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

same quality, the quality of something remembered, that shares and is inextricable from the moment of being. I could never capture it, and I don’t know why I needed it to be captured at all, but that is as good an example of human determinism as we’re likely to lay our hands on for now!

You will be wondering, Jeffers, what the phrase was that came out of L’s paintings and spoke itself so clearly to me. It was: I am here. I won’t say what I think the words mean, or who they refer to, because that would be to try to stop them living.

One day I wrote to L, inviting him to come to the marsh:

Dear L

Richard C gave me your details – I think we are both friends of his. I first came to know your work fifteen years ago, when it picked me up off the street and put me on the path to a different understanding of life. I mean that quite literally! These days I and my husband Tony live in a place of great but subtle beauty, where artists often seem to find the will or the energy or just the opportunity to work. I would like you to come here, to see what it looks like through your eyes. Our landscape is one of those conundrums people are drawn to, and end up missing the point of entirely. It is full of desolation and solace and mystery, and it hasn’t yet told its secret to anyone. Twice a day the sea rises over the marsh and fills its creeks and crevices and bears away – or so I like to think of it – the evidence of its thoughts. I have walked on the marsh every day for these past years and it’s never looked like the same place twice. They’re always trying to paint it, of course, but what they end up painting is the contents of their own mind – they try to find drama or a story or a point of exception in it, when those things can only ever be incidental to its character. I think of the marsh as the vast woolly breast of some sleeping god or animal, whose motion is the deep, slow motion of somnambulant breathing. Those are just my opinions, but they make me bold enough to suspect that you might share them and that there is something here for you – and perhaps only for you.

We live simply and comfortably, and have a second place where people can stay and be quite alone if they want to be. We’ve had a number of guests here to do their own kind of work, one after another. They stay sometimes for days and sometimes for months. We don’t keep a calendar and so far haven’t seemed to need one – it all goes quite naturally. I repeat, you can be entirely alone if you wish to be. The summer is the best time and we have more visitors asking to come then. If you’re at all interested in coming I can write again with more details of where we are, how we live, how to get here, etc. We are quite remote, though there is a small town a few miles away where you can find amenities if you need them. People often say this is one of the last places.

M

He replied, Jeffers, almost straight away, which came as somewhat of a surprise. It made me wonder who else I could summon up, simply by sitting down and directing my will at them!

M

I got your note, and read it on the terrace of that new restaurant in Malibu, shielding my eyes from a bloodletting of a sunset that brought hellfire and brimstone to mind. I’m in LA to hang my new show, which opens in a couple of weeks. The pollution is obscene. Your woolly marsh sounded nice by comparison.

I haven’t seen Richard C in years. I don’t know what he’s doing now.

As it happens I’m alone, and free to try something different. I’d like to try something. Perhaps what you’re suggesting is it. I wonder what it was you saw that took you off the street.

Give me the details, anyhow. The place you describe sounds isolated, but I’ve never yet found anywhere I can be freer and more alone than New York. Are there really no people, or does that small town you mention harbour a cluster of arty types?

Let me know, anyhow.

L

ps: My gallerist says she’s been somewhere that might be where you are. Is that possible? From how you described it, it didn’t sound like somewhere she would go.

I wrote back, telling him more about Tony and me and about the life here and what he could expect of us, and trying to describe what the second place was like. I made sure not to exaggerate, Jeffers: Tony has taught me that my habit of wanting to please people by saying that things are better than they are just creates disappointment, mine more than anyone else’s. It’s a form of control, as so much of generosity is.

We built the second place when Tony bought a parcel of wasteland that bordered our land, to prevent it from being misused. The rules here about development are strict, but of course people find all kinds of ways to get around them. The most usual one is to plant trees in order to cut them down again for money, pale and sapless trees that grow fast and straight up in rows like soldiers and then are quickly felled like soldiers too, so that what’s left is a shorn mess of amputated stumps. We didn’t want those poor soldiers marching past our windows to their deaths day and night! So we bought it, intending to turn it over to nature, more or less, but once we’d started clearing away all the brambles and fallen trees we came upon a whole different story. Tony has a group