This is Life Read online

  Also by Dan Rhodes

  Anthropology

  Don’t Tell Me the Truth About Love

  Timoleon Vieta Come Home

  The Little White Car (writing as Danuta de Rhodes)

  Gold

  Little Hands Clapping

  Thanks to Blondelle Woods, Jenita Colganova and M.E.M. Rhodes for early readings; F. Bickmore and all other humans of Canongate; Christine Glover; the American Academy of Arts and Letters; The Society of Authors; a cormorant in Cork; another cormorant in Paris; The Laugharne Weekend; Aberdeen Art Gallery (which is where Eugène Carrière’s Enfant avec casserole really lives); parents, and family in general.

  Special thanks are due to the true author of this work, the petite, beautiful and forever young Danuta de Rhodes – cruelly felled in her prime.

  And thanks most of all to Arthur.

  This book was written in Buxton, Derbyshire, through the long, cold winter of 2010 & 2011.

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  This digital edition first published in 2012 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Dan Rhodes, 2012

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 85786 245 7

  eISBN 978 0 85786 247 1

  Typeset in Sabon by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  www.canongate.tv

  For Wife-features and Arthur

  CONTENTS

  MERCREDI

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  JEUDI

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  VENDREDI

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  SAMEDI

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  DIMANCHE

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  LUNDI

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  MARDI

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  MERCEDI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Chapter XXXIX

  Chapter XXXX

  Chapter XXXXI

  THE LAST DAY OF LIFE

  Chapter XXXXII

  Chapter XXXXIII

  Chapter XXXXIV

  Chapter XXXXV

  MERCREDI

  I

  Aurélie Renard was standing on the west side of the small square. She struck a match against the wall, lit her fourth cigarette of the morning and tucked the dead stick back into the box. It was the tail end of the rush hour, and a stream of people rose from the exit of the Métro station and walked past her on their way to jobs in the streets beyond. On the other side of the square, intermittently visible through the passing bodies, sat a thick-bearded old man, wrapped in a heavy and ancient brown coat as he played a hurdy-gurdy. She enjoyed the rattle and drone they made together, and remembered it well. He wore a Russian hat, and it was because of this that Aurélie had always thought of him as The Russian. She really had no idea where he was from, or what his instrument was called. To her it was just that Russian instrument, and she didn’t want to risk spoiling its magic by finding out too much about it.

  The previous evening she had taken off her blindfold, walked over to the map of Paris that she had pinned to her wall and been pleased to see that the dart had landed somewhere familiar. The summer before last, when she was nineteen and had just arrived in the city, she had found a job in a kitchen shop a few streets away, selling expensive pots and pans to people who seemed to have no idea that they lived in splendour. This had been the nearest Métro station to her work, and for a while she had walked across the square almost every day. She liked the idea that she had once been a part of this same flow of people. She pictured herself as she would have been back then; bleary-eyed and walking fast, almost running, as she tried to get to the shop on time after a muddled start to the day. Now, though, she stood still, cigarette in hand, as she waited for the right moment to begin.

  The Russian had been there every morning, and he had always worn his coat and hat, even at the height of the summer, when any clothes at all felt like a hindrance. Just looking at him on such days had made Aurélie feel a dull throb of heat exhaustion. Today, there was a real chill in the air, and this was the first day this autumn when his clothes would have seemed appropriate. Aurélie could even see her breath, and some of the people walking by were wearing thick jackets, even winter coats and gloves. Others, the ones the weather had caught by surprise, were trying not to look uncomfortable as they hurried along faster than usual on their way to work.

  Nobody seemed to be paying any attention to the hurdy-gurdy man. Most of them would have walked past him several days a week, just as she had done, and they had long since stopped noticing him. She had never known anyone to stop and listen, or throw him a coin, and she had even wondered whether he was really busking; maybe he had a landlady whose nerves couldn’t stand the noise, and who sent him out of the house to practise. Though his case was open, it was on the bench beside him rather than in the traditional buskers’ spot, on the ground by his feet. These ambiguities had stopped her from ever giving him a euro or two, and even now she felt half bad about it. It seemed a strange way to try and make money though, playing for the same horde of hurrying, inscrutable commuters every day.

  She considered her own clothes for a moment. She had given a lot of thought to what she was going to wear. First impressions were going to be crucial, and she had wanted to look like an artist in a way that was plausible without being overbearing. She was confident that she had done a good job. Almost everybody walking by was wearing ordinary clothes for a working day, just as she had whenever she had walked through the square, but today she stood out, wearing black work boots that were spotted with various colours from her recent failed experiment with oil paint, black jeans and a brand new red quilted jacket, a last minute addition thanks to the temperature. Her hair, after years of changes, had finally returned to its natural colour, a colour which in her early teenage years she had condemned as mousy before attacking it with bleach and dye, but which she had lately come to think of as a pleasing dirty blonde. She had yet to decide whether to grow it out properly, but for now it was just long enough to tie back, which was what she had done. She knew she looked right. The first impression was going to be a good one.

  She smoked her cigarette as far as it would go, then ground it out on the wall and put the stub in the matchbox. The time had come. A new batch of passers-by was spilling from the Métro, and they were augmented by the passengers of a bus that had just pulled up. She switched on her video camera, and rested it on her shoulder. It was quite heavy, an old-style one that used VHS tape, and she hoped its antiquity would help towards the mixed-media aspect of her assessment. She took the stone from her pocket.

  She had chosen it carefully. It was a smooth pebble about the size of a small grape, and so dark g
rey that it might as well have been black. She had decided that a dark one would be ideal for the task, because it wouldn’t be lost against the backdrop of light stone apartment buildings. She had taken it from the collection of interesting stones she had built up as a young girl, most of them found on beaches on family trips to the seaside. She couldn’t remember which beach this one had come from, but it must have been the combination of its smoothness and darkness that had marked it out from its neighbours and inspired her to pick it up and take it home.

  She had spent the preceding Sunday afternoon practising in the Bois de Boulogne. When she was growing up, her father had often told her he wasn’t prepared to raise a daughter who couldn’t throw, and over the years she had developed a good right arm. The problem was going to be capturing the stone on film. She had begun with horse chestnuts, throwing them as high as she could and trying to locate them in the viewfinder at the same time, following their trajectory as they rose and fell. Once she had practised enough with horse chestnuts she had moved on to stones. She had been so lost in her task that by the time she gave up, her arm aching so much she could no longer throw, the park was growing dark, and unusually beautiful silhouettes had begun to appear along the roadside.

  It was a clear morning. Yesterday’s rain and clouds had gone, leaving only a few puddles. The sky was blue, and the light was good. She held the stone as she pressed the record button, closed her eyes, counted slowly to fifteen, pulled back her right arm and threw.

  She knew before it had left her hand that the throw was a good one, high and true. She opened her eyes and immediately caught the small black dot in the viewfinder, just as she had practised. It rose to its apex, and seemed for a split second to hover, completely still, before beginning its descent. It was at this moment that her doubts set in: she went from a state of absolute confidence in her plan to a feeling of wretched stupidity. This is art, she had thought, exhilarated as the stone had left her hand. But she no longer felt that way, and she had no idea what it was, apart from a ridiculous and ill-thought-out thing to do.

  She had intended to stay silent, but she couldn’t. Even so, she had no idea that she had spoken. It was only much later, when she played the tape back, that she heard, above the music of the hurdy-gurdy, the words she had uttered as she saw where the black dot was heading.

  Oh God. Oh shit . . .

  She realised with horror that the stone – smooth and black and the size of a small grape – was about to land, hard, on a baby’s face.

  II

  It had been a long day for Professor Papavoine, the one he dreaded more than any other in the academic calendar. The students had been given free rein to come up with a personal project, and it was his job to listen to their ideas and either sanction them or not. As always on this day of the year he was running late, but at last he had almost made it through. He had only a handful of ten-minute tutorials left in a day that had been full of ten-minute tutorials. The door opened, and his latest student walked in. His heart thumped as if she had pulled a gun on him, and he stopped breathing.

  He coughed as air rushed back into his lungs, and tried his best to pull himself together. ‘Sit down,’ he invited, his tone welcoming, just as it had been for all the other students. He looked at his schedule. ‘Aurélie Renard?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Aurélie Renard. Aurélie . . .’ He left a deliberate gap, smiled and rolled the r for as long as his tongue would allow. ‘. . . Renard.’ This double repetition had become traditional, and he did it without thinking. It was a friendly touch that was designed, successfully, to put the student at ease and give the misleading impression that he was going to be fully engaged in the conversation that was to follow, listening very carefully to every word of their proposal. This time, though, he added a third repetition which, it struck him halfway through, was for his own benefit, to imprint her name in his memory. ‘Aurélie Renard,’ he mumbled, his eyes glazed. It was a repetition too far, and his intonation left its meaning unclear.

  She looked confused. ‘Er . . . yes?’

  He shuddered as if waking from a trance, which, he supposed, was just what was happening. He knew he had to turn this situation around. ‘Hello, Aurélie Renard!’ he cried. He realised too late that this was over-friendly. He had even raised his hand in a cheery wave, as if she had been a small child and he a dental surgeon about to perform an appalling procedure upon her. He cleared his throat, and for a moment he allowed himself to just look at her. She was quite short, three or four centimetres below average height he guessed, and slim, with breasts that were palpable, yet unobtrusive. She was very pretty, in a no-make-up kind of way. She was what his colleague Professor Boucher would have called a compact blonde.

  Professor Boucher took pride in putting all the female students into chauvinistic categories, and whenever a compact blonde was in the vicinity he took the opportunity to pull faces, wink and bug his eyes out, implying that she would be Professor Papavoine’s type. Sometimes his grey chain smoker’s tongue would even dart out of his mouth and moisten the lips that lurked below his unruly beard. Professor Papavoine was always exasperated by these displays, and what exasperated him more than anything was that Professor Boucher was right; he supposed the compact blonde was his type, insofar as he had one.

  ‘So,’ he said, taking care now to sound at least a little bit professorial, ‘you have an idea for your project?’

  ‘Yes.’ Aurélie swallowed hard, and began. Until a few minutes earlier she had been determined to stick to her original plan of spending the coming weeks producing a series of line drawings. Drawing had been her first love; it was what had led to her being singled out by her art teacher as an exceptional student, and it had won her prizes at school. It was her love of drawing that had driven her to apply to art college, to leave the industrial town she had grown up in and come to Paris to learn about materials and technique, and to become as accomplished as she possibly could at the only thing she had ever been really good at, apart from making mashed potato.

  Her idea for the project had been to wander around her neighbourhood and draw people, animals and objects: anything she saw that she thought would make a good subject. She’d had a feeling, though, that telling the professor she wanted to draw a series of pictures would not be enough, that he was going to be looking for an angle. She had one ready. It was bold, perhaps even audacious: she was going to look him in the eye and tell him that she planned to make these line drawings really, really good. She would leave it at that.

  As she had waited for her name to be called, she had joined her fellow students outside the professor’s office, and her confidence began to drain away. Sitting in a circle of much criticised plastic chairs, she had listened quietly as they talked at length about their own proposals. They seemed to come from a different planet from hers. Their talk was of recontextualising found objects, of blurring the boundary between art and the everyday, and of provoking extreme reactions. One of the students, Sébastien, was saying something about subverting the zeitgeist.

  She watched him as he took his turn to hold court. On the last day of college before the summer break everyone had gone out for drinks, and she had ended up inviting him back to her apartment, and they had spent the night together. He had left first thing in the morning, and hadn’t called her once over the summer. He was tall, and had good bones, and she had liked him from the moment she had set eyes on him. She had spent more time than she should have done wondering whether he had lost her number, or whether she had written it down incorrectly as he hurried to gather his things and go.

  When she saw him again at the start of the current term, as scores of students milled around waiting to be allowed into a lecture hall, she had sought him out, gone up to him and said hello. He had given her only a cursory greeting before returning to the intense conversation he had been having with a fellow student about something she didn’t understand, and had no particular interest in understanding. He was acting as if nothing had ever hap
pened between them, as if she was just another slight acquaintance from his course, as if she had never slept in his arms, and as if he had not lightly pinched her chin as he told her that her eyes were just the right shade of blue. He hadn’t even asked her how her summer had been.

  She had stood there for a minute or two, and when she realised he wasn’t going to acknowledge her further she had gone away and leaned against a wall by herself. He hadn’t been her first, but he had been her third, and she had hoped it would be a case of third time lucky. He was with another girl now, a sculptor with waist-length black hair, who never smiled. She had seen them around together.

  On visits home, Aurélie had endured several identical conversations with various aunts, uncles and neighbours about the apparent horrors of a monstrous thing called modern art.

  —So you’re at art college?

  ‘Yes.’

  —What kind of work do you do? It’s not modern art, is it?

  ‘I mainly do line drawings, but I’m starting to work with oil paint too.’

  —So, it’s not modern?

  ‘Er . . . not particularly.’

  —Thank God for that.

  Every time this happened she felt like grabbing the aunt, uncle or neighbour and shaking them. She didn’t like the idea that what she did was automatically considered to be better than everything that they lumped together under the banner of modern art. She was also frustrated by the implication that because she chose to work in a conventional way, then what she produced must be old-fashioned and unoriginal. By their standards, being old-fashioned and unoriginal were virtues, and they didn’t even feel the need to see any of her work before declaring her superiority, purely because of her perceived refusal to embrace anything that might be considered to be in some way progressive.

  She was very impressed with a lot of the work her fellow students were producing, and some of this work would doubtless be considered modern art by these aunts, uncles and neighbours. She knew how much care and thought went into it, and though some of it ended up plain, ugly or nowhere near as original as the artist thought it was, a lot of it worked incredibly well, and it dismayed her to see it all dismissed by people who would never be open-minded enough to give it a chance. She was always looking for different ways to approach her work, and she had ideas for new perspectives and techniques, and had plans to seek out unusual subjects, all of which would amount to something that would be seen as undeniably modern to her supporters.