French Revolutions

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 flady 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 Chateau 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