‘That crazy magazine,’ Fabian remarks, referring to a recent adulatory article in Italian Vogue in which he and Jesper were featured, ‘they’ll be mourning when your hair is shorn within an inch of your scalp for the Tour. What was it that they wrote about your legs?’

Jesper waves his hand dismissively and busies himself tearing open a bread roll, buttering it well, yet not eating it.

This is good, Jules thinks, humour, laughter, the team is reacting well.

He answers on Jesper’s behalf. ‘The article said – team, listen up – Jesper Lomers has the most beautiful thighs in the peloton.’

The team fell about laughing.

Jesper shrugs. ‘They’re the tools of my trade, guys, the tools of my trade. I’m a good rider – not a sex symbol.’

‘Where’s the problem in being both,’ Fabian comments, knowing his own blend is consummate.

‘Anya would beg to differ, I’m sure,’ chips in a team member.

‘Anya wants to go back to Holland,’ Jesper says to everyone but looking steadily at Jules.

‘And we want the green jersey,’ Jules responds, holding the eye contact whilst aware and pleased that the restaurant saw fit to serve him first, ‘and we want you, Jesper, to win it for us again this year.’ He regards his rider, one of the most consistent he has ever known. ‘The maillot vert is yours. You can take it again, your riding warrants it.’ Jules knows he can keep Fabian – a little flattery, a lot of money. Jesper he is not so sure about and it unnerves him.

I’ve never known a rider who can win so spectacularly but with such good grace. Nor have I known a rider so keen to kiss his wife whenever she’s at the start or the finish. Increasingly, though, she’s been at neither. It unnerves Jesper, I know. She wants to go home. And that unnerves me. Jesper must stay. She has plans. But so do I.

‘That’s why no wives,’ Jules, musing to himself over the three he’d regrettably suffered, proclaims. Luckily, Jesper is preoccupied dunking his bread into the soup like a tea bag and appears not to have heard, let alone taken offence. A couple of the other riders, however, shoot blade-sharp looks at their directeur. When they are sure he isn’t looking.

‘I ride better if I sleep better and I sleep well when I share with my wife,’ says one under his breath.

‘Vraiment,’ agrees the other. ‘I need a bed-mate on the Tour, not a room-mate. No offence.’

‘None taken,’ his team-mate confirms. ‘So, are we rooming again, this Tour?’

‘I would think so,’ the other shrugs. ‘I’ve requested it.’

‘So have I.’

‘You nervous?’ his team-mate asks, despite knowing it is a question that will never be answered directly.

‘You?’

Clever but fairly standard answer.

‘No Weakness,’ the rider proclaims as if it is some mantra.

‘Précisément!’ The team-mates, soon to be room-mates in lieu of their female bed- and soul-mates, chink glasses and drink the red wine as if it is nectar.