This is Life (24 page)

Professor Papavoine broke the silence. He turned to his wife, his face drained of expression, and his voice little more than a whisper. ‘Though I am ashamed of it now,’ he said,
‘I had begun to lose faith. I had been starting to wonder whether this day would ever come.’ He returned his gaze to the baby as he continued to address his wife. ‘We must not
waste time. I shall prepare the altar, you fetch the knife and ready my robes.’ He looked upwards, to the ceiling and beyond, and closed his eyes. He raised his hands high. ‘Thank you,
oh great one,’ he said, addressing an unseen higher power. ‘Thank you for bringing us the boy child.’ He fell to one knee, his arms still raised but his eyes closed and his head
bowed. ‘We shall do as we have been bidden.’

He was knocked out of this apparent state of religious ecstasy by his wife, who jabbed him sharply in the ribs with her knuckles. She couldn’t stop herself from laughing, though.
‘Enough of that, Papavoine,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I think it’s just as well we never had one of our own. You’d have scarred the poor thing for life with your
jokes
. I’m still not quite sure how you’ve managed to land us with a baby for the day, but this is a big responsibility. Now, let’s get the toys out.’

She pulled out the hamper containing the things that they kept for visits from their grandnieces and grand-nephews, and started to sift through it. She found a plastic battery-powered tortoise,
which, when pressed, played ear-splitting electronic renditions of nursery rhymes. Herbert loved it.

Professor Papavoine looked on. ‘So what do you think of our Mademoiselle Renard?’ he asked his wife.

‘She seems very nice, if a little unhinged. Let’s hope it’s just the sleep deprivation. I wonder if we’ll ever find out what her visit is all about.’

‘We’ll have to cancel lunch with the Thibodeaus,’ he sighed.

‘What a shame.’ She hid her relief. She couldn’t stand the Thibodeaus, and had been dreading this lunch ever since it had been arranged, just as she had dreaded every
appointment they had ever made with the Thibodeaus. She looked at Herbert. He was much better company than they would ever be, and her relief grew into elation. She was so happy at getting her day
back that she could no longer contain herself. ‘Tell you what, let’s not reschedule.’

‘But they’re your friends.’

‘No, they’re not, they’re
your
friends.’

‘I thought it was
you
who liked them. I can’t stand them.’

‘Neither can I!’

‘Why have you never said anything?’

‘Why have
you
never said anything?’

They fell about laughing at the realisation that for over thirty years each had been stoically enduring these people for the other’s sake. Once they had even gone on holiday with them,
spending an entire week on a failed hiking trip, sheltering from the rain inside a Bavarian log cabin, each Papavoine believing themselves to be the personification of self-sacrifice as they
tolerated the other’s interminable, humourless friends. They were both drunk on the relief they felt at the thought that they would never have to see them again.

Madame Papavoine had an idea. ‘Instead of meeting them four or five times a year, let’s have four or five Thibo-deau days – days when we do something we wouldn’t
otherwise have done. Something that would be more interesting than spending time with them.’

‘Eating my own kneecaps would be preferable to spending time with the Thibodeaus.’

Her plan began to take shape. ‘For our first Thibodeau day, let’s go to Euro Disney.’

‘Yes!’ cried Professor Papavoine. ‘You’re a genius, Liliane! I knew I married you for a reason. I’ve always wanted to go to Euro Disney – I’m going to
have my picture taken with Goofy. Fuck the Thibodeaus!’

‘Language.’

‘Oh. Yes. Sorry, Herbert, I was getting carried away.’

The baby looked up at them, gleefully clutching his excruciating tortoise.

‘You are a highly valued visitor,’ continued the Professor. ‘If it hadn’t been for you, we might have been stuck with those boring bastards for the rest of our
lives.’

‘Papavoine! Watch your tongue.’

‘Oh. Yes. Sorry again, Herbert.’

Herbert acknowledged this apology by pulling a face. Then there was a squelch, and a smell.

‘Your turn,’ said Madame Papavoine.

Professor Papavoine emptied Herbert’s bag on to the floor, and picked out everything he would need to change a nappy. As he got ready to wipe the child’s bottom, he found himself
recalling his unexpected meeting with Le Machine. It all seemed quite serendipitous.

T
he arts editor of
L’Univers
always rose late on a Saturday. His butler was under strict instruction to leave him in peace until
precisely noon, at which point he was to bring him his silver breakfast salver and, beside it, an ironed copy of the paper.

When the butler had made his delivery to the four-poster bed, accepted his customary scolding and left the oak-panelled room, the arts editor of
L’Univers
chewed on a chunk of
croissant, and picked out his supplement. He could see at once that something was not quite right. But what was it? He moved the paper around, looking at it from a number of angles, and at last he
found the offending detail. It was the headline. For some reason it now read:
The End of Life?
Where had the question mark come from? First thing on Monday morning he would track that
sub-editor down and have their guts for garters.

He was eager to find out how Jean-Didier Delacroix had skewered his subject. He knew he could trust him to have done it with a delicious deftness, and no little humour. That was why he had
chosen him for this assignment.

He began to read.
Pure Jean-Didier Delacroix
, he thought.
This is why we pay you so much, you little scamp
. But as he neared the end and realised what his chief arts correspondent
had done, he inhaled a chunk of croissant in shock, and began to choke. Turning purple, he reached out and rang his golden bell, and moments later his butler glided in, and after a few hard but
futile white-gloved pats on his back, followed by a far more fruitful Heimlich manoeuvre, the errant bolus was dislodged.

‘Save me faster next time, you ghastly little man,’ wheezed the arts editor of
L’Univers
. ‘Now get me my telephone.’

The butler left the room, and returned moments later, wheeling a gigantic and ancient telephone on a silver trolley. He plugged it into the wall, and went away.

Jean-Didier Delacroix was also in bed, and like his superior he was reading the arts supplement of
L’Univers
. His was a little crumpled. He had always felt sure
that one day
he
would be the arts editor, and he would have a butler to iron it for him, but now, for the first time in his life, he wondered whether that would happen. Everything seemed
upside down.

He had woken in a panic, sure that he had made the biggest mistake of his career. As he thought back to the evening before, he felt he must have been having some kind of breakdown. Was there any
way he could really have written what he had?

He stared at the paper, and began his fourth read-through of the morning. It was pure Jean-Didier Delacroix: perceptive, passionate, wise and grammatically beyond reproach, and it was all
suffused with his trademark wit. And yet it seemed to go against everything he had ever believed in; he felt as if he had entered a new world, a world in which the old certainties had been swept
away.

His bedside telephone rang. He knew who it would be. His girlfriend was lying beside him, naked but for the slices of cucumber on her eyes, and she tutted loudly at the disturbance. He held the
receiver to his ear. It was a deafening voice.

‘
De-la-crrrrrroooooooiiiiiixxxxxx . . .
’

‘Good morning,’ he said, swallowing nervously. ‘So you’ve read my piece?’

Jean-Didier Delacroix had never had the intention of stitching up Le Machine. He had not planned to go in and use the time-honoured journalistic tactic of making friendly
conversation and engaging him in lively banter, all the while feeding him just enough rope to hang himself. No, he was going to go straight on the offensive, putting him on the back foot from the
start.

He had been ushered into a small room backstage in the seedy little cinema, and come face-to-face with the man. He was wearing a white towelling robe and a distracted expression. There were
angry red marks where until minutes earlier his eyebrows had been, and his head and face were barbershop smooth.

Jean-Didier Delacroix looked him in the eye, switched on his Dictaphone and, without so much as introducing himself, began the interview: ‘So,’ he said, fixing Le Machine with an
ice-cold glare, ‘how does it feel to be a living joke?’

When it was over, Le Machine felt he had not fared particularly well in the interview, but that he had not disgraced himself either. This first question had taken him by
surprise, but he had not considered it unfair. He had thought for a moment before giving an answer about how it was understandable that most people would see him that way, bearing in mind the way
his work was presented in the media. ‘If all I did was take my clothes off and go to the toilet in a bottle, then it would be right for people to regard me as a joke. But anyone who comes to
Life
will find that there is so much more to it than that.’

‘For example?’

Le Machine went into a spiel about the technical side of
Life
: praising the work of his sound designer, whom he saw as an equal collaborator, and the importance of the lighting and the
craftsmanship involved in the glassware.

Jean-Didier Delacroix yawned, and did not ask to be pardoned. ‘Loudspeakers, light bulbs and novelty glassware,’ he said. ‘Fascinating.’

Other questions followed. Most of them Le Machine had anticipated, though he had expected them to have been posed in a less combative manner.

You have said that you feel you were rejected by Paris, so what makes you think that Paris is going to want you now?

Apart from the inevitable perverts, what sort of audience are you expecting?

Do you honestly believe that what you do deserves so much attention when compared to work of a less sensationalist and scatological nature?

And so it went on, for around twenty minutes. He had pat replies for most of the questions, all of them civil but bland, and was soon tired of the sound of his own voice. Jean-Didier Delacroix
showed no sign of interest in anything Le Machine said, and Le Machine could tell this, but he stayed calm and answered the questions as efficiently as he was able, though never to his
interrogator’s satisfaction. To him it was just another interview, and all interviews were ordeals of one kind or another. This time they had sent an attack dog, but that was OK. It
wasn’t the first time. He even had some admiration for the man; at least there was no bullshit about him.

Jean-Didier Delacroix kept going, waiting for Le Machine to slip up, to give the line that he could quote, the one that would reveal him as a fool. So far he had only been a bore.

Time was running out, and Jean-Didier Delacroix knew he had to start wrapping things up. Out came the big question, disguised as a sardonic throwaway line:
So
, he yawned,
what is the
meaning of
Life
?

Le Machine knew that this was where, if he wasn’t careful, he could let himself down. He was just about satisfied with the answer he gave, but his interrogator was clearly not.

Jean-Didier Delacroix was all for egalitarianism, just so long as he didn’t have to be involved, but Le Machine had taken things too far with his suggestion that everyone who came into the
room was welcome to interpret the piece in their own way, and that he didn’t want his words to influence them, to cloud their minds. Jean-Didier Delacroix knew for sure that the general
public – road sweepers, Métro drivers, schoolteachers, office workers – could not be trusted to draw intelligent conclusions about a piece of art by themselves, and for the
artist to refuse to offer them direction was a dereliction of duty. But then again, this wasn’t art, and if people were stupid enough to spend money coming to this show, then they deserved to
be left floundering as they tried to come up with their own interpretations.

Why are you so reluctant to talk about the theory behind your performance?

For the first time in an interview Le Machine acknowledged that he was being evasive, that there was a theory, and even a story, behind it. He didn’t want to explain his work, he
re-emphasised, because to do so would be to strip away any magic it might have. If an artist needs to explain their work, he said, then they have failed, and if they choose to explain it then they
choose to spoil it for people, denying them the possibility of connecting with the piece in their own way. He had started to feel like a dog chasing its tail. ‘It comes back to that word
again,’ he said. ‘
Magic
. If you are an artist then you must believe you have it, otherwise why would you bother? And if you have it why would you want to snuff it out by picking
it to pieces?’

‘And you believe that you are an artist?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you truly believe that your work has . . .’ he spat the word, ‘
magic?
’

‘Yes, I do. But you are welcome to disagree, Monsieur Delacroix.’

‘As if I need your blessing to disagree with you.’ Jean-Didier Delacroix smiled for the first time. It was not a pleasant sight.

Le Machine was starting to disagree with himself. The words had been coming out as they always had, but he wasn’t sure he believed them any more, and he had given so many similar answers
in so many interviews that they sounded to him like platitudes. The encounter had descended to the verge of quarrelling, but there was every possibility that the reporter was right. Maybe there
would be no magic. Maybe there never had been, and Paris would be the place where he would find out that there really was no more to
Life
than a naked man shitting on stage.