French Revolutions Page 13
During our telephone conversations Nick had been brought up to speed with my project, but as his eyes twinkled encouragingly at me I realised I might have glossed over certain issues, most notably my physical ineptitude and an associated propensity to cheat. A minute earlier, leafing through a book on the Tour’s history that had been presented to Nick by the author, I had chanced upon the statement: ‘I am a cyclist. I do not get off and walk.’
For an accurate précis of my not altogether admirable Pyrenean performance one would simply cut the negative word from the second of these sentences and paste it in the first, but somehow it seemed a shame to disappoint him so early in our acquaintance.
‘Well,’ I began, concocting an answer that dropped right on the boundary fence of the honesty ball-park, ‘I paced myself.’
He gave me an understanding smile. ‘Ah – saving yourself for Hautacam.’
It was supposed to come out as a helpless self-deprecatory snort, but somewhere between brain and mouth it evolved into a heroic sigh of painful recollection.
‘Paced yourself again, yeah?’
‘No – no, actually, no. No, I didn’t. No.’
‘Chapeau!’ said Nick, raising his beer can, and with a single modest shrug the humble economies of truth were inflated to a huge and ugly edifice of deceit. I think I might even have rubbed my legs with a showy grimace. What had I done? This was certainly the most idiotic duplicity I had essayed since pretending to be Portuguese during a youthful confrontation with two London Transport ticket inspectors. I could hardly ask Nick to sort out my gears now.
Much to everyone’s surprise another guest turned up at this point, a middle-aged Australian with a face like a jolly 1950s schoolboy, wheeling a hefty tourer weighed down with front and rear panniers and a tent. Rhys had found something on the Internet about Pyrenean Pursuits, and was stopping off halfway through an eight-week European odyssey. He was older than I am, and fatter, but had done 2,500 kilometres already at 100k a day, and camped every night except one. Rhys was instantly identifiable as a very nice chap, but statistics like these were intolerable. I smarted as Paul Kimmage had done when a bearded tourist lurched out of an Alpine crowd on his panniered tourer and pedalled up past him as the Irishman struggled desperately to keep the approaching broom wagon at bay. Humiliated, and humiliated by a tourist, ‘a bloody Fred’.
‘Any mountains?’ I felt myself constrained to enquire.
‘Tim here just did the Aubisque and Hautacam in one day,’ chipped in Nick on cue. I nodded slowly and fixed a flinty yet mystical gaze on the mist now smudging out the peaks above.
‘Nah, well, no really big ones,’ said Rhys mildly. ‘I shouldn’t really be doing this at all – the doctors told me my back wasn’t up to it, and my ankle joints never fused properly when I was a kid. The pain’s pretty bad after the first hour. But I guess you know all about pain after yesterday!’
We drank beer until it rained, Jan retiring to put the kids to bed and hone the website that had attracted Rhys, Nick disappearing into the kitchen to do quite outstanding things with ducks and flageolet beans. Rhys and I sheltered in the bar/garage, watching the Tour of Italy on Eurosport and playing about with Nick’s turbo trainer, a bike with its front wheel removed and the back one wedged between resistance rollers. It was good to exchange road tales, the fly-swallowing and the loose chippings, though my rigged coronation as King of the Mountains loomed shamefully over the conversation. Rhys knew nothing about bike racing but plenty about bikes, and every time he started talking about gear ratios I tutted gutturally in what was supposed to be a matey don’t-let’s-talk-shop fashion and dramatically changed the subject.
This tactic was additionally employed over dinner to probe the motives for Rhys’s extended journey, which at his stage of life I was fairly hopeful would involve some unspeakable lifestyle apocalypse: the gay affair that forced a messy divorce, a border-hopping white-collar-crime spree. But no: he’d been a civil engineer with the same firm for fifteen years and like all Australians was therefore eligible for three months paid leave. His wife and teenage daughters were waiting back home, hoping Daddy got Europe and cycling out of his system before his ankles melted.
Bloated with confit de canard and vin de pays I lay awake for some time in my room, scanning the whitewashed ceiling for spiders, while out in the rain woodland creatures did shrill and ghastly things to one another. It was good to have proper pillows again after eleven nights spent with my head cricked painfully against the sort of thing you would expect Gladiators to hit each other with, but I still couldn’t sleep. The day’s revelations had been almost uniformly troubling. Why had Nick beaten a teenage Chris Boardman in a 25-mile time trial? How had Rhys hauled half a branch of Millets for 2,500 kilometres on unfused ankles? When would I stop lying?
I crept back downstairs when everyone was in bed to call Birna on Nick’s payphone, and drunk and tired it had all come out in one long blurry sentence. There was an extended pause when I’d finished, understandable when you’re woken up at midnight to hear your absent husband mumbling words like ‘pain’, ‘lies’, ‘bonk’ and ‘Fred’. In the end I carried on myself. ‘I can’t do it I just can’t do this and next it’s Mont Ventoux where people die and then the Alps and I just can’t I’m just not no I can’t.’
It wasn’t a very Eddy Merckx moment. Birna did all she could in the way of offering soothing platitudes, and when they elicited only mid-pubescent wordless whines she tried out a pull-yourself-together verbal cheek-slap. That worked better, but it was still gone 4 a.m. when I slammed Bernard Hinault’s biography shut, flicked a weary V-sign at the yellow-jerseyed slaverer on the cover and switched off the light.
Nine
The rain had flattened the long grass like a stampeding herd of bulls, but the sun was out now and, pouring me the first of half a dozen glasses of orange juice, Nick suggested the three of us go for a mountain ride. Because this could not be allowed to happen, I went back to bed until I heard Rhys and Nick leave, then shambled wanly downstairs to look at the map. Nick’s proposed circular route up to the col de Saraillé and back to Biert down the gorge involved a climb to 942 metres up a tiny road whose impressive collection of double-gradient chevrons guaranteed a rousing ‘sod-that’ verdict. Instead I sat on the patio, reading selections from the Flanagan cycling library and enjoying the experience of wearing only slightly foolish clothing during the hours of daylight. The sun made my mottled, waxy nose throb; under the table, the one-eyed dog leaked sympathetic milk over my espadrilles. I was ready to go back to bed when I found myself gradually absorbed by the story of Eugène Christophe.
Leading the 1913 Tour as it crosses the Pyrenees, Christophe is hurtling down the Tourmalet when his front forks snap, propelling him into a wall of scree. Tour rules dictate that riders must effect all repairs themselves (a situation that persisted until 1930), so Christophe dusts himself down, shoulders his stricken machine and somehow runs with it for 10 kilometres down what was then Europe’s highest road (sorry: ‘road’). Arriving bloody and exhausted at the village of Sainte-Mairie-de-Campan, he is followed silently into the local forge by Tour snoops keen to ensure no illicit aid is offered or received. Waving the blacksmith aside and perhaps hissing lengthy compound insults through his teeth, Christophe begins to hammer wearily at strips of glowing metal, and after two hot, hard hours has somehow fashioned himself a set of forks. As he prepares to set off, now four hours down and in last place, an official blocks his way. The handiwork may have been all his own, but in allowing the blacksmith’s boy to pump the bellows Christophe has accepted indirect third-party help. Illegal assistance – a further ten-minute penalty.
I put the book down on the rain-spotted table, leant back in my slatted folding chair and looked up at the mountains. Then I went inside, withdrew a number of other titles and thumbed through their indices looking for Christophe, Eugène. The early years were bad enough. In 1910 he ploughed through snowdrifts in the Milan-San Remo race, an effort which ear
ned him a month in hospital and two lost years of racing; in his comeback Tour, 1912, he actually finished with a lower overall time than the winner, but because that year the race was decided on an arcane points basis Eugène was placed second. And then it got worse.
Determined not to abandon the 1913 race after the rather trying bellows incident, he somehow claws his way back to finish seventh. The war then intervenes, but in the first race afterwards, 1919, Christophe soon finds himself the inaugural wearer of the new yellow jersey selected by the Tour organisers to distinguish the race leader. During the stage between Metz and Dunkirk, at 468k (what? What?) the second-longest in Tour history, race leader Christophe feels an ominous shudder and then a mighty wrench. He can’t quite believe it, but it’s the front forks again. By the time he sources a new pair from a bike factory he has lost over an hour and again it is too much to regain. He keeps trying until 1925, when, nineteen years after his first Tour and now aged 40, he enters his last, abandoning well before the finish.
I restocked the library and went into the bar. I’d hidden ZR behind a table here to minimise the risk of kit-comparison sessions during which the extent of my ignorance would be quickly exposed, but now extracted it. Propped against Nick’s turbo trainer, without the panniers it looked lithe and poised. I thought of a picture of Eugène Christophe I’d just seen: flat cap, recklessly enormous ringmaster moustache, spare tyre wrapped round shoulders of fisherman’s jersey, filthy legs planted on filthy cobbles. And, held by one hand on the saddle, the other on the bars, his bike. It reminded me a lot of my first bike, the hand-me-down Wayfarer: no gears, meaty iron tubing, sit-up-and-beg handlebars – and a big chrome bell. A bell. Ding-ding! Ding-ding! Leader of world’s most gruelling sporting event coming through! Ding-ding-ding!
Suddenly I understood something important. Part of the Tour de France was about trying to get one over on your opponents: better tactics, better equipment, better drugs – a competitive advantage by any means necessary. I remembered a helicopter shot I’d seen of the Tour of Italy, with half a dozen riders sneaking a short-cut across a petrol-station forecourt while the rest of the peloton log-jammed slowly through the adjacent roundabout. Stuff like this, and the more epically blatant chicanery of the early years, had appealed to me, and in my own way I had already done it all. But beneath this professional cynicism, the Tour was still fundamentally about the amateur ideals of courage and noble suffering, and this was a Tour I hadn’t yet entered. In any case, who were my opponents? Carefully selected old men aside, I was essentially competing against myself: the shiftless, irresolute schemer facing the rather more reticent lion-hearted incorruptible, the one who got on his bike instead of getting off it. Humbly thanking Eugène, I went upstairs, changed into my jersey and shorts, came back down, cleated myself into ZR and headed for the hills.
The D17 out of Massat was thin, steep and so quiet that dogs slept on it. With the sun working on the wet greenery you could smell photosynthesis going into overdrive: Jan had given up her vegetable plot after weeding it became a painting-the-Forth-Bridge job, and Nick said hillsides like this one were regularly buzzed by police helicopters looking for pot plantations. It was almost tropical up there. I nodded at a couple of ageing hippies on their corrugated veranda; three blokes pretending to fix a barn roof jeered, ‘Eh – le Tour est arrivé!’ as I rounded the hairpin alongside. The road dipped slightly, then pitched radically upwards, but even as it did so I became aware of an important fact: I was not slowing down. The D17 climbed through a dark arc of woodland and I climbed with it, looking down at my back wheel to note that I was only in gear twenty-four, three shy of the bottom of the barrel. The trees petered out and suddenly there it was, a yawning 360-degree panorama of perpendicular pastures and snow-veined granite that swept all the way across to Spain.
My heart felt like bursting, but not for the reason I had become accustomed to on reaching such altitudes. Reaching the brow of the col de Saraillé was a religious experience: I am healed; I can see; in conquering the savage beauty around me I have, in fact, become its creator. The climb had not been a calvary but a road to Damascus, one that had converted me to a self-believer. For the first time in over twenty years I raised both my hands from a set of handlebars and punched the blue sky.
On the loop back to Biert up the gorge I stopped at Castet-d’Aleu for a celebratory coffee at an excellent bar/shop, where an unbelievably old man presided over dark cabinets of pre-war preserves. Was it the lack of panniers, I wondered as I sat outside watching the traffic, or the additional rest, or the brevity of the day’s 33-kilometre itinerary? Probably all three, but none of them played any part in the conclusion I arrived at during the course of a bitter, beetle-black coffee and what would have been a complimentary chocolate if the old man’s old wife hadn’t nicked it while I was in the loo. I had gone off that day to search for the hero inside myself, and somewhere up on the col de Saraillé I had found him. To return to Pyrenean Pursuits and be obliged to dismiss my climb in casual terms was a very hard thing to do.
On this basis, it was a shame that in the pitiable depths of my long, dark night of the soul I’d already committed myself to more cheating. Biert was a good 60k off the route of a stage which dead-ended at the unpromising town of Revel, from where the riders would take a plane transfer across Languedoc to Avignon (alight here for Mont Ventoux). Birna had not been required to use all of her powers of persuasion to convince me on the phone to bunk off the bit to Revel, and had even, as a call from her that morning revealed, booked me a hire car to drive myself from Toulouse airport to Avignon.
I would get to Toulouse by train, or rather I wouldn’t, for as Nick established during an epic sequence of chair-bitingly contradictory telephonic encounters with assorted transport officials, of the three trains a day which would accept bicycles, an impressive seven were affected by wildcat strike action. Of the remaining five, six were redirected to Barcelona, though the front two carriages of the other four would proceed to Carcassonne, arriving eleven minutes before they had left. ‘I’ll drive you,’ said Nick; I instantly protested at this further act of generosity, but not for very long.
We left the next morning, my body still processing a snails ’n’ quails gourmet extravaganza that had made an additional mockery of Pyrenean Pursuits’ 250F-a-night half-board tariff. Rhys, now infected by the Zen-like inertia that apparently governs many an Ariègeois lifestyle, was planning to stay a few more days, cooling his heels and more particularly their adjacent ankles. A serendipitous phone call from Nick’s next guest, an American called Mike, asking to be picked up at Toulouse airport, made me feel slightly better about his 200-kilometre roundtrip, and proved an additional boon when it became clear that the only hire-car available at the airport was the one Mike had just returned.
It was odd to be driving again, odd to ease down on the sort of pedal that effortlessly whooshed you up to idiotic velocity. Cleated to the bike I’d forgotten what it meant to be footloose and fancy-free, and it was good to remember. Hammering eastwards on the hot motorway I passed the pop-up medieval horizon of Carcassonne, deafeningly serenaded with the bygone sounds of Nostalgie FM, the station selected by Mike and, after a fruitless attempt at mastering the tuning procedure, tolerated in default by me. I’d read somewhere that French radio stations are obliged to broadcast 40 per cent of their music in the native language as part of the nation’s campaign to prove that it is better than England, and the distressing Halliday-heavy consequences of this made themselves apparent as I flew up the fast lane. Still, the Nostalgie playlist devisers had found the odd grey-area loophole. ‘Michelle, ma belle’ and ‘Chanson d’amour, ra-da-da-da-da’ had both blared out of the speakers twice before I began the first of several late-afternoon laps of Avignon’s city walls.
Avignon was my second pre-booked flash-hotel stopover, though given the modest scale of my achievements since Dax I barely felt I’d earned it. I eventually found the Mercure Palais des Papes near the famous half bridge, embedded in th
e man-made cliffs that shore up the Pope’s palace. My plan had been to bugger about up and down the ochre boulevards and high-sided alleys, then early to bed for a prolonged toss/turn session mulling over the looming horrors of Ventoux, but this scheme was adapted somewhat by the revelation at reception that my single room had been upgraded to the rather larger one necessary to accommodate Birna and our three children. The party had arrived on the TGV an hour before and, as I presently discovered, were currently in situ.
I will leave you to imagine the emotional, high-pitched yelps of ‘Daddy gone but Daddy here now!’ as well as my children’s own reactions. Birna explained that my unsettling telephonic performance had triggered much domestic concern, and I belatedly understood that all the car-hire booking and detailed enquiries into my itinerary were related to the planning of this half-term surprise. ‘In fact, I’m completely OK now,’ I said with an effort. ‘I went up a big mountain yesterday without any problems at all.’ Birna has an impressive armoury of level looks, and she treated me now to her most horizontal. ‘Isn’t that what you said to those men in the Pyrenees?’
My morale roller-coaster had been round a few loops and corkscrews since that terrible phone call, but I realised just how bad I must have sounded for Birna even to have considered marshalling three children aged 1 to 6 single-handed from London on the train. I-Spy had regressed into We-Punch well before the Channel, and after the sweets ran out at Lille Birna had been drawn inexorably into yet another prolonged search for our children’s on/off switches, or at least volume controls. A snooty businesswoman had repeatedly demanded that ‘the calme of the wagon to be respected’, and though she abruptly relocated to the next carriage after a co-ordinated ‘bouncing’ incident outside Dijon, those final hours of onboard high jinks had been inevitably trying.