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

‘I always try,’ I said.

‘Only a r-real emotion can change anyone. You’ll be swept away,’ he said, by which I understood him to mean that my unchangingness would be my doom, like the tree that breaks in the storm because it cannot bend.

‘I have a protection,’ I said to him, lifting my head.

‘You have gone far but I have gone further,’ he said, or I thought he said, for he spoke more indistinctly now than ever, ‘and I know a destruction that passes over your protection.’

And this was more or less the tone of all my dealings with L from this point on. He was unfailingly hostile to me in the period of his recovery. It was as if the state of illness had offered him some ultimate opportunity for disinhibition. Another time he said to me:

‘All the good in you has come out in your daughter. I wonder what is there now, where the good used to be.’

He got it into his head that I was always staring at him, and sometimes he would startle me by snapping the fingers of his left hand in front of my eyes.

‘Look at you, staring at me like a hungry cat with your green eyes – well, I snap my fingers at you.’

Snap!

It all suddenly became too much for me, and one day when I was lacing my shoe I fainted and remember nothing of what happened for the next twenty-four hours – it seemed I was on holiday, lying on the bed with a smile on my face, while Tony and Justine took turns sitting anxiously beside me, holding my hand. When I got up, I discovered that a friend of L’s had written to me asking whether he could come to visit. He was concerned about L, he said, whom he had known for many years, and even more concerned about me, and the predicament I had been put in by L’s falling ill on my property. He also had some money from L’s gallerist to give me, to set against whatever expenses I had run into on L’s behalf. So I returned from my little sojourn in the underworld to find the world above was a bit saner than when I had left. I wrote back and said he could come when he liked – his name was Arthur – and a week or so later a car pulled up in the drive and there he was!

Arthur was a delight, Jeffers, a tall, handsome, debonair-looking fellow with a splendid shining mane of dark hair, who greatly surprised me once he had bounded out from his car and introduced himself by bursting into tears, something he was to do frequently over the course of his stay, whenever his sympathy and compassion were aroused. He often kept talking and even smiling while he wept, as though it were a completely normal and natural phenomenon, like a rain shower. Tony was so amused by this habit that he would burst out laughing whenever Arthur did it.

‘I’m not really laughing,’ he would say to Arthur, his shoulders shaking with mirth. What he meant was that he wasn’t laughing at him. ‘It’s just very nice.’

These two became very good friends and they are still close to this day, and call one another brother, so that it is almost as though Tony has regained the relative he lost in his youth. It makes me happy to attribute this gain in some way to L, from whose presence Tony had otherwise not profited. But sitting between them that first afternoon with one weeping and the other laughing, I did wonder what latest strange harbour my ship had weighed anchor in!

Arthur was keen to get across and see L, and while he was gone I made up a room for him in the main house. He came back a couple of hours later, his face aghast and his handsome hair standing on end in affront.

‘It is quite shocking,’ he said. ‘You must not be expected to bear the responsibility.’

He had known L for more than twenty years, Jeffers, and probably knew more than anyone about his life. As a much younger man – he was now somewhere in his forties – Arthur had been L’s studio assistant, when L was still successful enough to require such a thing. He had gone with L to openings, and watched him be touted around in front of collectors like an increasingly unmarriageable daughter, and realised he himself wanted nothing more to do with the art world, though he had hoped at one time to become a painter. Nonetheless he had stayed in touch with L through the years. It was true that L’s circumstances were very much reduced, he said, as a lot of people’s were in the light of recent events, but L’s decline had been going on for a long time before that and he was now at the very bottom of the barrel of cash and goodwill. And he had no family he was prepared to recognise, but Arthur had managed to find a half sister of his who he thought might be persuaded to take him in. She still lived in the place where L had been born. His half brothers were all dead. If nothing else, the state there would have to take care of him, and Arthur was prepared to make the necessary arrangements.

Well, Jeffers, it was in one way a great relief to hear all this, but at the same time I couldn’t bear the thought of L being consigned to the fate Arthur had described. If only he could have taken advantage of my goodwill, gotten along better with me, been nicer, kinder, more reciprocal …

‘You can’t expect to keep a snake as a pet,’ Arthur said, sympathetically but accurately enough.

I was in turmoil nonetheless, believing somewhere inside me that if I could become capable of greater generosity, then L would be saved.