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

accept her own need for privacy. I remember the surprise – almost the sadness – I felt, the first time she closed the door against me while she took her bath. How often I have been made to realise it is children who teach their parents, not the other way around! Perhaps this is not true of everyone, but speaking for myself I felt certain that of all bodies mine was the one Justine would least like to see unclothed, and I myself had not seen her naked for many years.

‘We won’t look,’ I said to her in the end.

‘All right,’ she said.

And we flung off our clothes as fast as we could and ran shouting into the water. I believe there are certain moments in life that don’t obey the laws of time and instead last forever, and this was one of them: I am living it still, Jeffers! We quickly grew quiet, after that initial boisterousness, and swam silently through water that in the moonlight seemed as thick and pale as milk and that left great smooth furrows behind us.

‘Look!’ Justine cried out. ‘What’s this?’

She had swum a little distance away from me and was floating and dipping her arms above and below the surface so that the water ran down them like molten light.

‘It’s phosphorescence,’ I said, lifting up my own arms and watching the strange light flow weightlessly over them.

She cried out in wonder, for she had never seen this before, and it struck me, Jeffers, how the human capacity for receptivity is a kind of birthright, an asset given to us in the moment of our creation by which we are intended to regulate the currency of our souls. Unless we give back to life as much as we take from it, this faculty will fail us sooner or later. My difficulty, I saw then, had always lain in finding a way to give back all the impressions I had received, to render an account to a god who had never come and never come, despite my desire to surrender everything that was stored inside me. Yet even so my receptive faculty had not, for some reason, failed me: I had remained a devourer while yearning to become a creator, and I saw that I had summoned L across the continents intuitively believing that he could perform that transformative function for me, could release me into creative action. Well, he had obeyed, and apparently nothing significant had come of it, beyond the momentary flashes of insight between us that had been interspersed by so many hours of frustration and blankness and pain.

I swam to the end of the creek and when I turned around I saw Justine coming out of the water onto the sandbank. She was either unconscious of my looking or had decided not to notice it, for she stepped unhurriedly to get her towel, her white form revealed in the moonlight. She was so smooth and sturdy and unblemished, so new and strong! She stood as a deer stands, proudly with its antlers lifted, and there in the water I quailed before her power and her vulnerability, this creature I had made who seemed to be both of me and outside and beyond me. She dried herself quickly and dressed while I swam to the shore, and I was dressing too when she grabbed my arm and squeezed and said:

‘Someone’s there!’

We both looked into the long shadows beyond the path, and there indeed was a figure, sort of scurrying away.

‘It’s L,’ Justine said wryly. ‘Do you think he was watching us?’

Well, I didn’t know whether he had been or not, but he certainly moved to get away faster than I might have expected him to! When we got back to the house we saw that far from looking after L, Tony had fallen asleep in his chair, and so I went across to the second place myself to make sure that all was well. There were no lights on, but the night was still so bright that I found my way easily through the glade, and as I approached could see quite clearly into the main room through the curtainless windows. Whether or not it was him we had seen on the marsh, L was now standing at his easel, and the moonlight fell in pale bands across him and across the furniture and the floor, so that he seemed almost to be a mere object among other objects. He was working in deep concentration, so deep that he barely moved, though I believe he was usually very kinetic and mobile in the act of painting. Nonetheless he was still, and watching him I realised that a certain kind of stillness is the most perfect form of action. He stood very close to the canvas, almost as though he were feeding from it, and therefore blocked my view of it. I stood there for a long time, not wanting to disturb him with any clumsy noise or movement, and then I very quietly went away, feeling that I had witnessed something in the way of a sacrament, the sort of sacrament that only occurs in nature, when an organism – be it the smallest flower or the largest beast – silently and unobserved confirms its own being.

I wish, Jeffers, I had paid more attention in the period I am describing to you, not because I don’t remember it, but because I didn’t live it as I might have wished. If only something could tell us in advance which parts of life to pay attention to! We pay attention, for instance, when we’re falling in love, and then afterwards as often as not we realise we were deluding ourselves. Those weeks in which L painted the night paintings were, for me, the opposite of falling in love. I went about in a low, almost mindless state, heaving myself out of bed in the morning and feeling as though I were carrying something dead