

It is of course well known, Jeffers, that L’s late work brought about the renaissance of his reputation and also earned him real fame, though I believe a part of that fame was simply owed to the voyeurism that always crops up around the aura of death. His self-portraits are veritable snapshots of death, aren’t they? He met death the night of his stroke, and he lived with it – if not happily – ever after. Yet I personally still find too much of the iconography of self in those portraits, inevitably, I suppose. They harken back to the person he had been; they radiate obsession, and disbelief that this could happen – to him! But the self is our god – we have no other – and so these images met with great fascination and favour out in the world. And then there were the scientists, poring over this evidence of a neurological event, so beautifully and accurately described by L’s brushstrokes. Those brushstrokes illuminated some of the mysteries that had taken place in the darkness of his brain. How useful an artist can be in the matter of representation! I have always believed that the truth of art is equal to any scientific truth, but it must retain the status of illusion. So I disliked L himself being used as proof of something and dragged, as it were, into the light. That light was indistinguishable at the time from the limelight,