by Rachel Cusk
‘How dare you?’ I cried, which was what I had wanted to say to her since the day we had met. ‘Who do you think you are?’
Justine was emitting muffled shrieks, which I soon understood were indicative of laughter, but all the same I was furious and upset, just as if it had been my own flesh that Brett had unveiled so mercilessly.
‘I’m sorry,’ Brett said, putting her pretty, remorseful face too close to mine and her conciliatory hand on my arm. ‘Was that too high-spirited?’
‘We’re not all exhibitionists here,’ I said, spitefully.
Justine, however, wasn’t angry with Brett at all after that incident, and even allowed herself to be called Mother Hubbard on occasion, which I privately fumed at until I realised one day that the sackcloths were no longer in evidence and that my daughter was undergoing a transformation. I came out of the house into the bright sunlight one afternoon and saw two figures sitting on the grass, and for a moment I didn’t seem to know either of them – two fresh and laughing young women, their limbs bared to the sun, like a pair of nymphs in the dawn of the world who had alighted on our lawn!
‘Brett wants to teach me to sail,’ Justine said soon afterwards. ‘Do you think Tony would let us use the boat?’
‘You’d better ask him yourself,’ I said. ‘Are you sure she really knows what to do? It’s not like motor-boating on the Mediterranean out there. I think he’d be worried.’
‘She once sailed single-handed across the Atlantic!’ Justine burst out when I made these objections. ‘They even put on an exhibition in New York of the photos she took of the journey!’
Well, I could barely stop myself from unmasking Brett as a fantasist there and then, and forcing Justine to acknowledge the outlandish nature of her claims about her own life, but it seemed reasonable enough to expect that the facts would come to light on their own. I left it to Tony to shine that pitiless torch on Brett, and I felt secretly guilty that I had allowed Justine to become attached to someone who lied and aggrandised herself, as well as chagrined to remember that it was L who had brought her uninvited into our midst.
‘She can do it,’ Tony very much surprised me by saying, after I had forced him to go and talk to Brett about sailing the boat. ‘She’s got the certificate. She showed it to me.’
This was an international qualification, Jeffers, that apparently enabled the holder to skipper large-sized yachts anywhere in the world. Our old wooden dinghy barely counted! Justine had always loved going out on that boat with Tony, though she had resisted his own attempts to teach her how to sail it. I think it would be true to say that she wasn’t sure the adults in her life could teach her anything, not even Tony. But also she couldn’t see the point of learning, she had said, since she would be unlikely ever to keep a boat of her own, and Kurt had seemed to reinforce that outlook, in which fear masqueraded as common sense or even disdain. I could almost see him thinking that if Justine learned to sail, she might one day just get in a boat and sail away from him! In this and other ways she and Kurt had seemed to be turning their backs on risk and adventure. But now I saw her begin to rebel against these prescriptions, even as I had privately resigned myself to them and to the future in which they had promised to confine her.
What I am trying to say, Jeffers, was that in watching Justine begin to separate herself from Kurt and question his control over her, I was in the strangest sense watching her overtake me, as though we were running a race, at different points in time but over the same terrain, and in the place where I had catastrophically fallen she leaped with superior skill and strength and ran on. The resemblance I saw between Kurt and her father was a striking product of my unconscious mind, because I was frightened of the latter and therefore saw him as something menacing and large, whereas Kurt I dismissed as clinging and weak. But Kurt wasn’t weak: men never are. Some of them admit their strength and use it to the good, and some of them are able to make their will to power seem attractive, and some of them resort to deception and connivance to manage a selfishness of which they are themselves somewhat frightened. If Kurt was weak, in other words, then so had Justine’s father been, and this was what the incident with the photograph had revealed to me. So much of power lies in the ability to see how willing other people are to give it to you. What I had dismissed as weakness in Kurt was the same force that had ravaged my life all those years before, and which even now I had only recognised by mistake.
Those first weeks of L’s visit, while Tony laid the irrigation system and Brett trespassed into our lives and the hot weather held us in a kind of thrall, had a quality of intermission or interval, and the changes that occurred were like the changes of costume and scenery that go on backstage. And there was I, an audience of one in the stalls: it felt, almost, as though I were looking at it all through the wrong end of a telescope and seeing things from a greater distance than I usually did, perhaps because I myself was not especially the focus of anyone’s attention. These periods can feel like intimations of death, until one remembers that it is the presence of the audience that allows the whole show to be put on in the first place. But I was aware of an empty seat next to mine, where L should have been: I felt we could have watched and understood together. My disappointment and my sorrow were held in check by the hope that soon he might reveal himself.
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 trouble lay in finding anything to put on the other side of the scales: I was quite capable, as I have said, of spending all my free time just sitting and staring in front of me. And yet the second anyone asked me to go and do something, I immediately felt oppressed! Tony understood this about me entirely, and hardly ever expected me to move a muscle, and the only thing that irked him was that I couldn’t expend more of this need for inactivity in sleep and in mental passivity. I always sprang out of bed in the morning, careening around full of energy and will and quite capable of building Rome in a day, only this other part of me wouldn’t let me do it. Tony slept deeply and long, and when he rose he carried the balance of his pleasures and his duties along with him, so that he never strained any one part of himself with too much of either. I would watch him in fascination, Jeffers, trying to learn. He made and ate his breakfast with excruciating slowness, while I wolfed mine down like an animal, so that it was gone long before I had stopped feeling hungry. He would go to an immense amount of trouble over certain things that filled me only with impatience, like the broken old radio I had wanted to throw away but he was determined to fix, even though we had replaced it with a new one. He spent the longest time over it, and for a while our kitchen table was covered with all the parts, and then just as we had started to argue over it, it disappeared. A few days later I had to go and tell him something while he was down at the field on his tractor, and as I approached across the grass I distinctly heard an aria from Handel’s Alcina pealing out over the noise of the engine. He had installed the machine in his tractor, so that he could listen to music while he drove up and down!
Tony believed that I had done more than my fair share of work, and that what was required of me now in my life with him was to enjoy myself, but what he hadn’t reckoned with was the difficulty of finding pleasure and enjoyment for someone who has never really valued them. He thought I should take pride in what I had survived and what I had achieved, and go around like a sort of queen bee, but meanwhile I had come to view the world as far too dangerous a place in which to stop and congratulate myself. 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.
What I wanted now was work or distraction of a meaningful kind, but try as I might, I couldn’t find meaning in those seedlings! Nonetheless I put on my old boots and found the trowel and rake, and with much sighing I trudged down to the vegetable beds to begin my task. Just as I was unloading the trays of little green shoots from the wheelbarrow, who should appear by my side but Brett, all fresh and lovely in a primrose-yellow dress, with silver sandals on her feet that offered the greatest possible contrast to the muddy, ogreish affairs on mine.
‘Need a hand?’ she said cheerfully. ‘L’s in a foul mood this morning, so I thought I’d better make myself scarce.’
Well, Jeffers, with all my irritation over Brett’s presence and my feeling of being imposed upon, I admit I hadn’t thought once about how it might be for her to be stuck out here among strangers, sharing a confined space with a man of famed intractability to whom her relationship was unclear. I’m not the kind of woman who intuitively understands or sympathises with other women, probably because I don’t understand or sympathise all that much with myself. Brett had seemed to me to have everything, and yet in that moment I saw in a flash that she had nothing at all, and that her intrusive and uninhibited manner was simply her means of survival. She was like one of those climbing plants that has to grow over things and be held up by them, rather than possessing an integral support of her own.
‘That’s good of you,’ I said, ‘but I wouldn’t want your nice clothes to get dirty.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ she said. ‘It’s a relief to get dirty sometimes.’
She picked up the trowel and squatted down beside the trays of seedlings.
‘If we dig a little trench,’ she said, ‘it will make it easier.’
I was quite happy to let her take charge, and I sat back on my heels while she made a low trench very deftly and neatly all along the bed. I asked her whether L was often bad-tempered, and she stopped what she was doing to throw her head back melodramatically and laugh.
‘Do you know what he says? He says he’s going through the change!’
‘The change? Like a woman?’
‘That’s what he says. Except I don’t think women actually use that word any more.’
I found this idea quite interesting, Jeffers, despite Brett’s laughing at it: it seemed to me like something that might well happen to a creative artist, where a loss or alteration in the sources of potency had occurred. Oh, the bitter feeling of release from one’s service to blood and fate! To be led and then discarded by one’s urges: why should an artist not feel it more than anyone?
‘If you ask me,’ Brett said, ‘it’s everything else that’s changing, not him. He preferred it like it was before. He’s sulking, that’s all. He wants back all the things he pretended to take for granted.’
The art market had completely collapsed, she went on, after years of crazed overvaluing, so there were a lot of people in the same boat as L – and far worse, because they didn’t have his pedigree. But there were others – a small number – whose reputations and fortunes were surviving unharmed.
‘Some of them happen to be younger than him,’ she said, ‘and a different colour, and a couple of them are actually women, which adds to his feeling that the world is against him. The trouble is, he feels impotent.’
‘But he is somebody,’ I said.
Brett lightly shrugged her shoulders.
‘I think he was settling in for a long and luxurious retirement as an artistic eminence. He has a lot of rich friends,’ she added, in a low voice. ‘It would have taken him a whole year just to visit them all, and by the time he’d finished he’d be ready to go back and see the first one again. Most of them were heavy investors in his work, and if he paid them a call now, they’d all be sitting staring at walls that have had ninety per cent of their value wiped off them. I believe,’ she went on, nimbly lifting the seedlings from their trays and starting to stand them in a line down the trench, ‘this might be the best possible thing for him. To be stripped down to nothing again. He’s too young just to sit drinking martinis by someone else’s swimming pool.’
I asked her how old she was herself.
‘I’m thirty-two,’ she said, grinning, ‘but you have to swear not to tell anyone.’
She told me that she had met L through her rich cousin, the same one who had flown them here.
‘He’s an awful creep,’ she said. ‘He used to shut me in a cupboard at family parties when I was little and put his hands up my dresses. He looks like a sea monster now. But he became a collector, as they all do. They have so little imagination, they don’t know what else to do with their money. It’s funny, isn’t it, how determined they are to prove that the thing that can’t be bought can in fact be bought after all. I actually first met L at his house, and then later I persuaded him to buy a whole tranche of sketches L had sitting around in his studio, and since he knows nothing about art he was happy to pay far too much for them and then fly us here into the bargain. That’s all the money L has,’ she added, ‘for now.’
‘And what about you?’ I said, rather aghast at all this.
‘Oh, I’ve always had money. A lot of it’s gone, of course, but I have enough. That’s been my problem. No motivation.’ She grimaced and made quote marks with her fingers as she spoke the words. ‘I was drawn to L because he seemed so bitter and angry and rebellious, and I hardly ever meet people like that in the world I live in. I didn’t ask myself what he was doing there in that world himself!’
She told me how much she liked Justine.
‘She has so much honesty,’ she said. ‘Did you make her like that?’
I said I didn’t know. I’d certainly always been honest with her, but that wasn’t quite the same thing.
‘People can get tired of too much honesty,’ I said. ‘It makes them want to cover things up again.’
‘It certainly does!’ Brett said. ‘By the time I was eleven, I was so tired of people showing me things they pretended weren’t for my eyes, I decided to become a nun! I was always deciding to be things – I think I did it in the hope of finding something I couldn’t do.’
She asked me how I’d met Tony and come to live out here, and I told her the story and about how it had happened entirely by chance. It was a strange thing, I said, to live a life that had no connection whatever to anything you’d ever done or been. There was no thread that led to Tony, and no path between here and where I was before, and so my knowledge of it and of him had to come from an entirely different source. There was a place not too far away, I told her, a sort of archipelago where the sea has made these great fissures into the land, and on opposite banks of one of these very long and narrow bodies of water there are two villages that face one another. It would take literally hours to get by road from one to the other, going miles and miles inland and then coming back out again, yet they can see one another so clearly, right down to the clothes hanging on each other’s washing lines! Something of that separation, I said, which was composed not of distance but of impassibility, illustrated my own situation: I was more familiar with what I looked at than with where I actually was, and so I knew exactly what it would have been like to be over there, looking across at here. What I wasn’t so sure of was what here looked like. But I knew I was lucky to have met Tony.
‘It’s frightening to live on luck,’ Brett said, somewhat wistfully.
Then she asked me, straight out, if I thought I was in love with L!
‘No,’ I said, though the truth was, Jeffers, that I had been starting to wonder the same thing myself. ‘I just want to know him.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I wondered what it was.’
‘Are you in love with him?’ I asked.
‘I’m just a pal,’ she said, dusting the earth off her hands and putting the empty trays back in the wheelbarrow. ‘He was really crazy about me for a while. I think he thought I could fix him sexually, but I
can’t. He’s all finished in that department. Instead I’m getting him to teach me to paint. He says I’ve got some ability. I think that’s going to be my next career!’
Tony surprised me very much by saying that he was going to sit for L. He went across to the second place on a bright fresh morning, and returned several hours later.
‘I don’t know why that man doesn’t just kill himself,’ he said.
He gave L two more sittings, and after that he had too much work to do. Large shoals of mackerel had suddenly arrived in our waters, and he and the men were taking their boats out every day and then selling the catch. It meant we had fresh mackerel for dinner, and also that Tony was gone from dawn till dusk.
A parcel arrived for L, a large tattered box covered with foreign stamps, and since Brett and Justine had driven off to town together, I took it across to him myself. I hadn’t set foot over there in all this time, and hadn’t seen L alone since that first morning when we had stood by the prow of the boat and talked. It’s hard to say exactly what I felt, Jeffers, except that there was a numb kind of disappointment inside me for which I could find no justifiable cause. Perhaps it was simply that although L and Brett had been with us for three weeks or so by then, we had absorbed their arrival without feeling any increase from it. Brett sailed gaily on the surface, while L had sunk like a stone into deep waters. I couldn’t really have said what was wrong, or expounded on my disappointment and the expectations it had come from – we were used to such visits taking all kinds of unpredicted forms – and all I could think was that it somehow came back to the question of gratitude that had arisen right at the start, in that first conversation with L. I had never, I supposed, come across such a flagrant case of ingratitude as his, and what I remembered was that he had offered gratitude in the very first words he spoke to me and that I had spurned his offer.
