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

M

I decided to move on. I’ll try to get to Paris after all. Do what you want with the paintings, except for number seven. That one’s for Justine. Be so kind as to give it to her.

L

So! Half-crippled as he was, he had set off in pursuit of that old sexual fantasy, and decided to throw his tattered hat in the ring of life once more! Well, Jeffers, there were all kinds of pandemonium while we tried to find out where he had got to and how, but in the end the mystery was solved simply enough when one of the men mentioned to Tony that he himself had driven L to the station, after L had accosted him in a field near the house a week or so earlier to ask the favour. They had arranged a time, and L had offered to pay and been politely refused, and the man had assumed it was all perfectly open and above board. Which in a way, I suppose, it was.

I have never been able to find out the precise details of L’s journey and of how he managed to get so far out into the world from our tiny station in his weakened state, but it is well known that he died in Paris in a hotel room not long after he arrived, of another stroke. Soon after that news came, Arthur pulled up in our driveway again and together we went through everything, and packed up all the paintings and the sketches, and all L’s notebooks and other materials, and one day a big van arrived to take it away to L’s gallery in New York. It wasn’t long before the rumble that started over there became audible here, and I began to get all kinds of enquiries and demands for information, and to see my name appearing in the articles that soon started to come out about L’s last paintings. It turned out that he had corresponded with a number of people during his time in the second place, and had wasted no opportunity to tell them the most terrible and vituperative things about me and about the controlling, destructive kind of woman I was, and about Tony, whom he mentioned rather obsessively, always – and only just – stopping short of making fun of him and putting him down.

Tony was calm enough about it, given how much he had done for L and how little he had profited in the history of our dealings with him.

‘Did you trust him?’ I asked, since I believed he never had.

‘Only a wild animal doesn’t trust anybody,’ Tony said.

He didn’t care about the articles, since no one he knew ever read the kinds of papers these things were printed in, but he had observed how much L’s opinions affected me and he worried my life with him at the marsh might now be spoiled.

‘Do you want to go somewhere else?’ he asked me, which in terms of a sacrifice was like him offering to sever his own right arm.

‘Tony,’ I said to him, ‘you are my life – you’re my whole security in living. Where you are, the food I eat tastes better, I sleep better, and the things I see feel real, instead of like pale shadows!’

As for me, I have been disliked all my life, since I was the tiniest child, and have learned to live with it, because the few people I myself have liked have always liked me back – all except for L. His calumny, therefore, had a rare power over me. Hearing the dreadful things he had said about me, it seemed to me there was nothing stable, no actual truth in all the universe, save the immutable one, that nothing exists except what one creates for oneself. To realise this is to bid a last and lonely farewell to dreams.

More wrestling than dancing, Jeffers, as Nietzsche described living!

So I gave up L, gave him up in my heart, and filled in the secret place inside myself that I had kept free for him all along. Someone wrote to ask whether it was true there was a mural painted by L’s hand on my property, and I went to town and bought a big tin of limewash, and Tony and I painted over Adam and Eve and the snake, and I rehung the curtains in the second place and told Justine she could consider it hers, and for her own use, whatever and whenever that might be.

She put her night painting – number seven – in there: as its owner, she now has the peculiar distinction of being the wealthiest person I know! Though I don’t believe she will ever sell it. But I like to think that, however unwittingly, L gave her freedom, the freedom not to look to others for the means of her survival that is still so hard for a woman to come by. She is in love with Arthur, of course, so that game of chance is still hers to play – as, I suppose, it will always be. Might it be true that half of freedom is the willingness to take it when it’s offered? That each of us as individuals must grasp this as a sacred duty, and also as the limit of what we can do for one another? It is hard for me to believe it, because injustice has always seemed so much stronger to me than any human soul. I lost my chance to be free, perhaps, when I became Justine’s mother and decided to love her in the way that I do, because I will always fear for her and for what the unjust world might do to her.

The painting is rather the odd one out of the series, and to my mind the most mysterious and beautiful of all, since unlike the others it has two half-forms in it – amid all the extraordinary textures of darkness – that seem to be composed