Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (25 page)

‘
About …?’

They had turned the corner into the village and were passing the mayor’s front door
– which chose that moment to open. The mayor emerged right into their path, complete with dog. He said,
‘Bonsoir Messieurs.’
They said
‘Bonsoir Monsieur le maire’
to him, Gary taking his cue from Adam, then Adam bobbed down and fondled the dog’s ears for a second and Gary and the mayor exchanged a sentence or two about the weather before they all disentangled themselves and went their different ways. ‘What about?’ asked Adam when he had Gary to himself again.

‘
What about what?’

‘
What did Sean talk to you about?’

‘
Oh yes. Mostly about you actually. He was worried about you. Unsuitable liaisons, that sort of thing. I thought about pots and kettles myself but it was hardly my business to say so.
He
was hardly my business – lovely though he is. You know, the most beautiful people are not always the most rewarding people to know, or love. Sorry, I shouldn’t be saying this. It’s for life to teach you these things, not me.’

‘
You seem to know a lot about love,’ Adam said, unsure himself if he was being ironic or not.

‘
It’s just a question of time. Wait till you’re my age.’ He paused for a second. ‘We seem to be being very open with each other tonight. You’ve asked me a few questions that surprised me and that perhaps I’d have preferred unasked. So here’s one for you. What’s happened with the other man, the French one? The one you say you love but who somehow vanished as soon as Sean arrived.’

‘
It wasn’t like that,’ said Adam uneasily. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘
No,’ said Gary softly. ‘Perhaps I wouldn’t.’

‘
He’s still around though,’ Adam said defiantly. ‘I’m seeing him tomorrow.’

‘
Then perhaps I ought to wish you luck.’ Gary’s tone thawed slightly. ‘It isn’t easy being in love with more than one person.’ Then he smiled and added, ‘Don’t you think sometimes the hell of being a teenager is actually rather fun?’

Adam laughed in spite of himself.
They had reached the front gate. Adam put his hand on it to open it and then stopped. It occurred to him for the first time that a man of Gary’s age – thirty-eight, forty? – could be, might be, sexually attractive. Not to him of course, but in a more objective sense. True, his face had the slightly leathery, lived-in look that adulthood quickly brings. But Adam could remember seeing him several times in shorts and t-shirt. Though it hadn’t struck him at the time he now thought how trim and well-proportioned Gary was, how flat his stomach compared to most people of his age and how almost boyish were his muscled calves and thighs. Just for a moment his imagination surprised him with the image of Gary’s fly unzipped, though not by him of course, and …

Then reality returned and surprised him slightly more.
Gary leaned towards him, took his head between his hands and gave him a neat little kiss on the lips. ‘Good luck, my little pirate captain,’ he said. ‘And take care.’

As if in obedience to some primeval reflex, Adam clutched with one hand at
Gary’s buttocks and placed the other on the place in his trousers where his erection might be located, supposing he had one. And he had.

Gary
took a pace back smartly. ‘Don’t … touch goods that really don’t interest you. I’m still your parents’ house guest.’ He sounded startled, almost alarmed.

‘
You touched me,’ objected Adam.

‘
One day, I hope, you will learn the meaning of the expression
a chaste kiss
. Life might then become a little less complicated for you. Here.’

Gary
fished self-consciously in the breast pocket of his shirt and produced a card. ‘ You won’t want my advice again, I’m sure, but if you ever come to Paris and want to play Beethoven or just drop in for a chat you might like to know where to find me.’

Adam, still smarting from
Gary’s rebuff, accepted the card with a starchy thank-you. He thought: people only carry a card in a shirt pocket when they are already planning to give it to someone.

‘
Come on,’ said Gary. ‘Let’s go back in and face the grown-ups.’ He put an arm lightly on Adam’s shoulder and Adam did not shrug it off as he pushed open the gate and they walked the last two metres to the front door.

THIRTEEN

When
Adam got up to get ready for school the next morning Gary was already on the point of departure. He was bending in under the bonnet of his car checking the oil level and he wiped his hand on a cloth before shaking Adam’s to say good-bye. When he drove off Adam had just time to realise that the house would seem empty without him before the mental din of pre-school preparations drowned out the noise of quieter reflections.

His schoolmates found him somewhat withdrawn and preoccupied and put this down to a
nostalgie
for his home in Britain, brought on by the visit of his friends. Christophe had a more informed insight into this but it was not something he wanted to throw into the general discussion. In fact he was a little shy of Adam at first, as if he feared that Adam might blurt out
his
new secret, but by the end of the first day, relieved that this had not been on Adam’s agenda, and pleased that heavy discussions were not going to be engaged in for now at any rate, he had retrieved his normal trusting, cherubic mien.

Once school was over,
Adam had only one thing on his mind: to re-establish contact with Sylvain, whatever might come of it. He didn’t imagine that it would be a straightforward business, now that Sylvain had pointedly not kept the rendezvous they had made for the previous day. It would not be easy to go looking for him in a hundred square kilometres of wooded, ravine-cut countryside, and he didn’t think he would have the gall, this time, to march up to the front gate of the farm. (Behold, I stand at the door and knock.) How straightforward their old relationship seemed in hindsight: how unthreatening and safe, compared with the unknown territory of their next meeting and beyond. Everything had been so natural, so…boyish. But Adam had been growing up fast over the last week and he had learned that nothing in life could go back to how it was before: that for good or ill, nothing could ever stay the same.

To find Sylvain he would have to look for him, just as he had done the last time they had lost contact.
There was no point trying the vet, Pierre, this time, and he had already ruled out a visit to Sylvain’s home. The
vallon
, by the springs and the log sleepers where they should have met yesterday seemed as good a place as any to make a start.

In a studied repetition of the previous afternoon Adam descended the track as far as the springs, went halfway across the log ‘bridge’ and sprang up onto the handrail, conscious this time that Sylvain had been sitting exactly here
– waiting for him? – the second time they had ever met.

A cuckoo called in the distance, the sound fogged by a kilometre of dense foliage.
Maybe this was a futile idea. Although there was a chance that Sylvain might pass this way sometime in the next few days there was no reason why this time should be better than another. Adam could hardly camp out here day and night. He gave up trying to weigh probabilities. The sun was shining on him through a gap in the leafage and he pulled off his shirt so that it could warm his shoulders. Maybe after a million years or so it might even turn them brown like Sylvain’s. After a few more minutes’ idleness he opened his fly as well and inspected what lay hidden there – a tried and tested method of dealing with moments of private boredom. He enjoyed the unfamiliar sensation of the warm sun on that usually shaded region. He was not very large today, had not been in fact since the torrid debauches of the previous week. Adam stroked himself experimentally once or twice but with no response. He realised with a little surprise that he hadn’t touched himself in this way since Sean and Michael left on Friday.

A snap of twigs just two yards away and a shaking of the hawthorn boughs.
No time to stuff himself back in his trousers. Adam just managed to throw his discarded shirt across his lap, steady himself with one hand on the wooden rail and hope for the best. If whoever it was wanted to peer closely at his crotch … Adam banked on the probability that they wouldn’t.

But it was Sylvain.
Who would. And did.

It occurred to
Adam that, by accident, he had stumbled upon the most disarming tactic he could have used. Had they not first met, after all, when Sylvain was similarly, disingenuously, exposed? Adam slid his shirt away, simply, not theatrically, and let Sylvain take in the sight of him as he was.

Sylvain stopped in his tracks at the beginning of the log path just as, in a reversal of their present roles,
Adam had done three months ago. There was a long silence as the two looked at each other, weighing the situation up, looking for clues in face or gesture, unsure who would speak first, unsure what they would say.

Sylvain spoke.
With almost infantile directness he said,
‘Tu m’aimes plus,’
the three syllable, French, economy version of
you don’t love me any more
. He placed a hand on the rail beside him.

Lately
Adam had been playing out his high-tension emotional scenes in English. It was with a shock that he awoke to the obvious but forgotten fact that he would have to manage this one in French. He had also forgotten what a child Sylvain still was. In the last week or so, Adam felt, he had outpaced him still further in emotional development and wisdom.

‘
Mais si,’
Adam answered, like an indulgent parent. ‘Of course I do.’ He looked down at his exposed member and noted approvingly that it was beginning to thicken up as if in corroboration of his last statement.

‘
You don’t,’ Sylvain insisted curtly. ‘You told me lies. You kept me away from you. Instead of going to England you had your English friends here.’

‘
I didn’t know what to tell you,’ Adam said uncomfortably. ‘I didn’t invite them, they invited themselves.’ He was beginning to regret his state of exposure.

‘
You didn’t introduce us when we met by accident.’

‘
I was embarrassed because you caught me out. I …’

‘
Invited or not, you all had sex together, I think.’

Adam
turned scarlet. ‘Whatever makes you say that?’

‘
If you could see your face… Other proof not needed. But it was the way one of them was looking at you. The blond one, the hunky
beau gosse
.’

Adam
was at once fantastically flattered to think that his new intimacy with Sean had somehow been guessable from Sean’s behaviour or facial expression and mightily horrified that Sylvain had remarked it. ‘It was …’ How this word kept cropping up lately. ‘ …An aberration. A one-off. It wasn’t planned. I didn’t want to have sex with anyone but you. Only things got confused…. I can’t really explain.’ He bent his head and stared at the mud-streaked logs a little way below his perching feet. It was so much easier to be faithful to Sylvain when he was physically present and Sean was not.

‘
And now they’ve gone you come looking for me again.’ Sylvain paused, then added, ‘Dangling your cock like bait.’
(Faire miroiter ta bite comme appât.)
He could not help the ghost of a smirk appearing on his face as the cleverness of his remark struck him, though he was clearly not yet ready to be won over by the mere sight of an incipient erection.

‘
I didn’t think you’d mix well,’ Adam tried clumsily. ‘ You don’t speak English and they don’t have much French.’

‘
They mixed with your other French friends,’ Sylvain chillingly observed.

‘
They’re all only sixteen or so. You wouldn’t have the relationship with them that you have with me. We’re a one-off too, you and me. Me sixteen and you twenty-two.’

‘
I’m twenty-three,’ said Sylvain. ‘It was my birthday last week.’

Adam
found himself wrong-footed again. Placing his confidence in something older than words he slid off the handrail, took the three paces that separated them and slipped his hands tentatively round Sylvain’s back. Sylvain didn’t pull away, though his face remained impassive. Adam drew himself closer to him till their chests were touching and his rising cock nuzzled at Sylvain’s groin.

For three or four seconds they stood so, then Sylvain’s defences broke.
He put his own arms tightly round Adam and let his lips brush Adam’s neck. ‘I love you I love you,’ he said almost without voice.

His intensity melted
Adam totally. ‘I love you too.’ His own voice broke and spluttered. Then they both began to cry, chokingly, their chests heaving against each other uncomfortably, Adam’s tears soaking into Sylvain’s loose shirt collar, Sylvain’s trickling hotly down Adam’s bare neck. Not only tears but also promises came pouring out in the breaking storm: promises that were barely articulated, that overlapped and interrupted each other; promises that were scarcely heard but – for the two of them at that moment – hardly needed hearing.