Cross Channel (20 page)

The broom-wagon, that’s what it’s called, that’s the worst thing. It sweeps you up. Follows behind with a broom-stick attached to its roof, just waiting for you to fail. It’s there all the time, haunting the last man on the road. I had it alongside me today. Want to come in, want to get home, that’s a nasty fall you had, muscles must be aching by now, nice soft seat inside. Sweep, sweep. It’s like some bloody tempter coming alongside. Won’t have to worry any more, won’t have to pedal. Put your feet up. Take the short-cut to home. No one gets round La Grande Boucle the first time, you’ve done more than everyone expected. Don’t wreck yourself for the rest of the season. Come on, get inside. Sweep, sweep, keep the road nice and tidy. Can’t exactly fetch water for your team leader when you’re twenty-five minutes behind, can you? Don’t give me that shit about pride. No one’s blaming you. Come inside, put your feet up, there’s plenty of room for more. Sweep, sweep. Look at those mountains. They strip you, and they leave you naked.

Very early on Andy told me another story. He was trying to impress me about how
hard
everyone was. I’ve come to hate that word, you know. So Saint Sean Kelly had something wrong with his bottom. I don’t remember the details, except that of course it was more painful than anything a woman could possibly understand. He had some treatment and it went on being just as painful but he carried on riding anyway. It wasn’t in France, for some reason I remember that. Anyway, when Andy had finished telling the story I could see I was meant to be impressed but it sounded … not exactly stupid, but let’s say I wasn’t open-mouthed. So I said, what happened? Andy said, what do you mean, what happened? I said, so Sean Kelly won the race? Andy said no, and I said, well it wasn’t worth it then, was it? And I could see he was getting cross. He said all right I’ll tell you what happened seeing as how you’re so interested. What happened was he went on with the race, and a day or two later his stitches burst when he was in the saddle and his shorts were full of blood and he had to retire, now do you see why I admire him? Well I said yes, but I’m not sure I didn’t mean no.

Mr Douglas told me about Brambilla. The name won’t mean anything to you unless you’re one of us. He was an Italian. Way back then. Lost the Tour on the very last day, which isn’t something that happens often. That’s not why Mr Douglas told me about him. He was a real pro. A hard man. When he thought he was riding badly he used to slap himself round the face and whack himself with his pump and not let himself have any water even though he had some left. Tough character. You have to be a bit crazy as well to do what we
do. Anyway, he was a well-known rider, and he’d had a good career, and he was getting a bit long in the tooth. And one day his mates went to see him, and they found him at the bottom of his garden. He’d been digging this sort of pit, well more a narrow trench but really deep. And you know what he was doing? He was burying his bicycle. Burying it upright, like it was when he rode it. And his mates asked him what he was up to. And Brambilla told them what he was doing. He was burying his bicycle because in his opinion he was no longer worthy to ride it. Mr Douglas said I should never forget this story, and I haven’t.

H
ERMITAGE

T
HEY SAW IT FROM
the Pauillac steamer, its pocked façade still quarter-lit by the early afternoon sun. They had embarked at Bordeaux, near the Place des Quinconces, at eleven, taking their place in cane seats beneath a striped awning. On the foredeck immediately below them clustered the third-class passengers, equipped with livestock, energy and noise. Florence felt debilitated by the evidence of normal vivacity undiscouraged by the heat; yet Emily seemed to feed from it.

‘Look at that man, Florence. He does not just talk. He … he
dances
his conversation.’

‘I expect he is saying something very mundane.’

‘If so,’ Emily came back, undaunted, ‘if so, then his manner permits him to transcend the mundane.’ She took out her sketch-book and began to draw the capering, sharp-nosed fellow, with his bare head, blue blouse, stubby pipe and liquid hands.

‘I wish I discovered as much transcending as you, my dear Emily. It seems all around you. Now you transcend the man some more by turning him into art.’

‘You shan’t put me out of humour. And besides, we all believe in transcendence. You merely disguise it by calling it practical improvement.’

They sat quietly, two Englishwomen in their thirties, sailor-hats and brown shoes apiece, while the steamer headed past a winter woodland of ships’ masts. Steam whistles were the loudest birdsong here. A tugboat named
Ercule
churned froth on the
café au lait
river; lesser ferries scudded across their bows like water-spiders. They had been away three weeks, and were at the most southerly point of their journey. Soon, as every year, they would be heading back to their separate Essex villages, to winds from the Urals and the chill conversation of turnip-farmers. Of course, these dinner clods cultivated other crops, but this was how, in their private conversations, Florence and Emily invariably designated them.

‘I shall never marry,’ said Florence suddenly. She made it sound a matter of fact but not regret.

‘In any case,’ her friend replied, continuing, or perhaps duplicating, the thought, ‘it is well known that a turnip-farmer is beyond any possible transcendence.’

The little steamer tacked from bank to bank, picking up and depositing merchants and peasants, livestock and priests. The Garonne embraced the Dordogne and became the Gironde. Emily’s skirt bulged with the wind until she pressed down on it a map marked with the châteaux of the Médoc. She settled a small pair of field-glasses over her spectacles and adopted a scholarly hunch familiar to her fellow-traveller. Alongside Beychevelle, Emily explained that the château had once belonged to an admiral, that every ship passing along the river had been at one time obliged to lower its sail, or
baisser la voile
, in homage, and that this phrase had been corrupted into the present name.

‘Quite fanciful,’ commented Florence cheerfully.

Emily indicated Margaux and Ducru-Beaucaillou, Léoville-las-Cases and Latour, appending Baedeker embellishments
to each name. Beyond Latour, the boat ran close to the bank as it headed up towards Pauillac. Ribbed vineyards ran away from them like green corduroy. A broken-down pier came into sight, followed by a patch of corduroy stained half-black. Then, a little higher up, a flat façade made biscuity by the sun, with a brief terrace half-obscuring the ground-floor windows. After a nudge of focusing, Emily detected that several balusters were missing from the balcony of the terrace, and others badly askew. Florence took the glasses. The façade had large holes gouged into it, there were some broken upper window-panes, while the roof appeared to have been given over to experimental agriculture.

‘Not exactly our hermitage,’ she commented.

‘So we shall visit tomorrow?’

This teasing pastime had evolved during the last two years of their French excursions. Idling glances proposed a different life: in a timbered Normandy farmhouse, a trim Burgundy
manoir
, a backwater château of the Berry. Lately, a new gravity of intention had arisen, which neither woman could quite admit. So Florence would announce that their hermitage had again not been found, and soon afterwards they would visit.

Château Dauprat-Bages had not been listed in the great Classification of 1855. It was a modest
cru bourgeois
, 16 hectares planted with cabernet sauvignon, merlot and petit verdot. During the last decade phylloxera had blackened its green corduroy, and some hesitant replanting had begun under its enfeebled and impoverished owner. Three years previously he had died, leaving all to a young nephew in Paris, who snobbishly preferred Burgundy and sought to divest himself of Château Dauprat-Bages as quickly as possible. But no neighbouring estate could be persuaded to take on the blighted vineyards; the
régisseur
and the
homme d’affaires
had therefore
struggled on with casual labour, producing a wine which even they admitted had sunk to the level of a
cru artisan
.

When Florence and Emily returned for their second visit, Monsieur Lambert, the
homme d’affaires
, a short, black-suited man with a felt cap and a spiky moustache, his manner both fussy and domineering, turned suddenly to Emily, whom he judged the younger, and therefore the more dangerous of the two, and demanded, ‘Êtes-vous Américaniste?’

Misunderstanding him, she replied, ‘Anglaise.’

‘Américaniste?’ he reiterated.

‘Non,’ she replied, and he grunted approval. She felt she had passed some test without having been told what the test might be.

Next morning, over a breakfast of oysters and hot sausages at the Hôtel d’Angleterre in Pauillac, Florence said musingly, ‘You cannot say that they have landscape here. It is more that they have contours.’

‘Then it will not seem entirely a change from Essex.’

Both observed the seduction of
might
and
could
into
is
and
will
. They had travelled in France together for five summers now. In hotels they shared the same bed; at meals they permitted themselves wine; after dinner Florence would smoke a single cigarette. Each year had been a heady escape, both a justification of their life among the turnip-farmers and a rebuke to it. Their excursions among the French had so far been light-hearted, flirtatious. Emily now felt as if something - not destiny, but the lesser organisation that directed their lives - was calling her bluff.

‘However, it is your money,’ she said, acknowledging that things had become very serious indeed.

‘It was my father’s money and I shall have no children.’

Florence, the larger and slightly older of the two, had an
oblique way of announcing decisions. She was dark and sturdy, with a deceptive style of down-to-earth discouragement. In truth, she was both more capable and more benign than she appeared, despite a docile preference for only the broader aspects of any project. Emily could always be relied upon to take care of the particularities; Emily, slim, blonde, neatly fussy, peering through gold-wired spectacles at notebook, sketch-pad, timetable, newspaper, menu, Baedeker, map, ticket and legal fine print; Emily, fretful yet optimistic, who now said wonderingly, ‘But we know nothing of making wine.’

‘We are not applying for posts as
vendangeuses
,’ Florence replied, with a lazy hauteur that was not wholly self-mocking. ‘Father did not understand how the saw-mill operated, but he knew that gentlemen required desks. Besides, I am sure that you will study the matter. It cannot be more complicated than … cathedrals.’ She threw this out as a recent example, since in her view they had spent excessive time beneath the statue of Bertrand de Goth, Archbishop of Bordeaux and later Pope Clement V, while Emily expounded on 12th-century Romanesque arches in the nave and a choir with double stalls from some other - no doubt earlier, or later - century.