Chapter Three The Double
The Double (it deserves the capital letters) is a snow and sea ski challenge and it began, as so many of James’s misadventures do, with Freddie saying the words ‘I bet you can’t.’
‘I bet you can’t,’ Freddie said, gesturing vaguely toward the window with a glass of something amber, ‘ski down that black run, drive to the coast and go waterskiing before dinner.’
‘Which boat?’ James asked, because this seemed like the relevant question.
‘The ski boat we used last time, the one in Cap Ferrat that Maurice is looking after.’
‘Maurice’s in Cap Ferrat?’
‘Maurice’s always in Cap Ferrat, that’s the point of Maurice.’
Maurice, I should explain, is the go-to boat captain and maintenance man in this small fishing port.
A leathery Provencal gentleman of indeterminate age who has been caring for various vessels for generations.
He lives on whatever boat he is currently fixing up, subsisting on red wine and unfiltered cigarettes, with an apparent immunity to the passage of time.
His skin has the texture of expensive leather luggage left too long in the sun.
His vocabulary, in both French and English, consists primarily of shrugs and the occasional dismissive hand gesture.
‘That’s at least two hours’ drive,’ James said, doing the mathematics slowly. ‘Maybe three with the snow on the road. And I’d have to change out of my ski gear.’
‘No changing, that’s the challenge, you ski the run, drive down the mountain in your boots and swim out to the boat dressed as you are.’
‘In ski boots?’
‘In ski boots.’
‘You can’t drive in ski boots, they’re enormous, they feel like... like wearing two plastic coffins on your feet.’
‘You can if you’re good enough.’ Freddie leaned back in his chair with the satisfied air of a man who has just laid a trap and watched his quarry walk directly into it. ‘But if you don’t think you’re up to it...’
Freddie, who has known James even longer than I have, understood his motivations perfectly.
He had been using it to manipulate James into stupid bets since school, when he had convinced James to eat an entire jar of pickled onions on the grounds that ‘your stomach probably couldn’t handle it.
’ James’s stomach, as it turned out, couldn’t handle it.
But he had finished the jar nonetheless and spent the next twelve hours in the bathroom, emerging triumphant in a way that only James could consider a victory.
‘Three hours,’ James said now, his jaw setting in that way I had learned to recognise. ‘That’s the time limit?’
‘Three hours. Ski down, drive down, swim out, ski behind the boat while drinking champagne. If you’re not up on your skis drinking champagne by...’ Freddie consulted his watch with the exaggerated precision of the profoundly drunk ‘...six thirty-seven precisely, you lose.’
‘What do I lose?’
‘Your dignity and you have to buy dinner, at that place. The expensive one.’
‘Which expensive one?’
‘The really expensive one, with the fish.’
This narrowed it down to approximately half the restaurants on the C?te d’Azur, but James accepted the terms. The Riviera is not short of expensive restaurants with fish. Finding one that wasn’t expensive and didn’t serve fish would be the greater challenge.
‘And if I win?’
‘You won’t win.’
‘But if I do?’
Freddie considered this with the gravity of a man contemplating a genuine impossibility. He swirled the liquid in his glass, held it up to the light as if seeking inspiration and finally spoke with the solemnity of a judge pronouncing sentence.
‘If you somehow manage to ski down that black, drive ninety miles in ski boots on snowy mountain roads, swim out to the boat and waterski while drinking champagne, all in under three hours, I will...’ He paused, searching for a suitable forfeit.
Something sufficiently terrible. Something that would make victory taste sweet.
‘I will lend you the E-type for a whole year.’
‘The E-type?’
‘The E-type.’
This required a moment of reverent silence.
The E-type in question was a 1963 Jaguar in British racing green.
Freddie had inherited it from an uncle and treated it with the kind of devotion most men reserve for firstborn children.
The idea of Freddie giving it away, even for only a short time was roughly equivalent to the Pope giving away the Vatican.
‘You’re joking.’
‘I am absolutely not joking, but it doesn’t matter, because you’re not going to win.’ Freddie set down his glass with ceremonial finality. ‘You can’t possibly make it in three hours, the drive alone is two and a half if you’re lucky, the maths simply doesn’t work.’
‘Then why are you betting the E-type?’
‘Because I like watching you try impossible things. It’s entertaining.’
‘Deal,’ said James and they shook hands with the solemnity of men who have just made a decision they will both regret, Freddie ordered himself another bottle to seal the agreement.
James’s plan was to ask Freddie for the keys to the E-type to make the drive. He was relying on that, in fact: the Jaguar was faster than any rental car and James knew those roads well enough to push it. But when he raised the subject, Freddie refused.
‘Absolutely not, you’re not taking my car down a mountain in ski boots. You’ll destroy her.’
‘But how am I supposed to...’
‘That’s your problem, not mine. The bet is the bet, you need to find another way and your time starts now.’
The proprietor, watching from behind the bar, shook his head slowly.
He had seen this kind of thing before. The young English, with their money, their boredom and their endless appetite for self-destruction.
He poured Freddie’s wine and said nothing.
It was not his place to interfere with natural selection.
???
The black run in question is locally known as Le Faceplant, a name that should tell you everything you need to know about it.
It is, by the standards of serious alpine skiing, magnificently difficult.
It is a black run, but more importantly, it is a French black run, which is roughly equivalent to an American double-diamond that has been closed off due to a landslide, or a Swiss ‘what the hell are you doing up here, you’ll kill yourself.
’ The French, in their wisdom, grade their ski runs with a certain Gallic optimism, assuming a baseline level of competence that many visitors simply do not possess.
Le Faceplant descends approximately eight hundred metres over a distance of perhaps three kilometres, with a gradient that varies between ‘steep’ and ‘are you quite sure about this.’ The upper section is relatively forgiving: wide, well-groomed, the sort of slope where an intermediate skier might feel briefly confident before the mountain reminds them of their place.
The middle section narrows, steepens and develops the kind of moguls that appear when the slope is too hard to piste regularly and the locals fancy a bit of a laugh.
The snow compacts into a series of icy bumps that exist solely to destroy knees and egos.
The lower section is where the run really earns both its black rating and its nickname.
The gradient increases to nearly forty degrees in places.
The snow, by afternoon, has typically been scraped down to ice by the passage of hundreds of skiers, or one solitary snowboarder, sliding terrified on their backside.
There is a cliff on one side, not a dramatic cliff, just a twenty-metre drop onto rocks that the resort has thoughtfully marked with orange netting.
On the other side, a forest, the trees standing like patient spectators waiting for someone to make a mistake.
James, by his own account, skied it competently. ‘The skiing was fine,’ he told me later. ‘Really quite smooth, actually, I had a good rhythm going. Bit of a wobble near the bottom where there was some ice, but nothing serious.’
This was James’s assessment of his own skiing ability and as such should be taken with significant scepticism.
He learned to ski as a child, on family holidays to Verbier and Courchevel and he approaches the sport with the same cheerful confidence he brings to everything else, which is to say, he points himself downhill and hopes for the best. His technique, such as it is, relies heavily on momentum and luck, with occasional contributions from prayer.
The ‘wobble,’ according to Freddie, who was watching from the terrace through binoculars he had borrowed from a startled German tourist, involved James losing control on a patch of frozen snow, performing ‘a sort of spinning cartwheel thing, really quite graceful in its way, like a man trying to dance with invisible partners while falling down a hill,’ and sliding the final fifty metres on his back while his skis went in opposite directions.
He came to rest against the padding around a lift pylon, winded but intact and lay there for a moment staring up at the sky while small children on the learner slope nearby pointed and giggled.
Then he collected himself, retrieved his skis from where they had landed; one in a snowbank and one hanging from a tree branch at head height, then stumbled toward the car park with the determined gait of a man who refuses to acknowledge defeat.
‘But you made it down,’ I said, when he told me this part.
‘I made it down. Forty-two minutes from the restaurant to the car, that left me two hours and eighteen minutes for the drive, the swim and the waterskiing.’
‘And you couldn’t use the E-type.’
‘I could not use the E-type, Freddie was very firm on that point, so I had to make do with the rental.’