Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (20 page)

‘
I did not,’ Sean returned with weary good humour, then turned to Adam. ‘He still enjoys winding people up.’ He sounded a little conscious of his marginal seniority and of the presence of a real adult in the person of the until now ignored Hugh.

Getting into the car
Adam took a seat at the back, leaving the other two to sort themselves out. Michael cheerfully got in beside Adam’s father and Sean, with an easy smile, took his place with Adam in the back. Sean spread his legs innocently wide so that his knees touched Adam’s … whose own legs were spread equally wide in a pretence of nonchalance in which innocence played no part.

‘
This is just so beautiful,’ Sean said, looking out at the landscape beyond the car window: at the winding trout-stream that was the River Marne in its optimistic bubbling youth; at the forests that flanked the road, and then as they headed up towards the plateau, at the meadows which were now a golden blaze of buttercups in the slanting evening sun.

‘
Last week it was all blue,’ Adam said. ‘It changes every month. It’s now in its second yellow period.’ He did not say who it was who had alerted him to the glories of the coloured seasons.

‘
Then it has turned quite gold from grief,’ said Michael for Adam’s benefit. Quotes from Wilde would be lost on the others.

Adam
laughed and seized the moment to put one arm along the back of the car seat behind Sean’s shoulders as if they were in the back row of a cinema. He found that he had a hard-on and only restrained himself with an effort from reaching out to check whether Sean might have one too.

Arriving at their destination the boys fell out of the car like puppies and without invitation embarked on an immediate tour of the garden.
If they had been equipped with tails they would have wagged them. They hadn’t guessed quite what Adam’s new home would be like and now that they actually saw it, the place far exceeded their modest imaginings. ‘You never said there were peacocks,’ said Michael in wonder.

Over dinner and until long afterwards the new arrivals excitedly relayed news from the school in
England. Anecdote followed anecdote in a bewildering litany. There was a story about a tedious cricket match that came spectacularly to life when someone called Frank split his trousers in two while taking his guard at the wicket… ‘And we could all see he had nothing underneath.’… There was the duel that Sean had fought with another friend in the street using imaginary fencing foils and during which the friend died so convincingly that passers-by alerted the emergency services. Then, during the mock exams someone had told Morsehead (Who? Adam tried to remember a Morsehead) that his afternoon paper had been switched to the morning; this was just as he was arriving at school on the stroke of nine in the morning; Morsehead had looked like having a stroke himself until someone kindly told him it was only a joke.

Michael
himself had read a paper to the sixth form about Nietsche but – in Sean’s words – ‘nobody in the school had heard of him and the discussion afterwards didn’t even begin.’ Michael had been left with egg on his face and a thirty-minute period to fill. ‘What did he do?’ Adam asked. ‘He told jokes of course,’ Sean answered.

There was little that the three adults could do to get a word in edgeways while the flood of stories ran its course, though
Adam noticed that Gary in particular was attending to them quietly with a look of mild amusement on his face.

There was another story about a notice that appeared one day on the staff-room door and which read:
Arselickers Anonymous. Crawl Right In.
The perpetrator was never found.

Then there was something about a character called Stupid Squirrel who had apparently taken to doing his exam revision sitting on a first-floor outside windowsill, wearing an old fringed lampshade on his head. Adam couldn’t remember who Stupid Squirrel was, or even if he knew him.

These stories had the perverse effect of making his old school seem more remote and strange rather than bringing it back into focus for him.
Till now he had felt very close to the place, as if he had never gone away. Now he saw that it had become a new and different place, a venue where unfamiliar dramas were being played out by a cast of unknowns. He realised for the first time that his life here in France had become more real than that other one across the sea. Once again he had the impression of worlds colliding, with unforeseeable results.

It was bedtime before either
Jennifer or Adam had a chance to explain the emergency sleeping arrangements. Adam told the story of how the spare bedroom had come to be spangled with droplets of honey and littered with dead bees. They all trooped in and had a look, Sean and Michael nodding their heads and for the first time since their arrival, unable to think of anything to say.

There were two beds in
Adam’s room. Someone would have to make do with a sleeping-bag on cushions on the floor. Jennifer suggested they toss a coin to settle it and then quickly retired and left them to it. Adam had already imagined what would happen next. Sean would be the gentleman, the unselfish guest, and volunteer to sleep on the floor; Michael, the spoilt youth would accept the offer of the second bed without even a pretence of protest, while Adam would occupy his own bed as a matter of right. But, as usually happened when he expected something – Adam had recently become aware of this – what actually happened was the completely unexpected. Sean said: ‘Nobody has to sleep on the floor. I’ll tuck in beside Adam, if he’ll have me, and Michael can have the other bed to himself.’ This bombshell was delivered totally straight and apparently innocently, without a hint of knowingness or innuendo.

Adam
could hardly believe what he had heard. Did Sean have any idea that Michael and he had – or rather, used to have – a sexual relationship? Adam supposed now that the answer must be no, but this was hardly the moment to ask. Sean did seem to have answered the unasked question about himself and Michael though. Clearly there was nothing of that nature between the two of
them
. Sean’s proposal was accepted with sotto voce polite noises, both Adam and Michael trying to hide from him their very real astonishment. And if it occurred to Michael, momentarily, to pipe up and assert a prior claim on Adam as a sleeping partner, he must have buried the idea at once because he said nothing at all to that effect.

All in turn visited the bathroom and began, rather self-consciously, to undress.
Adam had taken to sleeping without pyjamas since he had begun his affair with Sylvain. He wasn’t quite sure why; it seemed somehow to be part of the natural evolution of things. Both the visitors had brought pyjamas with them; they now hesitated as to whether to wear them or to do without. In the end no-one wanted to be the first to reach into a rucksack and drag forth effete nightwear and so nobody did.

Sean took his clothes off with his back to the others. Adam saw that the naked Michael had a substantial erection which he made no effort to hide. He had one himself and didn’t dare to let Michael catch his eye. Instead he hopped quickly into bed before Sean could see it. He didn’t trust himself to look at Sean when he finally had to turn towards him to get into bed too. Adam did not know how he would have coped were it to turn out that Sean had a hard-on too.

As it was, the night was one of the most excruciating torture.
Every accidental brush of Sean’s body against his own – and in that single bed these occurred constantly – racked up Adam’s state of desire to a never before experienced degree. He felt like a musical instrument being tuned up to an unimaginably high pitch. He dared neither to caress his unwitting torturer, asleep and oblivious beside him, nor to try to give himself relief by hand. The latter idea seemed vaguely sacrilegious; besides, it would have been cringingly embarrassing were Sean to wake up. Then he thought miserably that he would almost certainly have a wet dream, something that would be all too obvious to Sean even if he were not – horror of horrors – literally bespattered at the climactic moment.

By some miracle morning came without
Adam having done so first. Sean was the first to saunter off to the bathroom to shower. At which Adam took immediate advantage of his absence to leap out of his bed and into Michael’s, whereupon they both came explosively the moment their two bodies touched. It was quite unnecessary for either of them to explain why. Sean returned unexpectedly soon from the bathroom to discover them still lying in the same bed, though both on their backs and as nearly non-intertwined as the narrowness of the bed permitted. They looked as caught-out as they felt but Adam had the presence of mind to brazen the situation out rather than to leap absurdly back into his own bed. Sean stopped for a second, then he just smiled and shook his head. ‘ You crazy pair,’ he said.

It was not until after breakfast that it dawned on
Adam that what had taken place would have some bearing on his relationship with Sylvain. To put it more simply, his conscience woke up. Before the weekend he had told himself – he had hardly needed to: it had seemed so obvious back then – that he would not be having sex with Michael during his visit. He had never imagined finding himself in the situation he had been in last night. Every morning for nearly two months he had woken to the thought of Sylvain and the image of his face. But not this morning. For there Sean had been with his flesh and blood face, warmly breathing, in the place where he had never even dared to imagine it, on the pillow beside him. The last thing he had meant to do was to rush into bed with Michael, throw himself upon him and ejaculate on his chest. But he had done exactly that. And not because he wanted Michael, but because he had been driven mad with desire by the proximity throughout the night of Sean. You crazy pair, Sean had said. He had been right. In a way that Adam had never anticipated, this morning had dawned on a crazy world. Well, let what had happened stand as a warning. Tonight he would make sure that the sleeping arrangements were different. Let the others do as they liked; he would have his own bed to himself. What had taken place would not be allowed to happen again.

The three boys spent most of the morning in the garden, part idling and part working on the one task that Adam’s parents had asked of them: namely to clean out the window embrasure where the bees had nested.
There were waxy remains to be scraped off the stone surrounds and the shutters and the window-panes to be polished. As for the inside, the bedspreads and floor-carpets were to be collected by the cleaners’ van while Gary had very decently volunteered to clean the floor. The general mood was rather subdued. Sean and Michael were a little tired after a long day’s travelling, and all three of them were preoccupied with making their own private sense of what had occurred in the bedroom earlier.

They livened up as mid-day approached.
They took the rare bus into Langres to be shown the sights by Adam and by the time they had had a small beer and a sandwich each at the Café du Jardin the three of them had rediscovered their extrovert ebullience of the day before. In the Café – which was the smartest hangout in the town and
the
place in which to be seen – they ran into Thierry with Christophe’s sister Monique and were all invited to a barbecue which was happening the following day at Christophe’s place on the shore of Lac de la Mouche. Adam was quite relieved that things were happening that would occupy their time and save them from the kind of otherwise pleasurable rambles around the plateau that might bring them into contact with Sylvain. He also had reason to be grateful that, since they had become lovers, Sylvain had abandoned his routine of cycling past the house first thing in the morning. Adam’s bedroom would have shown unmistakeable signs of occupation at getting-up time, not just by one naked boy who was supposed to be in England but by three of them.

Adam took his friends on a circuit of the ancient ramparts which commanded impressively plunging views of the valley on three sides.
He was able to point out with a proprietorial air the remains of the funicular railway that had once permitted a speedy if vertiginous descent to the mainline railway station far below. He showed them the small white chapel on its grassy mound that had been built in thanksgiving for the town’s narrow escape from invasion during the First World War. And he told them how he had once looked down from this height upon the backs of three jet fighters as they skimmed the forest in a high-speed training dash up the valley.

It was not until later in the day, back in the garden, that Adam and Michael had a chance to catch up on things that they felt could not be discussed in front of Sean.
For example Sean himself… Sean at that moment was sitting under a damson tree a little way off and engaged in animated conversation with Gary, who was unsurprisingly delighted to have his peace and quiet dispelled by the arrival of two further puppyish teenagers, of whom one at least had the looks of a nearly full-grown god.

‘
Well, is he or isn’t he?’ Adam wanted to know. ‘And. Just checking, because after last night I’m pretty sure the answer’s no, but – are you and he by any chance an item?’ Seeing a look of incredulity cross Michael’s face he added, ‘I’m so out of touch, remember. Don’t forget I haven’t seen either of you since September.’

Michael giggled.
‘Except Christmas.’

‘
You know what I mean. Anyway I didn’t actually see you, if you remember. I simply meant that in that long a time anything’s possible.’

‘
Yes, maybe,’ said Michael, ‘but not that possible. Sean still claims to have a girlfriend, though we never see her. But there’s certainly no sign of him going the other way. Pity, really. Unless you count last night, of course. What
was
all that about?’

‘
Nothing, I think,’ said Adam. ‘ You know what happened, or rather didn’t happen and then did. He’s a big innocent in some ways, I sometimes think.’

‘
He’s certainly innocent of me. We haven’t done anything together. He’s all yours if you can persuade him.’

‘
I don’t intend to do that,’ said Adam sternly. ‘I would have tried to once. I mean, if he’d ever behaved like that before. But I wasn’t kidding when I wrote and told you I was in love with Sylvain. I’m not doing it with anybody else.’

‘
That’s not the impression I got this morning,’ said Michael.

Adam looked down and stared with apparent fascination at a small beetle wading through the grass they were sitting on.
‘That was an aberration. I suppose it’s as well you brought that up. Because I want you to know that I don’t think I should have done what I did. It’s not going to be repeated.’

‘
If you say so.’ Michael sounded slightly disappointed, but only slightly. He also sounded unconvinced that Adam’s high-minded resolution would stand much testing.

Adam looked up again.
‘Are you seeing anybody else?’ He asked broad-mindedly, more eager to change the subject than anything else.

Michael looked a bit sheepish.
‘There was somebody a couple of times. Remember Richard Sargent?’

‘
The one you used to call Little Beau Creep? Surely not!’

Michael winced.
‘Oh he’s alright. He’s grown up a bit now. And physically too. It was only a couple of times after school anyway. No big deal.’ He sensed an opportunity to shift the discomfort back to Adam. ‘Not like your wild loony of the woods at any rate, who you’re so serious about. Thought we’d have met him by now. What’s happened to him?’

Adam had to explain the whole story: how he felt he could have let Michael but not Sean meet Sylvain, and how he had pretended he had gone to spend half-term in
England. Michael looked at him with an expression of pitying wonder. ‘You really are mad, aren’t you? You’ve got this thing big.’

Sean’s turn for a private chat with Adam came a little later.
It was just before dinner and Michael had gone indoors to be nice to Jennifer in the kitchen. Sean began by asking about the climate on the plateau, about the fauna and flora and the economy of the region. Adam couldn’t remember him talking like this before. But eventually he took the plunge and asked the question he had really been wanting to. ‘You and Michael. Do you … you know … do you actually …?’ He couldn’t quite manage to finish.

Since Adam and Michael had stared, horror-struck, at Sean out of the same bed earlier that day, their tummies still wet from their extremely brief encounter, there seemed to Adam to be no point in denying it.
‘Yes,’ he said but then, for a whole complex of reasons, amended it to: ‘I mean we used to.’

Sean gave a little chuckle that wasn’t meant to be audible.
Then, apparently changing the subject, he said: ‘Don’t you get lonely out here?’

‘
Yes,’ Adam admitted. ‘At first it was quite hard. But I’ve made friends, sort of, at school. You met two of them for yourself and you’ll meet more of them tomorrow.’

Sean looked at him with a slight frown, an expression he had rarely treated Adam to, and said:
‘Michael was saying something about you meeting up with some strange guy in the woods.’ Then he stopped abruptly.

Adam was torn between embarrassment
– because Sean knew – and feeling flattered that Sean was so curious about him. He decided to answer more or less honestly. ‘Don’t get judgemental. He’s twenty-two. And we’ve been having sex together.’ He found he could not say to Sean:
and we’re in love
.

‘
Wow,’ said Sean. Then: ‘To be honest, I never saw you as the type to be having an adventurous sex life, if you like. But there you were, doing more and going farther than any of us. Good luck to you, I suppose.’

‘
You’re not off me on account of it all being gay, then?’ Adam was naively surprised and ready to be wounded.

‘
No. If that’s the way the cookie crumbles, so be it.’ Then Sean looked closely at Adam. ‘I wonder if I can guess how your teeth got broken.’

Again Adam felt the rush, the knock off balance that whatever it was that Sean radiated delivered to his system.
‘I was being fucked,’ he said, astounded to hear himself pronouncing the words – to Sean of all people – and in his parents’ garden.

‘
You’re quite a guy,’ said Sean in a tone that Adam dared to imagine sounded almost admiring, maybe even envious. Then they both looked at each other in thoughtful silence until a shout from Michael summoned them indoors for dinner.

After dinner
Gary was persuaded by Michael to play the piano. To Adam’s astonishment – and slight pique. He had never presumed so far as to ask the great man to play a solo. He felt it was tantamount to asking a doctor to diagnose some ailment when he was in your house as a dinner guest. Fools rush in, he thought smugly. But Gary was surprisingly amenable to the idea. Adam was even more surprised when he sat down gravely at the little piano and launched into a bravura performance of Chopin’s Grande Polonaise. It was the piece with the fitness-testing and spectacular octave passages in which the pianist’s left hand becomes a blurred jack-hammer for whole minutes at a time. Adam knew that Gary had not been in regular practice for several weeks now and, knowing what a holiday from such practice meant, suspected strongly that he had abandoned his composing earlier in the day when everyone was out and secretly put in some time at the piano to work the piece up. At any rate the performance had an electrifying effect on his audience. Sean in particular was leaning forward in his chair, his expression frozen, his mouth open in astonishment. Adam feared at one point that the piano would break.

When he had finished
Gary turned to his gobsmacked audience and accepted their very vocal appreciation with a quiet smile. They begged him to play something else and he hesitated, explaining very reasonably that he was not sure how he could follow what he had just done. In the end he decided to play some Chopin waltzes, going up to his room to fetch the music and then playing them from the score while Adam volunteered for the honour of turning the pages. The atmosphere had changed subtly from concert hall to family fireside.

‘
I never heard Chopin properly before,’ said Sean afterwards. ‘ At least I never listened properly. And certainly never played like that – and at a distance of five feet.’