Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (17 page)

The force and the surprise of it caused Adam to bang his chin upon a wooden object half-hidden in the straw.
There was a jarring sensation and a crunch and Adam felt something in his mouth like broken oyster-shell. So this is what it’s like, he thought.

It was over very quickly.
He felt Sylvain swell inside him, felt him come. He’d thought it would hurt and was surprised that it didn’t. Perhaps it was only painful if you fought against it. Though (‘Ow’ , he said) it did hurt when Sylvain pulled himself out. ‘You should have come out more slowly,’ he complained. They were his first words to Sylvain for half a week.

There was another new experience to come.
Sylvain said, very gently, ‘Sorry I hurt you,’ then rolled him round and took his hard cock in his mouth. A moment later and Adam felt himself unloading hotly, urgently, inside Sylvain’s uncomplaining cheeks.

The whole experience had surprised both of them, despite the fact that Sylvain had clearly done some thinking about it beforehand, and once they had pulled apart they spent some time simply looking at each other in wonder and doing nothing to return any kind of order to their general state of dishevelment.
Then Sylvain reached forward again and kissed Adam long and hard. Next he gave Adam and then himself a restorative swig of damson spirit. Only then did he say, ‘ Dear God, I missed you,’ and Adam, by now quietly crying, managed to articulate, ‘ I missed you too,’ in a choked pianissimo.

They recovered themselves and their clothing slowly, in between hugs and caresses.
‘Let’s have a look at your mouth,’ Sylvain said, once it became possible to talk of practical matters. ‘They’re all there,’ he said reassuringly, once he had carried out a cursory inspection. ‘Only the two front ones are a bit shorter than usual.’

‘
Merde,’ said Adam. He had been proud of his top front teeth. With the pronounced gap between the centre two they had given his smile a winsome photogenic quality throughout his short life. He felt them with a finger. He was appalled by the changed sensation, by the sharpness of the broken edges.

‘
It’s not as bad as it feels to you,’ said Sylvain. ‘You imagine you’ve lost half of two teeth. I promise it’s only about one tenth. Where can we find a mirror?’ He looked around them, not very hopefully.

‘
Later will do,’ said Adam. ‘Tell me about the buzzard.’ He was interested to hear Sylvain’s account of the end of the bird business, but he was even more concerned about Sylvain having spent time in Pierre’s company without Adam to chaperone him. How quickly jealousy could germinate in a new relationship.

Sylvain dutifully related the story, much as the vet had done, though his version was more detailed, and coloured by his tender feelings both for Adam and for the creature they had rescued together.
But Adam was still uneasy. Had Sylvain’s new sexual adventurousness come from nowhere or did Pierre somehow have something to do with it? He decided to be bold. ‘Did you and Pierre … do anything together?’

Sylvain looked shocked by the question.
Then he burst out laughing. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course not.’ He paused and looked thoughtful. ‘Maybe he would have liked to in the end, but he knew better than to … to make the attempt. He could see as clear as day that I belonged to you now.
Ça se voit, tu sais
.’ The explanation made perfect sense to Adam. He was relieved and happy and the broken tooth was at once forgiven and forgotten.

They really did go and feed the pigs then. The animals lived in a spacious if ramshackle apartment, divided into half a dozen separate pens, on the ground floor of the barn.
Sylvain showed Adam how to open the meal-sacks by pulling on the white thread which then came ripping out of the paper in one piece with a satisfying purring sound. The meal was tipped into a wheelbarrow which Sylvain then trundled back and forth, measuring the meal into troughs with a scoop while Adam poured on water to make a mash. The pigs’ heads usually got into the trough in advance of their dinner so that the oatmeal cascaded onto their necks and ears, to be licked off by their neighbours and finally rinsed down by the water from Adam’s bucket. The snuffling of the pigs crescendo-ed into hoots and shrieks as the wheelbarrow approached each pen and then became submerged into the general squelching and slurping as snouts engaged with supper.

It was time for Adam to go after that.
It would take him over half an hour on foot and he didn’t want to be so late as to attract comment. He took his leave of Sylvain with a smoochy kiss – he was getting good at those – and with a very practical arrangement to meet the following afternoon, and every school-day, by the rainbow springs down in the
vallon
ten minutes after the arrival time of the school bus. Then he began the long trudge up the farm track, leaving Sylvain sorting out some minor problem with a door-latch on one of the pig pens. But he had only put one bend in the track behind him when he heard the sound of the pick-up rattling up behind. He turned round and was astonished to see Sylvain himself at the wheel. The truck skidded to a halt on the sharp flints. ‘Get in,’ said Sylvain.

‘
I didn’t know you could drive.’

‘
Of course I know how to drive.’ They were jolting up the track even faster than Jean-Paul had driven down it. It did go through Adam’s mind that knowing how to drive and having a licence were two different things but he did not pursue the matter. Once in the lane they continued to bounce along towards Courcelles at a speed that made Adam tense up every time they approached a bend and then breathe a small sigh of relief at the discovery, as each bend opened out, that nothing was coming round it. Then Adam said: ‘This’ll do,’ a little way before his parent’s house came into sight. ‘Too many questions if you drive me right up to the door.’ Sylvain showed no sign of slowing down until Adam added, ‘Unless you’re kidnapping me, that is.’ At which Sylvain laughed and stamped on the brake so hard that Adam was lucky not to arrive at his front door via the windscreen. Sylvain gave Adam a rapid kiss while grabbing simultaneously at his crotch. Adam squirmed his way out of the car.
‘A demain,’
he said.

‘
A demain, Adam… hein?’
said Sylvain, grinning with delight at the unexpected brilliance of his wordplay. Then he shot backwards, turned rapidly in the mayor’s driveway just as the startled mayor himself emerged from his front door to take his dog for its evening promenade, and headed for home.

To his relief, Adam’s lateness was passed over without comment.
Jennifer was talking to Gary in the kitchen while they prepared food together. They seemed so much at ease in this situation that Adam guessed that they had often made meals together in the past. It was funny how he had never tried to imagine his mother’s life as a student beyond the few anecdotes and memories she had chosen to share with him. He put his head round the door just long enough to establish his presence then retreated to the living-room and took out his cello. It would be the first time he had played the instrument since Gary had arrived and he began to practise the Beethoven A-major sonata in a spirit of something like defiance, hoping to be heard, and at the same time not heard, by Gary. But once he had begun he was surprised by the confidence, not to say boldness of his playing. One or two days away from the routine of practice could do you good, he told himself.

A little later Hugh returned from work and dinner was ready.
Then, a few minutes into the meal, Jennifer suddenly called out her son’s name in a stifled shriek. ‘Adam! Your front teeth! What on earth have you been doing?’

‘
Oh,’ said Adam. His mind was such a swirl of impressions – reunion with Sylvain, two new kinds of lovemaking, a new take on Beethoven – that he had all but forgotten the little dental accident that had occurred along the way. He had given no thought to providing a convincing explanation. ‘I was … er … fighting.’

‘
Fighting?’ said his mother. ‘Why? Who with?’

‘
You, fighting?’ queried his father, unable to keep a hint of admiration out of the surprise in his voice.

‘
Not real fighting,’ Adam backtracked. ‘Just a friendly scuffle with Thierry. Over a chocolate bar. Fooling around.’ He was astonished at the circumstantial details he managed to dream up under the pressure of the moment. ‘It was only in fun. Just an accident.’

‘
Well, just wait till I see Thierry,’ said Jennifer more calmly. ‘I’ll have a thing or two to say to him. It’s quite spoilt your smile. You look like a pirate.’

All this time
Gary had said nothing but had been staring at Adam with a fixed expression that somehow gave him the feeling that Gary was fascinated by the change in Adam’s appearance, that he did not believe a word of his explanation and that he had quite a shrewd idea about the real circumstances. Of course Adam might have been imagining all this. Then Gary said, ‘ But a very handsome pirate,’ and immediately earned Adam’s gratitude by turning the conversation. ‘ I liked your way with the Beethoven. I had no idea you would play with such maturity and with such technique. Would you like to play it through with me after dinner?’

Quite coolly Adam answered,
‘Yes, why not?’ though in fact he was quite overwhelmed by the thought – flattering, daunting and exciting in equal measure – that he was going to play Beethoven with someone who bestrode the concert platforms of the world and whom Thierry listened to on CD…. Thierry. Oh dear. Here was somebody else now whom he had drawn into a lie in order to protect his relationship with Sylvain. And this was far worse than merely implicating Christophe in the rescue of a hawk. Thierry was going to have to take the flak from his mother, the next time they met, for breaking his shop-window teeth. With an effort Adam came back to Gary’s offer. ‘I mean, I’d really like to. It would be …’ he struggled to find a word. ‘… an honour.’ He meant it.

‘
Are we excused the washing-up?’ Gary asked facetiously at the end of the meal. Adam was glad that no-one had tried to make a concert out of the event. His parents sensibly, almost conspiratorially, withdrew into the kitchen and left the performers to it.

Adam found the piano part and handed it to Gary who sat down with it at the upright Pleyel, checking with experienced fingers that the pages would turn easily when he wanted them to.
Then he gave Adam his tuning ‘A’ and, without fuss, they began. Adam experienced a momentary pang of nerves at the thought of the gulf that separated them in terms of musical prowess and achievement during that initial lonely moment when the cello plays the first unaccompanied phrase, but it melted at once in the intensity of the experience that began to unfold when Gary joined in with the piano’s answer.

The quality of
Gary’s playing seemed somehow to seep into Adam’s. It was inspiration by osmosis, if you liked. Adam found himself quite simply playing better than he had ever played before, better than he had ever imagined that he could play. His rows of notes joined up into a single stream of sound, a song pouring from his heart as spontaneously as if he had written the work himself, a spring gushing from the rock like the spring in the
vallon
where the rainbows had darted like butterflies and the butterflies had shone like rainbows on the day he had first discovered the humanity, the heart, of Sylvain. This sharing of a work of art, this dividing it up and putting it together at the same time, with just one other person, was as wonderful, as magical almost as … He had to thrust that thought aside while the sonata continued; it was all too confusing, too much on a day on which so much had happened, a day which had given him so much to think about, so much to feel and take into his heart … and, in addition, blessed him with the features of a handsome pirate.

The sonata finished.
Adam put down his bow. He was in a state of near-shock, having found himself on a plane of existence that yesterday he had not known existed; he was the pirate captain of a great new ship of dreams, the weaver of musical spells in glorious partnership with Beethoven and Gary Blake, and not only all this but he was also physically intermingled now with Sylvain, their bodies mutually penetrated today as if to underwrite their penetration of each other’s hearts.

Adam’s parents crept out of hiding in the kitchen, murmuring their appreciation of what they had just overheard.
His mother’s face in particular expressed what she was too tactful to put into words: as a musician herself she recognised the change in Adam’s playing and knew that, whatever had occurred to make it happen today, it was a wonderful and profound change and one that could never be reversed.

Hugh had the very practical idea that they should all have a drink after that, and this was a relatively unusual experience for Adam too.
He did not usually get included in general rounds of post-prandial alcohol at home. He was thus elevated to the status of adult and professional cellist in addition to everything else that had happened to him that day by the simple action of his father in handing him a brimful glass of red wine and he felt as he might have felt at an after-concert celebration at the Festival Hall.

‘
One day you must do the D-major,’ Gary said. He moved back to the piano and without bothering to find the appropriate page in the score, launched into the opening bars of the piano part, with its two peremptory questions and its haughty condescending answer, a limpid descending waterfall of notes. Adam was on such a high that the beautiful shock of it nearly made him cry aloud. Gary broke off as suddenly as he had started and came back to rejoin the family among the easy chairs. Adam discovered that there were tears in his own eyes and turned his head away, momentarily cross with himself. He did not want Gary to see them. He rather suspected him of conjuring them on purpose.