Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (11 page)

At last
Adam stood just ten metres behind the back of the farmhouse, yet raised almost roof-high by the steep contours of the ground, with a view down and across the yard itself, of the buildings that surrounded it and of a small vegetable plot beside. With ducks foraging in and around a muddy stream, hens respectfully taking the long way round the dogs that lay snoozing in the yard, and with a litter of unsightly receptacles and redundant hardware scattered about, it was a scene familiar from nearly a millennium of literature and paintings, yet relatively new – and sadly unfamiliar before this year – to Adam with his modern upbringing in the English suburbs.

Standing in the yard, taking the hay-bales off the bottom end of the elevator as they descended and stacking them on a small cart attached to a tractor was a middle-aged man.
He looked quite sane and normal at this distance. He had all his clothes on for a start. His only unusual feature was the leather helmet he wore on his head. Reminiscent both of a rugby scrumcap and of an infantryman’s headgear circa Agincourt, it featured especially hefty ear-muffs and a stout chinstrap. No doubt it was a godsend on achingly cold winter mornings. But today was warm and springlike. Perhaps the rule about casting clouts before May were out was applied with particular rigour in the capricious climate of this high region.

Adam
supposed, for want of any evidence to the contrary, that the man he scrutinised was Fox’s father. A little way off, on the far side of the vegetable plot, a woman was moving to and fro among beehives. She was taking off lids, bending over and peering briefly in, businesslike and unfussy. She wore no veil and carried no smoke-gun, as far as Adam could see. She was a short stumpy creature in gumboots, wearing a nondescript apron over a mud-coloured skirt. She had long brown hair which fell to her shoulders where it finished raggedly, evidently not having been trimmed for some considerable time. Was this Fox’s mother? he wondered, with something of a frisson. Everybody had a mother, of course, as he had realised with the same frisson when hearing the story of Beowulf at school and reaching the point when the mother of the slain monster, Grendel, came toddling out of the foggy fens to take her revenge. Even monsters had mothers then. Though Fox was no monster…

Adam
peered up at the doorway high in the stone wall of the barn where the half-seen other man was still loading bales in the gloom. Could that be Fox himself? All that could be seen was a pair of brown hands which, seen from this distance, could belong to anyone. Suddenly, his task presumably complete, the unseen person stepped from the shadows and climbed onto the elevator himself, crouched down on it and descended slowly to the ground. Adam could see just enough to see that it was a young man who might have been Fox’s brother but was clearly not Fox himself.

At that moment
Adam found himself suddenly and comprehensively surrounded from the rear by a small army of ragged children and two – though it seemed for a moment more like twenty – barking dogs.

Alarm lasted only a second while
Adam spun round and the children called the dogs to heel. Embarrassment lasted longer. He had difficulty in following the chatter that ensued. He picked out some words such as
spy
and
prisoner
and though not intimidated by a posse of children whose ages ranged from twelve down to four, he knew that any explanation of what he happened to be doing there (even supposing he could think of one) would be totally unconvincing to such an audience, especially when delivered in a funny accent like his own. He was dimly conscious of having seen the two eldest children on the school bus.

‘
Seen you on the school bus,’ claimed one of them in sudden triumph.

Suddenly
Fox appeared at his elbow, to his intense surprise … and relief. Here was Fox, ready to take charge and sort out the situation. ‘ Let him alone,’ he addressed the children.
C’est mon p’tit-loup, mon copain.’
My kid, my mate. Adam took all the nuances of this public announcement on board and was touched.

‘
You don’t have any mates,’ said one of the younger children, aged perhaps seven, with the withering honesty of that age. There was laughter from one or two of the others.

‘
You’re so wrong,’ said Fox. ‘I have now.’

‘
You’re crazy, Sylvain.’

Sylvain.
So Fox had a name after all. He was not just a fantasy figure, a woodland faun, but a human being with a family and all the humdrum paraphernalia of human existence that went with it.

Adam
was suddenly very conscious of being in two strange situations at once. First, he was surrounded by a group of unfamiliar children and dogs: a situation in which he felt extremely uncomfortable, though hardly threatened. And then, he was in the company of Fox, now Sylvain, and discovering that he had never wanted to be in anyone’s company quite so much before in his life. He was on the point of calling out childishly to Sylvain something along the lines of:
take me with you
; only Sylvain spared him the embarrassment by doing just that. He put an arm on his shoulder in a hearty sort of way, propelling him forward with it just as he had done on their first meeting when he wanted to show Adam the daffodils, and said ‘Allez, viens’. He marched Adam right at the wall of little brothers and sisters that faced them, and the wall fragmented, scattered and vanished, dogs and all, at their approach. He kept his arm around Adam’s shoulders even after the children had gone. ‘ Now,’ he said, ‘it’s just you and me.’

They made a few more purposeful strides together in silence and then stopped with one accord as it dawned on them both at the same moment that they did not know where they were going.
Sylvain turned and looked cautiously into Adam’s eyes, not taking his acquiescence for granted and said, ‘I’ve got some damson spirit up in the barn. Do you want to try some?’

‘
In the barn? How do we get there? On the elevator?’ He imagined them riding up together on the grain-loader he had just seen in operation, in full view of the farmhouse.

‘
You’re joking. Someone has to start it up and switch it off at the bottom. We couldn’t stop it once we’d got to the top. Attract attention, that would,’ Sylvain said seriously. Then he paused. ‘ Mind you, my folks don’t mind who I bring back and anyway, I do what I want. So …’ There was another pause while he reconsidered this bit of bravado. ‘ No. I’ve got a better idea. There’s a way round to the back of the barn. No-one’d see us if we went that way.’

They tacked across the pasture, keeping below the crown of the field, descended into a spinney and then came out at the stream a little below the place where the farmyard ducks were paddling.
From here they circled slowly upwards, screened from the farmyard by trees. From time to time Adam’s gumboots slipped and slithered where spring-water made the ground unexpectedly boggy. ‘Don’t stagger around like that,’ said Sylvain. ‘You really will attract attention.’ Adam giggled. Had Sylvain told him to beware landmines and sniper fire he would hardly have been surprised.

At last the climb levelled out and the going became easy.
The back wall of the barn stood dead in front of them now and grew suddenly huge as they approached it across the final stretch of meadow, blocking all the other farm buildings from sight. Then they were standing beneath its rough stone wall. There was no access to the barn at this level. Adam stared up. Near the top the wall was pierced by a line of vertical slits like the loopholes of a medieval castle. There was also an arched doorway, closed after a fashion by a pair of decaying wooden doors.

‘
Up we go,’ said Sylvain, and before Adam had time to say ‘ how?’ he had grasped a metal cleat that was cemented into the wall at shoulder-height and begun pulling himself up something that Adam had not noticed: a ladder of iron staples embedded in the wall. When he had gone up only two steps he turned back to Adam. ‘Someone who climbs trees as well as you do isn’t going to have a problem with this,
quoi
?’ He permitted himself a grin for the first time since his encounter with Adam among the children.

Soon they had pushed open the rickety doors and were inside a large attic space which would have seemed ill-lit but for the brilliance of the spring sunshine forcing its way through the loopholes and under the roof-tiles and lighting up an open area that might have been the roof-space of a gothic cathedral, all timber-vaulted and with nothing to furnish it except a few broken bales of hay and straw.
Sylvain pointed towards a small untidy pile of them. ‘Have a seat.’

He lifted the corner of a loose floorboard nearby and pulled out from under it a clear glass bottle about three-quarters full of colourless liquid.
He held out the bottle towards Adam who took a small, suspicious swig and handed it back. They ended up sitting on the floorboards, facing each other, boots just touching, with straw-bales at their backs. They were close enough to pass the bottle from hand to hand without leaning forward.

There was an awkwardness now as both of them were obliged to remember the circumstances of their last parting just over a week ago.
Sylvain dipped a toe into the tricky waters first. ‘ And the cello? How is it going?’

Adam
smiled. ‘ I’ve done a lot of work on it since the school term finished. I love music and I hope it’ll be my work one day. But,
tu sais
, music isn’t the only thing.’ He pulled a fistful of straw from the bale nearest him. ‘ You need people, too.’ Then Sylvain smiled too, a smile of grateful relief, and Adam realised that their brief exchange had conveyed everything that needed to be said, at least for the moment. Sylvain realised this too and silently handed Adam the bottle.

It was the first time
Adam had been fair and square on Fox’s territory. It was also the first time he had had damson brandy out of a bottle. ‘ C’est bien, non?’ Sylvain said. Adam nodded agreement, though it felt like firewater going down. Perhaps drinking that kind of spirit required practice. Still, once the initial shock was over, it did leave a lingering plummy aftertaste in the mouth which, a few seconds later, suffused the nose as well and then the whole head. He nodded again, this time with a little more conviction. He thought, suddenly concerned, that without a glass it was difficult to know how much of the stuff you were drinking and was anxious as to the effect it might have on him. There was something to be said for the bourgeois convention of drinking vessels.

‘
Did you ever go to school?’ Adam asked suddenly. He would have liked to try out the name Sylvain, but was shy of doing so just for the moment.

‘
Of course. At first I did. But it didn’t seem to agree with me after a time and I stopped going.’

‘
Didn’t people make a fuss about that?’ Adam asked. He himself had never even considered playing truant; the repercussions among his parents and teachers would have been too traumatic just to contemplate.

‘
Ah, oui.
Official people used to come round and write things down. In the end the doctors said there was no point my going on with it – with school, I mean. So that all worked out nicely.’

‘
The
doctors
said?’ Adam had never heard of long-term truancy being prescribed as a medical treatment before.

‘
They though I’d be more use, and learn more, on the farm.’

‘
And were they right?’

‘
En quelque sorte
. But they found that too much work didn’t suit me, either.’

‘
I can sympathise with that,’ said Adam, enviously wishing that the medical profession might have made a similar discovery about himself. ‘ And so here you are.’ He thought for a moment and Sylvain passed him the bottle again. After giving his system another shock with the fiery liquid he went on. ‘ But can you read and write?’

Sylvain frowned, fearing a challenge.
‘I can read what I need to. I can write what I want. My name. Notes and messages.’ He brightened. ‘ I can take telephone messages and write them down all right.’ A thought struck him. ‘ It’s remembering to give them that’s difficult.’ He felt at his pockets. ‘I don’t have a pencil and paper on me or I’d prove it. I’d write something specially for you.’

Adam
felt strangely, disproportionately, flattered. ‘Another time,’ he said.

‘
Of course I couldn’t write a book,’ Sylvain went on, almost to himself. ‘ At least I don’t think I could. Mind you, I’ve never tried. But if I could, I think I’d like to write a book about blue sky.’

‘
About blue sky.’ Adam couldn’t stop himself from repeating the words.
Sur
le ciel bleu
. He found the idea unaccountably touching. Yet before today if anyone had announced a project so absurd he would have laughed in their face. As it was he found himself wondering in all seriousness what such a book might actually be like and over how many pages the idea could possibly be sustained. He gazed at Fox and heard himself saying earnestly: ‘ I hope you do write it. It will be a most beautiful book.’

Sylvain leaned in towards him, caught his hands in his own and kept on moving his face towards
Adam’s.
‘Embrasse-moi’
, he said. And so, quite unexpectedly, Adam found himself for the first time kissing a man who was not his father.

The sensation shocked him in its intensity.
The longer you sustained the moment, he found, the longer you wanted to sustain it. And it was not only that. The feelings that had been building up in him over the last week without finding either form or expression burst upwards and out of him in a great exhalation of breath that came as powerfully as any orgasm. And as he tore his lips away from Sylvain’s just long enough to let it out, he discovered that his great sigh carried words upon its warm current, almost accidentally, it seemed, as leaves are borne on the autumn wind.
‘Je t’aime,
Sylvain,’ Adam heard his own breath whisper.

‘
Eh moi, je t’aime aussi, Petit-Loup,’
said the other.

‘
Je m’appelle Adam.’
They had introduced themselves at last.

Now that they had discovered each other’s lips they found themselves unable to tear them apart again for some time, but knelt up against each other and clumsily unbuttoned and fumbled their trousers down around their knees.
They brought each other off in this position as if they feared the manoeuvre required to get themselves lying down might have involved too much risk of separating their mouths.

Afterwards,
Adam did look down for a moment, anxious lest Sylvain might follow up his performance with a waterspout as on the last occasion, but nothing of the sort occurred. Adam wondered if Sylvain had deliberately made an effort to conquer his old habit. If so, he thought, it was quite a tribute to him and a real, if quirky, token of love.

Only then did they lie down together, on a drift of straw, clasped in their shared stickiness and snoozing lazily.
The damson brandy, no longer required, lay neglected at their side. A little later they came a second time and after that Adam said that it was really time he had to go. Sylvain did not try to stop him. They arranged to meet the following day and chose, with grave symbolism, the spot in the woods above Courcelles where they had first set eyes and hands upon each other.

It took
Adam about half an hour to get home. Sylvain had shown him a short cut across the fields that kept him away from prying eyes from the farm or anywhere else. He didn’t feel at all drunk; the quantity of damson brandy he had consumed had not been so very great after all. But he was unsure of his head for spirits and apprehensive as to whether there might be some after-effect that had yet to manifest itself. To be on the safe side he practised walking in a straight line along the edge of the roadway, once he reached it, pretending that the demarcation line between grass and tarmac was a tightrope. But he had no problem.

Arriving at the house he found
Hugh already returned from work, which surprised him a little. He had quite lost track of time.

‘
You went for a long walk,’ his father said, mildly surprised himself.

‘
I ran into someone from school.’  Adam told himself that this was not a lie. There was an archaic use of the expression
from home
that meant
not at home
. Stretching a point, Sylvain could be said to be someone
from school
in that he had once been to school but didn’t go there now.

His father frowned very slightly.
‘ Have you been drinking?’

‘
He had a can of beer with him. We shared it.’ That was a lie and Adam was cross with himself. He had a healthy dislike of telling untruths and tried to tell himself that when he did lie it was in order to spare the feelings of others rather than to get himself out of a tight spot. He didn’t really feel that the present case gave him any such justification. Instead he found himself wondering how long his luck would hold.

‘
Well at least you shared it,’ said his father. He was still frowning, thinking perhaps that the smell on Adam’s breath didn’t quite match the explanation of beer, but deciding not to challenge it. ‘ I’m not happy about you drinking with friends in the daytime but perhaps it’s better than doing it alone. Now hop upstairs and clean your teeth before your mother gets in and catches wind of you.’

Glad to have got off so lightly,
Adam did as he was told and made a mental note to buy a breath-freshener spray next time he was in the town.

SIX

When
Adam set off for his rendezvous with Sylvain the following day he realised that he had entered a new phase of his life. He dared to imagine that this held true of Sylvain too. Yesterday’s kiss had transformed them both into different people. Under the tree from which Adam had dropped into Sylvain’s path, to their mutual surprise, just a month ago, Adam now encountered a more self-assured young man than he had had met back then. No longer in muddy, zipless, trousers, Sylvain wore blue denims, admittedly ancient, faded and with a modish slit at one knee, but looking freshly laundered and clean-on that day. The holed dish-cloth of a sweater had been replaced by a striped shirt – again old and without a collar, but clean and seeming actually to have been ironed – which was rolled up to Sylvain’s elbows and showed off his now familiar brown forearms: they were attractively muscular without being threateningly over-developed. A leather belt and lace-up working-boots completed the outfit. When he saw Adam his face relaxed into a confident smile of welcome. No longer a wild man of the woods he looked exactly what he was: a boy in love for the first time in his life.

They kissed when they met, standing up and fully clothed, like people who cannot remember a time when they were anything less than lovers.
True, the next thing they did was to force a hand down each other’s trousers in exploratory fashion. (Adam, who had experienced a tiny twinge of regret that Sylvain had grown out of wandering the woods with his flies wide-open, felt compensated by the discovery that his maturing sense of sartorial style had not taken him as far as wearing underwear.) There was an unspoken agreement between them that there was no hurry today. Their sexual appetites could be left in a delicious state of salivating anticipation for a while longer. After enjoying for a few seconds his squeeze of Sylvain’s semi-awakening cock and the tickling brush of his pubic hair on the back of his hand, Adam withdrew his hand and a few seconds later Sylvain followed suit.

Sylvain put a hand on each of
Adam’s shoulders and looked into his eyes. ‘ Where shall I take you today?’ he said. ‘ What shall I show you?’ Then he answered his own question. ‘We’ll go down to the western arm of the Mouche lake. See the frogs. I’ll show you the nest of a
litorne.
’

They set off exactly as they had done a month ago, leaving the track in the direction of the clearing where the daffodils had been.
And there they still were, a little past their best perhaps but even now able to surprise the eye with their yellow sparks of light among the shadows.

Yellow was to be the colour motif of that day, not to say of that month.
For March had gone out like a lamb, leaving the white wood anemones fading to pink and wilting, and April was in. Sylvain had said that the new month would turn the fields the soft colour of Chablis wine, though Adam had yet to see this happen. But they made their way today along a woodland track that Adam hadn’t found before and it took them to an unfamiliar side of the forest. And little by little, as they neared the wood’s edge, the sunlit open country beyond gleamed in at them with increasing intensity until the trees thinned out into a realm of lemony light.

The wood stopped then and so did they.
‘Cou-cou,’ said Sylvain, and laughed. Adam wondered if he was being obscurely teased, but then Sylvain bent down and picked one long flower-stem from which five brimstone flower-heads sprang. It was these, multiplied by thousands and then by hundreds again, that gave the meadow its sudden new wash of colour. ‘ We call it
cou-cou
,’ he explained. ‘ It comes just a day or two before the cuckoo bird.’ It was simply the name for cowslip in that part of the world.