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

sometimes advances gleaming and silent until it has covered everything in a glassy sheet of water – seem to be right there in the room with you.

The windows were one of Tony’s Certainties, and I disagreed with him and stood against him over them from the beginning, because I believe a house ought first and foremost to be cosy and to allow you to forget the outside when you’re in it. The lack of privacy was troubling to me, especially at night when the lights were on and whoever was in there could forget that they could be seen as clear as day. I have a great fear of seeing people when they don’t know they’re being observed, and finding out things about them I’d be happier not knowing! But for Tony a view has a kind of spiritual significance, not as something you describe or talk about but as something you live in correspondence with, so that it looks back at you and incorporates itself in everything you do. I watch him pause when he’s cutting wood or digging over the vegetables and lift his eyes to the marsh for a while, and then go back to what he’s doing; and so we eat the marsh along with our vegetables, and warm ourselves with it in our fires in the evening.

Tony wouldn’t hear me about the windows, and even went so far as to act as though he couldn’t hear me, and afterwards, whenever I brought the subject up and talked about how much trouble they caused, he would listen to me in silence and then say, ‘I like them.’ I suppose that was his way of admitting he might have been wrong. The very first time we had a visitor, a musician who was trying to record and replicate patterns of birdsong and who turned the whole place into a studio full of big black boxes and fantastic dashboards with dials and blinking lights, I went across through the trees to bring some post that had arrived for him, and there he was standing stark naked at the stove, frying some eggs! I would have crept away, except that he saw me through the windows the same way I had seen him, and had to come to the door and take his post, still without a stitch on, because he had obviously decided it was better to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

Or perhaps nothing had happened, Jeffers – perhaps the world is full of people like Tony and this man, who think there’s nothing to be worried about in seeing and being seen, with clothes or without them!

I was allowed after that episode to hang up some curtains, and I was very proud of those beautiful curtains made of a thick pale linen, even though I knew they caused Tony to have a pain in his eyes every time he saw them. The floors were made of wide chestnut planks that the men had planed and sanded themselves and the walls were rough white lime-plaster, and all the cupboards and shelves were made of the same chestnut wood, so that the whole place felt very human and natural, all shapely and textured and sweet-smelling, and not at all clinical and squared off in the way that some new places feel. We made one big room with the stove and the fire and some comfortable chairs, and a long wooden table for eating and working at; and then another smaller room for sleeping, and a bathroom with a nice old cast-iron bath in it that I had found in a junk shop. It was all so fresh and lovely, I was ready to move in there myself. When it was finished, Tony said:

‘Justine will think we made this place for her.’

Well, I can’t say it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder what my daughter would think of the work we’d done, but it certainly hadn’t crossed my mind that she might believe it had been done in her honour! As soon as Tony said it, though, I knew it was true, and I immediately felt guilty, while at the same time determined not to have something stolen from me. These two feelings, always coming in a pair, the better to incapacitate and handcuff me – I have been troubled by them right from the beginning, when Justine arrived on this earth and seemed to want to stand in the same spot that I stood in, only I was there first. I could never reconcile myself to the fact that just as you’ve recovered from your own childhood, and finally crawled out of the pit of it and felt the sun on your face for the first time, you have to give up that place in the sun to a baby you’re determined won’t suffer the way you did, and crawl back down into another pit of self-sacrifice to make sure she doesn’t! At that time Justine had just finished college and gone off to Berlin to work for an organisation there, but she often came back to visit seeming faintly unsettled, with a transitory air of immediate need, like a person in a busy station looking around for somewhere to sit while they wait for their train. No matter how nice a seat I found for her, she always preferred the look of the one I was sitting in. I wondered whether we ought to offer the second place to her straight away and get it over with, but as it happened she fell in love with a man called Kurt and didn’t come back at all that summer, and our new life of having visitors to the marsh began.

I didn’t, obviously, go into all this ancient history in my letter to L, only as much of it as I thought he needed to know. There were a few weeks of silence while life went on as usual, and then all at once he wrote