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

But who or what did I think I was saving him from? I liked to think I was prepared to go to the ends of the earth for L – but only if he upheld his side of the bargain, and was grateful and polite and fitted in with the pleasant, comfortable vision of life I had offered him. Which he would and could never do!

‘He isn’t your responsibility,’ Arthur repeated, seeing my distress, while the tears began to flow down his cheeks. ‘He’s a grown man who took his own chances. Believe me, he’s always done exactly what he wanted and never given a thought to what anyone else felt about it. He’s had the opposite life to someone like you – he hasn’t inconvenienced himself for a minute on account of other people. Face it, he wouldn’t help you,’ he said kindly, wiping his eyes, ‘if you were dying in front of him in the street.’

Despite everything, Jeffers, a part of me still believed that he would.

‘By the way, have you seen what he’s doing over there?’ Arthur said. ‘The self-portraits – they’re just incredible.’

I have to say that worried as we were, we had a wonderful evening with Arthur, who was such fun, and when Justine came to join us and saw the handsome stranger she blushed to the roots of her hair and I saw how beautiful she had become, and that she was in a sense finished, and I wondered whether this was how a painter might feel, looking at a canvas and realising there was no more he could or ought to do to it. Arthur left the next morning, promising to be in touch very soon and to come back as soon as he could. And he did come back, but by then everything had changed again.

By the middle of the summer L was much more himself, though a shrunken and very irascible version. He wore a look now on his face that is difficult to describe, Jeffers – put simply, it was the look of a creature who has been caught by a bigger creature and knows there is now no possibility of escape. There was no resignation in it, and I don’t suppose the creature feels terribly much resignation in the jaws of his captor either, despite the inexorability of his fate. No, it was more like the flash a bulb makes when the fuse gives out, illuminating and extinguishing in almost the same instant. L was caught in a long instant of illumination in which he realised, it seemed to me, his whole self and the extent of his being, because he was seeing at the same time the end of that being. In his expression, realisation and fear were indistinguishable from one another. Yet there was also a kind of wonder, as though at the original fact of his own existence.

It was around then that Justine began to say that L was sleeping much more during the day and working later at night. The weather was very warm, and there were often great bright moons, and she had started to find him sitting out by the prow of the boat long after darkness had fallen. In the morning she would discover him asleep on the couch in the main room, while numerous sketches lay scattered across the table. They were watercolour sketches, and all she could say was that they were pictures of darkness, and that they reminded her of how frightened she had been of the dark when she was a child and believed she could see things in it that weren’t there.

One day, L asked her whether she couldn’t find some bag or satchel for him to use so that he could take his materials outside with him, and she did find such a thing, and packed the materials he indicated into it. He had started to become very agitated, she said, at nightfall, and would move frantically around the room, sometimes knocking into the walls or upsetting the furniture, and though he was usually very kind and courteous to her he could sometimes shout at her if she happened to call by when he was in that state. Hearing this, I decided Justine needed a night off. Since it was so warm, I suggested that Tony could take care of L for the evening, while she and I went down to one of the marsh creeks for a swim. One way or another we hadn’t swum much that summer, though it was the thing I most liked to do. Usually we swam in the day – it had been years since I had done something so romantic as go down and swim in the moonlight! So after dinner Justine and I took our towels and left Tony to do the clearing up, and made our way down the garden and along the path to the marsh.

What a night it was, the moon so bright that it cast our shadows across the sandy earth, and so warm and windless that we could barely feel the air against our skin. The tide was in and the creeks were full and an opalescent sheen lay all across the water, and the moon burned its cold white path to our feet from the furthest horizon. And then, amid all this perfection, we realised that in our hurry we had forgotten to bring our swimming costumes!

The only thing for it was to swim naked, since neither of us wanted to go all the way back to the house, yet there was something taboo about this idea, at least for us, and I saw Justine hesitate as we realised our predicament. It is hard to understand, Jeffers, the physical awkwardness that grows up between a child and a parent, given the fleshliness of their bond. I had always been careful, once Justine was of an age to notice, not to impose my flesh on her, though it had taken me longer to