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

but it could just as easily become the light of cold-hearted scrutiny one day, and those same facts used as proof of something entirely different.

But it is the night paintings I want to talk about, and there the power of illusion is not surrendered. Those paintings were made at the marsh in a remarkably short period of time, and I want to say what I know of the conditions and process of their making.

After Brett had gone away and L was left alone at the second place, the question of how he should be cared for quickly arose. I knew that it would not be good for my relationship with Tony if I took on the role of L’s nurse and was always at his beck and call: I had been to that precipice and looked over the edge, and nothing was going to drag me back there! Tony himself had to do a great deal for L in the early days, since his physical strength was required to lift him and move him around, and L was quite dependent on Tony for necessities, though he treated him with a high hand. He had returned from hospital with quite a peevish, fussy little manner, and also with a slight stutter, and one would hear him ordering Tony about like a veritable dauphin.

‘T-t-t-tony, can you move the chair so it’s f-facing the window? No, that’s too c-c-close – further back – yes.’

I got used to the sight that had struck me so forcibly the first night I saw it, of Tony carrying L in his arms, sometimes all the way down to the bottom of the garden if there was something in the view L wanted to see. But as I have said, L recovered command of himself quite quickly, and Tony made him a pair of beautiful walking sticks out of sapling branches, and soon he could hobble around the place on his own. He was quite unable, however, to cook or care for himself, and when he began to work and needed to select and access his materials, it became clear someone would have to be on hand to assist him. Justine, to my surprise, volunteered for the role, and so Tony went back to his normal duties, and I found myself with just a little more to do than my usual nothing, looking after them both.

Does catastrophe have the power to free us, Jeffers? Can the intransigence of what we are be broken down by an attack violent enough to ensure we are only barely able to survive it? These were the questions I asked myself in the dawn of L’s recovery, when a new and raw and formless energy began to emanate from him quite perceptibly. It was a jet of life spurting out of the great hole that had been blown through him, and it had no name and no knowledge and no direction of its own, and I watched him begin to grapple with it and try to take its measure. He made his first self-portrait three weeks after his return from hospital, and Justine described to me the agonies he went through, endeavouring to hold the brush in his deformed and swollen right hand. He preferred to paint standing up, she said, with a walking stick in his left hand and a mirror to the side of him. She held his palette for him, and selected and mixed the paints where he told her to. The movements of his arm were unspeakably slow and arduous, and he groaned continually, and was constantly dropping the brush because of the violent tremor in his hand. It can’t have been very pleasant to assist him! That first picture, with its great diagonal sliding line of sight, the world pouring in at the top right corner and pouring out down at the bottom left, was shockingly crude – shocking because the accuracy of the moment could still be perceived through and behind it. It was mauled but still alive, in other words, and this dissonance between consciousness and physical being – and the horror of seeing it recorded, which was much like the horror of seeing a dying animal – became the signature characteristic of the self-portraits and the reason for their universal appeal, even when L was able to execute them with more control.

Soon, L was wanting to go outside, and Justine had the idea of hanging a toy horn she had found in her old toy box around his neck on a piece of string, so that he could squeeze the rubber balloon and honk it wherever he was if he needed her. I feared L would consider this an affront to his dignity, but in fact it seemed to delight and tickle him, and I was always hearing that faint honking sound coming from one place or another on the property, like the call of a bird as it makes its rounds in nature unseen. It was very useful, since he was starting to roam quite far, Justine said, and would sometimes find he couldn’t get back, or would drop something and be unable to pick it up again. I could see that his destination was the marsh: he got a little closer to it every day. One afternoon I came upon him standing by the prow of the landlocked boat, just as he had been the day of our very first conversation, and this coincidence led me to exclaim, somewhat absurdly:

‘So much has changed, and yet nothing has!’

When of course, Jeffers, it would have been as true – and as meaningless – to say that nothing had changed and yet so much had. One thing that hadn’t changed was the repudiating, indifferent look that L so often bestowed on me and that I never, nonetheless, had got used to. Weak as he was, he bestowed it on me now, and said, falteringly:

‘Y-you don’t change. You never will. You won’t let yourself.’

I was still public