Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (13 page)

‘
They come from nowhere, stream up like chains of beautiful jewels and then disappear for ever.’ Adam was startled to hear his exact thoughts articulated out loud, the more so as it was not he but Fox who voiced them.

‘
That’s what being in love is, I suppose,’ Adam thought, and was again startled, this time to find that
he
had voiced the thought out loud. He had meant, thinking your lover’s thoughts. But Sylvain seemed to realise this and showed no surprise at what might have seemed a strange non sequitur. Suddenly Adam found the presence of the table between them irksome, likewise the hovering innkeeper, and he found himself wishing he could have Sylvain’s company without any context at all, without any of the accidents of everyday life – clothes, furniture, work, other people.

Especially other people,
Adam decided when, at that moment, the front door opened and two specimens of the genus walked in. Adam recognised them vaguely. They belonged to another farming family of the plateau. And because the population density thereabouts was marginally lower than that of Saharan Algeria (a statistic treasured by the local population and brought out to astonish visitors on every possible occasion) the new arrivals recognised Adam too and gave him a curt nod of greeting. As for Sylvain, they clearly knew him slightly better since they greeted him by name, although with a hint of guarded surprise in their voices, as they looked around them, uncertain whether to join the two boys at the long table or to form a separate party at one of the small ones. In the end they joined them.

‘
It’s not often we see you out with company,’ one of the men gently ribbed Sylvain. ‘Are you celebrating something?’

‘
Nothing in particular,’ Sylvain replied gruffly.

‘
It’s a Wednesday afternoon,’ said Adam. ‘Why not celebrate that?’

The two men looked at him.
One, who was wearing a tie – not around his neck but as a belt to keep his trousers up – began to nod his head slowly and started to smile. ‘ Here’s a cocky one,’ he said. ‘ Though there’s nothing wrong with that. You have a funny accent though. Where do you hail from?’

It was amazing, thought
Adam, how a centimetre of beer could loosen your tongue. Within a few minutes he was chatting away with the two countrymen about his father and the dam repair project, discussing the timing of the cattle’s (imminent) release from their enclosed winter quarters and their turning out onto the pastures, and had even started on the subject of favourite French wines (‘You know what he sells here,’ said the one with the tie, ‘
C’est la merde
,’ at which the innkeeper managed an uneasy laugh) before he realised that Sylvain was taking no part in the conversation but had withdrawn into a state of silent communion with his beer glass. He was immediately filled with remorse. How could he have been so insensitive as to let his thoughts slip away without Sylvain, the lover whose being filled his heart? He stretched out his foot under the table and caressed the side of Sylvain’s calf with the toe of his gumboot. Sylvain came to with a pleasurable jolt, his face relaxed into a smile and he giggled.

‘
He’s funny, your friend,’ said the man who was not wearing a tie (he had braces), not appreciating the reason for Sylvain’s sudden laughter. ‘Bring him again.’ They had only called in for quick glass of wine each, and now they drained them and stood up to leave. Their transport could be seen outside the window, or at least part of it could: the upraised front loader of a tractor, with strawy cattle-dung hanging off the tines. As they turned to leave the bar, one of the men turned back to Adam. ‘ Hope you can put a firework up this bloke’s ass.’ He indicated Sylvain with his thumb. ‘ Nobody else has ever managed to.’

Sylvain gave a surly valedictory growl that might have been
‘ au revoir,’ or ‘ fous le camp.’ It was impossible for anyone to tell.

When they had gone, Sylvain said
, ‘Ass-holes. Fucking ass-holes. All of them.’

‘
Sylvain,’ said the innkeeper, mildly reproachful. ‘Don’t talk like that. They’re your own flesh and blood, those two. And if they’re no better than you are, they’re certainly no worse.’ He turned to Adam. ‘We’re all one family up here, you know. For centuries we’ve gone through everything together.
Ah oui.
All the same flesh and blood.’

‘
Come on,’ said Sylvain, noticing that Adam’s glass was empty like his own. ‘ Let’s go. Got to get you home.’ And he paid, which seemed strangely to restore his good humour, for he gave the
patron
a cheery
‘au revoir,’
and then they left.

‘
We need to find a place where they don’t come,’ Sylvain said once they were outside. ‘Not your enemies, not mine. We need a place that’s just for us.’

Sylvain’s words made
Adam’s skin tingle. He had heard people express similar sentiments in films, read them in books, but nobody had ever said them to him before. He had never imagined how wonderful it could be to hear them in real life – addressed to him.

Of course it couldn’t happen in real life, exactly.
He hadn’t yet started to imagine, even in his wildest moments, that Sylvain and he could actually go off and set up home. It would have to be a place in their hearts only, he thought.

‘
In my heart we’re always together. We always will be,’ he said. Sylvain was visibly moved and, although, they were in the nearest thing to a village centre that Perrogney offered, could not restrain himself from pulling Adam’s head towards him and giving him a quick, strong kiss on the lips.

SEVEN

The following day brought with it two surprises.
The weather had done a back-flip during the night so that Adam awoke to see his ceiling the spooky white of winter mornings and when he went to the window to check, sure enough, the garden, the lane and the fields lay under a seamless white blanket of snow that stretched to the farthest horizons. The fall itself had stopped, but the sky was still leaden and overcast with spent cloud.

And when he stepped out of the back door, first thing after breakfast, there was the second surprise.
The cuckoo, harbinger of summer, was calling, calling, calling, across the white wastes. Was it his imagination or was there a hint of puzzlement in the bird’s voice, cuckooing obsessively over the snow?

Later in the day he talked about this with Sylvain.
They had met in the woods as arranged, not in the t-shirts and rolled-up sleeves of yesterday, but in overcoats, scarves and sweaters. It was not really an afternoon for al fresco love-making, but they had done it all the same, albeit in a rather perfunctory fashion, standing up and without exposing any more naked flesh than was strictly necessary. ‘Yes,’ said Sylvain, buttoning himself up. ‘We call it cuckoo snow. It comes the same time every year –’ he looked around him at the inch-deep blanket ‘ – though not usually as much as this. But it’s the last snow of the year,
P’tit-Loup
, I promise you. And it won’t stay long. Two days and it’ll be warm again.’

Sylvain was right.
The snow had gone by lunchtime the following day, thawed by strong sunshine, and the day after that was positively hot. The cuckoo continued to call, and Adam fancied that the note of hysteria he thought he had at first detected vanished from its voice. Meanwhile its namesake flower nodded its head again in the pastures where it bloomed in ever greater numbers until all the fields around were a soft yellow-green billowing sea.

By now there existed a routine for
Adam and Sylvain of days spent together, a routine as heavenly as the celestial journeys of the stars, the routine of lovers. Adam and Sylvain, Sylvain and Adam, Adain, Sylvam, Sylain, Advam …. Adam tried their two names over and over on his tongue, spoonerised and anagrammed them in every possible permutation, as if he could make them into the one single name that identified the one, conjoined person that Sylvain and he had now become.

It no longer needed to be said that they would spend all their free time together
– most of the daylight hours. They only had to arrange a time and place to meet and then it was a matter of discovery as to where their subsequent roamings of the plateau, sometimes by bike, sometimes on foot, would take them. As the days passed they found themselves fording streams deep in the
vallons
at Vieux Moulins, crossing the high plateau towards Chameroy, descending the vertiginous corkscrew road to Noidant-le-Rocheux , and striking upwards towards the water-tower on its lonely height from which the rains divided into their northward flow towards the Channel and their southward path to the distant Mediterranean.

Wherever they went they made love.
Often twice. Occasionally more. They enjoyed each other in the deep recesses of the woods. They were no longer shy of stripping naked together beside the fast-flowing streams. Under lowering cliffs they would lie whole afternoons in each other’s arms, between each other’s thighs. Even in the open fields up on the windswept heights. Sylvain had made no further attempts to penetrate Adam since his first rather comical failure beside the lake and Adam wasn’t forward enough to try to adopt a dominant role in his sexual relations with Sylvain, six years his senior. It seemed to him, trying to keep a mental hold on what was normal for a boy like him and what was not, somehow part of the natural order of things that the older, bigger and stronger of the two should have the first test-drive down this potentially two-way street of pleasure. They just continued with what they had been doing up to now, and found the many variations that they improvised on its basic theme perfectly satisfying for two young people as much in love as they were. Adam even found an additional opportunity for pleasurable contact. When they were walking (this was not possible on bicycles: Adam did try but without success) he would encircle Sylvain’s waist with his arm and reach his hand into his lover’s pocket. The pocket linings in two out of Sylvain’s three pairs of trousers were worn to rags. He thus had direct access to Sylvain’s sex, still charmingly a stranger to underpants, which he would fondle like a semi-rigid comfort object as they walked.

They met few human beings on their travels, though other creatures there were in plenty.
Everywhere field crickets scolded them from the grass roots and, when searched for, could be seen, black, shiny and fat as miniature moles, reversing down into their burrows until only their two long antennae protruded from the ground. Swallowtail butterflies haunted the reedy river margins, and the cuckoo called incessantly. Sylvain found the nests of all kinds of birds and showed them to Adam. He had a country boy’s knack for finding them: the basketwork platforms of moorhens’ among trailing branches just above water level with their cargo of eggs, the semi-basement wigwams of willow warblers with entrances no wider than your finger, the treetop hideaways of owls. They got to know as an individual the white and sandy wheatear that bobbed and whistled on his fallen tree-trunk just outside Noidant. They greeted him as if he were a personal friend, with laughing
ça-va’s
, and he appeared to greet them in the same spirit, even if the reality was simply that he was impatient for the arrival of his mate from Africa. Adam brought his father’s bird book with him sometimes, then Sylvain would find the appropriate colour plate and give the bird its French name, Adam then pencilling it in alongside the English one.

Down in the depths of the valley at Noidant they discovered, in the front room of a house, a small bar that neither of them had come across before and which
– even better – was unknown to anyone who knew either of them. This gave them a special sense of relaxation and privacy, then, as the days passed, almost of proprietorship. This would be the place ‘ where
they
don’t come, a place just for us,’ the place that Sylvain had wished for when they had run into neighbours in the bar at Perrogney. There was even a terrace, a metre wide strip of riverbank outside the back entrance, where two minuscule tables perched unsteadily, with two metal chairs at each and one red sunshade with Martini written on it which would never stand straight and always threatened to descend and engulf unwary drinkers and their drinks.

Out here they could be quite alone: the
patronne
stayed within and no other customer ever arrived to take the second table. They would sit over a glass of bright beer and talk, or else not talk, as the mood took them. Occasionally a kingfisher would arc across the stream like a blue spark; more often they would only hear his whistle at a distance. Sometimes they varied their drink – usually just the one and that one drunk slowly – experimenting once or twice with whisky (the patronne raised her eyebrows expressively but said nothing – French law allowed Adam beer but not spirits, even if it was Sylvain who ordered) once with Campari
(mon dieu!)
and more often and less experimentally with a glass of wine. ‘Was I your first?’ Adam asked suddenly, during one of these lazy afternoons of riverside, dappled, sunshine.

The question surprised Sylvain a little.
‘Why do you want to know?’ he asked.

‘
Because I want to know you, know you better, I mean. Mainly.’ He paused then found himself trying but failing to repress a smirk. ‘But also I’m curious. About sex … and other people.’ He paused again. ‘Is that so shocking?’