Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (34 page)

All this
Adam had heard, thanks to his parents’ acoustic miscalculation, and remembered hearing. He remembered how unstoppably, night after night, the tears had coursed down his cheeks.

The school was lucky in its choice of psychiatrist and so, therefore, was
Adam. He had had the wit to see that the boy’s parents were not only a major part of his speech problem but also the main obstacle to its resolution and Adam’s general recovery. It was he who proposed the stay in the
maison de repos
.

Adam
was taken off towards Auberive in a car by a volunteer driver. It was a pleasantly anonymous situation, and Adam found it quite nice to be chatted to about the rotation of the crops and EU agricultural policy without being expected to make any sort of reply. He felt that the cure was beginning to take effect already. Perhaps he was right.

Nor was there anything very terrible about the place at which he found himself deposited.
It was an old country house in second empire style. He had a room to himself, there were communal areas full of air, daylight and newspapers to sit around in with the other, mostly elderly, inmates, and gardens and grounds to explore. The food was surprisingly good and he was even allowed to sunbathe. In no time at all the days had joined together to make a week and then two. His hand was healing well. He found that he was taking a holiday from his emotions; all his feelings were on hold. He didn’t feel particularly happy, but neither was he any longer in that wretched state of being that had been his during the few days between the disaster with Sylvain and his coming here. He no longer cried before going to sleep at night, although when, once or twice, he awoke in the middle of the night, he would notice that the pillow was wet. His unconscious, he presumed, was quite busy being miserable for him as if by proxy.

He was intrigued by the nurses and other women who ran the place.
Their calm, their placid smiles, their … what? … their
fearlessness
in the face of illness, dementia and who knew what else that surrounded them daily. Their quiet preoccupation with cleanliness. The floors, where they were of tile or bare wood, were always in the process of being polished and this was done by one or other of the older women strapping elasticated polishing cloths to the soles of their feet and then slowly skating up and down. It looked a most relaxing pastime and Adam decided that as soon as he was able to formulate the question he would ask to be allowed to try it himself. It was only on about the third day that the penny dropped and he realised that these women who each wore a uniform, knee-length, tartan skirt were actually a community of nuns, members of a nursing order. He felt stupid for not having tumbled to this before. Yet they never asked him about his religion or suggested he might like to visit the chapel on a Sunday. For that he blessed them.

Letters began to come for him.
From his parents, short (on the psychiatrist’s advice?) but full of love. From his French school-friends. There was a card from Gary Blake. ‘Get well, pirate captain,’ its brief message ran, ‘and look life in the eye again as soon as you can.’ He liked that. Then there were two each from Michael and Sean. Sean’s second letter had ended: ‘With Love’. Capital W, capital L. He read the valediction over and over, running his finger along the words as if trying to feel the indentation made by the biro. It was wonderful. He would keep the letter for ever. (And he did.) Michael had signed off his letters with the same words and the same capital letters, but somehow that didn’t have the same impact: it was simply what Adam would have expected from him.

Then one day, smelling the cleaning going on around him, he said
‘polish’ to himself, but quite loudly. This elicited nods and smiles of approval all round so he said ‘tair’ and ‘chable’ , which did not go down quite so well. But by lunchtime French words had surfaced too, and by the evening he was chatting away to his carers as merrily as a cricket.

His parents arrived the next day.
They saw him first together and then separately in his sun-filled room. Jennifer took his two hands into hers and looked into his eyes. ‘ The past is over and finished,’ she said. ‘ We never need to talk about it or even think about it again. We’re turning a new page. Full of promise and opportunity.’ She had prepared her speech carefully, Adam thought. He noticed she had been careful not to say:
turning over a new leaf
. ‘Now I’m going to ask you something. When you come home, which won’t be long now, will you start coming to mass with me again on Sundays?’

The torments of the last three weeks had aged her visibly, had added new lines to her face and put an altered look in her eye, had even
– though perhaps Adam imagined this – accelerated the greying of her hair. For the first time ever he saw in her face the form of the old woman she would one day become. He had caused that change. He alone. No-one else. Coming back from his vanished childhood there flashed into his mind the words from the Good Friday meditation on the Stations of the Cross that was interleaved between the verses of the Stabat Mater:
It is not Pilate but my sins have nailed thee to this tree
. He threw his arms around his mother’s neck and wept. Of course he would go to church with her if that was what she wanted.

A little later he was alone with his father.
‘Now that term is over, your mother’s teaching work here has finished. The company needs me for another three weeks or so to finish the project on the dam. She wants to go on ahead to England. To get the old house shipshape again. She’d like you to go with her and help …’

‘
Dad,’ interrupted Adam. ‘You and Mummy aren’t …’

Hugh
stopped him with that elder statesman look that only Adam could ever see. ‘ We aren’t crossing any bridges. If your mother wants you to go with her, then that’s what I want too. OK?’

‘
Yes, but … There’ll be a court case, won’t there? I’ll have to be there, won’t I? To give evidence … or something?’ It was not only the first time this had been mentioned, it was the first time Adam had even formulated the thought for himself.

‘
You’re not to think about that,’ Hugh told him. ‘ It’s all being sorted out by Céline’s father. You won’t have to do anything or go anywhere. You’re to forget all about it.’

‘
But Dad …’

‘
Not today.’ The elder statesman look again. ‘We’ve more important things to think about. Got to get you better.’ He smiled. ‘But it’s lovely to hear you talk. Even to hear you argue with me.’ Adam thought he saw his father’s eyes glisten.

The following day Céline had come, which delighted Adam.
She had driven herself, though in her boyfriend’s car. He had gone for a walk in the grounds while she came in to see him. ‘It’s absurd the way they carry on,’ she said, ‘as if you’re going to be bruised by the smallest piece of real-world information. And all I know is what I’ve overheard Papa saying on the telephone. Apparently, it’s all going to be done in the speediest possible way and with minimum publicity and fuss. That means a
Tribunal Correctionnel
. Sylvain will be dealt with quite lightly; your parents don’t want to press charges; it’ll all hinge on the question of his mental health. They’ll say he’s very sick and he’ll be sent somewhere for treatment. No further action to be taken, provided he never tries to contact you again. You won’t even have to appear.’

‘
But …’

Céline frowned faintly.
‘Well,’ she asked him gently, reasonably, ‘how would you prefer it to turn out? What do
you
want?’

‘
I don’t know what I want,’ he said. ‘That’s the problem. I only know what he wants.’

Adam was out of the
maison de repos
a few days later and back in England with Jennifer and his cello a few days after that. They went by train to Paris and then took the Eurostar, under the sea – which was a first for Adam.

He was looking forward to being able to talk to Michael and phoned his parents’ house as soon as he arrived.
But he got no answer. He then called Sean, who told him Michael’s whole family had left for Greece the previous day. ‘ But I am here,’ he said. That was Sean. Sean who had written: ‘With Love’ (capital W, capital L). Adam went to his house that very day. He had never been there before. Sean opened the door to him, dressed in a light blue T-shirt and cream shorts. Again that assault on his senses, that belt of pheromones or something, like an electric shock, that always went with a meeting with Sean, and that Adam had half-forgotten. Those blue eyes, like the cornflowers, like the sky. After some hesitation they went up to Sean’s bedroom and played a computer game. It seemed to both of them a weird, surreal thing to be doing. Then Adam said: ‘I love you, Sean,’ and pushed him playfully backwards on the bed. Sean offered no resistance but he didn’t enfold Adam in his arms either, and the serious look on his face made Adam hesitate rather than make that particular move himself.

‘
And I love you too,’ Sean said, almost sadly. ‘But so does this guy, Sylvain, doesn’t he? Or maybe he doesn’t count any more.’

‘
That’s not true,’ Adam protested loudly, horrified.

Sean ignored this.
‘And then what about Michael?’ he went on. ‘What’s the picture between you and him? So much loving, so much seriousness, so many people. It’s not kids’ stuff any more when somebody has to end up in prison.’

‘
Don’t, Sean. Don’t go on.’

Sean did take him in his arms at that point and said,
‘I’m sorry,’ but Adam understood that the gesture was a comforting one only: it was not intended to be passionate or romantic. Still, Adam had not lost his opportunistic sense. He had a fairly major hard-on in his shorts – his first for quite some time – and he pushed it experimentally into Sean’s crotch. He was encouraged by the discovery that Sean was sporting something similar, but then Sean said quietly: ‘Not now. Not here.’

(Not here, Sean?
Then where? Christ, man, this is your bedroom! We’re lying together, just with shorts on, on your bed!) Adam did not actually say this. He said, ‘But some time, somewhere, maybe?’

‘
Maybe,’ Sean said, his voice now little more than a whisper in Adam’s ear. Then, ‘Sometimes I think you forget I’m just a confused teenager like you. You don’t seem to know what you want or who. Well, maybe you need to realise it’s just the same for me. But I’ve never told you anything that wasn’t true. Not about love, not about anything. Remember that.’

A few days later Sean rang Adam and they met again.
Adam had found the experience of living with his newly religious mother rather harder to manage than he had anticipated. Even with the best will in the world, he thought, a couple of weeks entirely alone with her, without the balancing presence of his father, was as much as he could manage at a stretch. It was all very well going to church with her on Sundays but when, a few days after their arrival, she invited the parish priest round for coffee and he, a rotund and florid Irishman, had interrogated Adam for half an hour about his school work and leisure pursuits, he felt that enough was enough. ‘ I’m going back to France,’ he told Sean. ‘My mother’s said I can. And I want you to come with me.’

Sean was surprised to hear of such an abrupt departure but delighted and flattered to be asked along, and he showed his feelings by hugging Adam even though they were taking a walk through the middle of the park at the time.
But he said: ‘Oh shit, Adam,’ and had to explain about his forthcoming family holiday. Adam had chosen, in retrospect, to put an optimistic gloss on their previous conversation. It had left one potential doorway into the future fractionally open, he had thought, which was better than entirely closed. But Sean’s news about his holiday arrangement seemed to imply that fate was trying to tug the portal shut. They walked in the sun and sat and ate ice-creams and talked of other things: the possible break-up of Hugh and Jennifer’s marriage, the advisability or otherwise of Adam’s giving evidence at Sylvain’s
Tribunal Correctionnel
, and Adam was surprised to find their discussions more, not less enjoyable, for the omission from them of any mention of love or sex. At one point Adam caught Sean staring at his hand; it wasn’t bandaged now. But Sean looked up again when he saw that Adam noticed and said simply: ‘ Have you started up the cello again?’

‘
Just in the last few days.’

‘
I’m glad,’ said Sean. He smiled, then pulled Adam’s head towards him and kissed his forehead, despite the families all around them at the outdoor tables, eating ice-creams in the park.

It was when they parted that afternoon that Adam asked Sean to deliver his message to Michael when he returned from
Greece. Would Michael come to France in Sean’s place? And Sean agreed a little sadly to be the messenger, and wondered if the road he had travelled a short way down with Adam had finally reached its end.

SEVENTEEN

Michael
was acutely conscious that it was the merest chance – Sean’s parents’ choice of a holiday date – that had resulted in him being here in France rather than Sean. And he was sensitive enough to realise that Adam was sharing something very personal with him in taking him for that afternoon walk into the
vallon
, the place that – Adam rather carefully explained – had been his and Sylvain’s private domain back in the spring and the backdrop to the flowering of their relationship. Not that Adam used those actual words.