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‘Isn't that odd? He must know you're French.'

‘Oh I dare say he's not even aware I exist. More coffee?'

‘What does he look like?'

‘Oh young, thin, quite goodlooking in a sallow way. Wears those terylene suits that go shiny and look so cheap, so he has a kind of slummy smartness. Doesn't look like an artist.'

‘What do artists look like?' laughing.

‘Oh, I only mean he's conventional-looking – hair cut short, wears a collar and tie. I say, there's a concert in the big amphi at the university tomorrow night, an American soprano doing a Schumann group; we might go, don't you think?' He hadn't quite finished fishing.

‘You know a thin woman with brown hair and skin, lot of diamond rings, got two little girls with ponytail hair?'

‘Maggie Sebregt,' promptly. ‘They turn their names into something sounding English. She's the daughter of some big oil in Utrecht that makes gearwheels or cogwheels or something, and she's married to Robert who is tall, thin and sententious, something quite haughty in the civil service. I can't stand her – she's one of those women with an infallible nose for the misfortunes of others, who take the keenest pleasure in discussing them.'

‘Lovely. Does me a lot of good, all this. I feel filled with useful activities.'

‘Yes, well, don't forget there's the washing-up still to do.'

Although the riding-school seems lost in a sleepy village atmosphere, Holland – and especially metropolitan Holland – is
very small. Lisse is roughly half way between Amsterdam and The Hague, and no more than an hour in the car from either. From Lisse to the seacoast is only a few kilometres, and the strip of bulb fields lies between. The sand dunes, which have been made into a sort of nature-reserve, form a barrier through which one cannot cut direct, but it is not far from Lisse to the seaside town of Noordwijk, especially for the fast sports coupé that Janine got for her last birthday.

Janine and Rob were spending Sunday afternoon in the flat on the top floor of the hotel-café-restaurant Rob owned on the sea boulevard. It was a messy, ugly building of discoloured concrete that had several times had bits added by various owners in expansionist moments, and had climbed beyond modest seaside-café beginnings. It was on three levels – the café, with a big glassed terrace several steps above the sandy bricks of the boulevard; the restaurant, at the back and several steps lower, reached from the carpark on the landward side; and the hotel, an irregular cube perched above both, with balconies looking out to sea, an expensive but small hotel of twenty-four rooms or so.

Well run, all this would be a moneyspinner, and Rob did run it well. He was not, of course, on the level of the gang that goes to London every week – besides being socially inferior, a hotel is too easy-come-and-easy-go: one is overdependent on Holland's capricious summer weather, and the staff problem is always acute. But he was a lot richer than he seemed. Even staff was not too great a worry – he had friends in Italy, who kept him supplied with chambermaids from Calabria, and he even had a smattering of their dialect – he had always been popular in Italy. He taught them enough Dutch and German to understand the customers, and both restaurant and hotel ran smoothly.

Rob had bought it a year ago, when it was, on the outside at least, much as now, though far more run down and slipshod. There is now little debt, though this is due more to Rob's work than to Rob's money. He has worked like a tiger and has got the place nearly up to the standard he knows he wants, and it has just begun to make real money again. It has lost the evil reputation for bad food, sloppy service and exaggerated prices for cut drinks, and next year, the German couples from the Rhineland tell Rob, they will be back for a second season. Throughout the summer he will have to go on working like fury, but in October this year, he hopes, he
will be at last free for a long lazy trip round Southern Europe, and take Janine with him, which she so longs for.

Sunday afternoon was the only time of the week when he allowed himself to sit back for an hour, but though he was pretending to read
Match
he was busy thinking about all this. Janine had had a hard time all this year – all these years. And this last six months he had been too busy to pay much heed to her. Well, he would try and make that up to her. He thought this riding business kept her fairly content, but she deserved more.… He hadn't said anything; he was intending to keep it a surprise. Say to her, casual, in the first week of September, ‘Next week, treasure, we're going to make a cruise on a liner – go and buy yourself some clothes.' It was something he'd always wanted.

The room was a large oblong sitting-room with glass all along one side, looking out to sea. Even at this height, this far back from the beach, the window was constantly obscured by salt, which made the glass smeary and expensive to keep clean, besides corroding the metal window frames. When the wind blew, which it did seven days in ten throughout the year, one could not open these windows without vases of flowers getting knocked over.

The room had big armchairs and sofas upholstered in black leather, and white polar-bear rugs. The coffee-table was square, very large and massive: black Japanese lacquer with red and gold, covered in glass and the usual patterns of water-lilies and flamingos and spiky curved-roof pavilions. On the walls were several modern paintings, the kind one bought in St Paul de Vence. But most of the long wall, opposite the window, had been excavated into shallow curved alcoves with concealed lighting that could be adjusted with a rheostat. Here on shelves was presentation silver (or pewter, or electroplate) in every conceivable pattern from curliest rococo to bleakest Swedish – but mostly silver, for Rob was the best bicycle champion Holland had had in thirty years, since Long-legged Jan Mossup, or since ever, said some, for he was not only a sprinter.

He wasn't so vain as to allow pictures of himself in here, though Jannie (he wasn't allowed to call her Jannie, but he still thought of her as Jannie) had four silver-mounted cabinet photographs in the guest bedroom. But the café, downstairs, had the walls totally filled with photo-montages of Rob Zwemmer, world champion on the road, in the barred leather headdress of a track racer, in the
peaked linen cap of a road runner, bareheaded, his hair swept boyishly back by the speed of his passage …

No no, he wasn't vain. He had been cute enough never to make a serious challenge to the French in the long-distance races in stages. Only once had he tried the Tour de France, and he had reached the Pyrenees in a heatwave, and dropped out on the terrible Col du Tourmalet. So had forty others, but his had been the most remarked casualty. It wasn't a disgrace – the same thing had happened to Louison Bobet, who won three Tours – the same thing happened to Anquetil, who won five …

Nor could he challenge the emperor of Belgium, Ricky van Looy, who had two world championships, and a record in one-day classics over the wicked cobblestoned Flanders streets that nobody would beat. Nor could he match the fantastic total of winter wins in six-day events, on the covered city tracks, of the other Rik, the wonderful old Van Steenbergen (Rik One and Rik Two they were called, in the bicycle world).

But he was a complete runner. Who else with his record on indoor tracks (the brass band blaring in the smell of beer, the technique of sleeping in an unsoundproofed cabin while his partner took his stint of round and round, up and down, whizzing to the top of the banked steep track and accelerating down in a wicked diagonal sweep, and as suddenly idling down to cruise tempo, with the Oy-Oy-Oy of the music in the strapped padded ears – the smell was meat and the noise drink; never would he get them out of his grain and fibre), who else with that record had won a Tour of Flanders, a Liège-Bastogne-Liège, a Walen Arrow, and, greatest of all, a Paris-Roubaix in the teeth of them all, thanks to his punch. For he was a good track racer and a good road runner, an excellent sprinter and for a Northerner a remarkable climber, but above all he was a puncher, able to excel himself at a given moment. It was his punch that had won him a Midi Libre over the thirst-dried causses of Languedoc: it was his punch that had won him victory over the terrible Spanish climbers among the saw-edged rocks of the ‘Dauphiné Libéré'. The punch – he could do it once, at most twice, over a week's racing: his famous ‘coup de reins'. He would have agreed with Van der Valk that power, after you have learned to conquer heat, thirst, pain, fear, springs from the nape of the neck. To be a bicycle racer you have to learn to do a stage of two hundred and forty kilometres at an average over forty to the
hour, to climb a col of two thousand five hundred metres through roads with bends of a hundred and eighty degrees, under the merciless sun and the no less merciless rain, to go downhill at a hundred and twenty an hour. If you can do all that you are worth the money you earn.

He was thin, and looked fragile in his expensive suit – English material, Prince of Wales check, but cut more extravagantly than the clients of the manège would have considered permissible. They would, indeed, have curled the lip and given little deprecating laughs: what else could one expect from a boy who had made huge sums of money just riding a bicycle? No difference between that and a pop singer, that anyone-who-was-someone could see. Making money, to them, was something one did without the eyes of a crowd – the crowd might see how the trick was performed and that would never do.

Thin, with a narrow head, blond hair cut short, candid blue eyes. Anquetil, not surprisingly, was his great hero; Rob was another one who used his head. Rob had studied the terrible Norman for ten years with extreme care, and profited from something the same temperament. He was Dutch! – not for him the flamboyant fury of a Fausto Coppi, capable of winning on his own half an hour before the next – he had learned how to dose his effort, how to make ‘psychological wins'.

He was thirty-six, a calm, controlled man, very much in charge of the enterprise to which he had set his hand.

Every winter he had done two hundred kilometres a day, rough country roads with spare inner tubes slung round the neck, the rain slashing his face, wind in the eye. Six-day events were for money, and also to learn racing in a crowd, to keep balance in the desperate wobble of a sprint, to learn the hard lessons from riders who elbowed you, pinched you against the barrier, held you by the jersey. He wasn't a salon runner, as the French called it contemptuously. He was hardened. And he had been a lone wolf all his life. He had been sacked by Pellenaers from the Dutch team for disobeying group discipline. All Brabant had pelted him with eggs for that, and a national glory had turned into a national disgrace like so many more. He hadn't budged, and now he was ‘Our Robbie', the glory of South Holland. He hated the coldblooded metropolitan west, where there was no sport but football (which Rob thought a show-off game for oafish exhibitionists)
and where oafs giggled at his soft, peasant Brabants accent.

He would have liked to stay in France, where no rider, save perhaps the grave and courteous Raymond Poulidor, was more popular with the French crowd. In France he had been happy. He had learned to stop being uncouth, a tonguetied sweating clod – he remembered so well; Stablinski had beaten him by cunning in the Four Days of Dunkerque, and they had been interviewed together in front of the television. Jean deserved to beat me, he had thought, destroyed with shame and envy, listening to the Frenchman say calmly, ‘You have to exteriorize yourself' – what on earth did it mean?

He could talk French now well enough for anybody, a queer mixture, with Northern and Catalan expressions but perfectly understandable. In France a rider was respected and an individual was prized, and he had plenty of money. He would have stayed, but at the last moment he lost courage – for the first time in his life. When it came to buying property he was frightened of the flowery phrases of French bureaucracy, of the chalky old notaries and their exquisite Tourangèle accents, of the odious smooth young men in préfectures, showing all comers that they were Parisian, serving a short apprenticeship in this dusty provincial corner.… When it came to tax and capital, to economic outlay and return, to planning permission and the Préfet's Decision, he turned away instinctively, to his own people, to work his own way stubbornly through paper. And he had liked France …

Little thanks he had had – Janine had not really forgiven him, even now – but that was neither here nor there.

There she was, sulking again this morning, sprawling childishly on the big sofa instead of sitting straight. She was graceful and a gawk at the same time … but Robbie found this idea a bit ‘twiddly', a bit too like a notary embroidering sonorously upon the statute of eighteen eighty-one, as amended by the law of July ninth, nineteen sixty-one, relative to Immeubles.… He did not like twiddly ideas; he liked things simple.

Janine was thirty-two, four years younger than Rob. They had married when he was twenty-two and she eighteen, and had eaten together the bread of poverty and frustration. She had had three miscarriages, had lost two children prematurely, and now had her tubes tied; the doctor had said that there must not be another time …

She was a silver blonde, not white, not ash, and certainly not out of any bottle, but a silky silver, cuddly and delicate, and she wore it long, in ringlets that fell in a tumble to her shoulders. In her childhood she had dreamed of the cinema, and it had been Rob who had told her bluntly that she was not the new Bardot, but that he liked her the way she was. He had given her the roses from one of his first amateur wins, a ridiculous thing called the Tour of Overijssel, and she had gone, not long after, to Antwerp for the day and reappeared with a blue rose and the words ‘Rob, I am yours for ever' tattooed on her right hip. Rob had been profoundly shocked, and had seen to it that there were no further fantasies dating from her Bardot period. She had skin to match her hair, soft and tender with a pale bloom on it, and the French journalists – had they had a memory of a White Lady of some years before? – called her ‘Pêche Blanche'.