Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (4 page)

In between sucking and scraping at artichoke petals, chatting intermittently and occasionally running to detach a silver, writhing, red-finned roach from one or other of their hooks, Adam scanned the top of the dam that formed their northern horizon.
A road ran across it which was still in use, despite the scaffolded repair-site on its far side. From time to time a bicycle would form part of the traffic, and Adam would try to make out whether it might be the mysterious stranger. There was no way of telling, in fact. The distance was too great. You couldn’t even determine the sex of a cyclist, let alone identify one.

As the afternoon went on the temperature seemed to rise.
It did not have long in which to do so, though. The March sun was soon arc-ing towards the western woods like a shooting star in slow motion. At last it disappeared completely and the clear sky became a translucent duck-egg blue – a blue duck’s egg that Venus eventually pierced like a silver pin. The water, calmer now, was a mirror of dulled silver, the surrounding forests charcoal grey. It was time to count the catch and be gone. They cycled to the lakeside café beside the dam where they proudly showed off their sparkling captives to the patron and his wife. Thierry ordered four beers with a winsome smile. It did not work. ‘ You know your father won’t let you drink beer when you’re out on your own,’ said the patron.

‘
Oh, come on.’

‘
Ask him, not me. ‘ The patron was firm. ‘
Panaché
, OK. Straight beer only when your father says so.’ This made them all feel small. Adam, whose own father would not have gainsaid a request to drink beer in the bar, felt obliged to have a shandy like the others, out of solidarity. This was the downside of living in a community where everyone knew everybody else’s business. ‘Beer next year,’ the patron said brightly, as he poured the four shandies with an infuriating exactness as to the fifty-fifty proportion of lemonade to beer.

Adam
went back to Christophe’s for supper along with the others. Christophe’s mother accepted without fuss the red-finned, palpitating catch and turned it into a golden-crusted
friture
with lemon and parsley for garnish. Adam thought it was the freshest thing he had ever eaten. It tasted out of this world. Finally, his father collected him and his bicycle and drove him up the forest lane to bed.

The Sunday that followed was by contrast a social desert.
On some Sundays he went to mass with his mother, who was Catholic. But today – like his father who did not share his wife’s religion – he stayed at home. What his own beliefs were he was not sure, an uncertainty he disguised from his parents under a mask of private conviction as if the question of his religious beliefs were akin to that of his political ones: the secrets that an adult could, in theory at least, share with the ballot paper and no-one else. This particular sunny Sunday morning he elected to practise the cello. After early misgivings about the instrument he was glad by now that he had chosen it. Boys carrying violin cases were liable to be teased or picked on, were expected to be unsporting wimpish types, and whether they were or not was hard to prove; you simply couldn’t risk getting into a scuffle if you were carrying such an expensive and delicate piece of kit. The carrier of a cello case, on the other hand, had more street-cred about him and would rarely be teased about his luggage. Perhaps because a cello case looked as if, skilfully deployed, it could do substantial damage to an aggressor without the instrument inside sustaining serious injuries.

Also the cello was a bit unusual and
Adam liked that. All musicians, just all of them, played the piano. In particular his mother. At least he did not have to take his instrumental lessons from her. And even if she did tend to supervise his practice, he had the saving knowledge that she couldn’t play the thing herself. He had passed Grade Seven before leaving England and hoped to take Grade Eight on his return. This morning he hesitated for a moment between the Debussy he had been practising and the Beethoven A-major sonata on which he was also working. Beethoven won and he spent the morning in its womblike warmth until his mother’s return from church signalled the approach of lunchtime.

In the afternoon he announced that he was going out on his bike, something that these days surprised his parents not at all.
Back in Britain Adam had not been noted for any addiction to long solitary hikes or bike-rides. But then he had lived in a town whose rural hinterland had not been very inviting. Flat fields of wheat extended to the horizon in summer while in winter they were ploughed bare earth. The few coppices that punctuated the landscape were difficult of access and held little to capture the imagination when you got there. Besides, in England he had better friends and better things to do.

Here on the other hand, when everything in his life had been turned inside out like a glove since last September, the plateau and the wooded canyons that opened almost at his feet had become his companions.
They had seemed more sure and more dependable than his new school-friends at first, even than Thierry and Céline. He had discovered the landscape and fallen in love with it during the initial burst of excitement that followed his arrival. That had coincided with the heady Indian summer of the region, with its astonishing fruitfulness, the upland orchards purple with damsons, branches breaking beneath the weight of fruit, while the stubble fields shone gold in the September sun.

Then winter had blown in from the
Alps with all the savagery of an invading Vandal horde. The snow fell like scimitars and the animals were taken from the fields and put indoors for months. The fields and forests were out of range for idle strollers. Now, in just two weeks since the beginning of March, the snow had gone, the wood anemones spangled the forest floor and yellow splashes of carnelian cherry flower daubed the blank hedge. Adam had resumed his explorations.

He hesitated, once he had pushed his bike out of the garden into the road, before mounting it.
At this precise moment he bitterly regretted the provocative gesture he had made to the stranger through his bedroom window a few days ago. If he were to run into him this afternoon on the course of his travels he would feel highly compromised and at a great disadvantage when it came to managing the encounter. For this reason he decided not to take the uphill lane to the scene of their first meeting. To appear to be seeking the creature out would only disadvantage him further. He toyed with the idea of pedalling a little way down the Perrogney road. If he met him going that way it would look like a coincidence: the young man had no way of knowing that Adam knew where he lived. But pride got the better of curiosity. Whatever might happen, if they did meet again it must be by real, not pretended, chance. Adam would not lay himself open to the charge, even from within himself, of seeking the man out. So he rode off, away from the Perrogney direction, went straight on past the turning up the hill and rounded the corner by the church, where a row of quaintly crumbling stone cottages incongruously sprouted a mushroom crop of satellite dishes. After a moment’s thought and a look up and down the two other possible turnings, he made straight over the bridge that concealed the motorway running in its deep cutting below, and then off the road entirely onto a precipitous stony track which led him down such a steep descent that he was forced to skid to a stop in a cloud of dust and continue on foot, his suffering bicycle bumping along beside him like a lame horse. Thickets of bramble rose above him as he went, the path’s left-side grass verge reared up and became a limestone cliff, and as nature enfolded him more and more closely, purple orchids and sun-bright celandines appeared beside the way.

The weather had taken a dizzying turn for the better during the last twenty-four hours.
Yesterday’s clear, temperate afternoon, together with the fishing trip it had blessed, seemed as distant as a childhood memory. Now the sun shone almost fiercely while the first butterflies of spring flitted between the patches of light and shadow that fell across the path. Here they were not the one a fortnight phenomenon of English spring times, instead they were present in scores: brimstones like flying slices of pale lemon, marbled whites like miniature checkerboards, woodland species with watchful eye-patterns on their chocolate backs, even one handsome swallowtail, a star guest who was himself his own novelty yellow and black bow-tie. A little way ahead an early blackcap piped a cold translucent stream of sound.

At the bottom of its descent the path met boggy ground.
Here had been laid small logs, crosswise like sleepers but butted up against each other to provide a continuous wooden walkway across the puddly surface. On the right-hand, downstream side a wooden handrail had been erected to aid the timid and to catch those who might slide on the wet wood and fall off the path altogether and into the quagmire beside it. This railing was stout enough to sit on and there today, like Little John in the Robin Hood story, perched Adam’s nemesis, looking him full in the face as he approached. Adam froze. For a second or two he thought about the choices open to him: to turn on his heel and push his bike back the way he had come with what little dignity he could muster; or to push on rudely, muscling his way past the stranger’s jutting knees and feet, bumping his bike over the logs as he went. But the young man’s sculpted face softened into an uncomplicated smile of recognition. He said,
‘Regarde ça,’
and flicked his expressive eyes away to Adam’s left where rocks climbed away from the side of the path towards the cliff. Adam looked. He knew what to expect: the spring coursing out of the fissured limestone at head height and decanting into its mossy, ferny, pool. It was the overspill from this pool that created the boggy surface that the path traversed just here, necessitating the log sleepers and the handrail and, indirectly, this present confrontation. But today the usual tranquil picture was transformed. The rain-swollen waters gushed in four or more places from the face of the rock, their torrents meeting and splashing into each other, and the energy of these multiple collisions was throwing up a fine spray that filled the air above the basin. Right now the sunbeams slanting through the bare trees were catching the droplets and causing miniature rainbows to dance like the butterflies in the dappled light.

‘
Pas mal,’
said Adam. To have said more would have been deeply uncool. At the same time he discovered that any question of choice about what to do next had vanished as abruptly as any rainbow and he found himself propping his bike against the railings, springing quickly up and parking himself next to his no longer quite so new acquaintance, thigh against thigh.
‘Pas mal,’
he said again, looking straight in front of him at the spectacle as though he and his companion were in adjacent if uncomfortable seats at the theatre. His eyes did wander down to his neighbour’s lap, though, to see whether the ancient black trousers were open at the
braguette
. They were not. Perhaps he had more than one pair of mouldering black legwear. Adam felt momentarily cheated and then immediately was cross with himself for: one, being disappointed, and two, having looked in the first place.

‘Juste un p’tit-loup
,’
said the young man pensively, though whether he was referring to Adam or to himself was not clear.

Adam
decided to understand the former. Some survival instinct told him that if the creature was going to call him by a name it would be safer if that name were not Adam, and
P’tit-Loup
, which meant not only ‘kid’ but also ‘Little Wolf’, would do as well as anything. ‘ Then I shall call you Fox,’ he said, surprising himself by his boldness. ‘ Fox means
renard
,’ he explained.’ He had named Fox in English.

The other gave a little laugh of surprise.
It seemed he liked the idea. ‘Viens.’ He jumped down from the handrail and beckoned with his head. ‘Leave your bike here behind the tree,’ he said once Adam had followed him across the log track and onto firmer ground. ‘Nobody’ll nick it from down here even if you leave it in the open, but hiding things always seems to make people feel better. Don’t know why but it does.
Non
?’

The path was narrow and where they could not go abreast
Fox led the way. Adam already knew its twists and turns, he had explored them last autumn, but he felt suddenly excited at sharing the lonely woodland track with someone who also knew it, and knew it better. That was not the only thing that was starting to excite him, but he pretended that it was.

The path wound upwards to throw in its lot with the high banks and cliffs on the left while the waters of the spring funnelled deeper and deeper into the ravine that opened below them on the right.
Soon they were walking halfway between the tree-crowned limestone heights and the tumbling, forested valley from where the now invisible stream, nourished by more and yet more springs on its descent, could be heard rushing and chuckling away. They hardly spoke. At one point Fox turned to Adam over his shoulder and said, ‘It’s good, the fresh air and the sun.
Non
?’ sounding about as unthreatening as an aunt at a tea-party, and Adam replied with equal banality, ‘Yes, that’s true.’

They began to be enveloped by the sounds of the deeper woods.
Chiffchaffs had arrived from Africa earlier in the week and were starting to fill the valley with their two-syllable call. Thrushes were singing, but at half power because it was mid-afternoon, and then once or twice the silvery song of a wood warbler raised the musical stakes.