A Fool's Alphabet (28 page)

‘Alors, vous me suivez maintenant,' said Patrick, and got into his car, a white Simca with yellow fog lamps.

A small convoy trailed out of Bédoin, branching off through the second square and out into the foothills of Mont Ventoux. Pietro chatted to the two men he had been assigned to take. Harry, who could not speak French, looked moodily out of the window where the road began to mount through the scrub on a well-made surface with loose white chippings at the side. When they had climbed above the tree-line and were in sight of the summit one of the Frenchmen pointed excitedly to the side of the road and asked Pietro to stop. They went over to a small memorial stone erected to the memory of Tommy Simpson, a British cyclist who had died on his way to the top. Harry muttered about a similar fate awaiting the rest of them, but the two Frenchmen placed bicycle tyres over the memorial in a gesture of respect.

There were about twenty of them at the top. It was light, but there was no heat from the sun. The men stamped and hit themselves with their arms as they looked out over the whole spread of the Vaucluse down to the south and east.

‘Worth coming, just for the view, wasn't it?' said Pietro.

‘Listen,' said Harry. ‘I'm thirty-seven. I haven't ridden a bicycle since I was twelve. Most of these guys look about twenty, don't they?'

‘Yes, I should think that's about what they are. They're the local football team.'

‘Thanks for telling me. So what's Patrick doing with them?'

‘He's the coach.'

A long, open lorry was allowed on to the final peak by an official who guarded the road. On it were two rows of mountain bikes, which the men eagerly removed and began bouncing up and down on the road, testing for resilience and snap.

‘Allez, 'arry.' Patrick took him by the shoulder and presented him with a bike, which Harry rode shakily up and down.

‘It's like riding a bicycle,' said Pietro. ‘Once you've –'

‘La descente. Ça commence!' shouted one, then several, of the young men. There were cries and calls as they set off down the little road from the peak. ‘C'est la descente,' Patrick confided. After a hundred yards the leaders suddenly veered off the road and on to an area of loose white chippings like those that lined the route on the way up.

‘What's wrong with using the road?' called out Harry.

‘Search me,' said Pietro.

The hill funnelled down into a narrow track between the trees. The gradient meant that both brakes had to be applied all the time and neither could be released more than half an inch. Pedalling was unnecessary, but the legs took almost as much strain as the arms as they held themselves rigid on the bike against the steep fall of the ground. The surface was made up of sharp white stones, packed into loose trails through the forest. They jarred the hands and wrists through the juddering of the handlebars. Occasionally a squeezing wheel caused one to fly backwards at eye level. Soon Pietro and Harry found their arms aching with the strain of supporting their weight against the sharply descending bikes. From time to time they lifted themselves from the saddles to ease the soreness, but this only increased the pressure on the wrists. After a particularly steep section they lost sight of the rest of the party and were relieved to find Patrick by the side of the track. He was mending a puncture inflicted by one of the pointed little stones. To their disappointment this took him about a minute and a half.

‘When I was a kid,' said Harry, as they reluctantly set off again, ‘that used to take me the whole morning.'

‘How much would you pay not to be doing this?' said Pietro, the words shaken up by the impact of the bucking machine beneath him. The lever on the gear change had rubbed a patch of skin off his right hand. On the rare occasions that they came to a clearing and could see down the mountain, they appeared barely to have begun the descent.

The sun made spectacular paths and patterns on the forest floor, which passed unappreciated by the bikers. Harry and Pietro could sometimes hear virile noises from ahead as members of the football team encouraged or jeered at one another. Eventually, after an hour and a half, when both had said three or four times that they could not go on, they came into a clearing to find that the others had stopped. They were sitting on two long tree trunks. Some were tending cuts on their legs or making adjustments to their bikes. Most were breaking open their picnics.

‘Ah, les anglais!' called one. ‘C'est le casse-croûte maintenant!' He made eating gestures by bringing the fingers of his right hand to a point and shoving them towards his mouth.

Pietro and Harry slumped against a fallen tree and opened their plastic carrier bag. The journey down, with the bag stuffed inside Pietro's sweater, had agitated the cheese into ripeness.

‘Fait chaud, hein?' said Patrick, grinning. They agreed, as they stripped down to their shirtsleeves.

‘Do you know what time it is?' said Harry. ‘It's nine o'clock. It feels like we've been up for a week.'

Patrick's nephew, a lanky boy of about eighteen, brought them some wine and they began to relax. ‘Hannah's not going to believe this,' said Pietro. ‘This is the most ridiculous morning I've ever spent.'

He offered some of the rich cheese to Patrick, who in return held out some processed packets of La Vache qui Rit. In response to some of their sweating Provençal terrine, the
goalkeeper offered a vacuum-packed piece of ham with sliced bread.

There were several photographs taken before the first signs of restlessness appeared among the young men. They started to bounce their bikes up and down impatiently and to make wine-affected challenges and bets.

Pietro looked at Harry and grimaced. ‘La gloire.'

Harry pulled himself stiffly up. The football team rode slowly round the sun-latticed clearing, over the broken twigs, before one of them let out a yell and pointed his bike down an apparently vertical path. Momentarily emboldened, Harry and Pietro hurried after him.

‘Fait chaud, n'est-ce pas?' said Patrick's nephew, as he shot past.

At midday, an hour after they had finished the descent, they found their hands still shaking with exertion as they began their second
demi-pression
in the square at Bédoin. At the same time some sense of achievement began to seep through them. Pietro put his feet up on a spare chair as he engaged one of the team in conversation; Harry put on his sunglasses and rolled his head back to catch the sun.

After the picnic and the wine the standard of riding had declined. Every hundred yards or so there would be someone lying by the track with a bleeding knee. This helped slow down the overall speed of the party, though it did not deter the riders themselves, who thought each cut and graze a sign of endeavour. They had taken the wrong route and, when collapse was near, had had to climb for ten arduous minutes. At last, as they navigated a dense patch of wood, there came the sudden sight of tarmac. They released the brakes and freewheeled on the flat road for a mile into the village.

Most of them hurried off from the square, pausing only for a single drink and a slice of pizza from the lorry. Pietro and Harry, who felt inclined to discuss their triumph, found themselves with only two people left to tell. Eventually they too shambled off, with hand-shaking and promises of next year.

‘We're due in Uzès at one,' said Harry.

‘OK.' Pietro left some coins in the plastic saucer and grimaced as he stood up. ‘I think they're called the adductor muscles,' he said, putting his hand on his groin. ‘I had the same thing after I'd ridden a horse once.'

Now the car was on fire. The seats burned the backs of their thighs and the steering wheel was too hot to hold. They headed off for Carpentras with the windows down and the fan blowing cold. They had rented a house outside Avignon but had driven east the night before to be near Bédoin for the early start. Patrick was the brother of the man from whom they had rented the place; he had arrived one evening to see how they were, and after a glass of pastis had told them they were expected for the ride down Mont Ventoux: there had been no invitation and no description of what was entailed, just an assumption that they would be there.

They pulled up outside the Café Univers in Carpentras to ask the way. Something like a Sunday morning
passeggiata
was happening, with a number of exactly dressed young women and men ambling through the crowded tables on the terrace.

‘I'm thirsty,' said Pietro. ‘What do you think?'

Harry looked at his watch. ‘Better not. Not with the children.' He shrugged.

‘That it should come to this.'

‘I know,' said Harry.

They had difficult finding the restaurant in the old part of town. Eventually the sound of Mary's crying guided them down a narrow alley to a courtyard where Hannah and Martha were pacifying three children. Mary was banging her fork repeatedly on the table, Anton was whimpering and grabbing at his mother's arm; Jonathan, Harry and Martha's fretful two-year-old, was moaning softly in a shaded pushchair.

Pietro felt so dazed by the exercise he and Harry had taken that the noise, which might have been intolerable in their
house in London, was barely noticeable. No one else was outside, so there was no embarrassment about annoying the neighbours. Pietro took Anton on to his knee so Hannah could relax in the sun; Harry rocked the pushchair hopefully. The waiter brought water and a basket of bread.

Hannah began to explain to Martha and Harry how she and Pietro spent their time in London. She exaggerated elements of their day into something which would amuse them, usually at Pietro's expense. He liked it when she talked. He watched her with half an eye through his sunglasses as he whispered to Anton and bounced him up and down on his lap.

Hannah still had the commanding manner that had aroused him when he first met her; there was a bourgeois seriousness over matters of family coupled with an impatience with him if he seemed dilatory. There was also, however, a low humour which saw the pretensions in both of them, and was not above pointing out the ridiculous qualities of their closest relatives or friends. Her fringe hung girlishly over her forehead, shading the calm brown eyes which spoke of something more womanly and serene. She had well-shaped hands with long fingers that she spread when she spoke or explained; Pietro liked to watch them, contrasting in his mind their slender elegance with the comfortable shape of her hips.

‘When Pietro proposed to me,' she was saying, ‘he pointed out how dull Belgium was. “The most bourgeois people in the world” was one phrase he used. Wasn't it, darling? All that was going to be so different in London. Oh yes! All the theatres and the cinemas and the parties. I was rather frightened about coming. I didn't think I'd have the stamina to keep up with Pietro's social life and all the culture of the big city. Antwerp, after all, was just a little inland trading town – is that what you called it? Of course, some of the bars do stay open till four in the morning, but Pietro told me that was nothing.'

Pietro rolled his eyes and Hannah smiled. ‘When was the
last time we went to the theatre?' she said. ‘It must have been when John Gielgud was young enough to play Hamlet. I'm not saying we're not cultured. We must have watched more programmes about nature and current affairs than anyone in London.'

‘I never watch television,' said Pietro, ‘except the Open University.'

‘Why is there so much applause during the Open University?' said Hannah. ‘Who is that man with the Australian accent saying “England need another fifty to win”?'

Pietro shook his head and closed his eyes. ‘Quite untrue.'

‘One thing I don't quite understand,' Martha said to him. ‘With all this watching television and not changing nappies and not taking Hannah to the theatre, I don't quite see where you find time to fit in any work.'

‘Yes, it's curious, isn't it? She manages to describe a life of torture and injustice at my hands without once mentioning that I spend most of the day in an office.'

‘Do you like being back with your own company?'

‘I prefer it to working for Coleman.'

‘What happened to him? Did he go out of business?'

‘I doubt it. He had too many irons in the fire. But the project I was on had a lot wrong with it. He spent several thousand pounds on a Japanese version of a London A–Z before he realised it would be quite useless.'

‘Why?'

‘Because the street signs are not written in Japanese.'

‘Didn't you stop him?'

‘No. That wasn't my part of the project. I was doing maps and design, supervising photographs and colour origination. It was the printers who finally noticed. The other language versions sold very well.'

Martha laughed. ‘What a ridiculous man.'

Pietro looked at her. ‘Yes, he was.'

‘And is that why you left? Because the Japanese project was going to fail.'

‘No, not really.'

‘Harry told me you had a row with him.'

‘Did he? Well Harry shouldn't tell tales.'

‘Really!' said Hannah. ‘Martha was only asking.'

‘Listen,' said Pietro, ‘I do
not
want to talk about Coleman.' He had sat up in his chair, looking flushed and angry. ‘We haven't come on holiday to talk about people like him. Now let's order.'

Harry raised his head quizzically and wondered what Pietro was concealing.

Pietro silenced Hannah's budding remonstrance with a look that promised later explanation.

‘Where's Mary?' said Hannah, putting down her empty coffee cup.

‘I thought she was over there with you,' said Pietro. ‘She's probably gone inside. I'll have a look and pay the bill at the same time.' He stood up and flinched at the stiffness in his legs and back. The cool, dark restaurant was empty except for a waiter sweeping up at the back by the small maroon door saying ‘Toilettes'. While he added up the bill Pietro went through the door to see if Mary had locked herself in. There was a single washbasin and two doors, marked ‘Hommes' and ‘Femmes'. There was no sign of her in either.