Excerpt from Second Place by Rachel Cusk, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

There wasn't another soul in the gallery that early in the morning, and the sun came through the big windows and made bright pools on the floor in the silence, and I stepped around as joyfully as a faun in a forest on the first day of creation. It was what they call a 'major retrospective,' which appears to mean you're finally important enough to be dead – even though L was barely forty-five then. There were at least four big rooms, but I ate them up, one after the other. Each time I stepped up to a frame – from the smallest sketch to the biggest of the landscape works – I got the same sensation, to the point where I thought it was impossible I'd get it again. But I did: over and over, as I faced the image, the sensation came. What was it? It was a feeling, Jeffers, but it was also a phrase. It will seem contradictory, after what I've just said about words, that words should accompany the sensation so definitively. But I didn't find those words. The paintings found them, somewhere inside me. I don't know who they belonged to, or even who spoke them – just that they were spoken.

A lot of the paintings were of women, and of one woman in particular, and my feelings about those were more recognisable, though even then somehow painless and disembodied. There was a small charcoal sketch of a woman asleep in bed, her dark head a mere smudge of oblivion in the tousled bedclothes. I admit a kind of silent bitter weeping did come from my heart at this record of passion, which seemed to define everything I hadn't known in my life, and I wondered if I ever would. In many of the larger portraits, L paints a dark-haired, quite fleshy woman – often he is in the painting with her – and I wondered whether this smudge in the bed, almost effaced by desire, was the same person. In the portraits she usually wears some kind of mask or disguise; sometimes she seems to love him, at others merely to be tolerating him. But his desire, when it comes, extinguishes her.

It was in the landscapes, though, that I heard the phrase the loudest, and it was these same images that stayed smouldering in my mind over the years, until the time came that I want to tell you about, Jeffers, when fire broke out again all around me. The religiousness of L's landscapes! If human existence can be a religion, that is. When he paints a landscape, he is remembering looking at it. That's the best I can do to describe the landscapes, or describe how I saw them and the way they made me feel. You would doubtless do far better. But the point is for you to understand how it was that the idea of L and his landscapes recurred all those years later and in another place, when I was living on the marsh with Tony and thinking quite differently. I realise now that I fell in love with Tony's marsh because it had precisely that same quality, the quality of something remembered, that shares and is inextricable from the moment of being. I could never capture it, and I don't know why I needed it to be captured at all, but that is as good an example of human determinism as we're likely to lay our hands on for now!

You will be wondering, Jeffers, what the phrase was that came out of L's paintings and spoke itself so clearly to me. It was: I am here. I won't say what I think the words mean, or who they refer to, because that would be to try to stop them living.

Excerpted from Second Place by Rachel Cusk. Copyright © 2021 by Rachel Cusk. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.