Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (33 page)

They both balked at the idea of phoning
Adam cold and having to deal with his parents at the other end, whether Adam was actually at home by now or not. He had been found, the policewoman had told Sean, in an empty farmhouse in the Burgundy region, well south of Langres. Michael had forgotten to ask her about where Adam had been found. It all sounded awful.

It was
Sean who suggested finding out what they could from Christophe. That evening Michael sent a discretely worded e-mail to his parents’ house. (So cryptic was it that it would have made the most secretive of secret agents proud.) Then it was a week before Christophe replied – by letter. Who said that electronic communications would transform the speed of everything? Christophe wrote that everything was very awkward and that it was difficult to find anything out. Adam had not returned to school and there seemed to be a conspiracy between everyone over the age of thirty not to divulge any information to anyone under about twenty-five. Céline had had an extraordinary phone message from a child near Chalon-sur Saône, which she had communicated to Adam’s parents while her own father had contacted the police. Everyone at school had been scanning the newspapers and the radio stations, even to the extent of hunting down copies of the local newspapers from the Saône-et-Loire, but there was no mention of the case anywhere. Rumour – there was nothing else to go on – had it that Adam had been kidnapped by a member of one of the more primitive farming families of the plateau region, motive unclear. (
Mais moi, je le sais bien,
wrote Christophe.
Tu m’as parlé une fois de sa petite affaire de coeur. Ça reste, quand-même, notre secret.)
There had been no sign of Adam’s parents in the town, and if Christophe’s or Céline’s or anyone else’s parents had been in touch with them, well, they still weren’t saying anything. Did Adam know,
à propos
, that Céline’s father was a judge? Christophe finished by adding that if Adam’s troubles should by any chance bring Michael back to France to see him then he, Christophe, would be delighted and some good would have come out of the affair after all.

Michael
and Sean pored over this letter together and wondered what to do next. In the end they each wrote a letter to Adam assuring him of their friendship and support and asking him to give them some news about himself as soon as he was able. They put both letters in the same envelope and entrusted them to the post.

A few days later a letter had come back, but not from
Adam. It was an update of the situation from Christophe. Michael (and Sean) would want to know – though it would upset them, of course – that Adam had had some kind of a breakdown and was in a
maison de repos
in the depths of the country near Auberive. The address had been given out to his class at school and Christophe had copied it into this letter for his English friends. He had also heard, thanks to conversations reported back from younger kids on one of the school buses, that a member of the Maury family who lived near Courcelles, a young man called Sylvain, was on
garde à vue
in Chalon-sur-Saône. Michael and Sean could work out roughly what a
maison de repos
might be – it was alarming enough however you tried to render it in English – but they drew a blank with
garde à vue
and had to ask their French teacher. Apparently it meant
in custody
on remand
.

Again they wrote a letter to
Adam, more or less a repeat of the first one, but addressed care of the
maison de repos
. They had looked up Auberive on the map. It was not far from Langres, just across the plateau from Courcelles-en-Montagne. Again no reply was forthcoming, and a week later the English school term came to an end. Then out of the blue Sean had received a phone-call from Céline.

Adam
wanted him and Michael to know, she said, that he was OK. He’d had their letters but didn’t feel he knew what to say in reply, in writing at any rate. He’d had some trouble saying anything to anyone for a while, actually, she explained. But that seemed to be getting better. She had been over to see him in his
maison de repos
, she’d been so fed-up with the conspiracy of silence that was being maintained by everybody else. The good news was that he would be coming out in a few days and might be going back to England a week after that. The bad news was that it seemed as if his parents were splitting up.

Sean
nearly dropped the phone. ‘What?’ he couldn’t help saying. ‘They choose this moment of all …’ Words failed him. He reported all this back to Michael in the course of a private phone-call from his bedroom later.

‘
Shit,’ said Michael. ‘That means he’ll be coming back right in the middle of my holiday with my parents. I won’t be here.’

‘
Then I promise to look after him for the two of us,’ Sean had said.

There was no getting out of the family holiday.
Michael and his parents were alike conscious that this might be the last time he would want to join them on one, which gave an additional static charge to this year’s expedition to Greece. But when the sunburnt Michael came back to England at the end of July he was astonished to learn from Sean that Adam had only stayed in England ten days before returning again to France. ‘To be with his father,’ Sean had said. ‘They’re packing up the house there before coming back to England for good. Adam thought he could be useful there.’ Sean paused for a moment and looked Michael steadily in the eye. ‘He wanted me to go back with him. I’d have liked to, only … I have to go away with my parents in two days’ time.’ Sean was in the same boat as Michael had been: this would probably be the last family holiday all together before he flew the nest. ‘So he wants you to go, if you can, instead.’ Sean could not quite eliminate traces of jealousy and disappointment from his voice as he struggled to deliver this message in a neutral tone.

Michael
was silent for a moment as he thought this through. Then, ‘When?’ he asked.

‘
Next week if it’s possible. He said you can ring him.’

‘
Good,’ said Michael, and produced a brand new mobile phone from his pocket with a flourish.

‘
Hmm,’ said Sean, who did not have one yet. ‘I’m not sure if they all work cross-Channel.’

‘
This one does,’ said Michael infuriatingly. ‘Anyway, what about his mother?’ he wanted to know.

‘
Staying here in England. I saw her the other day. You can call on her if you want.’ Michael said he would think about it. ‘She’s become very different,’ Sean went on, ‘Very changed.’

‘
Developed, maybe,’ Michael said under his breath, and to Sean, ‘In what way?’

‘
Well, you know, difficult to say. You’ll have to see for yourself.’ And that became the keynote to all of Sean’s answers to Michael’s many questions about Adam. Sean’s accounts of Adam’s present state and what had happened to him were disjointed and difficult for Michael to interpret. Michael found this very frustrating. Sean had met Adam, had spent time with him, during the last two weeks but was able to tell Michael almost nothing, except for something about a mysterious scar on his hand, that he hadn’t already gleaned from Christophe’s letters. Michael put this reserve, or evasiveness, down to the fact that Sean’s relationship with Adam had become complex, not to say weird, during their stay on the plateau and he guessed that Adam’s reappearance in Sean’s life had made things more complicated rather than less so. Whatever had happened between the two of them during his own absence in Greece he was clearly not going to hear about it from Sean. So he had set about making arrangements to travel to France again, speaking to Adam on the phone and borrowing the money for the coach fare from his parents.

‘
I came through Folkestone and Boulogne this time,’ Michael told Adam when they met. ‘On the Sea-Cat. They have these three tugs in Boulogne harbour, called
Trapu, Costaud
and
Rable
. I translated them as Hunky, Chunky and Butch. You, me and Sean, perhaps?’

‘
Uh-huh,’ said Adam. ‘But then which one of us is which?’

Now that
Michael had arrived in Courcelles, he realised that Sean’s unsatisfactory account of things was not entirely due to evasiveness on his part. Adam’s own recollections of those first few days after the arrest of Sylvain were patchy. Michael began to realise that parts of what he had been through were too painful not only to share with others but even to bring to mind himself.

Adam remembered the drive home from the gendarmerie at Givry in his father’s car. He had been given the OK after a cursory inspection by the police doctor who had initially bandaged his hand. He remembered some of his tight-lipped, brittle exchanges with his father, their two pairs of eyes focused firmly on the road ahead, not meeting each other’s.

‘
It’s not that I can’t accept that you’re gay, Adam,’ Hugh had said. ‘To tell you the truth, it occasionally crossed my mind that perhaps you were – simply because you didn’t have girlfriends or talk about girls in the way that I did at your age, no other reason. I’d always told myself that if that did turn out to be the case I’d give you all the support you needed. But at the same time I wasn’t really expecting it. I suppose I just didn’t want it to be true. So, forgive me, but it has been a bit of a shock, especially all happening like this. And you’re turning out such a handsome, muscular boy. You could have any girl you wanted. I suppose you know that?’

‘
That isn’t the point,’ said Adam. ‘You really don’t understand. Being able to attract girls or not doesn’t come into it. It’s not like … like second best.’

‘
Well, all right,’ said Hugh. ‘But what really disappoints me is your lack of judgement, your lack of nous in handling the situation. A farm-worker in his twenties makes an approach to you. You were perfectly capable of saying no at the outset. But his parents tell the police that this has been going on for months under all our noses. You were a fool to get involved. You must have seen no good would come of it.’ The late dusk of midsummer was falling and Hugh switched on the car’s lights.

‘
He didn’t make the approach,’ said Adam.

His father turned his head for a second to look at him.
‘Are you saying that you began it?’ he asked incredulously.

‘
Yes,’ Adam began combatively but then conceded: ‘I don’t know who began it. Who ever knows who begins these things?’

Hugh
was silent and thoughtful for a while. Then he said: ‘I think it would be better if your mother didn’t know you were … how shall I say … a willing victim in any way. I think she needs to feel …’

‘
I know,’ said Adam. ‘I know what she needs to feel.’

Adam could not remember, or could not bring himself to remember, his reunion with his mother. That memory was blotted out by another one. In the church he had gone to in England, when he was small, had hung the usual depictions of the fourteen Stations of the Cross, the Via Dolorosa. In that particular church they consisted of rather realistic wood-carvings, their legends chiselled into a wooden scroll beneath each one. Their usual seat was next to Station Four: the carving was one of the most lifelike and poignant of the set; it had always pained Adam to contemplate it as a child; its caption was: Jesus Meets His Afflicted Mother. This was the memory that had to stand in for any recollection of that evening return home. His last memory of that day was of being in the dark warmth of his bedroom at last, and alone in that darkness that is one of childhood’s oldest memories, alike comforting and threatening in its oppressive safety.

It was when he got up the next morning that it became apparent both to him and to his parents that he had lost the capacity to speak.
Either he could not, or he didn’t want to, say anything. He did not know himself which of the two was the case and in fact the distinction between the two possible explanations for his silence seemed a pointless, academic one since the result was the same. He could remember shutting himself in his room, refusing meals. He remembered the doctor arriving, remembered the trip to the hospital later that day, the lengthy, fruitless, physical examination, the return home.

Next came the visit of a psychiatrist, arranged by the school.
This went a little better. Adam found himself willing and able to nod and shake his head in reply to questions. He remembered that the questions seemed rather sensible, practical ones at the time, but what they actually were he had no recollection now, nearly two months later. He did remember lying awake in bed on one of those first nights, hearing his parents talking in the kitchen directly below. They had never stayed talking in the kitchen after he had gone to bed before, they had always used the big living-room, and so neither they nor Adam had discovered how clearly the sound carried up through the kitchen ceiling into the bedroom above. Shreds of their conversations – or recriminations – were wafted up to him. His mother’s voice: ‘If I’d brought him up a strict Catholic as I was supposed to do, instead of going along with you, none of this …’ His father’s voice, striving to master the situation, telling her to calm down. His mother, recounting a dream she’d had: she’d seen Adam, just his body, very white in the darkness, and then an arm went round his naked shoulder; she’d been comforted to know he had a friend, that he was loved; but then she’d seen how dark the arm appeared against his white skin and she’d looked more closely, looked for the face that went with the arm; she’d seen it and, with a shock, saw that it was the Devil.