Playing Fields in Winter (10 page)

But now that prospect had been snatched away and he racked his brains trying to work out what he had done wrong, but could not think of anything. He was at a loss. Had Sarah misled him with her seeming acquiescence? Was she – impossible – not intending to come to bed with him at all? Was that not part of her idea of their adventure? Or had she had second thoughts about him at this late stage? He felt humiliated. On the way out they had passed Dev,
wide-eyed,
returning from the vending machine with his hands full of chocolate and he had beamingly offered them a bar. Ravi felt a sudden surge of anger at Sarah; what the hell was she playing at? Up till now, he had thought he understood exactly what was happening. He had known where he and Sarah were heading and he was enjoying the journey. Now he was stumped.

His bewilderment kept him awake and, in the morning,
turned to anger. Sarah had no right to do this to him. He thought of her across the city; she had become a picture again, as at the very beginning, for he could not imagine what she must be feeling this morning, what she could be thinking. He saw an agitated blonde girl at a breakfast table, confiding her night’s escapade to her tittering girl-friend Emily. The girl at the breakfast table was not nearly as brave and unconventional as she had made herself out to be; beneath her daring exterior, inherited prejudices still held her in their sway.

His anger grew and, by the afternoon, became a decision to confront Sarah. She jolly well owed him an explanation and he would make her tell him what was up. As late as possible, for he had told himself that he would get it over with before dinner, he walked out to her college. On the way he stoked his rage with the blithely weaving cyclists and the rain, but still he felt fearfully apprehensive as he drew nearer. What if she threw a screaming scene? What if she just refused to let him in?

She knew he would come. Of course she knew he would come. She had tried to prepare the scene a dozen times, but there was a point at which her imagination stuck: how would she feel when Ravi walked into her room? In her mind, Ravi climbed the stairs again and again. (In desperation? In anger?) He knocked at her door. (Timidly? Furiously?) And he came in. There she stopped, because she could not imagine what that moment would feel like. With her eyes shut, she tried to see Ravi’s face. To her astonishment, she could not. The shape of his hairstyle formed around his dark face; she could catch bits of his features, his nose, his teeth, but the real expression that was Ravi would not come. As an experiment she reproduced in her head the faces of her parents, of Emily Williams, even of David Whitehead, and they all swam up obediently from the dark. She tried to make Ravi’s again, but only his would not appear. Peculiarly upset, she wondered if this was a sign of subconscious racial prejudice which she had only now discovered.

She went to the college library, like a coward, so that if Ravi called she would not be in. But forgotten objects, like notebooks, kept bringing her back to her room just in case
he did. She got no work done and by the late afternoon was utterly wretched, undecided, had no idea what she felt about Ravi at all. The surroundings she had fled back to now repelled her. At one point she even thought of rushing out to Ravi, flinging herself on him and asking for forgiveness all the same. Then the thought of that made her shudder. She was standing miserably at her window, undecided whether or not to turn on the lights, when at six o’clock Ravi knocked and opened the door.

‘Oh God.’

‘May I come in?’

‘Yes, of course. Oh God.’

‘Stop saying “Oh God”. What’s going on?’

‘Oh, Ravi, I … sit down, let me make you some coffee.’

‘I don’t want any coffee, thank you. I have come … I would like an explanation, please. I’m afraid I don’t quite understand what happened last night.’

‘Neither do I.’

‘Neither do
you
? Well, who the hell
is
supposed to know, then?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know why I did what I did. It – it just happened. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m in a most awful state. If you’ve come round to be tough with me, then you’d better go – I can’t take it.’

‘Tough with you?
Tough
with you? Don’t you think you were maybe just a little tough with
me
last night?’

‘I didn’t mean to be. I’m sorry, Ravi. It just all sort of got on top of me suddenly and I had to get out.’

‘What did? What got on top of you?’

Simultaneously, they glimpsed the first possibility of humour in the past anguished hours and both giggled unhappily.

‘Oh Ravi, it’s not what you think. I wasn’t just being a prim little English prude, scared stiff at the prospect of sex. I promise you it wasn’t that.’

‘I didn’t think it was.’

‘Didn’t you? Then why did you think I did it?’

‘I’ve no idea; that’s what I’ve come to find out.’

‘I really don’t know why. I just suddenly felt that I didn’t
know where I was any more. I can’t explain it. I thought everything was fine up to then, you know I did.’

‘I
thought
you did.’

‘I did, I did! But last night I suddenly thought: what’s happening? I mean, what are we doing? It seemed as if we didn’t know each other at all yet and there we were – where are we going? Suddenly, everything seemed peculiar.’

‘Suddenly, everything seemed peculiar.’ Ravi wasn’t mimicking her, but the repetition of her words made Sarah writhe.

‘I know, I know it sounds stupid, but I’m trying to explain what I felt. Can’t you imagine what it’s like for me?’

Because Ravi had the role of the wronged party, he could afford to stay calmer. He sat and listened in injured silence while Sarah thrashed about on the hook of his presence.

‘But why couldn’t you tell me that you were scared?’

‘How? It was
you
that I was scared of. You … and what you mean …’

‘Me? You felt scared of me?’

‘It’s not that I feel any differently about you or anything. You do believe that, don’t you?’

‘If you say so.’

‘Oh Ravi, you know I don’t. It’s not fair – why should I have to defend myself like this? What have I done wrong?’

In the middle of that turmoil it struck Ravi as strangely delightful that even in love, Sarah should use the vocabulary of the playing fields: ‘It’s not fair.’ And he was distracted by it enough to answer, mimicking her in kind: ‘I’m not sure if you’ve been playing straight with me.’

‘I
have
!’ Sarah burst out. ‘I have. I just don’t see where it will end.’

She had failed to hear the borrowed vocabulary. It was an accusation she responded to with tears of instinctive outrage.

Ravi wanted to comfort her. He felt like reaching out his hand and patting the upset schoolgirl to console her, to reassure her that the end – wherever it came – would not be devastating, would not destroy her.

Sarah met his hand and held on to it with relief. He forgave her; she had not repelled him. The essential was secure, the rest could be dealt with later. So again they sat beside each
other on the carpet, silent for fear of damaging their happiness.

It was far too soon after the crash, too close to the rift for them to talk about it. They did not dare touch it in case it split open again. But they stayed there side by side long after it was completely dark, holding on to each other, depending on each other’s shape and breathing to carry on.

When Ravi had left, promising that they would meet straight after his politics tutorial the next day, Sarah threw herself on to her bed and wept at the release from tension. Then she wept with vast and desperate regret because Ravi was gone.

She knew then that he had won, for in the end it had turned out that he mattered more to her than her own ground. For him, she was prepared to leave safety and dignity behind after all. He would doubtless require huge and unknown sacrifices from her in the future and she would joyfully consent to them. Through her wild crying, she enjoyed one last flurry of false regret; she was actually looking forward to it.

Sarah missed Ravi for most of the night, but she must have slept a little between half-past three and five o’clock because, suddenly she was aware of a bird cheeping in the college garden and the dark beginning to thin out on the other side of the curtains. She stroked her face with one hand, pretending that it was Ravi’s hand, and mouthed the words he had spoken when they kissed for the first time: ‘One all.’ His voice had sounded low and lilting in the dark and his inflection made the words impishly his own. When he looked at her, his eyebrows arched in mocking query over the eyes on which she had nearly turned her back because they were not blue.

In the morning she went to meet him after his politics tutorial. He did not hug her in greeting because Sunil and Rajiv Mehrotra were with him and later, in his room, they were both still cautious and a little ill at ease. In the evening though, they went into college dinner with Sunil and Dev and Sunil entertained them with his inspired imitations of college Fellows feasting at High Table on venison and quail. Ravi and Sarah nearly choked with laughter.

They did not solve the problem straight away, of course. For almost a fortnight they waited, creeping cautiously back to where they had been before. Ravi especially was careful, for fear of setting off another panic; if Sarah had run away again, he would not have gone after her. She became impatient with his caution. Although she knew perfectly well that it was she who had provoked it, now she felt that Ravi was punishing her with his reticence. He tended to keep his hands in his pockets when they walked together and left without hesitation once he had kissed her good night. She wanted to show him that he did not need to be so cautious any more and she felt she ought to reward him for his patience. So in fact it was Sarah who initiated the act which put an end to caution.

It happened in the last week of May. She would remember the day and date for ever afterwards because, when it was over, she thought her life had changed and opened her diary to see the date on which that had occurred.

She had spent the afternoon in Ravi’s room, listening to a lady called Lateh Mangeshkar singing on the stereo and drinking very sweet tea with cinnamon in it. Outside, it was the sort of day which alternated violently between heavy squalls and white unripe sunshine. People coming into the room reported that outside it was April, May, June. A
high-pitched
hilarity connected to the coming summer was in the air.

For part of the afternoon Ravi was not even there – he had had to go off to some seminar – and Sarah had stayed and waited for him with his friends, finally feeling quite accepted by them and enjoying her position there. Only the girl Nanda occasionally still made her feel uncomfortable: prim and formal with Sarah, either resentful that Sarah had trespassed into her flirtatious monopoly or obscurely disapproving. Sunil, Dev, Rajiv and Dilip all seemed quite reconciled to her and Sunil gave her one of his small foul cigarettes – a bidi – to try while Ravi was out.

When Ravi came back, pleased with his success at the seminar, Sarah slung her arm around him and crowed, ‘Look, I’ve been picking up filthy habits from your friends!’

Everyone laughed and Sarah stuck the bidi sluttishly in her
mouth like a comic charlady. Later, she winced at the memory of what she had said and wondered if anyone had taken the remark badly.

She sat next to Ravi on the floor and pressed the full length of her leg against his. He squeezed her hand hard in return.

Because it was a Saturday night, they all decided to go and eat together at the Shah Jehan. Walking there in a noisy party through the quiet streets, Sarah exulted; she was part of their group now, she was part of them. Once upon a time, a group of Indians larking about in the street would have seemed flamboyant, undisciplined and foreign. Now she was one of them, she thought, and it was the streets which were foreign. She walked hand in hand with Ravi and he exulted too, to see her beaming in the dark.

They seemed to fill the little restaurant and the waiters rushed to and fro, bringing them more and more dishes. A favourite ploy, Sarah noticed, was to slip in extra dishes which no one had ordered, but none of the others seemed to mind. They peered at the new mixtures, consulted and invariably laughingly told the waiters to leave them on the table. Without alcohol, a drunken hilarity spread over them. People shouted and delved experimentally into one another’s plates. They called along their adjoining tables and cracked side-splitting jokes. At the climax of the hilarity, someone proposed a toast to Sarah in tea.

She did not say anything to Ravi when he waved good night to the others afterwards and turned to walk back with her to her college. Something in the way he publicly turned his back on them, put his arm around her and hugged her to him told her that that night marked a change. All the way back, her body felt quite hollow in anticipation. But just in case – just in case she was mistaken – she took Ravi’s hand as they reached the front gates and pulled him to her saying, ‘About time too, Mr Kaul!’

It was cold in her room and she flicked the switch of the electric fire before hugging Ravi. Then they took each other – neither knowing who took first – and enclosed each other in a long embrace. Ravi’s right hand reached inside Sarah’s duffel coat, but Sarah’s hands undid Ravi’s collar. Their mouths met in a warm, slippery, prolonged kiss. Ravi’s hands
reached under Sarah’s pullover and Sarah’s hands slid around Ravi’s neck. Their chests met, then their stomachs and they adhered to each other length to length. Their feet got in the way. Standing embracing in the middle of the room, each delved further inside the other’s layers of clothes as they rolled their heads, round and round on the soft pivots of their tongues. They bore against each other and their arms held each other fast. Their hands laid claim to the hollow of another back, to curves they could explore and acquire. Their hands felt for more territory, encountered fastenings.

They stood apart to undress. Silently, tidily, they took off their clothes and laid them on the chairs. Sarah was ready first and hopped quickly into the bed. Ravi, in the centre of the room, turned away slightly to hide his nudity, so that Sarah could watch uninhibitedly as his brown body emerged from his white underwear. Then he came over to the bed and slipped into it at the very edge. Sarah was waiting, rigid with apprehension on the cold sheets. Ravi threw back the sheets suddenly and uncovered their naked bodies. He looked down at Sarah’s, and he said gloatingly, ‘Miss Livingstone, I presume?’