Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (24 page)

Hugh
and Jennifer, seeing their son strangely lost after his friends’ departure, all moping and bereft, wondered together if, after all, they had done the right thing in bringing him to France. But they quickly overcame their doubts by reminding each other that the dam project had only two more months to run and that Adam would very soon be restored to his English milieu for good.

Gary
had a shrewder idea about the state of Adam’s mind and heart. Apart from anything else, his had been the bedroom next door. During the previous week he had been working feverishly at his composition for the Avignon Festival, perhaps slightly influenced by the pitch at which life was being lived in the adjacent room, and now it was nearly done. He played some of it through on the piano on Friday evening. But even when Adam made allowances for the fact that it was a mere black and white copy of something created for the orchestra’s paint-box of colour and effect, he found it disappointingly alien: all jars and jangles. He really could make very little of it and wondered how much this was due to the music itself and how much to the unprecedented state in which he found his nerve-endings.

Gary
sensed that the piece hadn’t gone down too well with Adam despite the glib compliments that he managed to dredge up when Gary had finished his keyboard demonstration. He changed the subject and said: ‘ Why don’t we do the Beethoven again before I leave on Monday?’

‘
Oh no,’ said Adam. ‘I couldn’t. I haven’t practised for a week. I’m not like you. I can’t just pick it up and do it.’

‘
I couldn’t once, either, you know.’ Then Gary smiled such a roguish smile that Adam thought he might have spotted a childishly smutty, though unintended, double-entendre in Adam’s last remark. Then he became serious and teacherly for a moment. ‘That’s what practice is for. You’ve got the whole weekend.’

Gary
’s challenge was opportune. Immersing himself in music and the demands that Beethoven made on both himself and his instrument, Adam was able to create an emotional decompression chamber that might bridge the gap between the turbulent atmosphere of the last few days and the potentially frosty one of his first encounter with Sylvain. He worked hard on the sonata for most of Saturday, not caring whether Gary overheard his trials and repetitions or not. On the Sunday he merely tinkered with it at intervals. He was outwardly quiet that day but mentally focussed on the two confrontations that would come later in the day: one with Sylvain in the afternoon, the other with Gary and Beethoven during the evening.

He cycled off towards the
vallon
earlier than the time he had set for his reunion with Sylvain, reflecting uncomfortably that not only lovers ‘ever fly before the
clock’ but also people with guilty consciences. The path was narrow now. Hawthorns had bushed out and brushed him on both sides with their foaming white blossom with its sweet and sickly scent. You mustn’t take it indoors, people said: its perfume was supposed to be reminiscent of death. Bright campion flowers shot crimson sparks along the banks, while where the meadows showed between the trees the first red poppies were opening among the gold, just hinting at the next month’s fields of flame

When he arrived at the sleeper path by the springs there was nothing to do but wait.
He heard the birds calling quietly in the afternoon warmth, heard the rustles of breeze and insects but there was no sign of Sylvain. Time passed and Adam sat tensely on the handrail of the bridge, now impatient for Sylvain’s arrival, now glad to be able to postpone for a few more minutes the inevitable awkwardness of their encounter. An hour ticked by. Adam got off the rail, slowly and heavily, like someone three times his age. Pensively he undid his fly and pissed without enthusiasm into the thickening mud beside the log path. Sylvain wasn’t coming. He zipped up and retrieved his bicycle from its usual hiding place in the undergrowth. It took an age to push it up the flinty slope. It took another age to cycle home.

Gary
was waiting for him when he got back. ‘ Come on,’ he said, ‘ let’s go for it. We’ll both get nervous if we have to wait till after supper.’ Adam was flattered by the inclusive ‘both’. This time Hugh and Jennifer were invited to be an audience. Adam had fully expected to be nervous, more so than before, but now the time had come he found that he felt cool and almost detached. Was this how professionals felt when they played in public? he wondered.

They sat down, tuned up, and then
Adam drew his bow across the strings. The sonata had begun. Here he was, playing it for the second time with a professional – he almost dared to think ‘fellow-professional’ but mentally slapped his wrist for such presumption. He did not feel the experience in quite the same intense way that he had done the first time.
…never recapture, that first fine careless rapture
. Sylvain would like that line about the thrush; Adam would try to translate it for him sometime. Sometime. When. …If.

This time
Adam felt a greater sense of being in control, of making the music do his bidding, of a greater technical mastery of the piece. And when the performance was finished and his parents very properly congratulated their almost professional sounding son, he felt a sense of achievement that was only partly due to his attainment in terms of the music. He felt as if he had somehow regained control of what was happening in his life and would be able to keep the events of the previous week in a sensible perspective from now on. He felt more ready and able to face Sylvain.

When they had finished supper it was still light outside.
Gary said he wanted a breath of fresh air and asked Adam, almost diffidently, if he would come for a walk with him. Adam by now quite hero-worshipped Gary, at least where music was concerned, and said of course he would.

‘
There’s something I want you to hear,’ Gary explained as they walked along the road past the mayor’s house. ‘ I remember you telling me once you couldn’t see the point of fugues in music. They were like nothing in nature, you said. I want to see if I can prove you wrong.’

They came to the fork in the road and chose the downhill lane towards Noidant, but they hadn’t gone far in this direction before
Gary made them stop near a wooden field gate. Beyond it lay a narrow strip of pasture just a few metres wide. Shaggy hawthorn hedges, heavy with blossom, edged the strip on both sides and reached across towards their opposite numbers with vigorously growing branches just as the upper storeys of medieval city houses stretch out and try to touch their neighbours on the other side of the street. The sun’s nearly horizontal rays lit the hawthorn leaves like emeralds among their flower heads of laundered lace. Darting rapidly from one side to the other and then disappearing into the dense foliage were small birds, light brown in colour and with a reddish tinge to their tails – the last part of each one to be seen as they plunged into the obscurity of the hedgerows. The shadows grew perceptibly as the sun sank beyond the
montagne
. In a few minutes the birds would have no colour in their tails at all.

‘
There was once an English cellist called Beatrice Harrison,’ said Gary. ‘She lived near Limpsfield in the Surrey Downs. She used to play her cello in the garden at night. Nightingales used to come out of the woods and sing along with her. Isn’t that rather lovely?’

‘
I think I once heard a recording of her,’ said Adam.

‘
You may have done. The BBC made several in the nineteen-twenties. Believe it or not, they were the first outside broadcasts that were ever done.’

The sun was finally gone from where they stood.
It only picked out the crests of the forest further east, beyond the
vallon
. Three long clear notes pierced the still air: the high-pitched whistle of an elfin ship leaving the port of day to set out on a magic journey across the still, deep sea of night. The hairs rose on the back of Adam’s neck as the music began. A second bird started up while the first developed his song, subject against counter-subject, just as in the artful fugues that Adam had distrusted up till now. A third voice entered, announcing its arrival with the same three piping whistles. Then a fourth.

Adam
and Gary listened in silence for five minutes, hardly moving a muscle. Then Gary said, ‘Come, don’t get cold. It’s their party, not ours. Let’s leave them to it.’ He turned and led the way back up the lane.

‘
That was brilliant,’ Adam said. ‘ I never imagined …’ He tailed off.

‘
They used to say at college that you didn’t really appreciate chamber music until you’d fallen in love with two violinists, a viola-player and a cellist. Only then could you hear all the voices properly. A fugue is only chamber music in a rather formal shape.’

‘
I think you’ve won,’ said Adam. ‘About the fugue, I mean. That really was one, wasn’t it? Not as formal as Bach, obviously, but I can see where the idea might have come from.’ He stopped, unsure what to say next. Now that Gary’s departure was imminent he found there were all sorts of questions he wanted to ask him and that he wished he had thought of before. ‘Did you fall in love with all those instrumentalists?’ was what he finally came out with.

Gary
laughed. ‘I’m not sure if I managed that precise tally. Something like it though, perhaps. I took the advice to heart in a more general way.’

‘
Why did you come to live in France?’ Adam asked next.

‘
Was it for music, or for love? Do I read your question right?’

Adam
nodded, embarrassed to discover that he was so transparent.

‘
Well, both in a way. A prophet is never honoured in his own country. It’s easier to be someone special in a foreign land, particularly in the field of music. You’d be surprised how exotic a name like mine sounds to French ears. It’s also …’ He hesitated … ‘At least this was the case twenty years ago … it was, how shall I say this, easier to be a gay man some distance away from where you grew up.’ A mouse rustled in the grass verge.

‘
Did you tell your parents?’

‘
No. Does that disappoint you? My father died when I was twenty and my mother nine years later. Perhaps I would have told them if they’d lived. But I don’t think they’d have taken it well. My brother and sister know, but that’s not quite the same.’

‘
One day,’ said Adam, ‘I suppose I’ll have to tell mine. But maybe I need to be a bit more sure myself.’

Gary
drew breath to say something, then shut his mouth tight against a burgeoning smile and appeared to reconsider his reply. ‘I think that’s quite wise,’ was what he finally said.

‘
Of course, it does seem more and more probable that I am.’ This time Adam could see Gary trying to suppress the smile. ‘And then, of course I’ll tell them.’

‘
Well, be careful,’ Gary warned. ‘They may not want to be hit over the head with it.’

‘
I’m sure they’ll be very understanding. They’re pretty together people.’

‘
I wouldn’t bank too heavily on that. D’you know?’

Adam
felt annoyed. ‘Why not? They’re OK about you. They let you take me out for walks in the dark … to listen to nightingales.’

‘
They trust me to be a gentleman. I told you that before. Anyway, don’t exaggerate the danger. It’s only just beginning to get dark and we’ll be back indoors in no time. Seriously, though, there is another thing. I am not your parents’ only son. You are. The most tolerant and enlightened people sometimes take a very different view of things when it comes to their own children. And that brings me to something else.’

Adam
groaned. ‘Don’t say that. You’re being like a parent now yourself.’

‘
Sorry,’ said Gary. ‘I’ll try not to do it again after today. Look, I’m not saying to you, do what I did and never tell them. Things were different when I was young. But I do think you should give some thought to the question of when and how they find out, if they’re going to. It may not be as easy or as painless as you imagine. And … this is my last word, I promise – if you carry on under their roof again the way you did last week, they will see only too clearly what is happening and you’ll have all hell to pay. You’ve got away with it once, I don’t know how. Put it down to your parents’ good natures that they didn’t get the whole picture, but you can’t go on presuming on their ignorance. You’ve been very lucky, but you won’t get that lucky again. When they do find out, it needs to be at a moment of your choosing, not theirs.’

Adam
had felt himself go hot and cold by turns during this speech. ‘You knew? You think Mum and Dad nearly …’

‘
Dear Adam, I had the room next door. I haven’t the slightest wish to know what went on exactly, but let’s just say you were hardly the quietest group of teenagers on the continent.’

Adam
still clung at times to the child’s perception that activities that were private to him were as invisible and inaudible to the grown-up world as if he had been a leprechaun. It gave him a jolt to have this illusion so comprehensively dispelled by Gary. Still, he was surprised to hear himself say next: ‘Don’t you think Sean’s beautiful, though?’

‘
Well yes,’ said Gary. ‘I can’t disagree. He’s like an Armani model…. No, no, that’s quite wrong. He’s like nothing of the sort. His great quality is his homeliness. If he became an actor – which he won’t – he’d play Thomas Hardy heroes or else take a leading role in the next generation of Hovis ads. I suppose I’m to understand that he’s one of the two loves of your life.’ Adam made an embarrassed mumble of assent. ‘Well, he’s a very nice boy. Sweetness is the quality that springs to mind. He had long earnest chats with me.’