Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (3 page)

Adam
loved so many things about his new country: the food, the wine – in which he was just beginning to take an adult interest …

And yet.

It was not so easy to replant yourself at sixteen in foreign soil. The going had been tough at first. It wasn’t just his accent. Adam had an easy way with him that meant he got on well, and quickly, with most people. He was neither so aggressive in his dealings with others as to provoke hostility nor so wimpish as to arouse contempt. He had not anticipated any problems at his new school. It had not occurred to him in advance how unfathomably alien his new schoolmates would find him. He was not sure even now if he had realised the full extent of his difference.

His shoes were different.
His hair was different. The way he spoke to teachers: different. Played football: different. Tossed a coin: different. Used his knife to cut lettuce leaves on his plate instead of folding them like blankets as the others had been taught. The list went on.

With no more than a couple of exceptions they were civil to him.
And Thierry and Christophe were almost friends, Céline almost a girlfriend. But the almost was a big one. Just as Céline had seemed to find herself up against some invisible barrier when Adam kissed her, there existed a strange wall between himself and the two boys too. Perhaps it was the accent that did it after all. But Adam did not really think so. As with Céline, Adam thought, the barrier had something to do with
that
.

That
, the thing that had – or might have – proved the stumbling block in his faltering courtship of Céline, was the most complicated thing that Adam knew about. More complicated than politics – the language of relations between people and peoples he had hardly heard of let alone understood. More complicated by far than harmony and counterpoint which, however difficult, did seem to make sense on their own terms.
That
was as tenuous as a spider’s web: strand upon strand of uncertainty that might (but only might) one day be seen (and then only thanks to the perspective that time bestowed) as a perfectly programmed whole. For the present those strands of uncertainty (strands plural because who would trust themselves upon a bridge made from only a single thread) took the form in Adam’s mind of questions in an endless and interlocking series. Such as: what was it that he had had with Michael, that purveyor of puns and doyen of the double-entendre? Was it friendship? Or something more than that – because of sex? Why was it so different from what he felt for Sean – Sean the sportsman, forever in cricket whites? Was all of it just a phase, as he had read and seen that in many cases it could be? Would a sudden realisation of the desirability of womankind descend upon them all (he and Michael and their kind) like tongues of flame and burn up all that had gone before? Descend upon some of them but – uncomfortable lurking dread – not all? The dread was not just lurking these days. Since his failure with Céline it was up and stalking; since Sunday afternoon in the forest it seemed close at hand and ready to strike.

It was not easy to feel your way towards others in whom the same gossamer fragments were so invisibly being stitched together.
Childhood relationships were as fleeting as encounters in a shoal of minnows. Few could develop. But little by little, as Adam hauled himself into adolescence, he had found some near-certainties. Michael, for instance. Well, Michael full stop. Then suddenly France. Here he was a navigator without a compass, an explorer without a map. If anyone at his new school was anywhere near to living on his wavelength he had no inkling of the fact and the next six months looked an unpromisingly short time in which to find out.

His father drove him to school this Wednesday morning. Normally he took the bus, the dust-coated creaking veteran that did the rounds of the ‘montagne’ villages, trawling for children to land in Langres. But normally was not much more often than half the time. His father often had morning meetings in the town, or had to drive through on his way to the larger town of Chaumont. Often too, his mother had reason to go into Langres, either for shopping or else to give a piano lesson. When she was driving Adam used to play a little joke on the other road-users they occasionally passed. He would hold up an open newspaper between himself and the windscreen and pretend to be reading it. (This only worked because they had a British, right-hand drive, car.) Drivers approaching round the blind bends of the hilly lanes would be appalled to see, as they thought, the driver of an oncoming vehicle immersed in the day’s news and with no view of the road ahead. His father wouldn’t let him do this and his mother didn’t really approve, either, but he did it anyway. Adam was very fond of his mother but thankful that she did not teach at his school. He pitied children whose parents taught in the same school that they went to. Especially if they shared the same funny accent.

In the middle of the usual pre-class hubbub
Adam ran into Thierry for the first time this week. Thierry was an unusually tall and angular young man with straight blond hair and a strong-boned face from which projected an impressive Roman nose. He would be handsome when he reached forty but not before. They asked each other what they had been doing. Nothing special, they both said. Thierry’s family had gone to visit cousins in Troyes on the Saturday. ‘Cousins’ , Thierry said, with a dismissive upward flick of his eyes. ‘ I know,’ Adam had said to show solidarity. ‘Mind you’ , he went on, ‘ that’s further than I went last weekend.’ The unintended ambiguity and the lie it contained struck him forcefully the moment he heard the words on his own lips. ‘Oh, by the way,’ he said, almost by accident, ‘ you don’t know of any people called the funny family, do you?’

No, Thierry did not.
‘Why do you ask?’

‘
Living along the lane towards Perrogney?’ Adam prompted a memory.

‘
No. No way.’ Thierry laughed and changed the subject. Adam thought it wise not to probe further. At least not with Thierry.

Later in the morning he asked Christophe, who lived a little nearer to the
montagne
, as Adam’s little corner of the great plateau – round Courcelles and Perrogney – was called. Christophe was Thierry’s physical opposite: dark-haired, shortish and stocky with something of the cherub about his face. But he adored Thierry for some reason that escaped Adam and went almost everywhere with him. He had no more idea than Thierry whom Adam meant by the funny family. But he did ask if Adam was interested in a day’s fishing the following Saturday. They would be going to the Lac de la Mouche, the reservoir behind the dam that Adam’s father was so busy repairing. It was just across the road from where Christophe lived. ‘ I think Thierry’ll come,’ Christophe said. ‘And I’m going to ask Céline.’ He grinned mischievously.
‘Spécialement pour toi.’
So that was fixed.

By the time
Adam caught up with Céline during the afternoon Christophe’s plans were clearly shaping up. Céline greeted him with, ‘It looks like we’re spending Saturday together – along with
Cul et Chemise
.’ (She meant Thierry and Christophe.)

‘
I hope that’s OK for you,’ Adam said. ‘Don’t let them drag you into anything …’

Céline gave him a look that stopped him in mid-sentence and which made it clearer than a thousand words that she was not someone to be dragged into anything she did not want to do.

‘Oh, well, good then,’ Adam responded brightly. ‘Should be a great day. Oh, by the way,’ – he found himself under some extraordinary new compulsion to blurt this out – ‘my father was talking about some crazy people he sees by the dam. Riding around on bikes. Not working. I mean they’re old enough to work. He calls them the funny family. But I can’t place them. Do you know who he could be talking about?’

‘
I haven’t heard them called that,’ said Céline, ‘but then I don’t spend a lot of time cycling around by the dam myself. I think perhaps I know who you’re talking about. But they don’t all cycle around by the dam, as far as I know. There’s one
mec
who does. Did your father say where they came from?’

‘
Perrogney, he thought.’

‘
That sounds about right. There’s a farm between Perrogney and your place where the people have a bit of a reputation. I think the guy on the bike may be one of them. My brother spoke to him once.’ She flicked back a too-forward lock of chestnut hair.

‘
What sort of a reputation?’ Adam’s curiosity was coming close to betraying him. He found to his surprise that he didn’t care.

‘
Oh, you know. Country people. A bit … old-fashioned. A bit basic. What’s all the sudden interest anyway?’

‘
Oh nothing.’ Adam saw he had gone a bit far, took fright and shied away. Céline and the strange but increasingly fascinating male creature must be kept poles apart, not only geographically but in the compartments of his mind, as if ideas might leak out and pollute one another.

‘
Anyway,’ Céline went on. ‘You ought to know them better than me. Some of the younger ones – the ones that can go to school that is – come in to the junior school in Langres. They probably travel on your bus.’ At that moment the bell sounded for class and the conversation was forced to an abrupt end.

‘
I’ll look out for them,’ Adam said, by way of conclusion. He liked to keep his conversations tidy. ‘Something to tell my father.’ At school all parents were ‘my father, my mother’,
mon père, ma mère
. It rarely occurred to anyone to ask if they had names. Just as well. It would have pained Adam to hear his schoolmates tripping over the pronunciation of his parents’: Hugh and Jennifer. Funny accents indeed.

The following morning found
Adam coolly monitoring his own behaviour. He could not forget the apparition of the strange young man on his bicycle the previous day. His own impulsive rash questioning of everyone he met on the subject had put paid to that. So, rising from bed, he dressed at a discreet distance from the window while at the same time directing discreet sidelong glances at it – like a demure spinster, he thought to himself – curious as to whether the scion of the funny family would come pedalling past. This morning he did not. The word
suitor
came into his head; he batted it back immediately into outer darkness.

But the next day, while Adam, just about dressed, was combing his hair in the mirror with his back to the window but not to its reflection, the young man did come slowly past and Adam spun round on a reflex, caught a smile of recognition on the other’s face then, on another, unprecedented, impulse, dropped his trousers just enough to flash an unmistakeable message before reeling round and zipping up in a panicky nanosecond and resuming his concentrated grooming before the glass.

The next three mornings were like a coin idly flipped. On Thursday the stranger passed the window and stopped, on Friday he didn’t pass at all, on Saturday he passed without stopping. On Thursday Adam responded with a smile, on Saturday with nothing, simply because he was taken slightly by surprise and had no time to change his expression. Though the young man grinned and slowed to a dawdle before accelerating away.

On Saturday there was school in the morning but the afternoon was free.
This was the day of the arranged fishing trip to the Lac de la Mouche, and the afternoon found Adam and his French friends with rods and baskets, in position like a row of herons on the reed-fringed shore. They all wore their oldest jeans and tops, even Céline, though nothing she wore could ever look less than stylish. All she had to do was pull on old denims and tie a piece of chiffon at her neck to look like someone fresh from a fashion-shoot. Adam wondered with mixed awe and envy how she managed it.

All the previous day and night it had rained.
Not for nothing did Parisian schoolchildren learn that the Plateau de Langres was the source of all their drinking, washing and bathing water. But by mid-afternoon the sky was clearing and the tattered clouds limping away like vanquished soldiers. Adam had only started to fish since his arrival in France; the activity had played no part in his previous existence. He had not arrived in France complete with state of the art equipment; his rod was an old one dragged up from the cellars of Thierry’s family home, the kind of gift that costs nothing to give yet is somehow forever slightly resented by its recipient. Adam’s bicycle came into the same category; it had been a cast-off of Christophe’s. Both items were in evidence this afternoon, the bicycle lying at its ease among the reeds by the water’s edge, the rod standing to attention, propped up by the little tripod that had thoughtfully accompanied the gift.

The waters of the lake were agitated and turbid after the rain, but a few intrepid roach and small perch found their way onto the maggot-baited hooks.
To keep themselves amused, Christophe had brought a camping-gas stove and a billy-can, which they filled with water from a bottle, not the lake, and into which Céline’s adroit fingers plunged a great globe artichoke when once the water reached boiling. She had brought four, one each, but they had to be cooked one at a time. As each one was judged ready (they took about twenty minutes) it was hauled out and left to cool for a few minutes before being passed around from one to another like a joint. Each person pulled off a petal, dunked it in a small container of vinaigrette which Céline had also thoughtfully provided, then sucked the small titbit of flesh off the scaly covering. This procedure went on for ages as the petals got smaller and more time-consuming to detach and eat, the effort eventually greatly exceeding the reward. At last the choke was exposed, despatched with Thierry’s sharp knife, and the meaty
fond
, the size of a sturdy mushroom, cut in four and eaten too. By that time the next artichoke would be cooked and the whole process began again. It was all accepted as the most natural part of the day’s routine. Adam couldn’t imagine English kids doing anything of the sort. It would have been bags of crisps or nothing.