‘That she’d worry more about her fingernails than your welfare?’

‘Si!’ Massimo laughed, remembering how Rachel had stayed up with him during the Giro, the prestigious Tour of Italy, last month, so that he could repeat over and over his anxieties for the next day’s Stage.

‘And that she might shrink all your gear in the wash?’

‘Ha!’ said Massimo, suddenly realizing he didn’t even know what happened to his dirty gear once he had stripped after a race.

‘Moaning about boyfriends the whole time?’

‘That too,’ Massimo agreed, having no idea if Rachel even had a boyfriend, current or past.

‘So,’ said Rachel, lifting Massimo’s leg over her shoulder, pushing against it for the stretch whilst doing something extraordinary to a point just below the buttock, ‘all in all, I suppose I’ve completely let you down then? Utterly destroyed your preconceptions of a female soigneur?’

‘Rachel,’ said Massimo, turning to lie on his front and inadvertently presenting her with a sizeable portion of hairy bottom from behind the slipped towel, ‘you are my soigneur. You are the best soigneur for Massimo. I don’t think of you as a girl at all.’

Well, I suppose that was the definitive compliment, Rachel muses as she washes her hands of oil and changes the towel on the massage table in preparation for the next rider. But odd too. Out of all the soigneurs on the Tour – three or four for each of the twenty-one teams – I’ll be one of only two females. And though it’s nice that Emma and I, in this hugely male-dominated world, are not hassled, it’s a bit bizarre that everyone completely denies us our gender. It’s like, in life there are men, women and soigneurs. I mean, I know I’m a woman, but it is a fact of negligible interest to the cycling fraternity.

‘It doesn’t bother me,’ she says out loud, allowing herself a fleeting glance in the mirror and thinking her hair really does need a cut. ‘This is my job. It’s appallingly paid but I love it.’

Rachel McEwen is twenty-seven years old and looks far too slight to be hoiking the heavy limbs of exhausted men and dispelling the lactic acid in their tense, brutalized muscles. But that is what she does and she does it very well.

‘But what the fuck is a signor?’ her best friends had enquired when she told them she was leaving Edinburgh for Italy to be one two years ago.

‘Soigneur,’ she stressed. ‘It means “one who looks after” – the riders’ needs are my responsibility.’

This was greeted, much to her consternation, by a rapid chorus of wink-wink, nudge-nudging.

‘I’ll be doing their laundry, for Christ’s sake!’ she retorted, twisting her hair around and around in frustration before pinning it to her head precariously. ‘And preparing their race food each day. And going on ahead to the hotels to check out the rooms and the menus. And giving massage and minor medical assistance. And counselling – many riders look on their soigneur as their confidante.’