Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (36 page)

‘
Are you one of the judges in Sylvain’s case?’ Adam blurted out, his carefully thought-out plan blown off-course by surprise.

‘
No, my friend, I’m not. Though for the best possible reason. Although I don’t know the young man myself I do know you. It’s never enough in life – at least in my profession – to have clean hands. You have to be ready at any moment to hold them up for inspection too. And that is why – although I’m very pleased to see you, Adam – the pleasure is a little reduced by the fact of its being here. Why did you come?’

‘
I felt I had to.’ Adam was still determined to hold his own.

‘
But to do what, precisely? You’re not being treated as a victim. I know you didn’t want that, for Sylvain’s sake. So that’s good, aren’t I right? And you’re not called as a witness.’ He lowered his voice. ‘It’s all been looked after very carefully. We, all of us, are on your side. And not against Sylvain, do you understand? But there is a law of the land in France. And all we can do is minimise its severity. With the best will in the world we cannot magic it away. But what we
can
do we can do better without you there. Trust me.’ He stopped and smiled. ‘You’re not planning to shout obscenities from the public gallery, are you?’

This scenario had actually featured on some of Adam’s lists of strategies, especially the ones he’d thought of late the night before.
Somehow it didn’t seem a very intelligent option now. He smiled a little wanly and said, ‘ No. No, sir.’

‘
I’m driving back to Langres in fifteen minutes,’ Céline’s father said. ‘Will you do me the honour of accepting a ride?’

There was no argument.
Adam had been conclusively if chivalrously toppled from his horse. ‘If you don’t mind the wait, I’ll show you a room you can sit in. If I remember rightly there’s a coffee machine in there which serves a curiously ghastly brew. At least it’s free.’

Adam and Michael sat.
They were alone. The room was bleak and functional and the coffee was exactly what the judge had said it would be. Then another door opened and someone unseen on the other side of it said, ‘You can wait in there.’ And Sylvain, all alone, came into the room.

He stood facing them, motionless, not speaking, for some time.
His face was thinner and his hair much shorter than before. He too was wearing a suit and tie, but it was old and too short for him (his father’s?) and it had the opposite effect on his appearance from that of Céline’s father’s suit on him: he looked lost and vulnerable. Adam thought that he had never wanted him so much. Then,
‘Mon
Dieu,’
Sylvain said, ‘it’s you.’

Adam opened his mouth to speak, but it was like a bottleneck of thoughts and words and not one of them would come.

‘It’s all OK, little one,’ Sylvain said. ‘ It’s going to be OK. It’s not for ever. They said I’m never going to see or contact you again. Well, they’re already wrong. I have. I will.’ He took two paces towards Adam and Adam leaped up to go to him but a sudden commotion outside startled them, then both doors opened simultaneously and the little room was full of people, uniformed, gesticulating, angry. Too late for an embrace or even a touch of hand on hand, but something got said, by each of them, that only the other heard. Sylvain was escorted firmly out by two uniformed guards while two other attendants, less threateningly clad but looking just as apoplectic, conducted Adam and Michael through the other door. ‘ Quite the wrong place to send you,’ they said when Adam protested that Céline’s father had told them to wait there. ‘Extraordinary misunderstanding
. Bon Dieu!’

Céline’s father seemed quite unsurprised to find the boys awaiting him in the main entrance instead of at the place that he’d arranged, and with a beaming but impenetrable smile he escorted them to his car.
No mention was made on the journey back of their impromptu meeting with Sylvain; they talked of other things. And when the judge deposited them at the bus station in Langres he said to them: ‘ I’ll leave you here, if that’s all right. And if by any chance your father, Adam, didn’t know you went to Chaumont today, he’s not going to discover it from me.
Au revoir, braves gens, et
bon courage
.’ They were the only words of French they’d heard him say.

Adam and Michael made the most of their remaining days in Courcelles, painfully conscious of the shortness of the time. By day they walked and played and talked in the sunshine, at night they clung ever more tightly to each other, and Michael was heartened by the realisation that Adam had stopped crying in his sleep. On their last evening of all they took a walk along the lane that led west out of Courcelles and up the hill. Adam suddenly said: ‘I suppose you think I made a terrible fool of myself. Over Sylvain. That I really fucked up. Fucked myself up. Fucked Sylvain up. Fucked my parents up.’ They were climbing over the gate out of the lane into the field where the log-splitter still stood, a lonely yellow gibbet, on the edge of the wood.

‘
Nobody fucks their parents up,’ said Michael. ‘It’s too late for that. Parents are fucked up already. I know mine are.’

‘
Yes, but you know. Mine may be splitting up because of me.’

‘
If they do – though I hope they won’t – it’ll be nothing to do with you. It’ll be an excuse, that’s all. A … what’s the word? … a catalyst, something that isn’t part of the chemical equation.’

‘
And Sylvain?’

‘
Yeah, I know that’s bad …’

‘
I seduced him, gave him his first taste of sex …’

‘
And it sent him off the rails? First, you flatter yourself. Second, he was off the rails already. If anything, he’s much more together now than he ever was before. If you weren’t bright enough at the beginning to realise what he was like … well, I suppose I might criticise you for that.’

‘
I suppose I did realise. Everyone called them the funny family. And he was the funniest of the lot. I just didn’t want it to make any difference.’ Dry stubble crackled underfoot.

‘
But it did. You kidded yourself. That’s the only thing you’re to blame for. You kidded yourself. Just like your parents kidded themselves they’d brought up a wonder: a goody-goody heterosexual boy with no sign of a libido, the first in the world. Did they stop to think about the improbability of that?’

‘
I could have handled it if the police hadn’t got involved, and if parents hadn’t got involved. OK, I made mistakes, so did Sylvain. But we could have sorted them ourselves. We’d have had to part this summer anyway. It’d have been painful but we’d have managed it without gendarmes, and shots being fired, my mother nearly having a breakdown and Sylvain being put in an institution. Why can’t they all just let teenagers make their own mistakes and put them right for themselves? Once older people get involved they make it ten times worse.’

‘
Jesus, what’s that?’ Michael suddenly cried. Two small creatures had leaped out of the stubble at his feet and taken to the air on rattling wings like wind-up toys.
‘Ker-ke-ker, ker-ke-ker’
they called to each other.

‘
A pair of quail,’ said Adam knowledgeably. ‘They do that.’

‘
Well I wish they’d give a bit more notice first.’ They watched the birds abruptly switch to glide mode and plane down in a short curve to disappear again in the stubble a hundred metres off. ‘Anyway,’ Michael resumed. ‘Older people. You seem to be forgetting something: Sylvain is an older person himself. At least, that’s how your parents saw it. And that was not exactly a small part of the problem. How do you see your thing with Sylvain, anyway? Was it a kids’ thing, like with … with us, years ago?’ He made it sound as if those people then were quite different from him and Adam now. ‘ Or was it an adult thing, like Céline and her man, like our parents? Or was it a mixture of the two?’

‘
Maybe,’ said Adam slowly, ‘it’s the mixture that’s not a good idea. But in our case, Sylvain’s and mine, I mean, it wasn’t that clear-cut anyway. I treated him as if he was about fourteen and, most of the time, that’s how he behaved.’

‘
He seemed quite grown-up when we met him the other day.’ Michael laid an arm round Adam’s shoulder. ‘You can’t keep the adult world at bay, Adam. Céline’s father more or less said that. Even Sylvain seemed to have realised that. You have to learn its rules in the end – and then learn to get round them, and make them work for you. That’s what Sylvain was saying to you, in his rather elliptic way, and Céline’s father too.’

They sat down upon the stubble, just where they were, on the edge of the wood, without going into it.
On this side of the hill the sun had gone. But where they looked down, across the landscape, it lit the village roofs, clusters of orange round the church spire, and coloured the broad bleached sweep of the eastern plateau all the way to where the cathedral, like a capital letter ‘H’, indicated the position of the town of Langres. Then a few minutes later it caught the high peaks of the Vosges mountains, impossibly far away and hanging weightless above the horizon, ethereal as clouds. Adam turned his head to look at his friend and saw that Michael had done the same. For a few moments they looked into each other’s eyes. Michael had grown rather beautiful, Adam thought.

That night in bed, curled up with Michael, Adam said
, ‘You know? I don’t want him ever to forget about me. Is that selfish, arrogant, vain?’

‘
All of those things,’ said Michael. ‘But I understand. You may yet meet again; the world’s a funny place. And if you don’t, then maybe he’ll get lucky with someone else. But if not that, then what he lived with you might just be one beautiful moment for him to look back on, something to treasure, something that was really his. A once in a lifetime experience of tenderness … or something … Even if it didn’t end the way he dreamed. No, whatever happens, he’ll never forget you.’ There was something in Michael’s voice as he finished, which took Adam by surprise. He didn’t answer him but clasped him a little tighter in his arms and held him a long while, thoughtfully, until they slept.

Hugh didn’t take them all the way to Chaumont in the morning. He still had to repack the car and then to make his own long drive to Calais. He drove them just as far as Langres. From there they took the bus to the coach station in Chaumont, each with one backpack and Adam with the cello too. When they arrived they discovered with some annoyance that their coach journey to the channel port would be a couple of hours longer than advertised due to a diversion ‘for operational reasons’ via Paris.

‘
Operational reasons,
mon derrière
,’ said Michael. ‘Lack of bookings, more like. They’ve simply packed two routes into one.
Quel
pain in the
cul
.’

Adam was suddenly struck by an idea, a great wave of optimism, and an unexpected tide of emotion that all arrived tumultuously at once.
He put down his cello and took Michael in his arms. If you couldn’t experiment with life when you were a teenager, Michael had once said, when could you? And Gary had said to him: though you may fall in love a few more times in your life those times won’t be
that
many. Everything seemed so possible now, at just this moment; every door lay open. Sylvain was still alive, they loved each other, they could meet again. Sean loved him too – in his own way, whatever that way was – and he loved Sean: they’d find a way. Then there was Michael … He kissed him on the lips.

‘
Not here,’ said Michael, startled. ‘This is a bus station, not an airport. And we’re not even saying good-bye.’

‘
I don’t want this to end,’ Adam said.

‘
What …?’

‘
I mean us, together. Not just yet. Maybe not for …’

‘
Don’t be silly. I mean, I don’t mean that. I mean … neither do I. But I didn’t know you felt that too.’

‘
We don’t have to go back to England yet. School holidays go on another month.’

‘
Oh come on, man. Get real.’

‘
I am real. Let our parents sort their own lives out. They don’t need us over their shoulders while they do it. Our coach is going to Paris. So are we.’

‘
Are you crazy? We can’t spend a month in Paris. Not even a weekend. We haven’t any money. We don’t know anyone there.’

‘
Yes we do. Gary Blake. He said to get in touch if ever I needed to. Well now I do. Give me your mobile.’

Michael fished in his pocket.
‘You really have gone mad this time.’ He handed him the phone.

‘
Yes I have. I want you so much right now and I want so much not to lose you that I’m taking you to Paris. Consider yourself abducted, kidnapped, spirited away. We can phone our parents when we get there this evening.’

‘
This’ll all end in disaster,’ said Michael, affecting a weary tone. ‘Everything always does with you.’ Though his body betrayed him and he trembled with excitement.

‘
But not before it’s even started.’ Then he kissed Michael a second time before reaching in his wallet for Gary’s card. With hands that shook he tapped out Gary’s number on Michael’s phone.