Читать книгу Ventoux онлайн

31 страница из 86

‘If you ask me, you were already involved when I got married. With your Porsche and your Mandy.’

‘That’s right. It didn’t work out with Mandy.’

‘And how did it happen?’

‘You say to yourself: this is easy money and I obviously have a talent for it. Let’s carry on with it.’

‘No pangs of conscience?’

‘Pangs of conscience are like muscle ache. You massage them away.’

He made a movement with his hand. Enough of this. He took me by the arm. ‘Glad you’re back, Bart, really glad. Come and have a look.’ He walked over to a work of art that consisted of scores of seemingly identical images of a racing cyclist on a cycle track, just before the finish line. If you looked closely, the photos were all different.

‘Attack on World Hour Record by Tony Rominger, Bordeaux, 5-11-1994’, it said underneath. ‘Tom Koster,’ said André, ‘graphic designer, great bloke. He died four years ago. I bought work from him regularly. Running, cycling, skating. One day he realizes: I can’t make any headway, what’s wrong with me? He goes to the doctor and the doctor says: Tom, my friend, you’ve got lung cancer. Nothing they could do. Lived another eleven months. Sold all his paintings to pay for the funeral and that was that. He’d just bought a new bike, shame. Was always concerned with time and suddenly time was up.’