Second Place

had such a long interest and with whose work I had a particular rapport. But in an arrangement such as ours there are certain necessary conditions, without which a range of abuses becomes possible, and the safeguarding of our privacy and our dignity of life was the first and foremost of them. I had the impression, from various things he had said in the course of our correspondence, that L was not above accepting favours from his friends and acquaintances, of whom a large number appeared to be wealthy. We were far from poor, but we lived simply and in a great degree of trust with those around us – we weren’t, in other words, offering him a high-class holiday, or a luxurious place to use as his own. All our visitors so far had understood this immediately and naturally and there had been an unmarked line where all of us had instinctively met, between privacy and togetherness. But looking at L and even more so at Brett, I wondered whether we hadn’t for the first time invited a cuckoo into our nest.

The first thing was to try to get us all into the truck, and then, once we’d called at the hotel, to get their luggage in as well. They had a large number of suitcases and bags, and Tony spent a long time planning how to fit them in, while the rest of us stood on the road, casting around for things to say. L had turned his back to me and put his hands in his pockets, and stood looking down at the crashing sea while the breeze made his shirt billow and flap and his short, fine greying hair lie flat against his head. I was left with Brett, who I had already understood was an insinuating kind of person who liked to get herself into your bodily space and make herself comfortable there, like a cat winding itself around your leg and then leaping into your lap. She was English: I remembered L alluding in one of his letters to his ‘English friend’ and wondered if this was she. She talked a great deal but didn’t very often say anything you could reply to, and she was, as I have said, ravishingly beautiful, so the whole thing felt rather in the way of a performance, with you as the audience. She had very blonde, soft, waving hair and an exquisitely moulded little face with a tipped-up nose and startling large brown eyes, and then that strange and violent mouth. She was wearing a tailored dress of patterned silk tightly belted at the waist, and a pair of red, very high-heeled sandals – I had been surprised by how quickly she had moved in them while we were walking up the hill. She kept offering advice to Tony about the suitcases and getting in his way, until L unexpectedly turned around and said gruffly over his shoulder:

‘Keep out of it, Brett.’

Well, Tony did take the longest time to manage it, and at a certain point when it looked like we could finally leave he suddenly shook his head and took everything out and started again; and meanwhile the breeze had picked up and it was becoming cold, and I thought about the long jolting journey in front of us and about my quiet, comfortable house and garden and about how this could have been just a pleasant ordinary day, and all in all managed to feel quite miserable about what I had brought about. Finally we got in, with L and Brett crushed together into the bench seat after all and Tony and I in front, where I relied on the noise of the engine to make further conversation impossible. All the way home I nursed my impression that there had been some kind of crash or clash, and my head spun with all the jarring sensations and disharmonies it had thrown up, and I had the blank, dead feeling I always get at such times. Tony’s face in profile, looking impassively out at the road ahead, is usually a great comfort to me when I feel this way, but on this occasion it almost made things worse, because I wasn’t sure L and Brett would ever get the hang of Tony, nor he of them, and the last thing I wanted to have to do on top of everything else was explain them to each other.

I don’t remember all that much about the journey – I have blotted it out – but I do recall Brett leaning forward at one point and saying into my ear:

‘I can colour your hair for you to hide the grey, you know. I know how to do it so that no one would ever guess.’

She was sitting directly behind me, and had obviously had ample opportunity to scrutinise my hair from the back.

‘It’s really quite dry,’ she added, and she even ran her fingers through it to prove her point.

I have mentioned, Jeffers, my relationship to commentary and criticism and the feeling of invisibility I very often had, now that I lived a life in which I was rarely commented on. I suppose I might have developed an oversensitivity or allergy to commentary as a result – whatever the reason, I could barely stop myself from screaming and lashing out at the feeling of this woman’s fingers in my hair! But of course I simply drove those feelings down inside of me and sat there like an animal in dumb torment until we finally reached the marsh and could get out.

Justine and Kurt had done everything exactly as I had hoped – the trouble was, what I had hoped for no longer applied. They had lit the candles and the fires and decorated the table with the first spring flowers from the marsh, and filled the house with warmth and the good smells of cooking. They were completely unruffled, with that acceptingness of the young, by the presence of