Second Place, Rachel Cusk [year 7 reading list TXT] 📗

of men he knows who all help one another when there’s physical work to be done. Some of those bramble clumps were twenty feet high, Jeffers, and they scratched the men to death trying to defend themselves, but when they were cut away all sorts of things were hidden underneath them. We found a beautiful half-rotten clinker-built sailboat, and two old classic cars, and then finally an entire cottage buried beneath a mountain of ivy! It was the integuments of a life we uncovered, complete with a lovelier view of the marsh than our own. I have often wondered about the person who lived that life that had been so deeply forgotten it had been allowed, literally, to rot back into the earth. The cars were in profound and interesting stages of decay and we let them be, and mowed the grass around them so that they became objects of display; and likewise the boat, which stood at the top of an incline with its prow lifted toward the sea. I found the boat a little melancholy, since it always seemed to be calling to someone or something out of reach; but the cars continued to collapse majestically over time, as though bent on discovering a truth of their own. The cottage was quite sordid and quite sad, and we quickly realised it would have to be done over to rid it of that awful human type of sadness. The inside was entirely blackened by fire, and the men had the theory that therein was written the fate of the previous incumbent. So they took the whole thing down and built it back up again by hand, with Tony giving the directions.

You and Tony have never met, Jeffers, but I believe you would get along: he’s very practical, as you yourself are, and not bourgeois, and not at all neglectful in the sense that the very souls of most bourgeois men are neglectful. He doesn’t show the weakness of neglect, and nor does he need to neglect something in order to have power over it. He does have a number of Certainties, though, which come from his particular knowledge and position and which can be very useful and reassuring until you find yourself opposing one of them! I have never met another human being who is so little burdened by shame as Tony and so little inclined to make others feel ashamed of themselves. He doesn’t comment and he doesn’t criticise and this puts him in an ocean of silence compared to most people. Sometimes his silence makes me feel invisible, not to him but to myself, because as I’ve told you I’ve been criticised all my life: it’s how I’ve come to know that I’m there. Yet because I am one of his Certainties, he finds it difficult to believe that I could doubt my own existence. ‘You are asking me to criticise you,’ he will sometimes say at the end of one or other of my outbursts. And that’s all he’ll say!

I’m telling you all this, Jeffers, because it has to do with the building of the second place and with what we decided to use it for, which was as a home for the things that weren’t already here – the higher things, or so I thought them, that I had come to know and care about one way or another in my life. I don’t mean that we envisaged starting some kind of community or utopia. It was simply that Tony understood I had interests of my own, and that just because he was satisfied with our life on the marsh it didn’t automatically follow that I would be too. I needed some degree of communication, however small, with the notions of art and with the people who abide by those notions. And those people did come, and they did communicate, though they always seemed to end up liking Tony more than they liked me!

When people marry young, Jeffers, everything grows out of the shared root of their youth and it becomes impossible to tell which part is you and which the other person. So if you attempt to sever yourselves from one another it becomes a severance all the way from the roots to the furthest ends of the branches, a gory mess of a process that seems to leave you half of what you were before. But when you make a marriage later it is more like the meeting of two distinctly formed things, a kind of bumping into one another, the way whole landmasses bumped into one another and fused over geological time, leaving great dramatic seams of mountain ranges as the evidence of their fusing. It is less of an organic process and more of a spatial event, an external manifestation. People could live in and around Tony and me in a way they could never have entered and inhabited the dark core – whether living or dead – of an original marriage. Our relationship had plenty of openness, but it posed certain difficulties too, natural challenges that had to be surmounted: bridges had to be built and tunnels bored, to get across to one another out of what was pre-formed. The second place was one such bridge, and Tony’s silence ran undisrupted beneath it like a river.

It stands across a gentle slope up from the main house, separated by a glade of trees through which the sun rises into our windows every morning; and the sun sets, through those same trees, in the evenings into the windows of the second place. Those windows go from the floor to the ceiling, so that the huge horizontal bar of the marsh and its drama – its sweeping passages of colour and light, the brewing of its distant storms, the great drifts of seabirds that float or settle over its pelt in white flecks, the sea that sometimes lies roaring at the very furthest line of the horizon in a boiling white foam and