Absences can be tricky things. Easy to overlook until it’s too late, and hard to explain. Cathy loves her work conserving paintings. She assumes View of Scheveningen Sands, like her marriage, is complete and needs only careful maintenance. But chipping away overpaint reveals hidden depths from the Dutch Golden Age, creating a dilemma. Something beautiful but challenging has been suppressed. Her marriage is founded on a mutual agreement not to have children. A late period awakens a yearning in her. In life as in art, the picture suddenly looks incomplete. The ways Cathy (and author Chloë Ashby) consider some options, and apparently not others, are revealing of character and society.
Cathy’s husband Noah is great with other people’s children. But the aftermath of a stillbirth ended his first marriage, and he can’t bear the woman he loves being pregnant. Early in their relationship, Cathy had an abortion. Her mother is increasingly forgetful and erratic. Her best friend is a great listener, when she’s not busy with her toddler or poleaxed by a miscarriage. Cathy feels alone in her predicament until she bonds with a single woman at a sales presentation for egg freezing. They both become customers.
Through painstaking restoration at the National Gallery in London, Cathy uncovers a beached whale, hidden because it was believed to be a bad omen. She faces the heartbreaking reality of her mother’s dementia. As she struggles to accept that she can have a baby or Noah but not both, there’s no suspicion of wife or husband looking elsewhere.
Second Self thoroughly explores the strain when a couple disagree on whether to have a child. But there’s an elephant – or whale – in the room. Cathy’s vocation is caring for the precious creations of others. I felt a growing urge to shout “adoption”. Surely, in her months of obsessively researching and contemplating, the idea would cross her mind? If there’s truth in the fact it doesn’t, it’s a sad truth.
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Cathy navigates emotional currents as one generation recedes and another emerges, sometimes in hints and glimpses, sometimes abruptly. There’s a light dismissal of not wanting children because of climate change, and parents who can’t agree whether to have another child. But the immersive insights into two good people at odds over something fundamental make compelling reading, like a picture being gradually transformed.
