Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (32 page)

It came in a goblet that seemed as big and round as the world.
The wine was so cool that the moisture in the air had condensed on the outside of the glass and Adam saw the pale clear liquid within like sunshine through a sea-fret. He sipped at it and thought it was like nectar. He had never tasted wine so good. All of a sudden he thought of Oscar Wilde, waiting for the end of his world at the Cadogan Hotel and drinking hock and seltzer. He had one up on poor old Oscar. Hock and seltzer could never have tasted as good as this.

Just then Sylvain arrived.
If Adam’s appearance had caused a ripple, Sylvain’s emergence onto the scene to reinforce the gypsy-like impression he had made created a discernible wave of shock. Adam had not given a thought before to just how brief Sylvain’s cut-offs were, or to the fact that his t-shirt didn’t really meet them at his waist. Everything that was not concealed by them looked a splendid shade of brown. And his hair, which needed cutting, was turning, thanks to two days without the attentions of a comb, into an impressively wild and wavy black mane. He carried a bulging supermarket carrier bag from which protruded the inescapable baguette. Adam hailed him with a wave. He pointed to his wineglass. ‘You must try some of this.’

Sylvain did.
‘Of course it’s not champagne,’ he said, tasting it carefully, ‘or even Chablis. But you have to admit it’s pretty good.’

Why did people always have to tell you that one thing was not the same thing as something else, Adam wondered?
But he was in far too good a humour, and far too much in love with Sylvain at that moment to find fault. At any rate Sylvain seemed to find it sufficiently good to propose that they had a second glass, and while they were waiting for it to arrive Adam was astonished to notice that the two bird-sized ladies at the nearby table had polished off their second lavish portion of beef and were being helped by the waiter to a third.

Another surprising thing happened after that.
Three people strolled into the conservatory from outside: two parents and their teenage son. (It was Wednesday, so there was no afternoon school.) The son was not in shorts but in clean cotton slacks, but his flaming head of hair marked him out as different, in all probability, from everybody else in the region. Neither of his parents shared that trait; it really must have been a throwback to his Scottish roots. Adam and Frédéric looked at each other in stunned surprise for a second or two before the stately progress of his parents dragged Frédéric away to a table at the other end of the room where he would be out of Adam’s sight unless he were pointedly to look round.

By the time Adam and Sylvain had finished their second enormous glass of Givry the two small ladies had been served and had eaten a fourth portion of beef and were being asked by the waiter if they might not see their way to managing a fifth.
Adam thought that the original joint might have been equivalent to their own combined weight. It was time to go. It had already been decided that Adam would leave first; he had the slower journey to make to their meeting point; Sylvain would pay the bill and leave in a few minutes. As Adam got up and turned to go he got a clear view, momentarily, of Frédéric, sandwiched between his parents, eating an elaborate ice-cream. And Frédéric saw him too. As quickly as he could he made a telephone gesture to Adam and then a thumbs-up sign that his parents missed. Adam returned the thumbs-up with a beaming, grateful smile. Then he and Sylvain enacted what they thought was quite a good pantomime of two people saying good-bye to each other and that they must meet for another drink again soon. As Adam left the conservatory he heard the two old ladies agreeing to ingest just one more plate of beef.

He felt light-headed as walked out into the sunshine and skipped rather than walked the zigzag route through the side alleys of the little town that he and Sylvain had planned together over their map on the back of the shopping list.
Twenty minutes later he reached the spot on the outskirts where Sylvain had dropped him a little under two hours ago.

It was not many minutes before he saw the familiar battered pick-up rounding the bend and making its way towards him.
He suffered a moment’s anxiety as he strained his eyes to make out that the driver really was Sylvain. He was nagged by the thought that his call to his parents had been intercepted even in the short time the connection had been open, and it was a relief when Sylvain’s face came into focus through the windscreen and he pulled up to let Adam in.

‘
C’est bien passé. Ah oui, c’est bien passé,’
chuckled Sylvain once Adam had jumped into the truck and slammed the door. Adam was inclined to agree. Everything had gone without a hitch. He was particularly pleased that he had engineered the end of the adventure without putting either Sylvain or himself at risk. Céline had been contacted and she would certainly have let his parents know by now that he was safe. Then the Noirmoutiers, arriving tomorrow, would do the rest. Meanwhile there was one last evening to enjoy, frolicking naked with Sylvain out of doors in the firelight with good food – he glanced at the bulging carrier bag nestling at his feet – and good wine.

They had left the town behind them and were in open country, the vineyards around them heavily green in the mid-afternoon sun.
Adam guessed they were within three kilometres of their destination. He felt his cock stirring inside his shorts. Everything felt good. ‘Can I drive?’ he asked. ‘It’s an easy road. We’re nearly there.’

Sylvain looked at him, noticed the promising bulge in his shorts, which quickly triggered a copycat reaction in his own, and said
, ‘I suppose you can.’ He pulled over, got out and walked round to the other side of the car while Adam slipped across the gear lever into the driver’s seat. He felt comfortable and confident. Sylvain dropped into the seat beside him and slammed the door. Adam released the handbrake, let the gears engage without too much of a shock and set a course along the centre of the road towards the place that, now he knew he must leave it tomorrow, he was beginning to think of as home. The feeling of being in control of the movement of the car excited him further and he wasn’t surprised to feel Sylvain fumbling at his shorts to open them and then free his pent-up member which popped up like a bottle that has been trapped under water and is suddenly released.

‘
Oh man, that’s terrific!’ he exclaimed in English, overwhelmed by the sensation: the bizarre juxtaposition of happening, situation and danger. Sylvain started to masturbate him slowly while, with the other hand, unzipping himself and extracting his own bulging erection. He felt this was the sensible way to go about things: Adam needed to keep both his own hands on the wheel.

By the time they turned up the cart-track that led to the farm Adam was squirming in his seat and taking the bumps and pot-holes in their path without slackening speed, just as he had done when learning to drive the tractor.
Sylvain was working away very fast now with both hands. He wanted the climax to come while they were still moving. It did. Adam spurted suddenly over his bare thighs and a second later Sylvain gave a cry and came heavily all over his shorts.

‘
Oh wow,’ said Adam, slowing the car down to a more sedate speed. Then he giggled. ‘What a mess we’re both in.’

They turned the last bend in the track, which brought them within sight of the front door of the farmhouse.
Outside it a large, dark blue car was parked. Adam gulped and braked suddenly in panic. Behind them he heard the sudden emergency brake-slam of the second gendarme vehicle that had driven up the track behind them.

The hair rose on the back of Adam’s neck and he felt a strange hot sensation around his groin.
He looked down momentarily, and realised to his intense horror that he was wetting himself, just as Sylvain had been in the habit of doing when they first met, three months – and a lifetime – ago.

SIXTEEN

‘
What happened to all the groceries?’ Michael wanted to know. ‘All the things he’d bought for your supper that night.’ A typical Michael question, Adam thought. That endless curiosity about even the most trivial details. At school he’d wanted to know how the Irish peasants had cooked their potatoes in the nineteenth century. (‘You must know,’ he’d badgered the teacher. ‘ Boiled? With butter and salt? Baked in their jackets?’ Of course the teacher had had no idea.) Now, for the first time ever it struck Adam as one of Michael’s attractive qualities.

‘
I don’t know,’ said Adam, echoing the hapless teacher. He plucked a blade of grass from the lawn. ‘Perhaps the
flics
took it home and ate it. Maybe it was returned to Sylvain’s parents and a receipt signed. Maybe it was left for the Noirmoutiers as a sort of war reparation. You can imagine, it was the last thing on my mind.’

The August sun flamed on their bare backs as they sprawled on the grass.
Michael had only recently taken to exposing his body to the sun (he had only recently liked his own physique well enough to consider doing so) and he tended to apply the sun-cream a little heavy-handedly, both to himself and to Adam. Adam protested that he didn’t need much himself, having built up a healthy colour over the summer – his skin tone almost rivalled Sylvain’s as it appeared in his memory – but he protested in vain. Michael’s interest in running his hands all over him was not exclusively bound up in his concern about his friend’s exposure to ultra-violet light.

One of the peacocks strolled past them, trailing its incandescent plumes over the parched grass.
On the top of the house a black redstart repeated his rattling song. Above, the sky was a milky but immaculate blue.

‘
What shall we do this afternoon?’ Michael asked.

Adam
shot him a questioning look. ‘I thought you might want to go and see Christophe, or have him over here.’

‘
Oh, I don’t know. Christophe’ll keep till tomorrow, won’t he? It’s you I want to hear about just for the moment.’

‘
Well then, shall we just laze about here? Or I could take you down the
vallon
and show you the springs and the path to the cliff-top in the woods. We didn’t go there last time you came.’

‘
You were afraid we’d all run into Sylvain, I think,’ said Michael.

‘
Well there’s no chance of that now,’ said Adam, in a tone that seemed to combine flippancy with bitterness.

‘
You’re acting very cool about it,’ said Michael, sounding almost disappointed. ‘ You don’t have to play all stoical with me. I’m for real.’

Adam
knew that Michael meant that. He didn’t say anything, but he submitted uncomplainingly when Michael decided to anoint him with yet another application of sunscreen.

Michael
had arrived the previous evening. Hugh had driven with Adam to meet him off the coach in Chaumont and then treated them both to a fine dinner at the Jeanne d’Arc in Langres, for reasons that had less to do with celebration than with the fact that he couldn’t face tacking on the cooking of a meal for three to the end of a gruelling working day – one that had already been extended by his having to make a fifty-mile round trip in the car to pick up his son’s friend.

Adam
had fully expected that Hugh would consign Michael to either Gary’s room or the bee room – as the two spare bedrooms had now become designated – and that the idea of his sharing Adam’s bedroom would be met with a frown at the very least. Yet when they arrived Hugh cheerfully sent Michael up the stairs to Adam’s bedroom. After all that everyone had been through, and despite everything that Hugh had learnt about his son in the last two months, he seemed – unbelievably (wilfully?) – blind to the possibility that his sixteen-year-old son, homosexual by his own admission, and recently involved with such dire consequences with a man of twenty-three, might be sexually involved with another sixteen-year-old, his best friend Michael. Or had he seen the situation clearly, and decided that it and the blind eye he was going to turn to it were the least of possible evils? At all events he gave them their privacy together as soon as goodnights had been said.

By unspoken agreement they had left the telling of
Adam’s tale until the following day. Michael sensed quite keenly that Adam needed him in other, deeper ways right then than just as someone to unburden himself to. And not just for sex either, though that came into it. First and foremost he needed holding, and Michael was only too happy to oblige as soon as they were alone. They both came twice, though, within a short time of snuggling up in bed together: it was Adam’s first sexual contact since his shipwreck; for the first three weeks he hadn’t even played with himself – something which, for all his mental anguish, he had found a moment to note dispassionately as an all-time record.

At one point during the night
Michael woke up to hear Adam quietly sobbing. He whispered: ‘ It’s all right. I’m here.’ But Adam gave no indication of having heard and Michael concluded that he was crying in his sleep. Although Michael knew about Adam’s crisis and his stay in the
maison de repos
, this was the first tangible sign of the hurt he had suffered. Michael had stroked his hair softly until he fell back into sleep himself.

Michael’s knowledge of the events of the past two months was patchy. During the evening of that alarming day back in June when the police had interviewed both him and Sean, a female officer had paid a visit to his parents’ home – and to Sean’s too, obviously – to say that Adam had been found safe and well. What happened to the man in the case – as the policewoman insisted on calling Sylvain – would depend on whether Adam’s parents decided to press charges with the French authorities. In any case the British police were no longer concerned in the matter. For further information Michael would have to contact his friend direct. Michael felt unable to do anything that evening, not even to telephone Sean from his parents’ house. (Parents could pick up vibes from phone-calls even when they didn’t hear the words and were quite capable of asking unnecessary and awkward questions afterwards in a way that they would never dream of doing with a stranger.) So he had to wait in a state of great agitation until school the following morning gave him the opportunity to confer with Sean face to face.