Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (8 page)

‘
Do you go to the cinema, from time to time?’ Adam heard himself absurdly ask.

Fox took the question seriously.
‘Not often. But I’ve been to films.
On n’est pas si plouque que ça.’
Not that much of a yokel.

Adam gave an embarrassed giggle and looked down.
His eyes engaged with Fox’s chest. He envied its spare muscularity, its wind-tanned air of confidence, the plume of hair that showed below the navel and then dived down below the waistband out of sight. He thought how childlike his own physique was by comparison. If anyone had told him that he only had a short time to wait before the maturity he admired in Fox’s frame would be his too, he would scarcely have understood. But he was not abashed either. Fox had seen him nearly naked and had not been unimpressed. Adam slowly peeled off his own shirt and vest, until his state of dress mirrored that of the man beside him. His state of excitement too, he noticed, glancing quickly down to where promising indications stretched the fabric of both their trousers.

‘
T’es beau,’ said Fox, meaning it, and Adam was happy to accept the compliment even if he hardly dared to think it true. Fox had been here. Waiting for him. It had been an appointment and Fox had kept it. Adam felt a warm glow of comfort and security. He stretched out a hand and ran it over Fox’s front, exploring the smooth surface, touching the rubbery protrusion of a nipple. It felt quite solid. Adam was intrigued; he was sure that his own nipples never got like that; something to do with being older, maybe. He ran a finger down to Fox’s navel. Fox gave an involuntary little half-gasp then lay back on the young grass. Still crouching beside him, Adam slipped his hand down the warm slide of Fox’s stomach until the fingers were quite out of sight. Then with his other hand he started to undo the metal buttons of his denims, one by one.

FOUR

Christophe
’s family had invited Adam and his parents to dinner. It was one of that sort of social occasion that hurled together adults and their teenage offspring and where different worlds collided – or appeared to – like solar eclipses, with unpredictable results. At school the impending event had been acknowledged by Adam and Christophe with rolling eyes and expressively raised eyebrows. And by Thierry too. He had been invited, along with his own parents. Adam had not had too much to do with Thierry in the last few days. Adam sensed a new aloofness in him. He didn’t try to imagine its cause.

Christophe
’s family lived in a prosperous looking modern house by the shore of Lac de la Mouche. The house was set back from the lakeside road and the driveway that led up to it ran through an expanse of long feathery grass that was referred to, with the sangfroid of the well-to-do, as a garden. There was more garden of the same sort at the back, running away to finish where forest and hillside rose up abruptly together beyond the fence. Getting out of the car, Adam and his parents were greeted with the salvo of hysterical barking from family pets that traditionally constitutes a formal welcome in rural France. Fifty metres back from the front door lay the lake, stretching away out of sight in both directions. Today it was flat and glassy, a mirror reflecting the oncoming evening. Beyond, its forested opposite shores lay black against the west. Kites wheeled overhead in the still blue air above the water. Adam had never seen birds of prey in such numbers before coming here. But up on the plateau they were everywhere. Every time you looked up it was to catch sight of a harrier or a buzzard or – more exhilarating to watch – a kite.

There were two kinds of kite here, the dark one, the ‘black kite’, and the red one with its more deeply forked tail.
Adam had looked them up in his father’s bird book. Both were wonderful to watch as they sliced through the air with the daring and skill of stunt pilots, adjusting the trim of their tails and wing primaries to take a sudden sharp corner or to deal with an unexpected change in the breeze. They would skim the surface of the lake like bats or outsize swallows, and just like swallows’ too were their breathtaking changes of direction, when it seemed that the wind must catch their sails wrong-side and dash them, like their string and fabric namesakes, to the water or the ground.

‘
Come on. What are you dreaming about?’ said Hugh. ‘ Get inside.’ Christophe’s front door, unknocked upon, had opened.

Thierry and his parents had already arrived, and while
Hugh and Jennifer were offered seats and aperitifs in the house with the other parents, Adam was sent out to join the other young people in the garden where they were expected to entertain each other in adolescent fashion until dinner.

A game of pétanque was going on.
Thierry and Christophe’s sister Monique were quite engrossed in this and hardly looked up on Adam’s arrival. Christophe was only half interested in the game and broke off to talk and play host. ‘Boring,’ he said. ‘ Céline can’t make it.’

‘
I didn’t know she was expected.’

Thierry looked up from his game.
‘She wasn’t.’

Adam
looked back at Christophe, puzzled by the contradiction.

‘
Oh, all right,’ said Christophe. ‘If you really want to know, we had a bit of a falling-out. She and me.’

‘
Over what?’ Adam wanted to know.

Christophe
was silent and thoughtfully chewed his bottom lip with his top teeth. Thierry chipped in.

‘
He thought he could get somewhere with her.
Tu sais?
But you know what she’s like.’ Thierry stopped and his coal-dark eyes looked a challenge at Adam.

‘
Come on,’ said Monique. ‘You shouldn’t be talking about her like that in front of me.’ Monique was one of Céline’s best girl friends.

‘
You know what she said?’ Thierry had chosen not to hear Monique. ‘She said that
you
wouldn’t like it. You!’ He sounded bitter.

‘
I can’t see what it has to do with you if she did,’ said Adam frostily. He was irritated by the tone Thierry had adopted; he had not heard it before.

‘
Pay no attention to him,’ Christophe said to Adam in a conciliatory tone. He put a brotherly hand on Adam’s shoulder. ‘ He gets like this.’

‘
I didn’t know you were after Céline anyway,’ said Adam to Christophe. He had never thought of Christophe as ‘after’ any girl, he now realised, and rebuked himself inwardly for his lack of … curiosity? … imagination?

‘
Well, I’m not now, so there,’ said Christophe.

‘
He still has the hots for her, though,’ said Thierry.

‘
This is boy talk,’ complained Monique. ‘I’m going inside.’ And she did, while the two family dogs ran out to take her place, wagging their tails uncritically.

‘
But you of all people,’ Thierry returned to attacking Adam. ‘Why should she have a thing about
you
?’

‘
I’ve no idea,’ said Adam.

‘
He’s winding you up,’ warned Christophe. ‘It’s just something she said once to Thierry that made him think you’d made a pass at her.’

‘
And if I had?’ asked Adam. ‘What of it?’

‘
Did you?’ asked Thierry.

‘
I said
if
.’ Adam stood his ground. ‘And
if
I had, she wasn’t Christophe’s girlfriend at the time. Or yours. Or, as far as I knew, anyone’s.’ He turned back to Christophe. ‘What’s got into him today? I’ve never known him like this. Time of the month?’

Christophe
was surprised into a loud guffaw which he hastily suppressed.

‘
No,’ said Thierry scornfully. ‘You didn’t do any such thing. Not you. You wouldn’t.’

Adam
was getting tired of this childish game but found himself unable to extricate himself from its illogical coils and twists. ‘And why not? Why not, exactly?’

‘
English boys,’ said Thierry. ‘English boys.’

‘
Meaning what?’

‘
I’m not quite sure that you like girls at all. They say that English boys do not acquire much of a taste for girls until they’re older. Quite a lot older, actually. Say, around sixty.’

‘
Laisse tomber!’ said Christophe. Drop it.

Adam
would have made a dive at Thierry at that point, but he was not so far out of control as to forget that Thierry was nearly a head taller than he was and broad in the shoulder too. Christophe he could have managed, but Christophe still seemed to be on his side.

‘
He’s joking,’ Christophe said. He had caught the strength of Adam’s feeling from the tension in his face and forearms. ‘Take it as a joke yourself,
mec
.’

But
Adam was not in the mood for joking, though his bad humour was not all the result of Thierry’s asinine antics. Something had happened a day or two previously – something connected with Fox – that had first upset him and then left him brooding and uneasy, and, though right now he was trying to forget about that, Thierry’s mad behaviour came like a stern reminder to settle a bill that has already been paid. And was about as well received.

‘
You’re telling me I’m
pédé
. Is that it?

‘
You might be,’ returned Thierry evenly. ‘ You might well be.’

‘
And you would know, I suppose.’ Adam’s anger boiled over. ‘
You
might well be – both of you.’ He drew in Christophe with a flick of his head. ‘ You’re probably the biggest pair of
petits frères
on the plateau. No wonder Céline calls you
Cul et Chemise
.

There was a stunned silence during which
Adam realised with a horrible sick feeling that he had gone much too far, and that it was beyond him to unsay something which Céline had actually said. Unable to retreat, Adam hacked his way forward desperately like someone in alarmingly thickening undergrowth. ‘ How would I know?’ he blustered. ‘ How would I know anything? You two don’t show any signs of life in you at all. I mean sex life. At least I
have
a sex life. At least I’ve
had
sex. A lot of it.’

There was another silence.
Then Christophe said: ‘ I don’t believe you.’ His lower lip was trembling as if he were going to cry.

‘
Girls or boys?’ asked Thierry coldly.

‘
Both,’ Adam lied. ‘What about you?’

‘
La vie privée,’
parried Thierry. ‘ You don’t ask that.’

‘
You did.’

‘
You
were bragging. I wasn’t. You deserve to be questioned.’ He took a step towards Adam. ‘So who with, then? Names!’ The two dogs caught the general mood and began to bark, while turning accusing stares on Adam.

‘
People at school,’ said Adam, trying not to take a pace backwards. ‘In England. Nobody you’d know. Or,’ he risked, ‘that would want to know you.’ He had no intention of boasting about anything that might have happened on the plateau. Especially not now.

Perhaps it was fortunate that at that moment
Monique called from the house to tell them on behalf of her and Christophe’s mother that dinner was ready. The parents had already had a flute of champagne each and the diversion occasioned by the arrival of the young people in from the garden gave Christophe’s father cover while he poured a second glass for himself and the two other fathers without the women noticing, just before everybody stood up to move to the table.

Communication among the three boys was now suspended due to force majeure, and
Adam switched his attention to observing the behaviour of the older members of the party. Apart from taking his mind off the unpleasantness of the last few minutes it stopped him from dwelling on what had happened with Fox.

Christophe
’s mother had prepared a
salade tiède
as a starter: curly endive and chopped walnuts with hot fried bacon strips and golden croutons poured on top with a vinaigrette. It was both simple and appealing. Christophe’s mother served it while expressing the hope that nobody had a problem with walnuts. (One read of such alarming stories about allergies in the press.) Nobody had.

Adam
’s mother had served an identical salade tiède to guests two weeks before. Now he watched her face as she sampled this one, seeing her attention to its presentation and the balance of its constituent parts. He observed her silent satisfaction at the discovery that this was definitely no better than hers and then he read a slight uncertainty in her eyes which could only be caused by the fact that she had garnished her dish with a sprinkling of finely chopped chives, whereas Christophe’s mother had seen fit to leave hers plain. Adam understood only too well his mother’s groping uncertainty. Were chives a faux pas on the Plateau de Langres? Or a brilliant innovation? Were people even now exchanging the news, goggle-eyed, of Jennifer’s culinary gaffe or – even less probably – applauding her garnish as a masterstroke of originality?