Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (26 page)

When the convulsions had died away there was no doubt or discussion about what they would do next.
Without another word they turned along the path they had taken when they had first met here, and then taken time and again since. As a precaution against brambles Adam tucked himself back into his trousers but he continued to walk bare-chested, his shirt clutched, along with his school bag, in one hand. He was childishly pleased when Sylvain took his own shirt off too as they went along, his brown torso making a striking contrast to Adam’s pale one. From time to time Sylvain dipped his hand into Adam’s pocket as if to make sure that what had so blatantly been offered was still really there.

They reached the summit of the path, where the oak-tree grew in its grass clearing and the stream could be heard splashing along a hundred feet below.
They turned and faced each other. ‘Your muscles are coming along,’ said Sylvain, running the flat of his hand over Adam’s bare chest. Then, looking each other steadily in the eye, they removed the few clothes they still had on. ‘ Happy Birthday, Fox,’ said Adam.

Adam did not forget his promise to let Sylvan experience the first bath of his life. A few days after their reconciliation came an afternoon when Hugh would have meetings in Chaumont until late and Jennifer had to make up piano lessons missed during the half-term holiday, returning from Langres around seven. It was by no means the first time that such a thing had happened but Adam had not previously dared to think of inviting Sylvain to his parents’ house in their absence. Now that he had actually been there on legitimate business, on the day of the removal of the swarm of bees, it seemed somehow an easier step to take. Besides which, after his recent failures where truth and constancy were concerned, Adam felt that there was nothing he would not be prepared to do for Sylvain to make up.

Sylvain made the whole thing easier by suggesting that he should make his own way to the house from the back, across the meadow and over the low wall into the garden.
The only windows that overlooked the back garden were a long way off and anyone seen stepping over a wall could not easily be identified as Sylvain, but could at a pinch be claimed to have been Adam himself in the unlikely case that anyone said anything.

It was a novel experience for them both, alone together in
Adam’s house. They were both self-conscious as they descended to the cellar to find a couple of cans of beer. This idea only came to Adam because there was quite a quantity down there just now, a present from Gary, and Adam felt sure his father hadn’t actually counted every can. They roamed the house as they drank, Adam showing off the appurtenances of his middle class lifestyle a little uncomfortably. But Sylvain was neither curious nor awkward about the unfamiliar surroundings – he had seen some of the house on the bee Sunday, after all. The only thing that caught his interest was Adam’s cello in its case, and then he showed something like excitement, insisting that Adam take it out and show it off to him. Adam was conscious of the limitations of time and played him a curtailed version of
Le Cygne
by Saint-Saens, wondering as he did so how this would go down with his untutored audience who stayed standing while Adam played. But Sylvain was quite knocked out by the experience and demanded an immediate repeat, which Adam was sufficiently encouraged as to deliver without cuts.

They did not sit down until they reached
Adam’s bedroom. There, once Sylvain had been introduced to Adam’s penguin mascot, it occurred to them both for the first time that sharing a bath together was only the second most exciting new thing they could do. Accordingly they undressed and – something that many other lovers take for granted from day one – slipped together into Adam’s bed. If Sylvain had any thoughts about this special place being shared by others not so long ago he kept them to himself.

How fast time went.
How tempting to ignore its passing and curl up afterwards and sleep. Perhaps it was fortunate that Sylvain retained his curiosity about the experience of bathing, and badgered Adam into getting up to run the taps. It was amusing for Adam to see Sylvain so captivated by the preparations for something so banal, and then jump in with such a careless splash that Adam was momentarily anxious for the bathroom floor. But joining him inside the tub was new to Adam too; he had never thought to try this out with Michael, though it might have been easier a year or two back with him than it was now with a full-grown man. They soaped and stroked each other and laughed and banged their heads on the taps. Then Sylvain could not restrain himself – he apologised simultaneously – from making water as grandly and vertically as a baroque fountain. Adam accused him of saving it up all week, but admitted it was an impressive spectacle. By then the two of them were hard again and had to deal with each other fiercely in the water, an experience with its own fresh surprises for them both.

That might have been the last of the day’s novelties so it came as a surprise to find that towelling another person down was quite good too.
But at last time weighed in and chivvied them into dressing and clearing up. Sylvain promised a surprise for Adam in return the following day if he would wait just where he got off the school bus in the afternoon. And Adam, squirting breath-freshener in both their mouths, unceremoniously pressed the two empty beer-cans into Sylvain’s hands and asked him to drop them in the mayor’s dustbin as he passed. A moment later Sylvain had climbed the garden wall and disappeared.

Adam was not all that surprised the next day, after the bus had dropped him at the crossroads, to find Sylvain turning up at the wheel of the pick-up. ‘ Aujourd’hui on vient chez moi,’ he said. Adam buried his head in Sylvain’s warm lap as they drove through the village, not wanting stray parents or neighbours to see him being spirited away. Once he guessed they were safely back in open country he felt able to look up again, but almost wished he hadn’t. Sylvain’s driving had not improved at all since the last occasion, and the high-speed journey to the farm was just as terrifying as before. At least it was soon over, Sylvain jerking on the handbrake to scrunch to a stop in the middle of the farmyard. ‘ We’re going to see your bees,’ he said as they stumbled out of the car into a spring tide of barking, tail-flagging canines.

There was no way of telling
Adam’s bees from any others. The new hive among the apple trees looked exactly like all the others and as for the insects themselves …. Adam was prepared to take their identity on trust. He permitted himself the trite observation that they seemed to have made themselves well and truly at home. And Sylvain made one of his rare dry jokes: ‘ No signs of homesickness.’ It sounded slightly better in French.

‘
Come indoors,’ Sylvain invited, and they turned back towards the house. As they were approaching the great barn a sparrow hawk appeared dramatically against the sky, steering stunningly fast around the corner of the barn roof, terrifying the sparrows that congregated there into disorderly flight. There was a whirring of wings and a chorus of panicked cheeping that almost drowned out the dying squeal of the one that tried to get away but failed. The hawk flicked away as quickly as it had come and vanished towards the nearby copse. As it banked Adam just had time to see the little bundle of feathers that it clutched tightly to its breast in vicelike claws.
Erl-könig hat mir ein Leids gethan
. The chilling music as well as the words flashed unexpectedly into his mind and he gasped involuntarily. ‘
Ouais
,’ said Sylvain, registering Adam’s start, ‘ that was quite something. Happens every day though.’ He put an arm round Adam’s shoulder as if to comfort him and was dismayed in his turn when Adam jerked it away with a cry as if the contact had given him an electric shock.

But a few moments later they were both restored by the novelty of finding themselves seated in the room Adam had once before seen briefly, where everything seemed snowed under with torn and muddy newspaper and dogs, Adam experiencing the strange liquorice taste of
Pastis for only the second time in his life. Sylvain’s father had poured the drink in a no-nonsense, hospitable way after shaking the boy’s hand. He had met Adam once before, when he had come with the whole family to collect the bee swarm, but that had hardly been a time for social conversation. He showed no sign of surprise now at Sylvain’s bringing a sixteen-year-old home with him. His curiosity was exercised only by the fact that Adam came from England. Wasn’t that a terribly dangerous place to live, he wanted to know? Didn’t they have terrorists on the news and bombs going off all the time? Adam said he didn’t think it was as dangerous as all that. Mostly those things happened in London, when they happened at all, and he himself didn’t go there all that often. He thought you could live quite a long time in England without much chance of being caught up in something like that. ‘Really?’ said Sylvain’s father. It just showed that you hadn’t to put too much trust in the media. He indicated the disintegrating pages that lay on the floor and seats around him with a dismissive wave of the hand.

Various children ran in and out from time to time as they talked and Sylvain’s mother appeared at one moment.
She greeted Adam with a friendly smile and shook his hand but quickly turned her attention to her son. She had quite a litany of instructions for him, concerning clean clothes and some medication or other which she went on about at some length, and something about money that Adam couldn’t quite follow, though it was hardly his business. This was a side of Sylvain’s existence that he hadn’t seen before: Sylvain as a rather disorganised child having to be nagged and sorted out by parents. He saw that it was a measure of Sylvain’s depth of feeling for him that he was letting Adam into his domestic life at all and then realised that, for all the differences of their backgrounds, Sylvain’s home life was more like his own than he would ever have suspected.

After a few moments Sylvain had clearly had enough.
He turned to Adam. ‘Want to drive a tractor?’ His mother protested but his father did not and so he got to his feet, a signal that Adam took to mean ‘follow me’, and together they left the room.

Adam
had been used to changing gear for his mother when she was driving and occasionally his father had let him take the car up and down the driveways of friends who were lucky enough to have them, but the tractor was even more fun. Adam loved the way you simply chose a gear and set the throttle and let the machine find its own speed like a horse. It took the bumps and hollows of the pasture gamely, without protest, like a boat in a slight swell. And it was fun to have Sylvain at his side, perched on the big rear mudguard, steadying himself with a hand on the back of Adam’s neck, telling him once or twice to change the control settings as the terrain required. He was quite sorry when the ride came to an end. He couldn’t understand now why the sparrow hawk they had seen earlier had filled him with such unaccountable dread.

On the way home in the pick-up Sylvain drove more calmly, although hardly more proficiently.
Perhaps his driving skills were better adapted to handling tractors on rough and open ground than to cars on the public highway, Adam thought charitably.

‘
In my grandfather’s time,’ said Sylvain, ‘they didn’t have tractors on the farm at all. They did everything with oxen. Ploughing, mowing and reaping, hauling logs. Always a pair together in the yoke. My grandfather told me that the two oxen that made a team grew together like brothers, like twins that were born together and made two halves of the same being. Then, when one of a pair died, the one that was left would be unable to eat. He would spend his time sniffing and smelling the harness and the reins that had his partner’s scent on them. He was no use for work. Couldn’t work alone and wouldn’t work with a new team-mate. Just pined, you see. In the end my grandfather would have to take it to the slaughter. You couldn’t give space to an animal that didn’t do anything.
Triste, non?
It’s like you and me.’ Sylvain stopped the truck just on the edge of Courcelles village. ‘We’ll be like the two oxen one day, won’t we?
Les vieux inséparables
.’ He drew Adam’s face towards him and gave him a thoughtful kiss.

Adam
walked the last hundred yards to home. On both sides of the road the fields were changing colour from buttercup gold to poppy red, as if someone were little by little stirring a dish of tomatoes into scrambled egg. And within himself he felt a similarly bizarre stir and clash of emotions: feelings that ran the whole gamut from sunbursts of the greatest rapture to thundershakes of the most extreme disquiet. It was only as he was pushing open the front gate that he realised he had spent an afternoon with Sylvain for the first time ever without making love.

FOURTEEN

How wonderful it was with Sylvain now.
No longer spring but high summer. How much better it was with this man he loved and who loved him back than it could ever have become with Sean. Sean blew hot and cold and, despite his recent dipping of a toe into gay waters, did not and could not possibly return the passionate feelings that Adam had for him. And how much better it was than anything he had ever had with Michael, fond of Michael as he was. Although Michael had surprised him during half-term by hinting that he felt more deeply about Adam than he had let on before, as far as Adam was concerned their relationship was still simply a friendship that included sex – not, emphatically not, a romance.