French Revolutions

an
endeavour was doomed. ‘Closed,’ I said, in a blank and broken whisper.
    ‘Yuh — bad news. It’s at least a 40k
detour back to the D road up the gorge.’
    I peered into the unhelpful mist
above. It was cold — actually, very cold now that I had stopped pedalling — but
surely there couldn’t be enough snow up there to block a road. And if there
was, couldn’t I just shoulder the bike over it? I didn’t have to think very
long about those additional 40 kilometres to know that even quite a sizeable
risk of lonely death was worth taking to avoid them.
    ‘I’m going to give it a go.’
    ‘Yuh? It’s got to be another 6k to
the top and...’ Levering his forearm at a radical angle to denote the
forthcoming gradient, the boy appraised my age and condition in a glimpse that
damned and sympathised in almost equal proportions.
    ‘And it’s absolutely bitter,'' said the girl, rubbing her thermal gloves. Why didn’t I have thermal gloves?
    ‘I don’t have any choice,’ I said
with off-hand bravado. ‘It’s on the route — the Tour route.’
    ‘Cool,’ said the boy, consulting a
ridiculous chronometer the size of a cartoon alarm clock. ‘OK, well, uh, best
of luck again. Maybe see you in Morzine for a hot toddy.’
    I had listened politely to details of
the girlfriend’s father’s premarital holiday habits and they hadn’t even had
the common decency to recognise the ongoing enormity of my achievement. Twice
I’d tolerated this, excusing it as a conversational oversight. The third time I
did not.
    ‘I doubt it, actually, because I’ll
be there before you and I’m going straight on to Evian,’ I said briskly,
pulling my chinstrap tight and preparing to leave. ‘Anyway, I’m sure you can
think of plenty of other ways of warming each other up.’
    I was quietly pleased with this
parting shot for the thirty seconds of histrionic puffing it took me to reach
the next bend, at which point I realised that it wasn’t her father’s
holidays, but their father’s. They were not boy and girl but brother and
sister.
    Though few made themselves apparent
at the time, there were several beneficent side effects to this regrettable
riposte. One was that for valuable minutes I had preoccupations beyond the
rigours of the climb; another was an increased determination to overcome
whatever hazard had closed the road and so make good my escape from sibling
outrage. A rather sketchier third was that my veiled accusation might indeed
have forestalled an incestuous atrocity: they wore the same clothes, after all,
and rode the same bikes — and, let’s face it, there’s no smoke without fire.
    Cows were now wandering about the
foggy road, inciting an injection of speed as efficiently as any injection of
speed, and straining up through a dense fir copse I was almost unsaddled by a
police car descending out of the mist at idiotic velocity. As the driver
completed an extravagant evasive manoeuvre, his passenger just had time to
frown at me, shake his head and cross raised forearms in unequivocal mimicry of
the looming blockade.
    I pressed on into the cloud. Although
my dramatic ‘mine not to reason why’ avowal to the siblings had, I now
understood, been that of a pompous nob-end, it was true to say that I did feel
a moral and spiritual obligation to conquer the final mountain. To bunk off
would be to cast a depressing symmetry upon my climbing career; by defeating
the Joux-Plane I could look back on an almost unbroken rising arc of
achievement.
    The obstacle that had repelled the
illicit lovers was hardly as fortified as they’d made out, just a single
crowd-control barrier flung half-heartedly across the road: ‘Route barrée’ in
word, maybe, but hardly in deed. A bit further on were a couple of
exclamation-mark triangles, and an additional no-entry sign with a dented
yellow ‘chaussée deformée’ propped
beneath it. Negotiating an unimpressive landslide round the next — small bits
of Christmas tree and a few buckets of mud slopped over the road, the tarmac
nibbled daintily away at one side — I felt enormously smug. Up, round, back,
up: half a dozen twists and fifteen minutes later I was leaning my bike up
against a signpost with a tin Savoy flag riveted to it, willing self-timer
flash to overcome fog so that future generations would not be spared the
inspiring image of their intrepid ancestor standing haughtily by his machine
before the enamelled legend ‘Col de Joux-Plane (Altitude 1700