Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (5 page)

The valley twisted away to the right.
The path now climbed steeply upwards among the trees. In front of Adam, Fox’s muscular legs were working away, the contours of his strong thighs and buttocks intermittently showing in his rather baggy trousers. Then, unexpectedly if you hadn’t been here before, the path reached a sudden summit. Adam and Fox stopped. They stood in a miniature clearing which had a flat floor of young spring grass, emerald green. The path, if they chose to follow it, would turn sharply, almost back on itself, and wind down to the floor of another valley. The clearing lay atop a sharp limestone spur from which the ground now fell away a hundred feet on three sides. A wooden fence, a metre or two in length, stopped you stepping out into space and falling headlong into the panorama below. Side by side, Adam and Fox peered out across the palings. Below them, almost vertically, the rushing stream was visible again where it tumbled over boulders in its drunken haste to meet its confluents in the wider valley that hustled towards the Lac de la Mouche. The view was nothing new to Adam. But this experience was. Contemplating the view shoulder to shoulder with the creature he had decided to call Fox and wondering what precisely would happen next (though he knew in outline) and who would start it. Adam had already assured himself that there was no-one in the vicinity. The limestone cliffs made their position impregnable on three sides; on the fourth the path, arriving from either direction, climbed so steeply that anyone making their way up would be heard approaching minutes before achieving the summit.

Fox
touched Adam’s cheek with the back of his fingers. Adam was surprised at the softness of his touch. ‘P’tit-Loup’, was all he said.

Adam
felt a sudden urge to pee and told Fox this as explanation for why he was so hurriedly opening his own fly. Once he had done that, he thought, the next step was up to Fox. They were still both standing pressed up against the guard-fence and Adam thought that perhaps he could project a hundred-foot waterfall onto the treetops below. He had never seen such a thing and was curious as to how it would look. But he quickly realised, once he had exposed himself, that such aquabatics were out of the question and that the pressure-capped spring that was suddenly desperate for release was not his bladder at all but something else.

Fox
took all this in at a single sideways glance. With a little giggle he undid himself and his trousers dropped, without further persuasion, to his knees. He was in the same state as Adam, though unencumbered with underwear, and as he turned towards him Adam registered his muscular brown thighs as a pleasantly arousing background to what commanded the focus of his attention. Fox threw off his ragged pullover. There was nothing underneath it. His chest was not broad but well shaped nonetheless. It was a soft brown in colour, like the rest of him and almost hairless. On the other hand, a decorative thick plume of dark hair curled its way right up from his dense pubic forest to finish in a tapering point at his navel. Without further prompting Adam threw off his pullover and, with a little annoyance, the T-shirt that lay demurely underneath. Fox pushed Adam’s jeans and pants further down his legs, gently but urgently, then folded him in his arms and said, in a hoarse whisper, ‘Lie down.’

It was more like falling down, collapsing in a heap.
Fox pressed his chest, belly and sturdy cock against Adam’s and for a moment Adam could not tell which bits of warm softness and warm hardness belonged to Fox and which to himself. Then, before either of them could decide what to move next, Adam came in a series of wrenching spurts. He felt as if an artery were bursting inside him. Seconds later Fox’s convulsive tremor and involuntary gasp told him that he had got there too and their bodies seemed to float together in a state of sudden lubrication like high-friction machine parts in their bath of oil.

There was a stillness.
Fox showed no sign of moving off Adam now their spontaneous eruptions were over and for quite a time they looked each other steadily in the face. Adam already knew that when you first have sex with someone you know, a seismic change occurs in the room that that relationship inhabits: Furniture flies around; pictures fall from the walls. It takes some time for things to settle down again in their new places. He remembered the shock, the initial recoil that followed when he first did it with Michael, and as he gazed thoughtfully at Fox he wondered how soon this next reaction was going to kick in. But it didn’t. Perhaps Adam had already been through that phase at the time of their first encounter, when his mood had swung vertiginously between excitement and horror for the best part of a week. This moment, by contrast and to his surprise, seemed to be laying things to rest, picking up the furniture and the dropped pictures, dusting them down and replacing them in a satisfactory place. Or perhaps there was nothing to rearrange. Maybe that was what happened when you had sex with strangers: there was no dislocation, nothing to rearrange, because there was nothing in position in the first place. Adam pondered this as he looked up at Fox’s shyly mischievous face.

‘
You look so serious,’ said Fox. ‘You could smile, you know.’ Adam did, but he kept on staring into Fox’s face, at the snub nose, the wide, sensual mouth and the brown eyes that seemed to express bewilderment and amusement in equal measure. How could you read a twenty-year-old’s eyes – if twenty was indeed Fox’s age – when you yourself were only sixteen? And if the older person were soft in the head, or retarded in some way, as Adam’s father had intimated, did that make it easier or more difficult? So far, Fox’s words and behaviour had suggested an age of more like fourteen than twenty. Perhaps that was how Adam ought to treat him; it would be relatively easy and an attractive prospect too: a mental age of fourteen – an age Adam had experienced already and knew how to deal with – attached to a physique equipped with all the strength and adornments of a full-grown man. ‘How old are you?’ Adam asked.

‘
Twenty-two,’ said Fox.

Adam
thought about this for a moment. Then, ‘Can I get up now?’ he heard himself say. ‘I really do have to pee.’

‘
You won’t run away again, like last time?’ Fox queried.

Adam did not answer and a moment later Fox slid off him.
Adam rolled away a quarter turn and emptied his bladder onto the grass but then he rolled back again and for a few moments they lay side by side, still naked from the knees up, contemplating the sky through the bare trees.

‘
You have a funny accent,’ said Fox.

‘
You said that before.’ Adam did not try to conceal his weariness of the remark. ‘I told you before, I’m English.’

‘
Why?’

‘
Why am I English?’ Adam’s mental circuitry blew a fuse.

‘
Why are you in France?’

‘
If that’s what you meant, you should have said it.’ Adam was proud of his articulacy in his new language. Sometimes he managed better in it than Fox. But all Fox replied was,
‘Hein!’

Adam began to trot out his well-rehearsed explanation.
‘I’m here because of my father. He’s working on the dam at Lac de la Mouche. You’ve seen the scaffolding.’

‘
Why do they need an English engineer?’

Adam thought he heard the question echoing from a hundred local lunch tables.
‘Because,’ he spoke with some heat, ‘my father works for a French company. His little engineering firm was swallowed by a bigger French one. That’s why he’s here. That’s why I am.’

‘
Why does a French company buy an English one?’

Adam pretended to be exasperated by the question.
‘Because … oh, why does it matter?’ In truth he had little idea himself.

‘
Will the dam collapse?’

‘
No, of course not. It’s simply a question of reinforcing it cost-effectively by the best means that modern technology affords.’ He had heard his father reiterate this so often that he was now able to parrot it fluently either in English or French whenever the question arose. ‘It was never going to collapse.’

‘
Lots of fish in La Mouche. Ever go fishing there?’

‘
Yes – No.’ He changed his answer hastily. He suddenly visualised a scene in which he was fishing with Thierry and Christophe – or Céline – and Fox suddenly joining them, trousers agape. He saw their speechless astonishment, their dropped jaws and bewildered eyes, heard their horrified whispered question: ‘You
know
him?’

‘
No, I haven’t,’ Adam said. ‘I’ve never fished there.’ And later he would accurately date the first of his many betrayals of Fox right back to this moment.

‘
I’ll take you some time,’ Fox prattled on obliviously. ‘We can go together.’

A relationship was already being created in Fox’s mind that Adam had no intention of allowing to materialise.
If he judged it expedient to have any further dealings with Fox, he decided in a sudden access of cold adult wisdom, they would be sexual dealings only. Yet how careful he would have to be. Sex was like the wooden horse of Troy, he decided. How uncomplicated a gift it seemed at first, but once you had let it through the gate how many unexpected dangers might be found to have stowed themselves away inside

THREE

Adam
had never before lived in a house where there were peacocks in the garden. Neither had his parents. The peacocks were symptomatic of the fact that the house they found themselves occupying when they came over to France was something of a find. It was a large, old stone farmhouse, one of several in the village, but unlike most of the others it had ceased to be a working farm some years ago and had been thoroughly modernised – almost spoilt, as Hugh had put it, ‘ but not quite’ – by a professor of architecture, who still owned it. The professor was on a sabbatical year in the United States during the precise period of Hugh’s French assignment, which happy coincidence allowed Adam and his parents the use of the place while the rent, which was not cheap, was (even more happily) paid by the company. The only responsibility that went with this was that of keeping the peacocks alive till their owner’s return. This had given Jennifer a few sleepless nights at first, especially when all three, one cock and two hens, had disappeared for two whole days during a prolonged snowy spell in December, but now, with summer approaching, everyone breathed more easily on the birds’ account.

The garden was spacious, as a garden with peacocks has to be, and almost English in its three-way division into lawns, flowerbeds and vegetable plots.
Though the last were still blank spaces in mid-March. Hugh had followed the example of his neighbours and covered the bare soil with as many panes of glass as he managed to find, stacked in an outhouse, to warm the soil after its winter ordeal by frost. In a few days seeds would go in: beans and peas, radishes, Swiss chard and – improbably – lettuces. The growing season here, though short, was fast, and the present run of warm sunny days would soon turn to real heat.

A very low, crumbling stone wall divided the garden from the pasture beyond.
Scrubby blackthorn, white with blossom at this season, straggled across it and grew from its widening fissures. The combination of stone and thorn, though easy enough for Adam to scramble over – even if he sustained a few scratches in the process – was just sufficient to deter all but the most hell-bent hoofed animal from ambling into the garden.

As a result of some quite complex negotiations in which cash played a significant part,
Adam found himself hand-weeding the beds just inside this boundary wall one afternoon after school. Every time he stood up to straighten his back he found himself staring across it, over the pasture and towards the dark woods beyond. And concealed in those woods lay, almost unbelievably, the ravines, the winding paths, the cliffs and streams of last Sunday’s escapade with Fox. From this vantage point the whole landscape of that adventure was invisible and subterranean, an almost perfect metaphor for the event itself. Adam remembered his walk back up the valley with Fox, alternately in single file and abreast as the terrain permitted, with Fox occasionally laying an arm lightly across Adam’s shoulder and he thinking doggedly how you had to keep these things in perspective and not let them faze you. He wasn’t too surprised at how quickly and uncontrollably he had come once Fox had embraced him: it was seven months since he had had any sexual contact with another person (he didn’t count what had happened at Christmas) and in any case he was only sixteen, an age when you were hardly expected to have an older person’s self-control. But Fox’s similar suddenness had given him pause; it had more of the fourteen-year-old’s gaucheness about it than of the precision-timing of the experienced seducer, and he had wondered whether Fox was perhaps himself a newcomer to the experience of sex with other people. Adam turned this over in his mind for a few moments and came to the comforting conclusion that in either case, Fox being sexually experienced or not, that precipitate ejaculation reflected quite flatteringly on himself.

Arriving at the log-path and the handrail where they had met,
Adam had almost expected to find the construction swept away in a sort of Rousseauesque sermon from nature that illustrated the saying: there is no going back. He had been perversely almost disappointed to find the crossing still intact and had bumped his safely retrieved bicycle over it with nearly deliberate roughness. Fox’s bike lay hidden on the other side and they pushed on up the last steep stretch of the track, through bushes, butterflies and orchids, together but in silence. Arriving on the public road at last, Fox looked quickly, though not nervously, about him and said: ‘ Next Sunday, same place?’ in the tone of voice of someone who doesn’t expect an answer. Then he mounted his bike and pedalled off in the opposite direction from the one that Adam would be going in. Adam watched him for a moment or two, expecting him to turn back and maybe wave, but he did not. Then Adam got on his own bike and rode slowly home. Half a week had passed since then and he had not seen Fox again.