Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (19 page)

Not until three days before the arrival of
Michael and Sean did Adam get round to squaring the event with Sylvain. Unable to find a solution to the impending problem, Adam at last decided, reluctantly, to tell him a lie. ‘ I’m going to be away for a few days.’ He saw Sylvain’s face fall like a child’s and, seeing it, felt a stab of pain. He had to stop and recover his composure before going on. ‘It really is only for a few days. I’m going to England. They’re having a short holiday at my old school. They want to see me.’ At least most of the detail was true.

Sylvain’s face crumpled.
‘You won’t come back,’ he said baldly.

Adam
did what he had to do: took Sylvain’s head in his hands and kissed his face all over, stroking and tangling his fingers in his hair. He cursed Michael just then for fouling up his lover’s idyll, for robbing him of the person who was his whole world and for forcing him to lie to him, to the one person to whom he wanted always to be true. ‘I am coming back,’ he said, his voice resonating in his chest in a sort of growl he had never heard before. ‘I’m coming back on Sunday week. We’ll meet at the usual place at three o’clock. In any case we still have tomorrow and the next day before I have to go. But I will come back. I promise. And I won’t leave you again.’ The growl in his voice had modulated upwards into a wail. ‘I’ll stay with you for ever.’ Then it was Sylvain’s turn to take over the role of comforter.

Once again it was time to get a room ready. There were four bedrooms. At the front, Adam’s and next to it a spare one that had become Gary’s. Behind Gary’s lay Hugh and Jennifer’s. This one was spacious and had its own bathroom; it looked out over the garden and the countryside at the back. Behind Adam’s bedroom lay the bathroom that had once been all his. Now he shared it with Gary and would soon share it with Michael and Sean as well. The last bedroom was at the back, beyond the bathroom, and it, like all the others, opened off the gallery that ran round three sides of the living room like the circle in a theatre. This arrangement gave the living room double height (there was an enormous picture window at the rear, garden, end) and also gave a certain amount of distance between all the bedrooms except Adam’s and Gary’s. It was the back room, unused till now, that was going to be prepared for Michael and Sean.

Jennifer
asked her son to help her with it. He went in first and put the light on. Although it was only dusk outside the room was in pitch darkness as the outside shutters had been kept closed to keep the windows clean through the storms of winter. Adam walked across the room to open them. First you had to pull the windows inwards, then you reached through to unhook the shutters from their fastenings. But this time, as he pulled open the glass panes, Adam became aware that something was not quite right. In the dark space – a sort of box formed by the windowsill and surrounds, the shutters and the glazing – something was hanging. Something like ragged brown curtains or half of a dead doormat. And as he looked at it, it began to fall into shreds, disintegrating before his eyes into countless moving, flying fragments. Which buzzed.

Adam
turned and ran towards his mother, standing uncertainly in the open doorway. He pushed her through it. ‘Get back,’ he shouted, panic-struck, and followed her through, almost in one movement, slamming the door behind him. They almost tumbled over the gallery rail together into the living room beneath.

Alone of all the bedroom doors this one had a small pane of frosted glass set in it and through this could hazily be seen the glow of the electric light that hung from the centre of the ceiling
– Adam had had no chance to turn it off again – and around it a blizzard of insect silhouettes whirling in disoriented fury with the noise of a fighter squadron as preserved on the soundtrack of an old newsreel. Bees were beginning to crawl out under the bottom of the door. Adam stepped on them. ‘Mum,’ he called out, ‘get a wet towel from the bathroom!’ And she did. Adam laid it along the bottom of the door like sandbagging. Only then did Jennifer and he feel safe enough to breathe.

Madame
Lepage, when telephoned for help and counsel, took the information very much in her stride. Swarms behind the shutters were a common occurrence among the plateau villages. Was there a quantity of comb? Adam thought yes, though he had only looked for about a quarter of a second. Well, Mme. Lepage knew a family who kept bees on their holding and who would probably be willing to take the swarm off their hands … to speak metaphorically, of course. She would set things in train, ring them back later and, with any luck the beekeeper would arrive in the morning. For tonight, nothing could be done; they would just have to sit tight and try to ignore the roaring sound behind the bedroom door as well as the sinister lighting effect that played through the frosted glass. Adam found himself hoping that the bee-keeping family would not be Sylvain’s and then, perversely, that it would.

It was.
Nor was there any question of Sylvain’s mother arriving alone to take charge of the situation. She came, her husband came, Jean-Paul came, two urchins, Nathalie and Dominique, came with a large dog called Milou, and Sylvain himself came. He knew exactly where he was, of course, but seemed ready to handle the situation with a certain amount of streetwise nous. To Adam he said, ‘So this is where you live,’ in the hearing of his brother but not of Adam’s parents. He mostly avoided Hugh and Jennifer but managed to find himself in the same place as Adam as if by chance whenever they were not around.

The weather had somersaulted back to winter in the night.
A gale was blowing and the rain lashed down. It was a perfectly foul Sunday morning for dealing outdoors with half a cubic foot of disgruntled insects. Hugh repeatedly expressed his grateful amazement that the funny family had turned out at all. First an attempt was made to prise the shutters open from the outside with a long-handled pruning-hook wielded from ground level. But the fastenings were sturdy and would not give. Next, Sylvain’s father went up a ladder, at some risk to himself, and tried to force the shutters with a crow-bar. It looked as though the shutters would be reduced to matchwood before either the hooks or staples let go their rock-fast hold.

There was nothing for it except to approach from the inside: into
the bedroom, then an arm thrust through the squatters’ hive itself to open the shutters in the normal way, as had been Adam’s original errand last night. This task fell to the plain, squat little woman who was Sylvain’s mother, and she accepted it without a flicker of expression of any kind. Up the stairs she went, Adam showing the way and Sylvain following, trying not to show his delight at this extraordinary opportunity to explore the inner sanctum of his lover’s home. ‘ Are you sure you’ll be OK?’ Adam asked when they reached the door behind which the many-headed monster still roared. Sylvain’s mother gave a curt nod, opened the door and disappeared inside, shutting it courteously behind her.

Adam
and Sylvain looked at each other on the gallery. They were close enough to kiss, and both wanted to, but since people were scattered all over the house and garden, and they themselves were in full view from the living room below and through the picture window from outside, they did not.

The door reopened.
Sylvain’s mother reappeared. ‘ The shutters are open and the light is off,’ she announced matter-of-factly. ‘ But the window must stay open for today as the room is full of bees. I’ll come back later and shut it when I take the swarm away.’

‘
How many stings did you take, Maman?’ asked Sylvain.

‘
Just four,’ she replied. Adam watched in frozen wonderment as Sylvain unceremoniously but expertly removed them from her cheek and forearm. Her face remained a picture of serenity while this was going on, and Adam had time to notice that for all its plainness it had nevertheless the same full lips, the slightly upturned nose and the lustrous brown eyes that had first drawn him towards her son.

Dealing with the swarm took up most of the rest of the day.
No music was composed, no cello practised, lunch was a scratch affair. The combs were torn down from the window embrasure and placed rather messily in a spare hive, thoughtfully brought along by Sylvain’s family, in the garden below. There were rainwater and honey and sticky doomed bees clinging to everything. But miraculously, as the day went on, more and more of the bees in the window and in the bedroom behind it, scenting the presence of their queen in the new hive, transferred their allegiance to it. At last Sylvain’s mother went upstairs and closed the window. The battle for the spare room had been won, the territory reclaimed, though at a cost of many hundred small lives.

And the mess.
Jennifer looked despairingly at the bedroom. There was wax everywhere in smears and little broken crumbs. There were dead and dying bees. There was mud on the floor. Above all, there was honey, in minute amounts it was true, but simply everywhere. ‘ I can’t possibly get this clean before your friends arrive,’ Jennifer said simply. ‘ It’s only for a few days. They’ll have to go in with you.’

Sylvain admired the bathroom when it was his turn to use it.
‘I’ve never had a bath,’ he said. ‘We always had showers where I live.’

This gave
Adam an idea. He put his hands on Sylvain’s shoulders and looked gravely into his eyes. ‘Here’s a promise then. When I come back from England we’re going to have a bath together, right here.’

‘
Your parents…?’

‘
When they’re out of course,’ said Adam, laughing at the idea.

TEN

Strictly speaking, Adam’s French school did not have a half term holiday during the summer term. But this year two public holidays had somehow got crammed into the same week in May and so had the feast-day of the obscure local saint whom Adam’s school was named after. Given that most organisations in France took ‘bridge’ holidays on a Monday or Friday whenever a public day off occurred on a Tuesday or Thursday, the school had bowed to the inevitable and so Adam found himself with a week of freedom that coincided with the official half-term of his British friends.

Hugh
drove Adam into Chaumont to meet the coach on which they were arriving early on Monday evening. It was a tense drive for Adam. What would his friends look like after nearly a year? What would they be like? Would they even recognise him after so long a separation? Teenagers could change so much – or at least develop – in that length of time.

Change or develop.
Was there a difference? Adam and Michael had argued so strenuously over this semantic distinction one afternoon about a year ago that they were both ready to cry with frustration when neither would give in. Adam made the assertion that people never changed, they simply developed; Michael said that, on the contrary, human beings were capable of real change. They had kept up this argument for a punishing two and a half hours until Adam (they were in Michael’s bedroom) slammed out and went home angry and exhausted. That was the trouble with Michael, he thought. You had sex listening to Wagner and then wrangled over something pointless for the rest of the day just for the sake of it. How much better, how immeasurably more wonderful it was with Sylvain.

It was a shock to see the two boys tumbling off the coach together.
Sean, who had towered over Michael and Adam a year ago, now seemed stocky and compact at Michael’s side. He still had his blond cornfield of hair, though, and the cornflower eyes that went with it; after a moment’s reflection he was still unmistakeably Sean. Michael, in contrast, was now tall, spare and gangly; no longer the petite, skinny figure he had cut when Adam was last intimate with him (not counting what had happened at Christmas, but on that occasion Adam hadn’t actually seen him). He was looking good. Adam thought for the first time that he stood a chance of actually being handsome one day. But it was Sean’s beauty that really captured his imagination at that moment. Intensified by a year’s absence and by a year’s progress on the road to adulthood, Sean’s appearance – which was also the window through which his sweet-natured personality projected itself without distortion – made Adam’s pulse suddenly race. He understood for the first time that the expression
a heart-throb
was more than just a cheap figure of speech. To be in the physical vicinity of Sean was to be on the receiving end of a barrage of … of what? Pheromones, charged atomic particles, cosmic rays? Here in Chaumont. Sean was here in Chaumont-sur-Marne. It was hard to believe.

Michael
and Sean stared uncertainly around them for a moment or two before they spotted Adam. Then they rushed over to him, rushed back again for nearly forgotten backpacks in the luggage hold, then there were shoulder-claps and pulled rib-punches, jokes and hallos, and much surprise that Adam – who seemed unaware of this – had grown some four inches since they had last set eyes on him.

Then there was a sudden silence as they all looked at each other with something like wonder at meeting old friends in such new, or at least altered, shapes and sizes.
What other, less visible, changes might have taken place over the same period of time?

It was
Michael who broke the spell. ‘What happened to your front teeth? Have you been scrapping?’

‘
Something like that,’ said Adam, feeling awkward. He didn’t want to say more, especially with Sean and his father there. Perhaps Michael sensed this because the next thing he said was, ‘Sean got off with a bird on the ferry.’