Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (22 page)

‘
Now I’ve hurt you,’ said Sean softly. ‘I’m sorry. I do love you, you know.’ That was too much. Adam broke free from Sean’s handclasp and walked off across the garden, explaining unconvincingly that he had to go for a pee.

He was still in a chastened mood when
Michael found him again a few minutes later. He was afraid Michael would want to talk to him about Sean and his heart warmed to him when he found that he chose not to. ‘Your French friends are a weird lot,’ he said instead. ‘Quite nice, though. The one doing the cooking is like a young version of General de Gaulle.
La France, c’est moi.
That kind of thing. But he’s right about one thing. We both agreed that you’re absolutely mad. He told me you’d told him you’d told your mother he’d broken your teeth. And that you wanted him to go along with the story if she asked him. I mean, come on man! He was really pissed off about that, I can tell you.’

‘
I know,’ said Adam.

‘
Well, why did you?’

‘
I don’t know,’ said Adam, though he did. Now that he had come down from his Sean-induced, sex-induced high he regretted his earlier silliness.

‘
If you go on like that you’ll have to spend the whole of the second half of your life apologising to your friends for what you said to them in the first half. That is, if you still have any friends left to apologise to.’

Adam
grabbed at Michael’s wrists and wrestled him to the ground, though not without an effort. Michael had toughened up a lot in the last year.

‘
Tell you one thing, though,’ Michael said calmly, looking up at Adam through the trellis of their forearms – he had no objection to being sat upon by his friend – ‘I’m surprised you haven’t had young Christophe yet.’

‘
Christophe!?’

‘
Why not? He’s rather cuddly, don’t you think? And clearly prefers boys to girls.’

‘
You’re kidding.’

Michael
gave Adam as pitying a look as anyone could manage in such a pinned-down position. ‘ Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. He’s mad for Thierry for a start – much good that’ll do him – and he’s also a little bit in love with you.’

‘
Jesus,’ said Adam. Then: ‘ He didn’t tell you all this, did he?’

‘
No, of course not. But I could tell.’ He put on a singsong voice that might have been meant to be Micky Mouse. ‘I know when people are in love. I ain’t stupid, you know. I don’t have to have everything spelled out for me. And I tell you what …’ He had abandoned the silly voice by now, or perhaps it had abandoned him. ‘ When it comes to people falling in love, like baby-face Christophe you know, people do make
the
most in-ap-
pro-
priate choices.’

Adam released his friend from underneath him and allowed him to scramble to his feet.

The atmosphere at bedtime that evening was more than a little tense, though not from any animosity or jealousy between the three of them. Almost the reverse, in fact. Sean, decently, set out his position first. ‘Look, I really don’t care what the two of you want to do. I really don’t mind. But it was a mistake my trying to join in, so count me out, OK? And I don’t mind sleeping on the floor if that’s more convenient.’

Then everyone tried to outdo everyone else in gentlemanly sentiment and self-sacrificing gesture.
Michael assured Sean that he wouldn’t have to sleep on the floor but could have ‘his’ bed. He, Michael, would sleep with Adam – if, of course, that was what Adam wanted. Adam answered that that would be no problem and tried to explain to Sean that he quite understood his not wanting to … though he wasn’t sure how to formulate the end of that sentence and so abandoned it just there.

In the end
Sean had one bed to himself while Michael shared with Adam, the two of them playing with each other until they fell asleep, but quietly, out of sensitivity to Sean’s feelings on the matter – whatever they might have been. As for the matter of Adam’s disloyalty to Sylvain, well, it seemed a bit late to dwell on that just now after everything that had already happened. The stage of ‘avoiding the occasion’ was well past; it would now have to be a question of putting things right afterwards. In the meantime, Adam supposed he might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.

In the morning
Sean did not hurry off to the shower as usual, so Michael went first instead. At which point Sean astounded Adam by calling softly across to him: ‘ Come over here.’ And amazement notwithstanding, Adam arose without hesitation, his cock doing likewise, and stepped across to Sean’s bed. ‘Give me a cuddle,’ Sean said, without any of the shyness he had shown two nights ago, and pulled back the duvet to let Adam slip in beside him. They didn’t experiment with anything more than they had done the last time but found it vastly more fun for being the more relaxed about it. So much so that they were quite unperturbed when Michael returned to the room to find them loosely cuddled together, quite uncovered, moments after they had simultaneously come – Sean most copiously; Adam, understandably after the night he had already enjoyed with Michael, in rather less spectacular fashion. Michael was wiser this time than to try to join them. He just sat on Adam’s bed and stared across at the two of them. ‘Well, well, well,’ he said cryptically.

They had been invited to go fishing.
Christophe had made the invitation the day before at the barbecue. Adam was pleased to find that it would only be a small party. No Thierry – just as well, in view of Adam’s behaviour to him yesterday – no Céline – enough emotional cross-currents as things were. Just the three English boys, Christophe and his sister. Michael had never been fishing; Sean had, and was a little inclined to play the expert at first. But once the borrowed rods were distributed (Thank-you, Christophe’s family) and the morning’s sport got under way, a pleasantly calm and peaceful atmosphere prevailed which, for Adam at least, was a blessed relief from the turmoil that seemed to prevail everywhere else, without and within.

They caught a respectable number of roach and then, to everyone’s surprise, one quite large pike which had to be killed with an accurate tap from a stone
– Christophe expertly obliged here – before it could do permanent damage to anyone’s fingers. Adam found himself looking at Christophe with new eyes. Michael had been right: he was quite nice-looking in a cuddly, undeveloped sort of way. For the first time ever Adam imagined holding him, undressing him, discovering his hardening little French
bite
… He discovered that he was getting an erection himself. Perhaps the more different people you got involved with, the more people you took an interest in, the more people you could consider becoming involved with and the more catholic your tastes became. It seemed a long time since last Friday when he had promised Sylvain he would stay with him for ever.

They had not brought anything to eat with them; this time there was no Céline to plunge artichokes into boiling water and to provide ready-mixed vinaigrette.
They decided to call at the café at St. Ciergues for a
casse-croute
before crossing the dam back to Christophe’s house. Without Thierry’s presence to remind the patron of parental strictures they were served beers, not shandies, with their
croque-monsieurs
and enjoyed a relaxed but quite serious conversation in which they compared French school life with its English counterpart. Adam found himself at half a remove from the discussion, partly because, as the only person present with in-depth knowledge of both systems, he had little to learn, and partly because they were five in number and Sean seemed more than ready to pair off with Monique, just as Michael was with her cherubic brother. From time to time he was called on to translate an unfamiliar idea from one language to the other but he was surprised to see how well, in the main, everyone coped: the linguistic immersion of yesterday seemed to have prised open unsuspected stores of French in the baggage of Sean and Michael; similarly Monique and Christophe turned out to have a greater command of English than they had ever let on to Adam.

It did occur to him that he was more exposed to the chance of an encounter with Sylvain down here by the dam than he had been at any time since his pretended departure for England, but having survived so far and this being the last full day of his friends’ visit, he was beginning to feel less cautious, less fearful of being caught out than he had done up till now.
True, once they had finished lunch and set off across the dam top to Christophe’s place he did feel a little exposed. Still, there was nobody else on the dam itself or in the near vicinity as far as he could see, and he knew only too well that anyone watching from a distance would see only five figures crossing the dam with fishing-tackle; Sylvain would not be expecting to see Adam in such a party and he would not be able to pick him out if he did.

At last they came off the dam itself and turned right along the eastern shore of the lake.
There remained just a couple of hundred metres before they reached Christophe’s driveway. A movement caught their attention and they saw that another fisherman had just finished his afternoon’s sport and was clambering up the bank towards them through the tall, bamboo-thick reeds. He carried his rod in one hand, his net in the other and his bag of bits and baits over his shoulder. His arms flailed once or twice as he struggled to keep his footing on the steep sandy bank. He was dressed rather attractively, as it happened, in blue denims and a loose shirt in a big blue check. Adam was pleased about that; at least the young man had not been shown sartorially wanting in comparison with Sean and Michael who were both dressed in pretty much the same way. Adam noticed this reaction of his with surprise, like someone making dispassionate psychological observations.

Of course that was the only thing he was pleased about.
The rest of his mind was overcome with horror. For a moment his eyes and Sylvain’s met. Each saw the same beginnings of a smile of recognition and a wave, each saw the other’s smile wither and die, saw the wave abandoned in mid-salute. Each saw in the whole figure before him the mirror of his own sudden confusion and pain. But in Sylvain’s expression perplexity had the bigger part, in Adam’s, guilt. And each heard, a fraction of a second later, as the thunder follows the flash, the sound of a greeting beginning with a spontaneous intake of breath but then choked off and exhaled as something like a grunt or cough.

Sylvain’s ascent of the bank halted.
Adam was borne along past him by the momentum of his ambling, chattering friends. They continued along the road towards Christophe’s, Adam giving nothing away to his companions by any outward remark or sign but feeling inwardly as if a trap-door had opened in the floor of his life to reveal nothing underneath it but the infinite cold emptiness of space.

The pike presented a problem when it came to dividing up the catch: it was a question of who would eat what and where. But a solution presented itself quite quickly after a short discussion and a phone-call to Jennifer. Christophe was invited to dinner at Adam’s, bringing all the fish with him. Monique would be out with friends and so quite ready to relinquish her share of the fish but driving back later and so able to pick Christophe up and take him home at the end of the evening. Christophe’s mother enquired anxiously over the phone as to whether Jennifer had the ingredients for a
beurre blanc
, was relieved to learn that she had, and then reassured the alarmed Jennifer in her turn that Christophe would undertake to do the actual cooking. When they eventually left, Christophe’s father – perhaps relieved to have the chance of an evening alone with his wife for once – sent them off up the hill with a fairly generous present of white wine.

Once again the enjoyable now of life
– an evening surrounded by friends, with good food and pleasantly more to drink than he was used to, and during which he, as host, was briefly at the centre of everyone’s world – shielded Adam from the storms that howled around outside. The charmed and sheltered moment took his mind off the reckoning that had to come between himself and Sylvain, and the reckoning that he would have to make with himself.

It was the middle of May. The day had been hot and the evening had cooled little, even when the sun’s fiery disc had given place to the evening star’s plain sceptre in the west. The pike had been a
grand succès
with its buttery accompaniment, and Christophe’s health drunk in appreciation. Afterwards, by popular demand, Adam had played the cello (nothing too heavy, no Bach, no Beethoven) with Gary consenting to accompany him. The picture window was slid open so that they played to the outside world as well, and once a bat actually flew in and did a circuit of the room before returning to more profitable outdoor pursuits. And after that the four boys drifted outside, managing to smuggle a full bottle of wine out with them plus (somehow) some glasses and a corkscrew, while Hugh and Jennifer and Gary remained inside with glasses and conversation of their own.

Somehow Christophe got lost.
One minute he was sitting with the others, the next he wasn’t and a moment later Michael also somehow disappeared into the darkness. ‘Well,’ said Sean, left alone with Adam under the damson tree, ‘it seems to be turning into quite an evening.’

Adam giggled.
He hadn’t realised before that Sean was capable of this kind of observation, that he had that kind of I’m-not-as-straight-as-you-think-I-am sense of humour. Perhaps before this week he hadn’t. Maybe it was the company of Michael that had brought it out. Maybe it was … himself.