Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale by Anthony McDonald Read Free Book Online

what you meant, you should have said it.’ Adam was proud of his articulacy in his new language. Sometimes he managed better in it than Fox. But all Fox replied was, ‘Hein!’
    Adam began to trot out his well-rehearsed explanation. ‘I’m here because of my father. He’s working on the dam at Lac de la Mouche. You’ve seen the scaffolding.’
    ‘ Why do they need an English engineer?’
    Adam thought he heard the question echoing from a hundred local lunch tables. ‘Because,’ he spoke with some heat, ‘my father works for a French company. His little engineering firm was swallowed by a bigger French one. That’s why he’s here. That’s why I am.’
    ‘ Why does a French company buy an English one?’
    Adam pretended to be exasperated by the question. ‘Because … oh, why does it matter?’ In truth he had little idea himself.
    ‘ Will the dam collapse?’
    ‘ No, of course not. It’s simply a question of reinforcing it cost-effectively by the best means that modern technology affords.’ He had heard his father reiterate this so often that he was now able to parrot it fluently either in English or French whenever the question arose. ‘It was never going to collapse.’
    ‘ Lots of fish in La Mouche. Ever go fishing there?’
    ‘ Yes – No.’ He changed his answer hastily. He suddenly visualised a scene in which he was fishing with Thierry and Christophe – or Céline – and Fox suddenly joining them, trousers agape. He saw their speechless astonishment, their dropped jaws and bewildered eyes, heard their horrified whispered question: ‘You know him?’
    ‘ No, I haven’t,’ Adam said. ‘I’ve never fished there.’ And later he would accurately date the first of his many betrayals of Fox right back to this moment.
    ‘ I’ll take you some time,’ Fox prattled on obliviously. ‘We can go together.’
    A relationship was already being created in Fox’s mind that Adam had no intention of allowing to materialise. If he judged it expedient to have any further dealings with Fox, he decided in a sudden access of cold adult wisdom, they would be sexual dealings only. Yet how careful he would have to be. Sex was like the wooden horse of Troy, he decided. How uncomplicated a gift it seemed at first, but once you had let it through the gate how many unexpected dangers might be found to have stowed themselves away inside
     
     
    THREE
     
    Adam had never before lived in a house where there were peacocks in the garden. Neither had his parents. The peacocks were symptomatic of the fact that the house they found themselves occupying when they came over to France was something of a find. It was a large, old stone farmhouse, one of several in the village, but unlike most of the others it had ceased to be a working farm some years ago and had been thoroughly modernised – almost spoilt, as Hugh had put it, ‘ but not quite’ – by a professor of architecture, who still owned it. The professor was on a sabbatical year in the United States during the precise period of Hugh’s French assignment, which happy coincidence allowed Adam and his parents the use of the place while the rent, which was not cheap, was (even more happily) paid by the company. The only responsibility that went with this was that of keeping the peacocks alive till their owner’s return. This had given Jennifer a few sleepless nights at first, especially when all three, one cock and two hens, had disappeared for two whole days during a prolonged snowy spell in December, but now, with summer approaching, everyone breathed more easily on the birds’ account.
    The garden was spacious, as a garden with peacocks has to be, and almost English in its three-way division into lawns, flowerbeds and vegetable plots. Though the last were still blank spaces in mid-March. Hugh had followed the example of his neighbours and covered the bare soil with as many panes of glass as he managed to find, stacked in an outhouse, to warm the soil after its