Second Place

by Rachel Cusk

seemed to me that all this beauty was no good if it had no immunity: if I could harm it, then anyone could.

Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented? Do you understand it, Jeffers? I have wanted to be free my whole life and I haven’t managed to liberate my smallest toe.

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.

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!

had no idea at all why things turned out the way they did, why I felt gorged with sensation at one minute and starved of it the next, where my loneliness or joy came from, which choices were beneficial and which deleterious to my health and happiness, why I did things I didn’t want to do and couldn’t do what I wanted.

Change is also loss, and in that sense a parent can lose a child every day, until you realise that you’d better stop predicting what they’re going to become and concentrate on what is right in front of you.

Because Tony was so busy with the hosepipes he didn’t have time to plant out the spring seedlings in the vegetable garden, and so I had to offer to do it myself, even though I dislike having to do work of this kind. This isn’t out of laziness, but rather the feeling that my life has entailed too many practical tasks, so that if I add even one more to the total, the balance will be tipped and I will have to admit I have failed to live as I have always wished to.

The truth was I had always assumed that pleasure was being held in store for me, like something I was amassing in a bank account, but by the time I came to ask for it I discovered the store was empty. It appeared that it was a perishable entity, and that I should have taken it a little earlier.

‘You always try to force things,’ he said. ‘It’s as if you think nothing would ever happen, unless you made it.’

‘It’s good to sit and watch this gentle world,’ L said. ‘We tire ourselves out so.’

Even Justine admitted it was for the best, though she was a little scared, now that the prospect of separation was actually here. I told her she would always be able to find a white man to be obliterated by, if that was what she decided she wanted. When I said that she laughed, and much to my surprise said: ‘Thank God you’re my mother.’