Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (10 page)

Adam’s blood ran cold in his veins.
His erection wilted, something that Fox observed with a look of disappointment on his face that he only managed to conceal after a moment’s struggle.

Adam hadn’t come along for this.
Sex, danger, experiment, yes. Fun, companionship, otherness. All those things. But not protestations of eternal commitment from a twenty-two-year-old with a mental age of fourteen. He got to his feet, yanked up his pants and jeans roughly and did himself up. Fox jumped up too. He put his hands on Adam’s forearms. ‘Don’t run away from me again, P’tit-Loup.’ There was the sound in his voice of inward tears.

Adam jerked him away, trying not to do it too roughly.
He was hurt himself, he didn’t want Fox to be hurt too. But he could see, and hear, that he was. He swore silently. Why did life have to be like this? So … complicated.

‘
I have to go,’ he said. ‘Things to do at home.’ He was trying to soften it. ‘My cello practice.’

‘
You play the cello?’ Fox said this in a tone of great reverence as if it were the most wonderful thing about Adam that he could possibly learn.

‘
Yes, and I need to practise,’ said Adam in a businesslike voice, then turned on his heel and ran off through the wood, conscious that Fox stood rooted to the spot and desolate behind him.

The memory of this parting made Adam go hot and cold as he relived it now in the privacy of his space in the back seat of the darkened car.
Oh dear, oh dear. Those moments that you wished unhappened. (Don’t minute that, Recording Angel.) Or that the floor could just open and swallow you rather than go through such a goodbye again. Because it was goodbye. Adam had not seen Fox since, nor would he in the future. He would avoid him as far as possible and, if they did happen to meet, which was a realistic probability, Adam would be polite but distant. Fox would be from now on simply a part of his past.

‘
Just look at that!’ said Hugh suddenly. They had rounded the U-shaped bend at the head of Lac de la Mouche and crossed the bridge over the stream that fed it. The car’s headlights showed up something on the road ahead that in a different season might have been a carpet of autumn leaves blowing steadily across in the wind. But it wasn’t leaves, it was frogs. A seething horde of frogs, hopping from left to right, on their seasonal pilgrimage to mate and spawn in the cold shallows of the lake. Their eyes caught the car’s lights and each one gave back a little pale green glow, so that the whole moving carpet seemed to twinkle with sequins. Adam and his parents watched with astonishment for the few seconds that it took the car to cross the frogs’ path. Some no doubt were soundlessly squashed beneath the car’s wheels. Adam turned round to look through the back window and there, sure enough, the little lamps continued to stream across the road, glowing a dim red now in the car’s tail lights. Hugh accelerated away and up the zigzag hill.

FIVE

Arriving at school the next day
Adam wondered heavy-heartedly whether Thierry would circulate the information that Adam had admitted to having sex with boys. (His lie, that he had had girls too, would not be sufficiently newsworthy to justify the bother of broadcasting it.) He found himself straining his ears every time he turned his back on a group of classmates to catch the horrified whisper:
‘Il couche avec les hommes. Tu sais?’
But he never did hear it. There was no change in anyone’s attitude to him. Evidently Thierry had kept Adam’s revelation to himself with an oyster-like discretion that Adam could not help admiring and being grateful for. But Thierry himself had turned cool to the point of iciness, cutting him dead when their paths crossed and behaving quite ostentatiously as if he did not exist, making it quite clear in the most childish way that he had in fact seen him while at the same time acting as if he were not there. Adam felt it beneath him to challenge Thierry over such an infantile tactic and decided simply to ignore him in his turn.

Christophe
was a different proposition. Adam was acutely conscious that he had treated him shabbily and would have liked to make it up with him. Unfortunately Christophe did not seem ready to make this easy for him. Several times Adam went up to him during the next two days, wanting to say sorry, but each time Christophe turned away with a wounded animal look on his face and was no more prepared to listen or speak to him than Thierry was. Clearly Adam’s uncalled-for jibe had hurt him deeply.

In the end
Adam had to give up. Those two days were the last two of the Easter term and what could not be settled in the course of them would have to be held over into the next accounting period. Adam was disappointed by this but not too desperately upset. He knew from experience that school holidays, on whichever side of the channel, tended to wipe the slate clean where classroom hostilities were concerned.

Nevertheless it seemed as though there would be no fishing trips with the two boys for the time being.
As for Céline, now that he had quoted her words to such devastating effect, he hadn’t found the courage to speak to her again. So when the holidays began Adam found himself confronting the not very cheerful prospect of being thrown entirely on his own resources for the duration. True, he would have Beethoven, Bach and Debussy for company, but he wasn’t too hopeful of their capacity to compensate for flesh and blood companionship entirely.

He passed the first days of the holiday quietly: sleeping late, reading, practising the cello, and doing the daily milk walk.
The milk walk consisted of a pleasant stroll through the village lanes to the largest farmhouse of the community at afternoon milking time. He carried an aluminium can with a tight-fitting lid that swung from a metal drop-handle. In the milking parlour Madame Lepage, who took charge of the milking, would fill it direct from the cooling vat with a giant ladle. It was still so fresh that its warmth heated the aluminium can and ran slowly up the metal handle until Adam could feel it in his fingers.

Sometimes there was cheese to buy too.
Madame Lepage made her own white, creamy version of
fromage de Langres
in the farm kitchen. She would turn a whole cheese out like a cake from its tin onto a board when a customer called for one, allow the little residual trickle of whey to drain off for a moment then wrap it carefully in waxed paper and present it with both hands outstretched, like a Christmas gift.

The Lepage family had been good neighbours from the moment of
Adam’s arrival in the village, ready with offers of help and full of local information and rural wisdom. Grand-père Lepage, although well into his eighties, had cycled round with a scythe over his shoulder – resembling Old Father Time so strongly that no-one thought it necessary to comment on it – and had mown the long grass at the front of the house on their very second day, without having to be asked. Then a week later he had arrived without scythe or bicycle and announced to Hugh, who opened the door, something that sounded like ‘Chef et le chef, allez.’ In response to Hugh’s uncomprehending silence he had added, for clarification, ‘You take me in the car.
Bon
?’

At that particular moment
Jennifer had the car keys. Hugh asked her for them. She naturally asked him why he wanted them. He was going off with the old man, he explained. Why, she asked? He didn’t know. Where, then? He couldn’t say that either.

Adam
decided to jump in the car too, attracted by the idea of a mystery tour. They did not go far. Just to the farm where Grand-père proudly showed them, standing in an outbuilding, a new sawing-horse. What he had actually said, it appeared, was
J’ai fait
le chevalet
. Well, as Hugh said afterwards, how was one expected to know vocabulary like that?

Another time Grand-père had shown them with equal pride the alembic still, all burnished copper boilers and pipes like an early railway engine, with which, for a small consideration, he made damson brandy in the autumn for those villagers who had damson trees on their property
– that was nearly everybody – and who took the trouble to press and ferment the juice … which these days was not quite so many. He was the only person in the neighbourhood who had the right to do this legally, he explained. When he died though, his licence would sadly expire with him and not be renewed or transferred to anyone else in this modern age of motor-cars, EU regulations and supermarket shopping. His longevity then was something in which the whole community had an interest. He was cherished by all and cosseted in every household whose threshold he crossed.

For those first few days of the Easter holidays Adam found himself envying the tranquillity of Grand-père’s existence and imagined himself living into a golden old age on the plateau, somehow inheriting Grand-père’s mantle of venerability together with his alembic still and the licence to use it.
But only for a few days. Then the lack of stimulation, the lack of youthful company and livelier pursuits began to bite. He missed the infuriating Thierry and his puppy-dog Christophe. He missed Michael. Missing Michael during term time was only a distant murmur of missing, now it became again a real rush of longing. There was more than sex between them. He had never been more conscious of the fact than now. They shared such a lot, so much experience, so many thoughts and feelings. Then there was Sean. He always missed Sean, even in his presence, because he never actually
had
Sean, in the sense that they were not actually close friends. Much as he treasured Sean’s mere existence Sean had never become part of him the way Michael had. But now he ached with desire just to see him again, just to be in the same room as Sean. Yes, he missed Sean these days more than ever. And then, finally, he had to admit it to himself: he missed Fox.

He had told himself that
Fox was in the past. He had decided just a week ago never to see him again. But that decision was beginning to be a difficult one to hold fast to. A part of him, the part that included his sexual longings and imagination, dreamed wistfully of an idealised faunlike existence with Fox, wild and randy among the greening woods. Another part of him, wiser and more circumspect, warned against the dangers of more folly. Too much emotional reliance on one, clearly unsuitable person. The chasm that existed between their different backgrounds, aspirations and understanding of the world. Discovery. This last was the most chillingly frightening of all. He had seen television news items about court cases in Britain. Accusations of child abuse, the public exposure – in lurid detail – of unsuitable relationships, slanging matches between rival sets of parents. How it might play out in France he could only speculate grimly.

As usual, he compromised with himself in the end.
He would still not seek Fox out. But of course it was silly to imagine that he could avoid their paths crossing. On this unpopulated upland they were practically neighbours, living less than two miles apart as they did. So if they ran into each other Adam would have to play the situation by ear. Which might not absolutely have to mean cutting Fox dead. Surely Adam was old and intelligent enough to handle the situation. It might be possible even to resume a sexual relationship. It wasn’t the end of the world, after all, if Fox imagined he was in love with Adam. Adam would make it clear that he could not return the compliment and they would both find a way to live with that. Thousands of people all over the world had to do just that. For example, Adam was in love with Sean and Sean didn’t reciprocate that. It didn’t seem to pose a problem for Sean, though.

Adam
’s strategy was not to be tested yet. As the days passed, his solitary rambles by bike and on foot resumed their previous range but they still gave him no sightings of Fox. He seemed to have gone to earth all of a sudden. By degrees Adam began to find the continuing no-show first irritating then frustrating. He wanted an opportunity to put his action plan to the test. He also found himself running conversations with Fox in his head, though their conversations in real life had up to now been extremely limited in scope. Then he began to imagine that he glimpsed him, satyr-like and half-clothed, among the trees in the forests and through the gaps in the hedgerows that divided the fields. When this had happened for about the third time Adam found himself almost unthinkingly unzipping and hauling out his stiffening cock, then masturbating boldly in the open field where he stood, as if, by doing something that Fox had told him he did himself, he could charm the fugitive creature to his side.

One day he found himself walking along the road to Perrogney.
‘Well, what a surprise,’ he said to himself – out loud, as if to make the lie to himself more persuasive – ‘I’m halfway to Perrogney. Might as well walk round by that old farm down there.’ He thought a little later that he had never tried so blatantly to deceive himself before and had to ask himself why it had become such a necessity now.

A stony cart track with a thin centre-line of grass wound downhill from the lane between two barbed-wire fences.
A huddle of roofs rose above the crown of a hump-shaped pasture. Blue wood-smoke climbed peacefully into the windless air. A two-stroke engine puttered at a distance; the top half of a grain elevator was in view; hay-bales were being loaded onto its top end by someone in the dark doorway on the upper floor of an old stone barn.

Adam
had no intention of following the lane round and entering the farmyard in full view, surrounded by the inevitable barking dogs as if he were a salesman. Instead he adroitly vaulted the barbed-wire fence, placing his two hands on the top of a post to take some of his weight, then ran across the pasture to the shelter of a line of trees. From there he approached the farm, moving from trunk to trunk each time the man at the top of the barn (the look-out in the crow’s-nest) disappeared inside to fetch out another bale of hay. His absences grew slightly longer each time, as the dwindling stockpile receded away from the doorway.