Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (2 page)

Adam
thought of himself in his moments of introspection as a lonely boy. He had no brothers or sisters to share his experiences with – not that he would have told them about this one, in all probability, if he had. As for his friends, most of those he called his ‘real friends’ were on the other side of the Channel. Integrating at his new French school had not been easy; most of his new schoolmates had treated him with a reserve and a coolness that still persisted after six months. Though there had been honourable exceptions: Thierry, Christophe, Céline … He drew in his breath involuntarily. He could not, would not, think about Céline.

He would have liked to talk to
Michael just now. He did not have a mobile, and a call from parental home to parental home on such a subject was out of the question. A fax was similarly ruled out and there was no computer at home. It would have to be a letter. Adam could not fathom why air-mails between France and Britain should take roughly the same time to travel as if they were conveyed by horse and cart, but a letter it had to be. He would write it that evening.

Back at home, as he had learnt to call the big stone house his parents had taken for the year, Adam got down to his usual Sunday evening tasks: preparing his back-pack for the morning, making sure the right school books were in it, checking that other ones were not
– he hated to find himself carrying dead weight – then getting ready his clean Monday clothes. After that he would practise the cello before supper and then, later, he might watch a film on TV with his parents (good for his French) before going to bed – or retiring to his room at any rate.

But today, as the evening wore on, he found concentrating on any of these tasks increasingly difficult.
The adventure of the afternoon began to swamp his consciousness, seeping into every other thought from the most mundane – shouldn’t that old pair of red socks be chucked? – to the most beautiful and rarefied: how best to draw out the poetry from this or that particular phrase in the Debussy sonata he was studying. And mixed with all this, separate from flashbacks to the afternoon and yet somehow all too much a part of them, came the thought of Céline.

The idea of Céline colliding against the thought of what he had done that afternoon
– or not done; it depended on how he looked at it, and that was changing moment by moment – that collision was a painful, jarring one. To imagine himself telling Céline about the afternoon was to imagine the unimaginable; his mind simply shied at it as a racehorse might refuse a ten-metre fence. What would Céline think of him if she knew – if she even suspected …?

On the other hand, he had no problem with juxtaposing thoughts of her and thoughts of Michael.
Michael was his own age so their affair could conveniently be labelled a ‘boy thing’. And then Michael was part of his past whereas Céline, he tried to tell himself, was part of the present. But then another voice, a small, cold, unwelcome voice, reminded him that even now it was thoughts of Michael that turned him on, that his physical contacts with him had been hot and exciting while his faltering approaches towards Céline had been just that and no more and had left him cold … Adam tried to ignore the reminder. Céline was beautiful, was she not? Adam could see that, could appreciate the fact fully. So nobody could say he was unattracted by girls. Could they?

At the beginning of the school year, on his arrival in
France, when everything had seemed so new and different, Adam had quickly latched on to Céline. Not just onto Céline but onto the idea of Céline. She might be, maybe would be, the person to change him. With Céline he would put away childish things, he would leave Michael behind him, and move out onto the sunlit uplands of heterosexual romance.

Only nothing of the sort had happened.
Back in October he had kissed Céline for the first time, and done it rather well he thought, quite expertly and confidently and at the same time with something that could have passed itself off as passion. It was at a party with other schoolmates and later in the evening his hand had stolen its way into her shirt and cupped itself over one of her warm breasts. It was like holding a fledgling bird in your hand, he discovered. But Céline responded strangely, as if something had surprised her, as if he had unwittingly done something that betrayed him.
He didn’t kiss like the other boys. He wasn’t heterosexual
. She had somehow read between the lines in the language of his kissing.
Céline knew
.

Even that could be glossed over when Adam willed it.
He could ignore the episode if he chose or even interpret it differently if he tried hard enough. Céline and he had remained good friends after that evening. However, nothing had happened since then that allowed him to think that they might ever be anything else.

But now there was this.
That crazy creature in the woods had emerged like the incarnation of something buried in his subconscious. It had come to tell him, not with words but with gaping trousers and an eloquent erection: ‘Don’t try to fool yourself; this is what you’re really after.’

It was time to write that letter. He excused himself from his parents’ company half-way through the evening film, went upstairs, sat down at the little table, exchanged glances with his mascot, a small velvety penguin which wore a blue bow-tie, and began:

Dear Michael,

What is this? The shattering of all earthly constants? A letter from Adam Wheeler! Well, alright. I can hear your slow handclap already, even at this distance. But here is some news. Something happened today that maybe won’t surprise you. But it certainly did me ……

Adam wasn’t quite sure what he had hoped to achieve by writing to Michael.
Perhaps by sending his account of the event in the woods overseas he had been trying not just to distance himself from it quite literally but even attempting to make it unhappen – the way confession was supposed to cancel out a sin. Or maybe it was more simple than that. He had shared everything in his life with Michael in the three years that they had been friends and neither distance nor the awkward nature of this particular piece of news was going to put a stop to that. Whatever the case, Adam now decided he would try to erase the episode from his mind as soon as it was safely entrusted to paper and the post. Having sex with Michael was one thing – though even that they concealed from all their other friends, especially Sean – but a squalid encounter with a loutish loony in a forest was quite another. If he forgot about it hard enough, Adam thought, maybe it would go away.

When Adam at last got into bed and closed his eyes an unexpected thing happened.
Against the sudden darkness he saw like tiny brilliant yellow lights the daffodils that he had been shown in the clearing in the wood
. They flash upon that
inward eye
, he remembered. And then he realised for the first time that Wordsworth had not simply been inventing a line that would fit his scheme of rhyme and metre; he had been telling an exact truth. He realised in the same moment that the creature in the forest had not been just a loutish loony; he had shown Adam the daffodils, somehow aware of their power to affect him and of Adam’s capacity to be so affected. There was a truth in that too, somewhere. Adam fell asleep.

Adam did not, of course, return to the woods as he had promised the strange man in his moment of rashness. Not the next day or the next. But the morning after that, as he was getting up to go to school, something else occurred.

His bedroom window overlooked the road, or what passed for one; no thoroughfare in or near the village amounted to more than a lane and few people passed along this one.
He had no qualms about dressing and undressing in front of the uncurtained window, with or without the lights on. No-one ever saw him. Only today someone did. At the precise and very brief moment when he stood naked before slipping on his briefs, a bicycle happened to pass. Its rider, a boyish figure in faded jeans, grubby jacket and wearing a furry cap of the kind that has ear-muffs, turned and saw him. And was the stranger from the woods. Trying to master both his surprise and his still moving machine, he rode round in a complete circle in the road to come to a stop under Adam’s window, steadying himself with one foot on the ground when once he did. For several seconds the two of them stared at each other in disbelief. Then the stranger’s eyes strayed downwards, taking in Adam’s nakedness, and when they rose again to meet Adam’s, the face they looked out from was grinning. The young man said something that Adam could not catch, then pushed down on his pedal and went on his way. Adam looked down at himself and dispassionately observed an extremely full erection.

Once he was dressed and had reduced the bulge in his trousers to a more manageable size, he went downstairs and entered the stone-flagged kitchen.
His parents were already at the breakfast table. His mother poured out coffee as he sat to join them.

‘
What was that man saying to you just now?’ she asked him.

‘
What man?’ Pretending ignorance seemed the best policy.

‘
Chap on a bike,’ said his father. ‘Stopped outside. Looked as if he was speaking up to your bedroom. ’Course he wasn’t. He talks to himself. Always cycling about the place, lost in his own little world.’

‘
Why,’ said Adam’s mother. ‘Do you know him?’

‘
Not exactly,’ said his father. ‘Never formally introduced. We see him down by the dam quite often though, idling around on his bike. Some of the workmen know him. He doesn’t work himself. I don’t think he can. He’s one of the funny family.’ He broke off a piece of baguette and dunked it in his coffee French fashion, butter and all.

‘
The funny family?’ queried his mother. ‘I don’t know who you mean.’ Adam was quite relieved to find himself melting into the shadows, away from the focus of his parents’ conversation.

‘
It’s in-breeding. Apparently the whole family’s ever so slightly nuts. They live on a smallholding down a lane along the Perrogney road. Lots of hens, pigs and children.’

Conversation turned to other topics.
But for Adam this had been another moment of truth. The strange man had not disappeared, along with his letter, into the post-box. He had substance and, although still nameless, an address of sorts, together with a family of some reputation.

TWO

There was no reason why Adam had to go to school in
France. His father, Hugh, had explained this at a sort of family conference back in the spring, the three of them sitting round in the familiar suburban living-room after tea. He had been offered the chance to spend a year in France working on the dam repair project but he was under no obligation to accept it. There would be no negative impact on his career if he turned it down. Similarly, Hugh pointed out, if he did accept the offer with his family’s support, there were a number of choices open to Adam as regards his schooling. One was a year at a French lycée, another would have been to move to a boarding school in England and the third was to remain at his present school, living with his mother’s sister Helen during term time and spending the holidays with his parents in France.

Adam
gave some thought to these options. He was delighted for his father that he had this opportunity to go and work abroad at this relatively late stage in his life and would not have vetoed the project for the world. With a teenager’s insight he thought that the experience might prove a tonic for his parents’ relationship. He imagined this as a ship in mid-cruise, long out of sight of the home port and yet nowhere near its final destination of death-occasioned separation. A year in another country might provide a welcome landmark on what Adam supposed was becoming a fairly featureless journey. As for himself, if it was a question of boarding school or a year in France, then France won hands down. But choosing between France and his present school required more careful consideration. It was hard to leave Michael and Sean and the others behind for a year – a whole year – and grow apart from them and different.. Yet, although he had never seen himself as an adventurer, something in him observed an opportunity that was unusual, special in a way, and reflected that, as in his parents’ case, it might never come again. On the academic front there were fewer problems than might have been imagined at first. GCSEs were just behind him and his choice of ‘A’-level subjects – French, Music and English (soft options, his father called them) fitted not too ill with a year abroad. Studying French would take care of itself, the question of music was answered by the fact that his own mother was a music teacher and as for English, he felt that anyone could read a dozen books in a year prior to splicing himself back into the second-year sixth. He was a bright boy and he knew it.

Now here he was, halfway through the year in
France with no real regrets about his choice. And yet …

His French was terrific now.
They might still find his accent funny in this remote corner of
La France Profonde
but back home they would say his French was accentless. To say nothing of the repertoire of swear-words he had learnt.

He had gone skiing after Christmas with others from the school.
A first for him, and though no-one saw in him a future champion he learnt quickly enough and found the experience exhilarating. In the summer he hoped to learn to play tennis. They played cricket at his England school and he wasn’t sorry to be missing that. The game bored him and he was not very good at it, though which of those was cause and which effect he was not sure. He would miss the sight of Sean in cricket whites though: Sean not only played rather well but he looked the part to perfection.