French Revolutions Read online

  ‘You’re pretty good at that,’ I said, watching in the harsh car-park light as Paul slipped wheels into axles and bolted on pedals, handling the spanners and hex keys with a juggler’s flourish.

  ‘Used to work the odd weekend in a bike shop when I was a kid,’ he said, closing an eye and chewing a lip as he assessed the alignment of his front brakes. Here was further evidence of the many-siblinged upbringing in Northern Ireland that had prepared Paul for most of life’s challenges.

  ‘How many odd weekends?’

  ‘About four years’ worth.’

  On the plus side, this meant at least three drrr-thwickless days; on the minus, my self-styled status as team leader was already looking tenuous. Having treated the subterranean parkers of Evian to an unexpected buttock festival, we slipped into Lycra, threw anything unwanted into the Espace and prepared to depart.

  ‘Actually, sod this,’ blurted Paul, tearing off the maroon helmet which he’d promised his wife he’d wear and flinging it into the car as I was about to close the boot. ‘I just can’t be doing with that.’

  ‘Because it looks stupid?’ I asked, running a self-conscious finger around the even more conspicuous circumference of my own headwear.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Paul, and off we went.

  I understood that Paul was not the sort of person who fell off bicycles. Mentally spooling through a montage of my own experiences of horizontal cycling, in particular the many featuring slow-motion topples in a variety of urban and rural settings, I accepted the different logic of our parallel situations. Although Paul had no interest whatsoever in watching sport, I recalled that he was always good at doing it. He couldn’t tell you who the England manager was but could wipe the floor with me at keepie-uppie. The name Tiger Woods would ring only the faintest bell in Paul’s mind, but in his hands a golf club could propel a ball with prodigious accuracy and distance. And though I now understood that the words ‘team jersey’ made sense to him only in terms of Channel Island offshore-banking consortiums, it was no surprise to look behind and see Paul pedalling lazily past Evian’s relentlessly manicured ornamental lakeside gardens with both hands behind his head.

  It got worse when we met up with Birna and the kids. ‘Did Paul tell you what happened to him in Singapore last week?’ I didn’t think this story would involve a fine for destroying a bus shelter, and I was right. Apparently, Birna told me as Paul coughed with embarrassed modesty, he had been working out on a hotel exercise bike with such devastating potency that the machine had exploded. ‘It didn’t explode,’ said Paul quietly. ‘Just sort of … caught fire and melted a bit.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Birna with a distasteful leer, looking as if she might be about to grab part of Paul’s leg between her thumb and forefinger.

  We’d gone about 15k up the busy lakeside road when Paul’s mobile rang. I was wondering how many multimillion deals we’d have to broker in lay-bys along the way when he passed it to me. It was Birna.

  ‘Anything unusual in your back pocket?’ she said, and even before I patted my kidneys for new lumps I knew that there was. The car keys.

  In the high sun, the great blue lake glittered almost painfully as I barrelled back to Evian while Paul waited at a waterside café. Half an hour later I met Birna outside the casino and voicelessly handed over the keys, wearing an expression normally associated with the latter stages of cholera, then set off to cover those 15 waterside kilometres for the third time in a little over an hour. But then two cyclists in pink jerseys whisked past me without a sideways glance, and though this seemed to be another bad thing, it actually proved to be rather a splendid one.

  Road-race cycling is founded on physics, and in particular the laws of air resistance which dictate, as I may well already have mentioned, that on a flat road a rider tucked behind another can maintain the same speed as the leader while exerting 20 per cent less energy. The tactical implications of this affect all aspects of the sport. One-man breakaways are invariably doomed; the peloton, sharing the wind-breaking effort at the front, can maintain far higher average speeds for far longer. And by letting their leader tuck in behind them, a team can give him if not a free ride then a very cheap one, towing him along, keeping him fresh for the final climb or sprint.

  It was this latter aspect that interested me most when, after an out-of-the-saddle rotary frenzy, I somehow managed to get up to the rear wheel of the second pink cyclist. His friend was pedalling hard; he was doing so steadily; I quickly established, to my considerable delight, that I could maintain my speed and position with only the occasional desultory revolution.

  I can only describe this experience as sensational. Wheel to wheel we swished towards Switzerland, and I realised that at last my knowledge of the sport could gain me an important advantage over a horribly well-conditioned new team-mate. It should not be too difficult to persuade Paul to go at the front, letting me idle in his slipstream like the leader I so richly deserved to be; he would unwittingly tow me along to the end of the day, and as the Espace loomed in the hotel car park I’d ease gloriously by. Twenty per cent less effort – even better results than a skinful of EPO. The next morning, confused by his own exhaustion and my chirpy freshness, it would be a simple matter to break Paul’s spirit. A ‘Keep it going, marathon man’ here, an ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ there and he would soon accept the new hierarchy: me as boss, him as cowed and humble domestique.

  Oh yes. This was all most satisfactory. Ruddle would carry my water, read the map, complain in restaurants, wash my kit. Such was the natural law of the Tour. Ninety per cent of all professional riders completed their careers in the service of an élite few, and were humbly happy to do so even for risible rewards. In 1986, Paul Kimmage was paid £700 a month by his team; two years earlier, the average professional was on about £400 at a time when trade unions were campaigning for a national minimum wage of £450.

  Every rider had to serve their time in the ranks. A young Eddy Merckx was ordered to cede certain victory in the 1967 Paris–Nice to his team leader – the leader was Tom Simpson, and Paris-Nice his final win. Paul might be the better raw talent (might? Might? The only machines I ever damaged through overzealous physical attention were ones that had erroneously retained my small change), but he had not earned his stripes. Where was he when Moore toiled through the endless forests of Aquitaine or crested the mighty Galibier?

  And, oh, how wearisome that stripe-earning process might prove to be. Merckx ruled his domestiques with a rod of iron: another of his famously ponderous catchphrases was ‘You have to put your own interests above camaraderie.’ Louison Bobet once dispatched a domestique on an epic quest for refreshment: he finds a bar, but has no money; the heartless patron insists on payment; he runs outside and begs the requisite coppers from locals; runs back in, purchases the water, runs back out and remounts; after scorched and agonising toil – by now the peloton is over eight minutes up the road – he pants back to his leader, tortured by the cool bottle whose contents he dare not even dab to his own cracked lips. ‘Where have you been?’ tuts Bobet as his mobile factotum breathlessly un-stoppers the bottle for Monsieur Louison’s convenience; then, peering at the label, shrieks, ‘And you know very well I hate that brand!’

  But even Bobet, even Merckx, even I in my wildest dominatrix fantasies, could never quite aspire to the autocratic excesses of René Vietto, France’s first King of the Mountains. Some months before the 1947 Tour, troubled by a septic toe, Vietto asked his doctor to remove the offending digit: ‘Take it off,’ he breezed. ‘I’ll be lighter in the mountains.’ Extreme behaviour, I think you’ll agree, but for René this was only the warm-up act. Training for the Tour, he sidled up to his trusted deputy Apo Lazarides and had a quiet word. Apo was an unusually impressionable fellow; the year before, leading the peloton by a country mile up the Izoard, he was seized with a fear of imminent attack by wild bears and stopped to wait for the rest to catch up. Behaviour such as this may have made him vulnerable to René’s more lunatic
whims: though we may never know what was said between the pair, the fact of the matter is that Lazarides also set off from Paris in 1947 one toe short of a shoe-full, and walked with a limp until the day he died.

  I broke out of formation with a cheeky ‘As you were, men!’ then arced round to the lakeside bar. Paul was sitting under a parasol, bike propped against the quay wall, shades on, surveying the glorious vista. In one hand he held what was full enough to be his second beer, and in his other – this was better than I dared hope – smouldered a small cigar. ‘That was quick,’ he said with a happy, lazy smile, and I felt a twinge of regret for what I was going to do to him. But it soon passed, and I heard myself say, ‘Well, you’ve got time for another, then.’

  ‘What – beer or cigar?’

  ‘Well, Switzerland starts just up the road and everything’s going to treble in price,’ I said, squinting at the white-crossed red flags hanging limply on their poles by the distant border post. ‘Better make it both.’

  Evian was hardly Detroit, but crossing the frontier the contrast was astonishing. Fresh, flat tarmac slipped smooth and silent under our wheels; the fields looked as though they had been ploughed by craftsmen working delicately with small trowels. We didn’t see any roadside rubbish for an hour, and even then it was a can of Italian beer.

  But at the same time the cycling experience was diminished. In France, riding two abreast is accepted practice, but as I chatted to Paul about this and that – this being the importance of smoking a lot of cigars while cycling, and that being the added benefits of doing so while riding at the front – we were furiously honked at four times in ten minutes.

  That the perpetrators were invariably hidden behind smoked glass which shook to the amplified beat of the power ballad was the first indication of an unlikely truth: the semi-rural Swiss male fancies himself as a bit of a lad. Over the next two days we saw hundreds of strutting young men proudly displaying the tight jeans, rolled-up jacket sleeves, flicked-back tonsorial splendour and threadbare moustache of the prize arse. Additionally, every town seemed to have its own sex shop – sadly, not one of these was called The Alpine Horn – and though at first we thought it was a one-off customisation job, repeated sightings eventually persuaded us to accept that Volkswagen had officially released a special Swiss edition of its best-selling product and entitled it the Golf Bon Jovi.

  The road levered upwards, and looking ahead I saw spots of perspiration moistening my domestique’s back as he fumbled with his gears. Settling comfortably behind him, I recalled a recent conversation that only a stern sense of duty prevented me from sharing with my domestique. ‘The col des Mosses? Ooooh, that’s quite a climb. I’m going to give it a go one day – maybe next July.’ I’d been discussing my itinerary at the breakfast table with an American who seemed involved in some way with the running of our hotel, but because he was both older and balder I hadn’t been overly concerned. The col des Mosses was only a category two, after all: the Tour’s last big hill, maybe, but only a hill.

  Between neatly terraced vineyards we climbed, boy racers screaming round hairpins in their Golf Bon Jovis. It was quite a haul. Paul’s shoulders were rolling, and I suddenly recalled that he’d had four hours’ sleep, and remembered my own travails up that first big hill near Poitiers all those weeks ago. Only later did I establish the precise beastliness of the col des Mosses: an ascent of over 1,000 metres in 17.5 kilometres, not as steep as some category ones, perhaps, but more drawn out than many HCs.

  When the road hugged up against the side of what soon became a horrible gorge cliff, occasionally hiding itself under a rockfall-deflecting concrete canopy, I had no choice but to accept that this was all a little more extreme than expected. Then, suddenly, there was an abrupt bend and the road leapt idiotically across the void, reaching the opposite cliff by means of an apologetic little bridge.

  That this hadn’t happened once throughout the Alps had long been a source of mystified delight, but it was happening now. Paul pulled over with an awed exclamatory sound and started rooting about in the bar-bag for his camera; I welded my gaze to the front wheel and sped rigidly across to the other side. My team-leader slipstreaming tactics were summarily abandoned, and inspired partly by guilt at my self-serving awfulness, partly by a colon-cramping fear of looking back until that big hole in the ground had gone away, I pedalled determinedly onwards.

  By the time I did peek behind, Paul was a barely animate white speck in a grim panorama of concrete and blasted rock. How pathetic he looked, and what a fiend I felt. It occurred to me that this might have been the first time I had tried to take advantage of a man by plying him with beer and tobacco. I had hogged his slipstream and clogged his lungs, and now he was in trouble. Waiting in the late-afternoon shadows, I unsuccessfully assembled dishonest explanations for my action. ‘Sorry,’ I said, when at last he gasped up to me, and as he sweated out a look of slightly aggrieved bemusement I knew that the ridiculous team-tactic fantasy was at an end. ‘I’ll go in front for a bit,’ I continued, pulling alongside him, ‘but, you know, at a reasonable pace. It’s … supposed to be easier if you ride behind someone, apparently, because of the, um …’

  ‘The wind resistance,’ panted Paul, who I later remembered had some sort of scientific degree in which sound knowledge of real facts about our world played a more important role than they had in my own university course, wherein a reasonable pass could be guaranteed by pathologically random use of the phrase ‘on a broadly macro level’.

  Despite my constant assurances that this was the last climb of note, the face that Paul wore as we creaked into the mountain-top pastures was not that of a man on holiday. Hungry, tired and now freezing bloody cold we crested the green col side by side in a cool dusk whose advanced status was explained when Paul flatly pointed out that my watch, mortally bollocksed in the Joux-Plane mists, was underestimating the time by a factor of two hours. It was gone 9 p.m., easily the latest I had been on the road, and neither for the first time or the last we were rescued by Paul’s mobile phone. It rang as we started the descent, and fifteen minutes later we were wedging bicycles between sleeping children in an Alpine lay-by.

  The hotel in Château d’Oex was grand but scarily empty, and had I been alone I would not have wished to select the phrase ‘skeleton staff’ in describing its paucity of personnel. Birna nobly baby-sat, giving Paul and me the opportunity to sit alone under the smoking room’s distant ceilings, marooned on sofas the size of bouncy castles while the Turkish waitress supplied us with rather too much wine. ‘It’ll be better tomorrow,’ I said, unfolding a large map.

  ‘Yes, it will,’ he said, ‘because instead of going from here to here to here’ – I watched him trace the Tour’s dilatory route across to Lausanne and up to Lake Murten – ‘we’re going to do this.’ And with the firm authority of a seasoned decision-maker he snipped off two sides of a sizeable triangle.

  ‘Great,’ I said, or rather belched. Paul had served his time as a domestique; the balance of power was shifting and I wasn’t about to resist.

  I went down to breakfast the following morning with blood all over my face. Sunburned crevasses on my nose and lips had been opened up by the previous evening’s chilled mountain-top mist, and were still leaking as I set about the buffet with the gusto of the slightly hungover. Surveying a table groaning with cooked meats, cereals, fruit and cheese, I realised how deeply poxy French breakfasts were, how even in a flash French hotel you only got a couple of croissants and a foil-topped preserve. Breakfast was One of the Good Things About Switzerland – not, let’s face it, an unwieldy list. The only entries I’d managed so far were the nice little crests on car number plates and public conveniences that were both clean and not peopled by brazen cockwatchers – surprising, perhaps, in the land that spawned Oscar Plattner’s Flying Circus.

  Groggy with calories, we agreed the meeting place and left my family to occupy their final full day abroad. It was a glorious morning for Paul and me, a glorious day in fact: an endl
ess parade of sun-dappled, chuckling brooks; of wild flowers and tailwinds; of doe-eyed cows in verdant pastures and doe-eyed blondes in Mercedes convertibles. We raced narrow-gauged trains through narrow-gauged villages, rattling along at such effortless speed that we only noticed that the gorges and peaks and cliff-top castles had gone when we sneaked off the Tour route at Bulle and looked behind us.

  ‘I suppose that’s the end of the Alps,’ said Paul, and he was right. I’d never realised how flat are vast tracts of the Swiss landscape. For the next two days the worst you could say was that it rolled, but even then only gently. With the mountains gone the cyclists returned, again generally retired ones, and in our new co-operative relaying formation we fairly flew past them all with a taunting vigour that Paul seemed to find uncharitable.

  ‘It’s dog eat dog with these old blokes,’ I insisted stoutly as we ate big pieces of meat by a fountain in Payerne. ‘Give them half a chance and they’ll make you suffer.’

  He looked at me the way he had when I’d deserted him halfway up the col des Mosses, then ordered a further pair of beers.

  Swiss people generally prefer not to say anything at all, but of those who do, only 18 per cent speak French. Unastonishingly the Tour route had been designed to meet most of them, and for the last day and a half the towns Paul and I had pedalled tended to kick off with a La or a Le and take in at least a couple of acute accents. Murten seemed to mark some sort of boundary. Beyond it were a sea of achs and umlauts and reckless overuse of the letter z; just before it everything was confused – there were villages whose names started off French but lost their nerve right at the end: la Corbaz, Greng, Faoug.