Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (9 page)

Conversation meanwhile fluttered around items of local news: the inconvenience caused by roadworks in the winding streets of Langres, the replacement by an estate agent’s office of one of the old butcher’s shops in the old town, the increasing power of the hypermarkets (but how convenient …).
Jennifer told the story of how, when she first arrived, she did not even know of the existence of the two big
hypermarchés
on the town’s outskirts and had attempted to buy a chicken in the town centre on a Monday. Not today, she had been firmly told. And tomorrow? she had ventured timidly
. Non
. Even more firmly.
Poulet mercredi
.

The main course was a healthy-looking leg of lamb which had been roasted on a bed of garlic.
The whole cloves were served, still in their skins, alongside the chunks of meat which Christophe’s father carved without undue ceremony or finesse. Green beans were the only other accompaniment. You were free to view the garlic as an inedible residue of the cooking process and leave it on the side of your plate or, more robustly, to see it as a vegetable in its own right – which Adam nowadays did, squeezing the soft milky flesh out from its husky covering with the side of his fork. When everyone smelt of garlic, he reasoned, nobody did.

It became clearer to the adults as the meal progressed that none of the boys were speaking to each other but only to the parents and to
Monique. It was also clear that Monique was the only person who would be able to tell them what the matter was and, equally, that she could not possibly be asked.

The conversation of the adults grew more nervous.
‘ We’re having a swimming-pool built,’ volunteered Christophe’s mother at one point out of nowhere, and Adam could see mortification on the faces of her husband and children. ‘ Of course we can’t afford it,’ she added, and there was a general shared uncertainty around the table as to whether that made the matter worse or better.

‘
We had ours filled in,’ said Thierry preposterously. ‘ The leaks, the cleaning, the scrubbing with cyanide … More trouble than they’re worth.’

‘
Cyanide?’ echoed his father incredulously while his horrified mother said: ‘ Don’t be absurd,’ before turning to Christophe’s mother to reassure her. ‘ He’s becoming such a tease these days. We’ve never had a swimming-pool.’

‘
And we haven’t got peacocks either,’ Thierry added, looking hard at Adam.

‘
Did I tell you,’ Jennifer intervened, struggling valiantly to get the right tone in French, and looking brightly at everyone in turn except, pointedly, Thierry, ‘ did I tell you we’ve got a composer coming to stay with us next month?’

This did at least shut everybody up and Jennifer was forced to elaborate.
‘ Well, he’s better known as a pianist, actually. His name is Gary Blake.’

Although, apart from Adam, all the young people looked blank and so did Thierry’s parents, mercifully both of Christophe’s parents nodded vigorously, partly because they did indeed know of Gary Blake and partly because they were greatly relieved to be rescued from the unanticipated depths of the swimming-pool.

‘He gives concerts at the Salle Pleyel,’ said Christophe’s father in a respectful tone. ‘And you know him?’

‘
We studied together in London.’

He came to Adam’s christening you know
, thought Adam, but for once she didn’t say it. Instead she went on, ‘Anyway, we got back in touch recently and it appears he’s taking a bit of time away from teaching and concert-giving to do some composing. He’s been commissioned by the Avignon Festival. Well, it seems he wanted a break from Paris too, so he’s coming to stay with us for a month …’

‘
Mum!’ interrupted Adam in English. ‘A month!’ He looked at Hugh who gave one of his elder statesman nods of the head that were visible only to his son.

‘
Nobody tells me anything,’ Adam grumbled childishly, but mainly to himself. His mother went on to talk about the Avignon Festival, answering the genuinely interested questions of the others, and seemed to enjoy holding court for once in a foreign tongue. Even Thierry seemed to become human again. He had heard of Gary Blake after all; he now recalled that he owned a CD of him playing the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto with the French Radio Orchestra and, to Adam’s surprise, asked Jennifer if she didn’t think it was a finer work than the better known fifth concerto, the Emperor. And Jennifer agreed and offered an anecdote about a pianist of an older generation, Edwin Fischer. An even more senior musician – it was the composer Richard Strauss – heard Fischer play the fourth concerto and said to him, ‘Why do you make such a fanfare of the opening? You have only to leave your visiting card.’

Gradually Adam found himself giving a cautious welcome to the idea of a top-rank professional musician joining the family for a bit, as if he thought that perhaps some of that glittering talent might rub off on him.

Cheese was served, including the prized local one that went under the name simply of Langres, and then Thierry said, out of the blue – it was becoming an evening of bolts from the blue – ‘Do you think, Adam, that people have a choice in the matter of who they fall in love with?’

‘
Were we talking about that?’ Adam returned, icily. ‘I don’t think we were.’ But his dismissive tone was a mere disguise. The remark had surprised him and touched him on a point which, since a couple of days ago, had become most sensitive. Though there was no possible way that Thierry could have known that.

‘
No,’ persisted Thierry, ‘but what do you think? Do you think people have a choice? With regard to the person? With regard to their sex?’

‘
I don’t think that’s a suitable subject for the dinner table,’ said Thierry’s father, gently but firmly.

‘
It depends what you mean by fall in love,’ Adam said quickly before anyone could try to shut him up too. ‘If you just mean when people
think
they’re in love, they’re infatuated, or they will themselves to …’

‘
Adam,’ said Jennifer, ‘Thierry’s father’s right.’

‘
…But if it’s about really falling in love,’ Adam ran on but then his confidence in his words could be seen to falter, ‘then … then maybe … they don’t have a choice. Maybe,’ he finished, almost under his breath.

Hugh, who had been preparing a frowning
Adam, that’s enough
in support of his wife and Thierry’s father now found that it would not be needed and cleared his throat instead.

After that the timbre of the conversation grew more tinkly and brittle.
It was as if the young people’s introduction of love and sex into the conversation had left it strewn with broken glass that had to be stepped over for the rest of the evening.

Coffee was served.
Cognac was offered but declined by the men because they were going to be driving and by their wives out of an obscure but deep-rooted feeling, peculiar to wives, for what was and was not appropriate.

In the car, going home, Adam was aware of a feeling of perplexity emanating from the front seats as his parents separately tried to make sense of the undercurrents in the teenagers’ dinner conversation that they vaguely recognised, the way you recognise and try to make sense of the underlying tensions when voices are raised in a foreign language.

Adam, occupying that spacious private fiefdom of only children, the Back Seat of the Car, was no less perplexed though for reasons that only slightly overlapped his parents’ areas of puzzlement. Thierry’s last challenge really had caught him off guard. He was full of uncertainty about the meaning of love and its implications, and never more so than now. Could he choose between what Céline represented and what Michael did? (He pushed Fox to the back of his mind for one minute longer.) He didn’t
know
if he was gay or straight, he didn’t
know
if the answer lay in his hands or out of them: was it a matter of will or wasn’t it? One thing he was certain about, more certain after this evening’s dinner party than ever. He would not be in a rush to tell the world, at sixteen, that he was gay. Especially his parents. However well they might take it (and he had no reason to doubt that they would take it well) it would be vastly more complicated to have to turn round in a few years’ time and try to explain that he wasn’t gay –
if
that turned out to be the case – and that his previous self-identification had been mistaken.

It was far better, he thought, just to get on with life yourself, to have your own adventures and make your own mistakes, without raising a banner over them that proclaimed: I’m this, or I’m that; of this party or of the other one.
After all, as Michael had once said, if you couldn’t experiment with life when you were a teenager, when could you? And that thought brought him suddenly, by an unforeseen short cut, back to Fox, finally.

He had met Fox two or three times more in the forests over the last couple of weeks, not always in the same spot, but with time and place more carefully planned and punctually observed.
The weather had continued to warm gently and it was becoming increasingly pleasant to lie nearly naked in your lover’s arms on the forest floor. Nearly naked because they had not yet crossed the threshold of stripping all their clothes off together. But they pulled their upper garments so tight up against their armpits, when they didn’t take them off entirely, and pulled their lower ones so far down on their ankles, that quite a satisfactory degree of intimacy could be arrived at. They achieved their ejaculations by pressing and rubbing hard against each other’s tummies, sometimes with the aid of a helping hand, sometimes not. It was still all over very quickly and it was still always Adam who shot first. He wasn’t at all embarrassed about this. It was only to be expected when he was so much the younger partner, he told himself. Instead of Mahler for background, as Adam was used to with Michael, they had the sounds of streams and birds: the chaffinch, the willow warbler, the wren… Fox imitated their songs in a sotto voce whistle in Adam’s ear, which tickled appealingly, and told him their names in French. When Adam could – though this was much less often – he gave Fox their names in English too.

Then, on the last occasion, when they had both come and were lying still together, Fox for the moment on top, Adam became aware that he was wetter than he usually found himself in that particular situation, and then realised that Fox was quietly piddling on his stomach, gently but copiously.

Adam froze for a second, rigid with shock and disgust, and for a moment thought that he would spring up and throw Fox off him. But then almost at once he found himself checking that the warm rivers would fall nowhere near his clothes, and Michael’s words came back to him: if you can’t experiment with life when you’re a teenager, when can you? So he put up with the unusual baptism, finding, much against his will, that the warm tickling sensation over his belly and around his genitals was rather soothing, and he had to blow away a tiny cloud of regret when Fox’s waterworks died to a trickle and stopped. All the same, he had no wish to repeat the experience and would have to tell Fox so. Experiments were one thing; to go in for more of the same might count as kinky.

‘
I’d rather you didn’t do that again,’ he said a moment or two later. ‘ Pissing on me, I mean. It might get on my clothes. As it is …’ He was sitting up on his naked bottom, not yet willing to pull his trousers up or his t-shirt down, and casting around for handfuls of grass or windflower stalks and leaves to wipe himself with.

‘
I’m sorry if you don’t like it,’ said Fox. ‘I knew someone …’ but he changed tack very quickly then and said: ‘It just happens sometimes after I’ve come. I can’t help it. But if it happens again I’ll try to aim it away from you.’

‘
But what happens when you … you know, in bed?’ Adam felt a hot flush of prurience at the thought – the first time it had occurred to him – of Fox in bed at home, doing what all boys, he knew, did. And grown men too?

‘
I never do it in bed,’ said Fox. ‘For that reason mainly. I do it around the farm, or in the fields, or in the woods.’ He paused mischievously. ‘ Like you do. As I caught you doing when I first met you.’

Having avidly wanted to go into all this a moment ago, Adam suddenly found that he just as urgently did not want to know.
In a different tone of voice – the change was so sudden that Adam saw the shock of it register on Fox’s face – he said coldly:

‘
Well, you’ll have to learn to stop that pissing trick if you ever get married – or go with a woman.’ He was being Adam the adult, the man of the world, the superior being, talking down to the mentally fourteen-year-old Fox.

Fox looked at him solemnly for a minute.
Adam became acutely conscious that Fox was now dressed but that he, Adam, was still in his unprotected state of post-sex near-undress, and also that the recent access of lust that had prompted him to ask about Fox’s bedtime habits had left him with a renewed erection that seemed almost childlike in its innocence and vulnerability.

Fox’s stare softened into a dreamy smile of wide eyes and half opened lips that seemed equally childlike and innocent.
‘I’ll never get married,’ he said in an even tone. ‘And I don’t want to try it with a woman. All I ever want, and everything I’ve ever wanted, is you.’