Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (7 page)

Michael
turned to face Adam. ‘ Show me,’ he said. His voice was husky with nervousness and sex. Adam did not need telling what it was that Michael wanted to see. He quickly unzipped, then everything else happened even more quickly; Michael dropped to his knees in front of Adam and caught the sudden upswing of his released cock with both his hands; Adam felt himself let go, observed his rapid discharge for the first time in startled wonderment; it looked like the brief jet from a hypodermic when a nurse is testing it for air bubbles, but milky white. His arms went round Michael’s neck and pulled his head against him, his nose and cheeks against his damp, deflating organ. With his hands he ruffled Michael’s hair. ‘Oh, wow,’ he said, uncertain if it was pleasure or shock or panic he was expressing. ‘Oh, wow.’

Then
Michael dragged him gently to the ground, undid his own trousers and yanked rapidly on his own slim appendage, in short staccato bursts, until his ejaculate came squirting out of him and his blurring fist slowed to a stop. They stayed looking at each other’s cocks for half a minute before buttoning up. It was the first time they had seen them, after all. Adam was quite pleased to see that Michael’s was considerably smaller than his own. It went some way to making up for Michael’s apparently greater experience in pleasuring himself, and for his capacity to hold off longer – by some thirty seconds. Then they stood up and dusted themselves down. It did not occur to either of them to employ a handkerchief to tidy up.

In the days that followed they learnt to pace the experience, to make it last and savour it.
The recoil and guilty shock that would assail Adam an hour or so after each of his first few times with Michael faded to a distant, manageable rumble of disquiet and grew fainter as the days grew into weeks. They progressed from the railway sheds to visits to each other’s houses, braving parents in the hallway, overcoming the challenge presented by a visitor in the inner sanctum of one’s bedroom. When they felt safe from discovery (parents not about this afternoon) and as they grew braver about exposing themselves, they would strip naked before throwing themselves onto the duvet (Michael’s plain, Adam’s patterned) and add a preliminary tussle/cuddle to their standard repertoire, usually to a background of Brahms or Mahler. It never crossed either of their minds that they might consider the experiment of a kiss.

Adam
pondered the implications of all this in moments of quiet. The word ‘gay’ floated on the currents of his mind quite a lot around that time. Was what he and Michael did a ‘gay’ thing or did all boys do it? And then ‘gay’ was something else? It was not easy to discover. He had heard that some bookshops had a whole section devoted to gay fiction. His local one did not. You would need to spend a fortune buying books on the basis of a promising title, or else spend an inordinate amount of time browsing, to make this a useful avenue of research. He consulted his local library instead and got one or two leads, a few whispers of hard fact. In the end it was Michael who came up trumps. ‘ Look what I’ve got from the library,’ he said one day. They sprawled on Michael’s counterpane and riffled through the pages. ‘Oh hey,’ they both said, and, ‘look at this.’ It was a book called
The Swimming-Pool Library.

When their affair had ripened over a six-month period into a state of comfortable constancy,
Adam one day worked his way round to a question he had been wanting to ask Michael. ‘You remember that first time, on the ropes. I mean the really first time.’ Michael nodded. ‘ Was that the first time you ever …?’ He tailed off, suddenly thinking that he didn’t really want to know.

Michael
looked surprised. ‘No. No way. I’d been doing it by myself for about a year.’

‘
By hand, you mean?’ For some reason the word wank, which they all used as part of the common currency of classroom exchange, was taboo when they were in private together, doing exactly that.

‘
Of course.’ Michael paused and peered at Adam. ‘ You, not?’

‘
No,’ Adam said softly. The conversation was sending gentle shivers around his shoulders and down his arms. Not unpleasantly though.

‘
But you do now, don’t you?’

‘
Of course,’ Adam said staunchly. Since he had started with Michael he couldn’t get enough of it; it had become a nightly ritual even when (which was most days) he’d done it earlier on with Michael.

‘
But you did it with me first?’ Michael sounded pleased.

Adam
confirmed this. ‘You did it to me three or four times, and I did it to you too, before I ever did it to myself.’

‘
But that’s great, man! That’s truly fantastic!’

‘
I suppose it is,’ said Adam, half convinced. But something in him remained absurdly jealous of Michael, who was actually a whole three months – an aeon of time – younger than himself, for having discovered the source of pleasure between his legs, learned how to use it and found it already operational when he did so, a whole year before Adam had taken any steps in the same direction. He did not tell Michael this. But Michael said cheerfully, ‘Anyway, you’ve been making up for lost time ever since,’ just as though he had heard Adam’s silent cogitation.

But Adam never really felt he had caught up, and even now, nearly three years later, and after his recent, riskier-seeming, experience with Fox, it still rankled: Michael’s year’s start on him seemed like something on which, even were he to devote the rest of his life to the acquisition of sexual experience, of whatever kind, he could never catch up.

Adam had mixed feelings about following up Fox’s easy, same time next week, proposal.
Meet Fox again. Sex with Fox again. It sounded so simple. But ‘again’ never was simple, not now. Back in those far-off uncomplicated times with Michael, at the very beginning, perhaps it had been simple; maybe it just looked simple now, in hindsight. But the repetition of even the simplest things was not a simple thing itself. The musician in the recording studio, the actor in rehearsal, was asked: ‘ One more time please, just the same.’ (Somebody moved, a shadow passed, a dog barked, we forgot to switch the machine on.) Trying to repeat a Sunday afternoon frolic in a clearing on a cliff-edge and to expect it to go exactly as before seemed to Adam a childish folly. Better to be sensible. Wait. Things would take their course. Above all, don’t look … eager.

There was a guest for lunch this Sunday.
Not, for a change, one of his father’s engineering colleagues with radical ideas about grouting – Adam was slightly relieved – but a music teacher friend of Jennifer’s (goodbye relief) and her husband who was a local vet. Lunch was later than usual and went on longer. With every English person’s dread of cooking for French guests and being found wanting, Jennifer had made superhuman efforts in the kitchen. She had not quite reached the eureka moment of discovering that French guests were really not so hard to please. Nothing they were offered by English hosts, however simple, however surprising, turned out to be anything like as ghastly as their upbringing and education had led them to expect; they usually left the table greatly relieved at the very least, and sometimes pleasantly surprised.

When it wasn’t focused on food, conversation turned from time to time to music.
‘You told me,’ said Marie-France, the music teacher, ‘that you were at college with Gary Blake.’

‘
That’s right,’ said Jennifer, pleased of the chance to speak of an illustrious acquaintance. ‘ Though I don’t know exactly what he’s doing now. We had a card at Christmas. He does know that we’re in France, at least.’

‘
Ah,’ said Marie-France, brightening at the chance to tell her colleague something she did not know. ‘ He’s taking a break from the recital circuit. Wants to settle to a little more composition.’ She sat back in her chair and bit off a morsel of bread and cheese in triumph.

Adam knew Gary Blake.
Knew of him, at any rate. He was a pianist of some repute who had started out in Britain but made his home in Paris for the last few years. Adam remembered his occasional television appearances during his childhood, sometimes as soloist, sometimes talking about music, and remembered his mother unfailingly pointing him out and saying: ‘ He came to your christening you know.’

‘
He came to Adam’s christening, you know,’ said Jennifer and Adam slid lower in his chair. ‘ I really must get in touch again. Now that we’re over here.’

Marie-France turned to Adam.
‘I know it’s Sunday,’ she said, with the easy charm that her English counterparts so often missed, ‘ but will we have a chance to hear something from you after lunch?’

A year younger and he might have thrown a teenage tantrum and marched out ‘to go for a walk’.
But the fact that he actually had an appointment down in the valley somehow made it impossible for him to say that he wanted to go there. He remained at his post, got out his cello and dutifully played the Sarabande from one of Bach’s solo suites. It went extraordinarily well and he surprised himself as well as his audience with his beauty of tone and depth of feeling. After that he found that the arranged meeting in the valley had taken on a new importance in his mind and it was with a certain solemnity that, at four o’clock, he announced his departure
faire une promenade dans le vallon.

He had reached the spring and the sleeper ‘bridge’ almost before he knew it and was immediately disappointed, then cross, to find that Fox was not sitting on the railing.
He glanced to where Fox had shown him rainbows dancing in the spray above the spring basin, but the light was different and the springs less boisterous and there were no rainbows. No, he thought, you could not have a complete repetition. Even on the way down he had noticed some changes since last weekend. Hedge-mustard was pushing up its bright cressy leaves, and orange-tip butterflies were delicately reconnoitring them from the surrounding air. The first innocent leaves of nettle were beginning to green the muddy edges of the watercourses. Adam hopped up onto the rail and sat there by himself for a minute. No-one came along. He got down from his perch and began to make his way purposefully along the path he had taken with Fox exactly a week ago. Wood warblers called from the greening willows and a blackcap, mapping its territory in song from the tip of a bramble spike, sprinted off into the air at his approach. ‘Sorry,’ he said to it and thought he sounded like one of Schubert’s lovelorn anti-heroes communing with the wild things, then he thought of Fotherington-Thomas and was glad there had been nobody to hear him.

Up the path he trailed, along the valley-side, until the path began its final steeper climb to the cliff-edge clearing.
He stopped for a second. Nature had fallen silent for a moment; there was just the rush of the hidden stream far below. Then he climbed the final slope and emerged into the dappled light of the clearing. His journey had been in vain. It had been silly to think of Fox’s casual remark as constituting any kind of appointment. It was just something people said. Fox wasn’t a responsible adult anyway. And Adam had not even replied. Besides, it was already later now than the time at which they had parted last week. He was cross with himself. And alone.

Until he turned slowly round and saw Fox sitting perfectly still at the edge of the clearing, taking the sun in the manner of his furry namesake and regarding him with the same amused stare.
He was naked to the waist, his dark pullover lay half balled-up under the palm of his hand, and the slanting sun laid bars of alternate golden light and bronze shadow over his chest.

‘
Good camouflage,’ said Adam.
‘Tu vas bien?’
Fox looked like … Adam tried to think what. It was a photograph, a famous photograph, a very old photo … a ballet dancer stripped to the waist …

‘
Et toi?’
Fox didn’t move or even extend a hand. He waited. So did Adam. Then he walked slowly towards Fox and sat on the ground beside him
. L’après-midi
d’un faune,
thought Adam. Nijinsky.

‘
You came,’ said Fox. ‘I wasn’t sure you would. I remember how you ran away the first time.’

‘
That was different,’ said Adam, feeling like Alice addressing some strange creature or other. ‘ I didn’t know you then.’ Then, from a wretched ingrained habit of politeness that he regretted as soon as the words came obediently trotting out: ‘ I’m sorry I’m late.’

‘
I’m glad you’re here,’ said Fox simply. Then his face relaxed into a smile and he changed the subject. ‘ It’s your first year here, no? You’re going to like the colours.’

‘
How do you mean?’

‘
Next month the fields turn yellow, almost from night to day. It’s a soft yellow like a Chablis wine. The next month everything goes blue.’

‘
You mean the flowers? The wild flowers colour the fields? Is that what you mean?’

Fox ignored the interruption.
‘Then yellow again. This time a deep gold like the butter, like the sun. Finally it all goes red. The colour of blood. Fresh blood.’ Fox wanted to be exact.

‘
Why do you say finally?’ asked Adam, slightly anxious. ‘You’ve only gone as far as June or July.’

‘
No more colour after that,’ explained Fox matter-of-factly ‘The fields are cut for hay. And then the summer bleaches all the colour out of everything. Until the autumn comes again.’ Fox had been looking ahead of him. Now he turned towards Adam and smiled. ‘But that is where you came in.’