Chapter Three The Double #2
The car was a rented Audi, chosen specifically because it had the largest footwell he could find.
Even so, driving in ski boots proved to be everything James had feared and more.
The boots are rigid plastic shells designed to lock the ankle in place, preventing the lateral movement that causes knee injuries; they are emphatically not designed for the subtle pedal work required to navigate hairpin bends at speed.
James described the experience as ‘like trying to play the piano wearing oven gloves, if the piano was also trying to kill you.’
He made it out of the resort car park and onto the mountain road without incident, though not without terror.
The road from Isola 2,000 descends through a series of switchbacks carved into the mountainside, each one offering a fresh view of the valley below and a fresh opportunity to contemplate mortality.
Snow lay thick on the verges and, in places, crept onto the road itself, turning the asphalt into a patchwork of black and white that required constant attention.
On one side of the road: the mountain, rising in grey and white indifference.
On the other: drops of several hundred feet, inadequately protected by barriers that looked like they dated from the 1950s and hadn’t been touched since.
Some barriers were decorated with flowers, placed by relatives of people who had tested them inadvertently. James tried not to look at the flowers.
He took the corners at what he considered a reasonable speed and what the rental company would later describe, in a strongly worded letter, as ‘reckless endangerment of company property.’ The ski boots made braking an imprecise art; he had to anticipate each corner well in advance, dabbing at the brake pedal with the delicacy of a man poking a sleeping bear, never quite sure how much pressure would be too much.
At the bottom of the mountain, the road joins the Route Nationale, which winds through the valley toward Nice.
This section James covered quickly, the ski boots proving less of an impediment on the straighter roads, though he did note that his right calf was beginning to cramp from the effort of holding his foot at an unnatural angle and his left foot had gone entirely numb, which was either concerning or convenient depending on your perspective.
‘I wanted to stop and change,’ he admitted. ‘But I was making good time and that would have been cheating.’
‘Cheating at a made-up challenge that no one would have known about?’
‘It’s the principle, Henry. If the bet was to drive in ski boots, then by God I was going to drive in ski boots. What’s the point of doing something difficult if you’re just going to make it easy?’
This, I should note, was extremely James.
The man will bend rules and expectations in almost every area of his life (he has a flexible relationship with punctuality, dress codes and the concept of indoor voices) but once he has committed to something, even something absurd, especially something absurd, he commits totally.
It is either his greatest virtue or his most annoying quality, depending on the circumstances and how much you have to listen to him talk about it afterwards.
???
The Corniche roads are spectacular and dangerous in roughly equal measure.
In the area between Nice and Monaco, there are three of them: the Grande Corniche, which runs along the ridge of the mountains and offers views that have inspired poets and terrified passengers in equal measure; the Moyenne Corniche, which cuts through the middle slopes with slightly less drama but no less danger; and the Basse Corniche, which hugs the coast and moves at the pace of the traffic, which in summer is approximately that of continental drift.
James, consulting his phone at a traffic light outside Nice, while a Frenchman in the car behind him expressed himself forcefully on the subject of tourists who don’t understand that green means go, chose the Moyenne.
It was faster than the Basse, less vertiginous than the Grande and offered what the guidebooks call ‘commanding views of the Mediterranean’, which is tourist-board language for ‘you will be so distracted by the scenery that you won’t notice the drop until you’re falling off it. ’
The Moyenne Corniche is the road where Grace Kelly died in 1982, her car plunging off the edge after she suffered a stroke at the wheel.
James claims he wasn’t thinking about that at the time.
‘I was thinking about the view,’ he said.
‘And the time. I had about an hour left, Cap Ferrat was still a long way away and I still needed to swim out and ski.’
I suspect he was thinking about Grace Kelly at least a little.
Everyone thinks about Grace Kelly on the Moyenne Corniche.
It’s impossible not to. The road twists along the cliff face with the sea spread out below, impossibly blue and you find yourself wondering what she saw in those final moments, whether the view was any comfort, whether she even noticed it.
The road surface was good, as the French maintain their scenic routes with the same care they lavish on their wines, but the traffic was unpredictable.
Tour buses appeared around corners with the sudden violence of ambush predators.
Cyclists in Lycra laboured up the hills, forcing James to swing wide to pass them.
At one point, a motorcycle overtook him at what appeared to be twice the speed of sound, the rider glancing back with an expression that suggested James’s driving was not impressing anyone.
He made it through èze, a medieval village of various levels, it’s top perched on a cliff that attracts tourists by the coachload, all of them apparently determined to photograph the same view from the same angle at the same time.
He made it past the turnoff for Monaco, where the road narrows and the traffic thickens with Ferraris and Bentleys driven by people who consider speed limits a suggestion for other, lesser motorists.
The Moyenne Corniche began its descent toward the coast, where it meets the Basse at the village of èze-sur-Mer. It was then that the car began to make a noise that James described as ‘concerning.’
‘Concerning how?’
‘Sort of a grinding and then a clanking, followed by a smell like burning and the dashboard lighting up with warning lights I’d never seen before. Lights I don’t think the manual mentions, but that clearly mean: pull over immediately and pray.’
The car, it transpired, had not enjoyed the mountain descent.
James, in his enthusiasm and his ski boots, had been riding the brakes heavily on the switchbacks.
And the brake pads, never designed for this kind of sustained abuse, had overheated catastrophically.
The grinding was metal on metal. The smell was brake fluid meeting surfaces it was never meant to meet.
The warning lights were the car’s way of saying, in every language it knew, ‘please stop doing this to me.’
But James did not stop. He could see the coast now as he passed the village of èze-sur-Mer, nestled at the bottom of the cliff.
As he drove past, the medieval town towering above it looked down with an expression of distaste.
He had perhaps fifteen minutes of the journey left if the traffic was kind and the car could survive.
The harbour was close, Maurice would be waiting and if he could make it, the E-type, was almost within his grasp; he just had to keep on moving.
The car limped down the final stretch of road, grinding and groaning and emitting the occasional wisp of smoke from somewhere underneath.
It made it to the bottom of the hill, through the village and with what James would later describe as ‘sheer bloody-minded determination on both our parts,’ to a bus stop near the harbour, where it shuddered, emitted a final mechanical sigh that sounded almost relieved and fell silent.
James looked at the dashboard, the warning lights had given up warning; they were now simply glowing with resigned acceptance. A thin curl of smoke rose from the bonnet.
He got out and left the keys in the ignition; the car wasn’t going anywhere under its own power and anyone who stole it would be doing him a favour, then began to run toward the harbour.
Or rather, he began to clomp. Have you ever tried to run in ski boots?
It’s like having blocks of concrete strapped to your feet, if the concrete blocks were also designed to prevent any natural ankle movement.
Each step takes about three times as much effort as it should and you sound like a horse with a rather aggressive set of hooves.
James clattered down the harbour road, past startled tourists and bemused fishermen, his ski jacket flapping, his face set with determination.
Their surprise turned to incredulity when he took a running dive off the end of the jetty and swam, still in full ski suit and boots towards the waiting ski boat.
He should have sunk like a stone, but the puffer jacket that he loves, but which is not overly flattering, worked like a life jacket and kept him floating on top of the water.
Maurice was waiting on the ski boat, exactly where he was supposed to be. He watched James’s approach with the magnificent indifference that was his trademark, a limp cigarette dangling from his lip, a wetsuit draped over one arm.
‘You are late,’ Maurice observed, as James dragged himself onto the boat with all the grace of a beached whale.
‘I’m not late. I have...’ James checked his watch ‘...four minutes.’
Maurice shrugged. It was a shrug that communicated doubt, resignation and a complete unwillingness to engage further with the conversation. He held out the wetsuit.
James stripped off his soaking wet ski gear with the frantic efficiency of a man racing against time, which of course he was.
The wetsuit went on in approximately ninety seconds, a personal record that he would later claim deserved some kind of recognition.
He was ready to go. Maurice, moving with the unhurried precision of a man who has never rushed anything in his life, started the engine.
‘The skis,’ Maurice said, gesturing to the water behind the boat. ‘They are ready.’
James looked at the water, at the skis floating beside the boat and prepared himself. Maurice produced a champagne bottle from somewhere and was now holding it with an expression that might, on another face, have been amusement.
‘Right,’ said James. ‘No time like the present’
He jumped into the sea, it felt colder second time round; April in the Mediterranean is not yet swimming season and the adrenalin from the drive and clomp through the harbour had worn off.
He gasped as he surfaced, treading water while Maurice tossed him the rope handle and bottle.
The skis were already on his feet and with only moderate flailing, he was ready to go.
Maurice opened the throttle; the rope went taut as the speed increased and James rose triumphantly from the water. The skis were strong beneath him, spray flew into his face, as he stood rope in one hand, champagne bottle in the other and for a glorious moment everything was working.
He was up. Maurice, steering with one hand, held up his phone to film the moment of victory. All James had to do was raise the bottle to his lips and the bet was won. The E-type would be his, Freddie would be devastated and it would be bloody magnificent.
It was as he lifted the bottle, that the wake from a passing yacht, a monstrous gin palace that had no business being where it was, hit the ski boat at exactly the wrong angle.
The boat lurched, sending the rope suddenly slack. James lurched, the skis which had been tracking smoothly through the water, suddenly weren’t. James felt himself tipping, overbalancing, reaching for something to hold onto and finding only air.
He hit the water face-first at speed, with the particular violence that makes soft water feel like set concrete. The skis flew off in opposite directions, the rope handle sprang from his grip and the champagne bottle, with a certain irony landed back in the boat.
James surfaced, sputtering, to find Maurice looking down at him with an expression of profound unsurprise.
‘You did not win,’ Maurice observed.
‘I noticed.’
‘The time, she is up.’
He checked his watch, which was fortunately waterproof: one minute over. After all he had done, the pain and the damage, he had missed it by one minute.
The E-type would remain with Freddie.
Maurice, with what might generously be interpreted as compassion, threw him a rope and hauled him back to the boat.
He passed over a towel and the champagne bottle.
‘For the effort,’ he explained, with another shrug and motored back toward the harbour while James sat in the stern, dripping and defeated, wondering how he was going to turn this into a story that made him look good.
Maurice dropped him at the harbour with a recommendation to have a stiff drink.
‘You have earned it,’ Maurice said, which was as close to a compliment as the man ever came.
Then he picked up the bottle of champagne that James had left untouched, before motoring back out to tend to whatever boats needed tending.
James stood on the quay, wetsuit dripping, hair plastered to his head, contemplating his options. He had lost the bet and now owed Freddie an expensive dinner. The rental car was smoking gently in a bus stop somewhere up the hill, so there was only one thing to do.
He made his way to Xavier’s and ordered a whisky. He didn’t know it yet, but the bet, the drive, the waterski failure, none of it would matter by the end of the evening. Something was about to happen that would make the entire catastrophic day the best day of his life.
But first: the whisky.