Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (31 page)

On the way to the interview Sean had felt curiosity, a little puzzlement, but nothing like alarm.
Until, turning into the corridor that led down to the interview room, he saw Michael coming out of it and turning another corner towards his own classroom. Michael hadn’t seen Sean at all, and Sean didn’t see Michael’s face, nor had he time to call out to him. But for some reason a little fist of fear clutched momentarily at his stomach. The principal thing that he and Michael had in common was – Adam.

He was shown in.
Two policemen sat behind the desk. They motioned to him to sit down, apologised for interrupting his studies and assured him that they would not detain him long. It was about … Sean waited for the name to come. He knew by now exactly who it would be about. And then the magic formula came back to him. The emotional background to what happened between them in France was restored to his consciousness like the memory of a recovered amnesiac. It was as clear as daylight why he had wanted to go to bed with Adam, why he had wanted to go to France in the first place, why he wanted Adam with him now. And he realised that anything that might conceivably happen to hurt Adam could not fail to hurt him too.

‘
What’s happened to him?’ he blurted out in a panic. ‘Missing? What are they doing to find him?’

‘
That’s where we hoped you might help us,’ said one of the policemen avuncularly. ‘You were staying with him recently. Did anything strike you about him that was new, different?’

A whirlwind of memories, of feelings, swept through Sean’s consciousness.
Everything had been new and different, from the moment he had arrived at the bus station in Chaumont and Adam had sat next to him in the car. Or perhaps before that, when he had decided, at the crazy whim of that powerful emotion, to go to France with Michael to see Adam in the first place. He felt giddy. He looked up at the old-fashioned clock that sat on the wall above the policemen’s heads, as if to draw a lesson from its example of poise and balance. He realised, as the policemen’s expectant gaze intensified, that his face had reddened.

‘
He must have made a lot of new friends in France,’ prompted the policeman when the silence showed no sign of breaking. ‘Did you meet any of them?’

Sean was at last galvanised into speech by the realisation that he needed to be helpful, to be useful to Adam.
Willingly he told the names of all the people, as far as he could remember, that he had met: Thierry, Monique, Céline, Christophe … The second policeman was nodding approvingly; he seemed to be ticking off the names on a list. Sean stopped.

‘
Was there anyone else?’ the first policeman resumed, after a decent interval. ‘Anyone you heard about but didn’t meet. Anyone whose existence you might have guessed at from his behaviour… For example, a girlfriend he didn’t want his parents to know about.’

Sean looked dumbstruck.
The policeman smiled, then said, more gently: ‘It’s very, very usual, you know.’

‘
Not a girl,’ Sean heard himself say, hoarsely. ‘There was a friend he had – a young man on one of the farms. We saw him but we didn’t meet him.’

‘
Interesting,’ said the policeman gravely. ‘I wonder why your friend Michael didn’t tell us that.’

‘
I’ve no idea,’ Sean mumbled.

‘
And how old would this man have been?’

‘
About twenty-one, twenty-two or so.’

The policeman looked at Sean impassively for a moment or two as if he found the youth’s face as informative as a well-written report.
Then he leaned forward and said, ‘And what do you suppose the bond between the two of them might have been? I mean, between a young lad who plays the cello almost to professional standard and the relatively uncouth son of a French peasant farmer. What do you suppose?’

The clock on the wall said eleven minutes past three.
Plus twenty-eight seconds. Twenty-nine… ‘It might have been sexual,’ said Sean, in a voice as thin as a thread.

‘
Thank you,’ said the policeman.

Sean left the interview room a few minutes later, weighed down with misery and foreboding.
Not the least of his burdens was the fear, a fear made even harder to bear by guilt, that what he had said – had been manoeuvred by the policeman into saying – far from helping Adam in his plight, might land his friend, his lover, in even more dire trouble than whatever situation he now faced.

Adam awoke the next morning in a positive frame of mind. He had shared a bed with Sylvain for the second night running, only this time he had some memory of the experience. He had woken in the dawn and watched the early light play on the sleeping features of his lover, and remembered enjoying the same appreciation of Sean’s proximity just a few weeks ago. It was still a new enough experience to contemplate with a certain awe, not something that he took for granted.

They had drunk well the previous night but more circumspectly than before, alternating glasses of water with the product of the vines around them, as they enjoyed a second balmy evening in the garden under the stars, with firelight, and their celestial chart of glow-worms in the grass beside them.
Adam felt clear-headed and strong. With the return of the Noirmoutiers tomorrow, which he knew about but Sylvain still didn’t, the end of this escapade was in sight. But he had hatched two plans as well, fail-safes, in case of any slips, or of Sylvain’s taking it into his head to announce new intentions.

After a cup of coffee and leftover baguette which they dunked in it, Adam asked Sylvain to give him a driving lesson.
In other words, allow him to drive up and down the farm track in the pick-up. Sylvain was happy to agree. He sat beside him and entered with pleasure into his new role as teacher of something he was not exactly a master of himself. He told Adam all about gear-changing and the clutch, which Adam already knew because of his occasional sessions with his father, but he was content to be patient and let himself be taught all over again. What he really needed was that practice, up and down the drive that would enable him to do the whole thing in a smooth flow: brakes, mirrors, gear-changes, steering, all at the same time. And after a little while Sylvain let him do exactly that. After another twenty minutes Adam was confidently zooming down the track, just managing to reach fourth gear before it was time to pull up smartly and do a three-point turn in the lane at the end (luckily there was little traffic) before haring back up to the farmhouse. Driving was easy, he discovered, once you had learnt to co-ordinate the footwork. Learning what you needed was the key. It was like school, like the cello, like everything else.

The driving lesson was connected with what Adam thought of as plan B.
If, in the last resort, something went wrong – the Noirmoutiers didn’t come, there were arguments, or Sylvain decided to re-kidnap him – he now had the final option of unaided flight by road. He felt fairly certain that it would not come to that.

Plan A was altogether simpler.
He would telephone his parents that afternoon and tell them, as he had instructed Frédéric to tell Céline, that he was fine and well and coming back the next day. Then he would manage to make it look as if he had got cut off before they had gathered their wits sufficiently to ask him what the hell he had been playing at for two days. He told Sylvain he wanted to come into Givry with him in the afternoon. As Adam had anticipated, Sylvain reiterated the danger of their being seen together in the public street. And, as he had planned to, he put this proposal to Sylvain. Why should Sylvain not drop him on the edge of the town when no-one was looking? Adam could have a walk round Givry on his own (and phone his parents without Sylvain knowing: that was the whole point of the scheme) and then, when he had given Sylvain enough time to go round the supermarket, they could meet for coffee or something as if by chance. That was not the sort of behaviour that suggested either runaways (he told Sylvain) or kidnappers and their victims (he kept this thought to himself). They would then appear to split, but in fact would rendezvous later at another spot on the edge of town.

The spy-story quality of all this appealed to them both, and the more detailed their plans became the more they fell in love with them, and were reluctant to criticise them as being fraught with opportunities for things to go wrong.
Sylvain found pieces of paper and a pencil hanging up in the kitchen for shopping lists and drew a rough plan of the centre of Givry. There was a place in the centre called the Lion d’Or, he said. They would meet there, when Sylvain had shopped, for a drink. What about money, Adam asked? He was told not to worry: Sylvain had plenty for the moment. And as there was only the moment to consider – the Noirmoutiers would bring it to an abrupt end tomorrow – Adam was reassured. He would not worry at all.

Lunch was cold aubergine left over from last night’s barbecue and more stale baguette.
It did not detain them long and they set off immediately after. Adam lay curled up on the floor of the pick-up, his head below the level of the window, in the tradition of all the best spy and gangster films. If by any chance the police stopped them, he would say he had dropped something from his pocket and was looking for it. After what seemed like a very few minutes Sylvain stamped on the brake pedal and brought the truck to one of his trademark halts. ‘ Now,’ he said. ‘There’s nobody about.’ And Adam opened the door just as they had arranged, slipped out of it and then crossed the road, giving Sylvain a nonchalant wave as he accelerated away into the town centre.

It took Adam a little longer than he had anticipated to get there on foot
– Sylvain had adopted a very cautious definition of the edge of town – but within twenty minutes he had arrived. He spotted the Lion d’Or at once. It was no corner café but the principal hotel in the small town and with its ivy-clad walls and wood-framed conservatory, bright with white paint, it emanated genteel prosperity in a way that Adam realised with a slight sinking feeling he very visibly failed to match. He looked down at his crumpled gym-shorts and sockless ankles above dusty trainers. Well, it couldn’t be helped. This was the place that Sylvain had said. And besides, in such a place there would be public phones. It would be less traumatic phoning his parents from the comfort of a booth in a hotel lobby than at an open-air installation in the main street under the eyes of
le tout Givry
. He gulped a couple of deep breaths at the foot of the entrance steps, then marched up them, trying not to feel like one of Dickens’ waifs and strays, and went inside.

He did not have to look far to find a phone.
There were two in the lobby, just in front of him, in coy little cubicles with swing doors that would have shown the heads and feet of the phone users, above and below them, had the booths been occupied. But they weren’t. Adam went into one of the booths and dialled his parents’ number immediately so as not to give himself time to lose his nerve. He heard the receiver lifted at the other end and then, as a thought suddenly struck him, he slammed down his own receiver as fast as if it had been a dangerous snake. Of course, the police would be monitoring his parents’ phone-line. A few seconds longer and they could have traced the call. The local gendarmes would be here in minutes and Sylvain would be seized as soon as he walked up the steps. Adam did not want it to end like that. He had his plan worked out. It all hinged on the Noirmoutiers, whom he had built up in his mind as towers of almost super-adult wisdom and dependability. They would sort everything out as soon as they arrived: gendarmes, parents, the lot. And then everybody could go home, stay friends, and live happily ever after. Adam walked out of the booth.

‘
Can I help you,
monsieur
?’ asked the smartly dressed young waiter whom Adam almost walked into in his rapid exit. The ‘monsieur’ was uttered in a tone of such deference that the word teetered uncomfortably on the brink of irony, while the waiter looked him up and down rather slowly, taking in the stained t-shirt and shorts, the dusty trainers and the jagged pirate teeth.

Unabashed, because the most difficult thing he had come here to do was behind him, he said that he was meeting a friend and could he wait in the bar and have a drink?
For half a second the waiter looked thunderstruck but then his face broke into a smile. Perhaps inside every penguin-suited waiter there might be a youth in a grubby T-shirt trying to get out. ‘This way,
monsieur
,’ he said.

Adam was shown into the grand glass conservatory that he had seen from the outside and seated at a table which was laid, like all the others, with a white linen cloth.
Around him a few of the other tables were still occupied by people finishing their lunch, mostly with large glasses of white wine at their side. No matter how you were dressed, this did not seem like the sort of place where you ordered a half of shandy. He asked for a glass of the local white wine.

One of the tables was occupied by two very elderly ladies, smartly dressed but so shrunken with age that it seemed as if the slightest draught might blow them away.
They had bright little eyes and sharp, hooked noses. Like birds, Adam thought. Miniature birds of prey, perhaps, like hobby falcons or a pair of sparrow hawks. Their toes touched the floor below the table, but not their heels. They were just finishing a main course that had been served on very large plates. Their waiter asked them something and after a beady look at each other they nodded their heads. He returned a moment later with a salver on which rested the substantial remains of an enormous joint of beef. From this he carved off further slices, one after the other, while the ladies’ hook-beaked heads still nodded, until at last the outstretched hand of one of them bade him desist. And then Adam’s wine arrived.