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

saying he was coming, and coming the very next month! Fortunately we didn’t happen to have any visitors just then, and so Tony and I flew around the second place, repainting the walls and re-waxing the floors and cleaning the windows with newspaper and vinegar until they shone. The first blossoms had just burst out of the cherry trees after the winter and the glade was frothing with the lovely pink and white flowers, and we cut a few branches and arranged them in big earthenware jars and even laid a fire in the grate. My arms ached from cleaning those windows and we fell into bed exhausted in the evenings, having barely been able to cook a meal for ourselves.

Then L wrote again:

M

After all I decided to go somewhere else. Someone I know has an island he says I can use. It’s meant to be sort of a paradise. So I’m going to go and try being Robinson Crusoe for a while. It’s a pity not to be calling in at your marsh. I keep meeting people who know you, and they say you’re okay.

L

Well, we accepted it, Jeffers, though I won’t say I forgot about it – the summer went on to be the hottest and most glorious summer we’d had in years, and we lit bonfires at night and slept outside underneath skies throbbing with stars, and swam in the tidal creeks, and I kept imagining how it would have been if L had been there with us and how he would have looked at it. A writer came to stay in the second place instead of L, and we barely saw him. He spent all day indoors with the curtains closed, even in the hottest weather – I believe he was asleep! But I did often think about L on his island, and about what kind of paradise it was, and even though our own place was more or less paradisiacal that summer I made myself jealous by thinking about it. It was as if some breeze kept wafting toward me, bearing a tormenting scent of freedom – and that same torment suddenly seemed to have bothered and pursued me for too much of my life. I felt I had dismantled everything and run this way and that trying to get at it, the way someone with a bee sting might tear at their clothes and run around making their agony visible to people who don’t know what’s wrong. I kept trying to make Tony talk to me about it – I felt a burning need to speak, to analyse, to get these feelings out of me into the open where I could see them and walk around them. One night, when Tony and I were going to bed, I flew at him in a rage and said all kinds of terrible things, about how lonely and washed up I felt, about how he never gave me any real attention of the kind that makes a woman feel like a woman and just expected me to sort of give birth to myself all the time, like Venus out of a seashell. As if I knew anything about what makes a woman feel like a woman! In the end I flounced off to sleep on the couch downstairs, and I lay there and thought about what I’d said and about how Tony never does anything to hurt or control me, and in the end I ran back upstairs and jumped into bed with him and said:

‘Oh Tony, I’m sorry to have said such terrible things. I know how good you are to me and I don’t want ever to hurt you. It’s just that sometimes I need to talk in order to feel real, and I wish you would talk to me.’

He was silent, lying on his back in the darkness and staring up at the ceiling. Then he said:

‘I feel like my heart is talking to you all the time.’

So there you have it, Jeffers! Truly I think Tony believes that talk and gossip are a poison, and this is one of the reasons the people who come here like him so much, because he acts as a kind of antidote to their habit of poisoning themselves and others and makes them feel much healthier. But for me there is a healthy kind of talking, though it’s rare – the kind of talking through which people create themselves by giving themselves utterance. I often had this kind of talk with the artists and other people who came to the marsh, though they were quite capable of the poisonous talk too, and did talk like that a lot of the time. There were enough instances of being in sympathy with one another, of transcending our own selves and mingling through language, for me not to mind it.

In the autumn I was surprised to get another letter from L:

M

So okay, paradise isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I got tired of all the sand. Also I got an infected cut and had to be rescued by a seaplane and flown to hospital. I spent six weeks in the hospital, time wasted. Life passed outside the windows. Now I’m going to Rio, for my show there. I’ve never been to that part of the world but it sounds like it could be a ball. I might stay the winter.

L

Just as I’d settled down again, now I had to walk around with Rio de Janeiro in my head day and night, all hot and noisy and carnal and full of licentious fun! The rain had started to fall and the trees grew bare and the winds of winter moaned across the marsh. Sometimes I would get out the catalogue of L’s work and look at the images and feel the sensation they always gave me. And of course there were a million other strands to life and things that happened and took up our thoughts and feelings, but it