TWENTY
IN TYPICAL ANQUETIL STYLE, even a good old-fashioned ménage à trois was too conventional. Only if it involved his stepdaughter as well as his wife could his desire for control, for family intimacy and for progeny be fulfilled. What was perhaps more remarkable still, he managed to make it work, more or less, for 12 years. Certainly, the first few years of Sophie’s life passed off without notable antagonism: ‘Life was without too many obvious tensions, parties and winter and summer holidays all helping, of course. There were plenty of good times, full of fun and laughter, underpinned by the relaxed atmosphere my father was so good at creating.’
Mostly this involved having a party. ‘Every weekend, the whole group of friends would come round. Friends from childhood, some from cycling: they would all come round and have a party,’ she told me, surrounded by pictures of the equally frequent festivities that are now held at the auberge she owns with her husband in Corsica. ‘Yes, I must have inherited something from them, my father, mother, grandma,’ she says with a smile. ‘My children like to party, too. My daughter loves to dance – and we all like champagne as well.’ Cue more laughter.
Anquetil’s schoolmate Dieulois was a regular visitor at this time: ‘We quite often went there for meals at birthdays, although, actually, you didn’t need a birthday. We just happened to enjoy sitting and eating round a table then going and playing baby-foot or going for a walk in the woods to see the birds.’
Jeanine agrees: ‘Jacques couldn’t be on his own, so any birthday, any weekend, every weekend, once he’d stopped racing, he was the host. He made a fuss if he had to go and eat at a friend’s house: “No, come to the house. It’s easier.” So, every weekend, from Friday to Sunday, there would be 15 or 20 of us. Obviously, my maid left on Saturday, so the wives did their bit – we roasted a lamb, made pasta, did the shopping. It was a laugh, and in the evening we got dressed up and had fun, and Jacques adored that. We were happy like that, every weekend, every weekend, every weekend.’
Whether as a result of these parties or not, Sophie is also adamant that throughout her childhood, in spite of all the later emotional upheaval, she was the beneficiary of the unreserved love and affection of all those around her, in particular her father: ‘Yes, he spoiled me. He was away for a part of each year, but when he was there he took me everywhere, although there was no routine. If he wanted to go somewhere in the middle of the night and he wanted to take me with him, then off we’d go. If he needed to wake me up to show me something, he’d wake me up. What I liked most was when we took out his binoculars to look at the moon. He showed me the craters on the moon, Saturn’s rings, that a star looked like a huge diamond in a telescope, that you had to follow the trajectory, as it moved all the time. They were wonderful moments. And also night walks in the wood when he would explain the marks made by animals, the noises. I was scared to start with, but he said don’t be. He just put the noises into context, and I was fine.’
Even the potentially disorienting fact she had two mothers didn’t unsettle her. Although France Dimanche, in a commemorative edition brought out after Anquetil died in 1987, either still didn’t know or chose not to publicise the fact that Sophie was Annie’s rather than Jeanine’s daughter – ‘And then, in 1971, a miracle: after 13 years of marriage, Jeanine has a daughter: Sophie. Anquetil is over the moon’ – Sophie’s real parentage was far from a closely guarded secret, as Jeanine recalls: ‘Those who were close to us knew our situation. They didn’t feel any need to talk about it, but everybody knew. We had journalist friends who knew right from the start that Sophie wasn’t my daughter but was my daughter’s daughter. But nobody said anything. Everybody accepted it because Jacques had explained things to them and that was that.’
‘I grew up quite normally in the middle of all this, where nothing was hidden and where there was lots of love,’ Sophie says in her book. ‘In fact, there is nothing but love in this story. I experienced it first hand. I know.’ Later on, she expresses the ease with which she accepted her situation:
As soon as I appeared at Les Elfes, life was wonderful. Very quickly, I understood that I had two mothers: no problem. On the contrary, I could give two presents on Mother’s Day, and I could play them off against each other. When I fell out with one, I sought solace with the other. Later, at school, I found out that other children didn’t have two mums, which seemed a shame for them. Life was great. I was the centre of attention.
That’s not to say, though, that Anquetil family life didn’t suffer from the stresses and strains inherent in such a set-up; after all, two’s company, three’s a crowd, and for good reason. The fundamental issue, according to Sophie, was the power struggle between Annie and Jeanine in their mutual desire to be ‘first lady’. Even in the first few years, before tensions had had time to take root, a family friend told Sophie that domestic harmony did not always reign: ‘There was constant friction in the harem. Sometimes your mothers argued ferociously, even in front of you.’
The catalyst for the inevitable breakdown in the relationship, however, was the arrival at the chateau of Alain’s wife Dominique. Although only six at the time, Sophie says she can remember precisely when Dominique came to live with them in 1977: ‘From that moment on, there was a different atmosphere among the adults of the house. Straight away, I was convinced, even if I didn’t tell anyone, that things would change.’ According to Sophie, Jeanine and, even more so, Annie turned against Dominique, a woman too many. A ‘foreign body’ had been detected in the almost organic Anquetil family unit and needed expelling: ‘Above all, Annie accused Dominique of playing Machiavellian games. She was convinced that she had married Alain, her brother, simply to be able to steal Jacques from her once she’d come to live in the chateau.’
Dominique’s own recollections of the distance and formality of her interaction with Anquetil at the time suggest otherwise: ‘When we knew each other before we became a couple, we used ‘vous’ [the formal French form of ‘you’] not ‘tu’ [the informal equivalent]. We respected each other. If you like, I was his daughter-in-law without being his daughter-in-law. My father-in-law was Dr Boëda. Jacques was no more than the husband of the mother of my husband.’ The use of ‘vous’ doesn’t preclude a warm relationship, of course. After all, it’s still relatively common in France for sons-in-law and daughters-in-law to be required to address their parents-in-law as ‘vous’, although this is often while being addressed as ‘tu’ in return. Yet for both people to use ‘vous’does suggest a degree of distance beyond that which would allow for the seduction of a man already in the middle of a ménage à trois.
Certainly, the only initial change in the standings of the three women was that Dominique’s stock began to fall. After little more than two years, in 1979, Dominique and a reluctant Alain moved out to a property on the other side of Rouen. Even though he would bring his son Steve to visit the chateau every weekend, Alain also had to give up working alongside Jacques as farm manager. This appears to have been a cruel blow. Anquetil described Alain to Sophie as ‘the guy that I loved the most. He was my son,’ and the feeling appears to have been reciprocal. Perhaps the perception, rightly or wrongly, that his wife was at fault for this separation was the cause of their own eventual parting of the ways.
Back at the chateau, the imbalance apparently created by Dominique’s brief residence would worsen, rather than improve, after her departure. The principal agitator for change was the young pretender, Annie. Sophie wrote:
With regard to my mum, the more time passed, the more she felt her youth was being spent a prisoner of an impossible situation. She waited years hoping for everything to change, for normal relationships to take over . . . But she knew it was in vain. In fact, she’d known this for a long time, and before she realised it, twelve years had passed. She knew it was now or never to leave Les Elfes.
Yet even though she’d met someone who tried to persuade her to leave with him, she hesitated. Her initial move was not to leave completely but to try and find a job outside the chateau, a move categorically rejected by Anquetil. It took another year of the intolerable status quo before she could be persuaded to leave. Sophie says that she was 12 at the time, so her departure must have been sometime in 1983.
Sophie writes that she was also remarkably sanguine about the fact her mother left her:
She asked me, before she left, if it was all right that she went. She explained that she had to go and that I could go with her if I wanted. I told her to go, and to leave me there. We knew that Jacques needed me, and he wouldn’t have been able to cope with losing both of us.
Nevertheless, even with Sophie deciding to stay with her father, Annie’s departure signalled the beginning of the end of the original Anquetil clan:
Annie leaving hurt him a lot. He couldn’t stop telling me how much. He loved Annie. He would do anything for her to come back or else . . . On occasion, he seemed to lose his mind. I think he was genuinely unwell. His love for her made him unwell, as did the fact she was no longer his.
At chateau Anquetil, possession was more than nine-tenths of the law. It was the law.
According to Sophie, it was Jeanine who attempted to heal the breach by instigating the return of Alain and Dominique to the chateau. This only led to further complications, however, the most notable being her father’s decision, several months after Annie’s flight and while still obsessed with getting her back, to seduce Dominique as a means to this end. ‘Tell your mother I’ve got my eyes on Dominique. She won’t tolerate that. That’ll make her come back,’ he told Sophie. Even the failure of this approach didn’t deter him: ‘She’s not come back because she knows nothing’s going on between me and Dominique. If she realises she’s my mistress . . .’
The day chosen to consecrate the plan was Sophie’s First Communion – Annie’s absence confirming Anquetil’s worst fears, as Sophie recalls: ‘At the height of his rage, he said to Nanou and me, “Right, as it’s like that, I’m going to take Dominique!” What an extraordinary thing to say. How did he know she would succumb to his charms? Had she already done so in secret? What I do know is that her first official visit to his bed was that very night.’
The consequences were immediate and stark. Sophie joined her mother, although she would later return to a boarding school in the region and spend weekends with her father, in spite of an uncomfortable relationship with his new companion. Alain left for a woman he had already fallen in love with and, according to Sophie, is still with today. Jeanine moved to a flat in Paris before eventually divorcing Anquetil less than two months before he died. The reasons for this delay are unclear. ‘We’d been separated, but as it was my children who would inherit everything and I would end up with nothing we divorced so I would be provided with a pension,’ Jeanine told me. Dominique maintained the divorce wasn’t confirmed until four years after Jeanine’s departure because Jeanine wouldn’t consent, making the process much more long-winded than it would have been otherwise.
Not surprisingly, Dominique’s recollection of events leading up to her installation at the chateau also differs from Sophie’s: ‘At the end of the day, I had problems in my relationship, and he had his. He was often out in the woods with my husband to find a bit of peace and quiet, and I called him to say, “Jacques, you’re very kind, but I’d prefer it if my husband didn’t keep coming back at 4 a.m.” He said, “Well, do you want to meet up so we can talk about it?” We still used “vous” at the time, but I said it was a good idea. When we met, we spoke about everything except the family. I think we’d both had an overdose of the family. So we found ourselves together, and we found we understood each other because of our own problems. Then we started living together, and after that we never left each other.’
Was she not concerned about hooking up with someone with such a questionable track record? ‘No, I knew Jacques when he was married to Jeanine, and I knew his private life. But I also knew that wasn’t him – not the real him. He had been sad. He had drawn a line under everything that had happened previously. It still existed, of course – it was part of his life – but we lived something else. We lived our own life.’
This life is recorded in her own book – Anquetil, Jacques par Dominique – published only two years after his death. It contains nothing about his previous relationships, an omission that was quite intentional. ‘My book is what I lived,’ she told me. ‘Later, there was Sophie’s book, what she felt through her mum, and how that happened. It’s a bit like two different stories.’
Her reaction to Sophie’s story is revealing: ‘It was difficult. When I was asked to appear on television with Jeanine, Sophie and Annie, I said, “Sorry, no, that’s nothing to do with my life. It wasn’t my life.” I was after that. And with Jacques we lived as a couple. We didn’t live with the others, then we had a child together.’
Christopher was born on 2 April 1986. ‘To start with, I wasn’t interested in having another child, making my life even more complicated, and at my age [he was by then 52],’ Anquetil told L’Équipe. ‘But when he arrived, I was smitten. It’s truly wonderful. And what’s more, everything revolves around me. His only word is “Papa”. He says “Papa” when he wants to say “Maman” – he’s as contrary as his dad.’
Contrary, perhaps, but Anquetil doted on his son. ‘He was an adorable father,’ says Dominique. ‘No, he didn’t change nappies. He said it made him feel sick. But he was quite happy, once the baby was ready – that’s to say, clean and dressed – to take him everywhere with him, even in the forest in a papoose. He’d take his hand, walk with him, feed him – he was quite happy doing all those things. He was very practical. But you had to make the baby clean and ready to go.’
Sophie also suggests that he was a natural father: ‘I remember him with babies. Often men are a bit gauche with them, but he wasn’t. He was happy to pick them up and play with them, even with nurse’s baby when she brought him in. He was quite happy to play with him.’
Anquetil himself, in another interview shortly before he died, makes it clear that becoming a father again had helped him move on from all the recent upheavals: ‘Christopher is the best present Dominique could have given me. She’s 37, I’m 53, but I feel ageless, above all, since I met her.’ The picture of domestic normality is underlined when Dominique describes their sleeping habits – the lack of a routine and his increasing insomnia had long been a source of concern for family members and directeurs sportifsalike: ‘Yes, he slept well and for long enough. We had a normal bed time. We went to bed between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m., but he did leave the television on all night. If I switched it off, he woke up. He liked having the background noise. We didn’t get up until 10 a.m. He’d found a way to lead a normal life again.’