Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (12 page)

The meadow fell away a little, then climbed towards the motorway which formed its eastern boundary.
They waded through the yellow, wind-ruffled surf of flowers, surprising bumblebees and yellow butterflies as they bounded along. Sylvain knew a tunnel under the motorway embankment which was used by the farmers and their tractors and which brought them out above the western arm of Lac de la Mouche. The lake was invisible as yet; there was still half a mile of woodland to climb down through. But the wood was not dense and sunlight splashed down upon its bridle-paths and clearings. Here too the white carpet of March’s windflowers had given way to high-gloss yellow stars of celandine and the occasional magical firecrack of daffodils.

Adam
could not remember a moment when he had been happier. He could not remember another time from which he had looked back and thought: no other moment has been as good as now. He could not remember – because he had never done so – saying to himself: I am as happy as I can ever be, because I am in love.

He looked sideways at Sylvain, wondering whether to share this insight with him now or later.
Then, conscious that they were both at least partly preoccupied with picking their way among outreaching branches of saplings and negotiating stray tree-roots and the odd dead bramble with their feet, he decided that later was the more sensible alternative.

At last their downward sloping path opened out onto a flat expanse of grass that had been cropped so short by rabbits that it was almost a lawn.
You could have played bowls on it if it had been a bit flatter. This clearing was a long crescent, its outer curve formed by the woods, its inner one the shore of the lake. It was a place of total seclusion whose regular visitors were normally only birds, insects and frogs. And in the still sunshine their voices only were to be heard. Like a small park, the grassy clearing was scattered with a few well-grown trees. Tussocks of bramble and rush grew around their trunks, enmeshed in eruptions of suckers that were just coming into full leaf, some way in advance of the cautiously budding crowns above them, and it was in one of these thickets that Sylvain showed Adam what he had promised: the nest of a fieldfare, just a foot above the ground, in its own private fortress of bramble thorns. The hen bird was sitting as they peered cautiously down. Her yellow bill and ash-grey head, her russet back, all seemed startlingly bright for such a gloomy recess. She moved her head infinitesimally and looked up at them with one eye, but sat tight, unflinching. They let her be and stole quietly away.

They did not go far.
Sylvain abruptly turned to Adam and embraced him. As if responding to a cue they unbuckled each other’s trousers and released the erections that had materialised almost instantaneously, as if by magic. Then when Adam eased Sylvain’s jeans down his now familiar furry thighs he discovered a new aspect of his situation. All that was Sylvain: all that muscle, hair and wind-tanned skin, all that warmth and energy, all that vibrant life was now a part of him. Part of Adam. His Own Flesh. The discovery overcame him and he felt dizzy with it, felt like fainting, felt like sobbing. Sylvain seemed similarly overcome. He clutched at Adam’s buttocks and pushed his cock hard against his crotch. To Adam it felt, had looked, more massive than ever it had seemed before. And Sylvain asked him, in a broken voice,
‘Puis-je t’enculer?’
Very politely. May I fuck you? Not just ‘can I’.

Adam had supposed for some time now
– perhaps a year – that, if he found out, or decided, that he was really gay, this moment would occur at some point in the exploration that was his life. He gasped involuntarily, like someone plunging into a cold sea, and thought both, God I’m young for this, and, why not now? And then thought, better get it over. So he said yes, but in the nettle-grasping spirit of someone who accepts the necessity of a painful rite of initiation rather than out of real enthusiasm or desire. Sylvain drew Adam down to the ground where they tussled lightly for a few moments, Sylvain seeming unsure whether to turn Adam on his front or lay him on his back, and Adam uncertain which way was correct and waiting to be shown. In the end Sylvain decided to take him from the front but was then confronted by the immovable (in the suddenly short time that remained to him) obstacle of Adam’s gumboots which prevented his jeans from going any further than his knees and pinned his legs together at that point as effectively as any chastity belt. Sylvain by then had run out of time and, still on hands and knees over Adam, came spontaneously, his semen raining down on Adam’s bared chest in hot staccato spurts. A few seconds later and Adam had followed suit with only minimal prompting from his hand. Then Sylvain threw himself down on Adam and they rolled together on the rabbit-bitten grass in a wet and warm embrace, laughing.

When they felt ready to they continued their walk.
They followed the lake to the end of the grassy crescent and then continued along the water’s edge by its fringe of trees. Adam was happily surprised to find the euphoric feeling of that spring afternoon in no way diminished by the all too early climax of its purely sexual element. Rather the reverse in fact. Perhaps there was more to sex than people gave it credit for. At least this seemed to be the case when you were in love. With Michael, once it was finished it was finished. You mopped up and then went on discussing Kant’s Critique or whatever. Adam put his hand, trusting and childlike, in Sylvain’s and Sylvain clasped it with a joyful tightness. It was as if an electric current flowed between them and Adam knew that there was no need to speak, neither of European philosophy nor of anything else.

The west arm of the lake grew narrower and finally dwindled to nothing more than a ditch which was crossed by an old brick bridge that carried a narrow lane.
This brought them round to the opposite shore which they followed for a mile or so along the lane. The banks were well wooded on this side too. And although there was the possibility of the odd car surprising them round a bend – even a car driven by someone who might know one or other of them – their hands stayed tightly clasped together. The danger added an extra dimension to the experience. Then suddenly the silence was broken by a loud crack behind them, a short swishing sound and a thump. They turned, startled. A large tree branch lay just ten metres behind them, nearly blocking the lane. Ten seconds earlier and they would have been flattened beneath it. Adam let go Sylvain’s hand. A superstitious dread stole up upon his happiness, a sudden storm cloud crossing the sun. Was the hand of God to be discerned in that suspended sentence? A warning tempered with mercy … subject to certain conditions of course. Adam thrust the idea behind him, turned the double heat of his mind and heart against the baleful chill of the cloud. He told himself that God – if he existed – really would move in more mysterious ways than this, would not conceivably employ such schoolteacherly unsubtle tactics, and certainly not when dealing with a creature of Adam’s intellect and sophistication.

By the time Adam had mentally wrestled with all this he had physically run back with Sylvain to the fallen branch and started to wrestle with that too, hauling it out of the path of traffic.
It wasn’t all that easy: it was both heavy and awkward to handle. But once they had manoeuvred it off the carriageway it tumbled down the bank with a satisfying somersault, coming to a final stop in the undergrowth a few metres below them, just above the lake shore. When they walked on again, this time it was Sylvain’s hand that sought the comforting clasp of Adam’s fingers.

At last the lane brought them round the curve in the shoreline where the two arms of the lake became one and there a whole new vista swung into view.
Christophe’s house was clearly visible on the opposite shore, its beige paintwork and orange roof tiles catching the sun among the distant trees. Further round, the top of the dam showed as a thin line dividing the stacked up waters of the foreground from the distant hills beyond. And a few moments later the rooftops of St. Ciergues appeared, climbing picturesquely up the western slope; among them was the lakeside bar where Adam had gone with his schoolmates after his last fishing trip and been obliged to drink shandy. As they got nearer Sylvain began to head for the bar quite purposefully, though pragmatically he let go of Adam’s hand as they approached the centre of the hamlet. Adam hung back, suddenly anxious. Sylvain sensed this and said: ‘ Don’t worry. You’re with me.’

‘
I can’t go in there with you. They know me there. My father’s site office is just two hundred yards away. If he sees me, or if someone tells him …’ He tried to reduce the impact of this betrayal of his love. ‘ He won’t let me go drinking with my friends in the daytime.’

‘
Well,’ said Sylvain, ‘ I can go in and buy the drinks and we can drink them in the garden.’

‘
There’s nobody else in the garden,’ objected Adam. ‘We’d be even more conspicuous if anyone in the site office looked in our direction.’

Sylvain stopped, trying to think what else they could do next.
But before he could come up with anything, the solution presented itself in the unexpected form of an old green Peugeot pick-up which came bouncing along the road from St. Ciergues towards them shrouded in its own micro-climate of smoke and dust. Sylvain stepped out into the road and waved at it with both arms until it stopped. He turned back to Adam. ‘It’s our van,’ he explained. ‘ Get in.’

So
Adam found himself clambering into the front and only passenger seat of the truck, which he had to share squashed up with Sylvain, and being introduced to Sylvain’s brother Jean-Paul. This was the man he had seen loading hay-bales onto the elevator just the day before. He looked quite like Sylvain, seen at close quarters, though his features were a little firmer and there were lines around his mouth. He was also a bit more solid in terms of muscle. This could all be put down to the fact, Adam thought, that he was probably two or three years older, and he found himself deciding – he who had never considered that even a twenty-two-year-old could be sexy before he met Sylvain – that Jean-Paul was also quite attractive in his way.

‘
Can you take us to Perrogney?’ Sylvain said quickly to his brother. ‘ To the
Licence Quatre
. The kid doesn’t want to drink with his enemies and he has one or two who go drinking at St. Ciergues.’

Jean-Paul
nodded and grinned. He seemed to find nothing out of place in the idea that an English teenager should want to hole up in a rural bar where his enemies didn’t hang out, nor in that his brother should be taking a foreign school-kid out drinking in the middle of the afternoon in the first place.

‘
I’m on my way back to the farm myself,’ he said. ‘It’ll only take me a minute out of my way to drop you off.’ He turned to Adam. ‘You like the country way of life,
non
?’

Like a video on fast rewind, the last hour of their lakeside hike ran backwards outside the car window in a couple of minutes, then they turned uphill and wound their way by a back road into Perrogney village.
Here all was silent. The ancient houses of roughly rendered stone had a brooding air about them as they slept through the afternoon and from their blank facades half-shuttered windows peered like old cynics who had seen all of life pass before them. They stopped outside one particular cottage. In one small pane of its front window was pasted a flyblown notice. It read, simply,
Licence IV
.

The truck drove off and left them.
Sylvain pushed open the cottage door and Adam followed him inside. He found himself in a narrow room which nevertheless ran the full depth of the house towards a window into which the late afternoon sun was slanting. A refectory table ran halfway down the length of the room with half a dozen chairs on either side. Beyond, towards the window, stood two smaller tables, square, with four seats at each. On the left was a short bar counter that jutted a short way into the room and behind that a door that led into the more private recesses of the house.

For the moment they were the only people in the room.
Then the door behind the bar opened and an elderly man appeared. Without showing any sign of surprise or curiosity about them he said simply,
‘Qu’est-ce que je peux vous servir, messieurs?’

Without consulting
Adam Sylvain ordered
deux demis
and a moment later they were sitting opposite each other at the refectory table with two glasses of draught blonde beer in front of them.

None of the individual parts of the experience was new to
Adam. He had shared cans of beer with friends in England, sometimes had a small glass with his father at home. Being in bars was nothing new either: there was his occasional glass of shandy with his French friends and before that, soft drinks in pubs in England. Sitting eyeball to eyeball with Sylvain was hardly new either, even if his perception of Sylvain as the object of his love, like his knowledge of his name, was a mere twenty-four hours old. But now all these elements came together and he found himself in the middle of a new adult experience that comprised all of them and created something much greater than the sum of all its parts.

Conversation seemed in order, but
Adam found himself suddenly tongue-tied. He looked into his glass of golden beer and watched the bubbles rising. He tried to follow them back to the beginning of their mercurial progress upwards through the sun-coloured liquid and failed to see where they started from, or how, or why.