Cat’s eyes are locked on to Ben’s. She’s delighted to see him.
I have missed him, I really have.
Fen observes how Cat sparkles at the doctor. She regards how her sister practically sings, ‘Hullo!’ to the rest of them before she beams at Ben, focuses on him exclusively and they kiss. The affection between the two of them is pronounced. It simultaneously warms Fen and worries her.
STAGE 15
Vizille-Gilbertville. 204 kilometres
Most courteously, Alex and Josh had taken the room with bunk beds so that the sisters could have the room with the small double and tiny single bed. Pip told her sisters she ought to take the single bed as she feared she was developing a cold. Josh was well aware that Alex presumed him to be asleep when his colleague crept from the room and when he returned in the early hours. Fen and Cat did not hear Pip leave their room but they heard her return. Facing each other in the double bed, they opened their eyes, raised eyebrows, bit back grins and pretended to be fast asleep.
Cat’s mobile phone woke them for real an hour later, at seven in the morning.
‘Cat?’
‘Rachel?’
‘Are you busy?’
‘Er, no.’
‘Are you asleep?’
‘Er, no.’
‘I need some help – can you come? Bring your sisters. It’s women’s work and I need all hands on deck.’
Rachel welcomed them into the Zucca MV team bus. Cat observed her sisters’ open mouths and wide eyes and realized with a certain warmth how initially she too had been staggered at glimpsing such a different, special, self-contained world; but how now all of this had become the norm to her, a plausible, preferable way of life.
It’s my world too, now. Part of my life. I’m happy here. I feel I belong.
‘Now,’ said Rachel, most officiously, ‘down to business.’ From a carrier bag, she laid out a selection of porn magazines.
‘Shit,’ Pip gasped, ‘where did you find those?’
‘Are they banned?’ Fen whispered ingenuously. ‘Did you have to confiscate them? Have you to surrender them to Jean Marie LeBlanc?’
Rachel and Cat laughed, though Cat, aware that porn mags were not a banned substance, was not yet sure of their purpose.
‘The boys had a really tough day yesterday,’ Rachel said, flipping through a magazine leisurely, ‘and today the forecast is very hot.’
‘And today they have five mountains to climb,’ Cat added, peering over Rachel’s shoulder at female limbs in a quite startling configuration.
‘So,’ said Rachel, ‘I thought, to hell with tin foil – I’ll wrap their race food in something far more appetizing. We need a production line. Fen, would you mind going through this pile, Pip you have that.’
‘What do you want?’ Fen asked, deadly serious. ‘Big tits?’
‘Split beavers?’ asked Pip soberly.
‘Perfect,’ said Rachel, ‘only try to find bodies where, if there is a face, it’s a pretty one. Bugger the readers’ wives and fuck the ones with so much silicone that their nipples spread out like a rash. Just go for the bimbos – I really want to treat the boys.’
In the front seat of the Système Vipère team car, Fabian Ducasse is pugnaciously silent and aggressively focused. Jules Le Grand is driving him down L’Alpe D’Huez, down the very mountain which the day before Fabian had ascended in his own funeral cortège. He stares straight ahead, not looking at the road, the gradient, the debris from yesterday. His eyes, today the colour of graphite and as seemingly insensate as the rock of the fearsome Alp itself, give nothing away. Fabian’s aquiline features are as sharp as the boulders. A scar scores through his soul in much the same way as the road slices into the mountain. Behind closed lips, his teeth are clenched. However, the external manifestation of his inner turmoil is one of brooding steady focus; he resolutely refuses to allow any hint of emotional turbulence to be visible. It’s strategy. The media must not know. Nor must any rider in the peloton. Nor, he thinks somewhat deludedly, must his directeur.
But it is Jules’s job to be in tune with his riders; though he has read Fabian’s condition in a glance, he knows that diplomacy is crucial if the great rider is to race well today. Personally, Jules detests seeing his team leader back in regular Système Vipère colours; Fabian looks wrong somehow, like he’s in mufti after eight days wearing the yellow jersey. Though his primary concern is for Fabian’s physical and mental recovery, Jules is also thinking of the Système Vipère sponsors, intending to phone them, reassure them, flatter them, once the Stage is under way. Jules has hardly spoken to Fabian because he knows there is little the rider wants to hear. When Fabian finished the Stage yesterday, Jules had grasped his shoulders, shaken him until eye contact was established and said, ‘Bien, Fabian, bien.’ Jules curses the fact that the only way to today’s start is down the very route that decimated his rider the day before, stripping him of his maillot jaune. Jules is painfully aware of the irony that L’Alpe D’Huez, in glorious sunshine, looks positively Sound of Music this morning.
‘Can he reclaim the maillot jaune?’ was a question posed to Jules by fans, by TV, by phone and in the press conference yesterday.
‘Tomorrow is another high mountain Stage,’ Jules had replied nonchalantly, ‘and there is of course another Time Trial to go.’
He had not said this to Fabian. There was nothing that could be said to Fabian that Fabian wouldn’t have told himself already, time and again.
Fen and Pip caught a ride to the Col de la Madeleine with another Zucca MV soigneur, a quietly spoken man with whom they conversed sparingly in pidgin Anglo-Franco-Italian. He felt it his greater duty to consolidate his passengers’ burgeoning passion for the sport by driving them along the race route than to go direct to the hotel to unpack for the riders. From Vizille, the summer seat of many a French president, through the Chatreuse Massif, they journeyed on a road laid down by Napoleon, unaware that the day was to bring a French revolution in the form of Fabian Ducasse’s comeback. Pip and Fen were seduced by pretty chalets in sleepy mountain villages where, in July, the Christmas lights were still up because the ski season alone defined such places’ existence.
Sunflowers, lavender and cow parsley provided a gentle aesthetic antidote to the rock faces on which firs clung precariously. Local women, laying claim to their favourite spectating spots, sat under parasols, compounding Fen and Pip’s feeling that they were driving through an Impressionist painting. Until, that is, the tifosi began to gather in force and en masse, their sodden clothes from yesterday drying on mountain safety barriers, shrubs, even the tarmac itself. The sisters grinned proudly while the fans cheered, waved and rang huge cow bells as the Zucca MV car passed by.
‘Madeleine,’ said the soigneur with hushed reverence, stopping the car near the summit of the great mountain. ‘Please,’ he said, hand on heart, as if it were his grave responsibility, ‘I wish you to have a very good day.’
‘Mille grazie,’
