Playing Fields in Winter (4 page)

They left the party early. An alternative would have been to stay extremely late and obliterate their disagreement with fatigue and alcohol. Instead, to round off their argument, they each went back to their own college. David found his friend Simon Satchell in his room and challenged him: ‘I thought you were supposed to be giving the party?’

‘I am,’ Simon said. He was virtually lying in an armchair. ‘I’m waiting to see how long it takes before someone notices I’m not there.’

They opened some beer and sat companionably in silence
for a time. After a while Simon said – just to point out to David that his evening did not appear to have been completely successful either – ‘What have you done with Sarah?’

David laughed, to give himself time to arrange the right answer, then he said, ‘Sent her home to bed. I needed some peace and quiet!’

Simon chuckled understandingly. For lack of any impulse to move, they sat there together until half-past three.

Sarah thought of dropping in on Emily Williams to ask her about the unknown man, but she had not come back to her room. In the room next door to her own, Jacqueline Poliakoff was being simultaneously tickled and throttled. Impetuously, Sarah’s winter dissatisfaction returned. She considered crying, but felt too lazy, so she made herself a cup of coffee and went to bed.

The next day, or the day after, there was a picnic to which Sarah and David had already agreed to go. When they met they made no reference to their argument; they usually dealt with their difficulties that way. They joined their friends at one of the boat-houses and loaded the picnic into two punts. But as everyone got in, it occurred to David to climb into a different punt from Sarah so as to show her that all was not forgotten. She pretended not to notice but when the two punts came together at their destination, having separated on the way, he saw that she had her head on his friend Nigel’s shoulder. They set out their picnic in a field, overlooked by ponderous cows; it was not a bright evening and almost as if they felt the whole exercise was too serious, too staid, before they ate someone produced two frisbees and they all shrieked and played. They were aware that they presented a happy, bucolic scene to other punts passing down the river and that was a major part of their enjoyment. They had a red and white checked tablecloth and long loaves of French bread. But midges rose up from the river in a spinning cloud and when they had eaten, they realised that the field was damp. Coming back, did David get into the same punt as
Sarah and when it was not his turn to punt, sit next to her and put his arm around her in the dark?

‘Honestly, I love the way you just assume I’m coming with you to the Ball. Don’t bother to actually ask me, will you?’

‘For Christ’s sake, what do you expect me to do? Go down on bended knee and beg you? If you don’t want to come, if you’d rather go off to your wretched Starvation Supper, all you have to do is say. It’s no skin off my nose. Twenty pounds saved!’

‘Oh, you weren’t actually going to pay for my ticket, then? We’d be going Dutch?’

‘Yes, of course we would. Catch me shelling out twenty pounds on you!’

‘Huh, charming! Well in that case, let’s just forget about it then, OK? I don’t particularly fancy paying twenty pounds for the privilege of spending an evening with you. Balls are supposed to be memorable.’

‘Oh, have you been reading your Mills and Boon again? Are you after some True Romance?’

‘Oh, piss off, David. Who’d want to dance all night with a berk like you?’

On the last night of term they walked beside the river, in an evening which the English had the cheek to call close and sultry, but when that term ended they already knew their makeshift intimacy was over.

Returning to Oxford to begin his second year, Ravi Kaul made a resolution. He had become too entrenched in his group of Indian friends, he decided. He would never live up to his early intentions of sampling what there was to be sampled in England – which, naive as they were, had some good sense in them – if he spent all his time with Sunil, Dev and Rajiv. They had been a fine cocoon to help him while he found his feet, but now it was high time to shake them off and be a little adventurous.

He knew one chap who was in with a tremendous lot of English students – Ali Suleiman from Pakistan. So on his
second day back he called on Ali, who was surprised and flattered by the visit. The other Indian and Pakistani students usually treated him with barely concealed contempt, as an ingratiating Anglophile chameleon. As he was leaving, Ravi said, ‘By the way, Ali, you know a hell of a lot of people here, don’t you?’

‘Do I?’ asked Ali, waiting to hear what would come next.

‘Yes, of course you do,’ Ravi said. ‘You know all sorts of people. Dev Mehdi and I were talking about it just the other day. You don’t just hang around with your fellow sinners. Who are those guys at Magdalen you’re always with? Tatchell? Latchell?’

‘Simon Satchell,’ Ali said correctly, ‘and Anthony
Crowmarsh
. Do you mean them?’

‘Yes,’ said Ravi, ‘probably. You’re really “matey” with them, aren’t you?’

Ali hesitated, for now he realised that something would be asked of him. He started to balance his head dubiously, but ended up proudly nodding ‘Yes’. ‘Of course,’ he added quickly, ‘they’re not the only ones.’

‘I’d like to come along and have tea with them one day, you know,’ Ravi said disarmingly.

Ali giggled and asked, ‘Why?’ This was one favour he really did not want to grant; despite what he had implied to Ravi Kaul, he knew that his position in that group was actually false. With the heightened sensitivity of people who are often subjected to slights, Ali was quite aware how patronisingly they treated him. He saw that he was a useful symbol for boys pretending to be broadminded. But at the same time, he was genuinely fond of them. Perhaps he made the situation out to be worse than it was, as he imagined Ravi Kaul seeing it. And it was gratifying to have someone as arrogant as Ravi asking him a favour.

‘Why not?’ Ravi answered. ‘It would be interesting to get to meet them.’

Ali pretended to be weighing up subtle issues. Then, just to show Ravi that he preferred meticulous English
arrangements
to slapdash verbal agreements, he said he would let him know when by means of a note in the inter-college mail.

‘Pompous arse,’ said Ravi in the passage.

The tea, a few days later, was not a great success. Ali was on edge and showed off embarrassingly. Ravi, already regretting what he saw as the grovelling which had been required to secure the invitation, was unnecessarily debonair. And the English boys were ridiculous.

That afternoon the subject under discussion was
rustication
, a lovely word. Someone had been rusticated for taking a pot-shot at one of the deer in the college deer park with an air-gun – did this constitute sufficient grounds for being sent down? Ali and Ravi arrived extremely late because Ali had insisted it was the thing to do. The room was ankle-deep in discarded coffee mugs and there were no biscuits left. A curly-headed chap, the Tatchell-Latchell whom Ravi had remembered, was sitting in the main armchair telling the story of an even worse offence he knew of, which had not warranted rustication. Sitting back-to-front on the two other chairs were what Ravi thought of as rugger types, listening with their arms folded along the chair backs. On the floor, there were five or six more fellows sprawled or lying with their legs jutting up into the air. There was only one girl in the room, a fairly pretty blonde girl, who was ostentatiously reading a book.

‘Anyway, he actually attacked a person,’ Tatchell-Latchell was saying as they came in, ‘not just a sodding deer. He actually assaulted a bloody don, for heaven’s sake, in the middle of the front quad!’

Ravi sat down on the floor near the bookcase where the fair-haired girl was sitting. This was not a deliberate move; there was an empty space there. The girl looked up from her book and smiled at him quite welcomingly – because he was a stranger, he imagined; she would not have stopped reading if he had been one of the familiars.

‘Hi,’ he said and immediately began agitating for some tea, since he hated to be thought ingratiating. It was coffee and the open jar was thrust at him from the middle of the floor. As the most recent arrival, Ali had gone down the corridor to refill the kettle.

‘But he was pissed out of his mind,’ someone said
contentiously.
‘Surely that’s mitigating circumstances?’

A few of them laughed, uncertain whether or not he had spoken seriously.

‘Wasn’t Larkin pissed?’ asked another, Larkin being the man who had shot the deer.

‘Larkin’s always pissed,’ Tatchell-Latchell cried, to general approving laughter.

‘Maybe that’s it,’ said one of the rugger types solemnly. ‘The deer was just the last straw.’

The conversation continued like this for quite a while. Then Ravi felt obliged to butt in facetiously: ‘Maybe it is your well-known national concern for animals which is responsible. Perhaps there is a strong anti-hunting lobby on the governing board and they actually feel more enraged at an attack on a deer than on one of their own number.’

This was met with an embarrassed silence, as if none of them could tell whether or not he were joking.

A little recklessly, Ravi pushed on, aware that he might be exposing himself to their ridicule. ‘I mean cruelty to one another is an everyday occurrence, is it not? Whereas cruelty to a deer is quite another matter.’

Help came unexpectedly from the girl, who suddenly announced, ‘I think he’s right. There’s a sense of outrage over a defenceless deer, which there certainly isn’t over fat old Dr Percival. I mean, killing Dr Percival could actually be considered a humane act.’

‘Oh, Sarah,’ one or two people said, as though she were known for her outrageous statements.

‘Go back to your book,’ said a blond boy derisively.

‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ Ravi said to the girl mildly, ‘but you take my point.’

That was Ravi’s main contribution to the tea and
afterwards
he did not feel encouraged to make any more. The conversation picked up again in the same jocular way. In their corner, Ravi and the girl began to talk, stiffly, seriously.

That experience drove him back to Sunil, Dev and Rajiv. Term got under way and he was busy choosing courses and fixing up classes. In the Long Vacation his friend Ved Sharma, a graduate student, had gone back to India and got
married. He now lived out of college with his wife and they gave a superb party for all the Indian students. Ravi’s resolution lapsed. He was quite surprised when a scribbled note from Simon Satchell invited him back to tea. He was inclined not to go. But he did not receive many notes like that – and on the day in question it was bitterly cold and he felt like a cup of coffee.

Again, the room was crowded. Ali Suleiman pretended to be pleased to see Ravi there, but was privately jealous. Some were born with a silver spoon, it seemed. Good-looking Ravi Kaul had only to lift a finger to get where he wanted, whereas he – short and plumpish and unimposing – might struggle all his life for nothing.

But although they had invited Ravi, none of them seemed particularly inclined to welcome him. As before, they lay about on the floor and only talked sporadically, their
conversation
verging on the incomprehensible. No one tried to include Ravi in it, perhaps because they did not want to fall into the usual English error of being too polite and
patronising
, but perhaps because they just had no idea how to approach him. He sat on the edge of things, growing more and more impatient and eventually concluded that Ali Suleiman must really be a fool to seek out this set. He looked around at the ruddy faces and he did not care if his disdain was visible.

That time, the fair-haired girl was not there. Not that he had looked forward to seeing her, but it was an even less interesting group without her. It occurred to him to ask Ali Suleiman about her afterwards.

‘What’s become of that girl who was there before?’

‘Sarah?’ Ali said familiarly. ‘David Whitehead’s girl?’

Ravi had not even identified David Whitehead among the taciturn guests. He tried to imagine which one of them the fair-haired girl might possibly belong to. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s right, Sarah.’

Ali giggled mischievously. ‘They’re through,’ he said. ‘Finished!’ He wondered momentarily whether to let Ravi in on their gossip and then went on, ‘Of course, old David hasn’t let on; he’d never talk about that sort of thing. But it’s pretty obvious if his lady vanishes off the face of the
earth that all can’t be well between them.’ He added, to convey to Ravi how much more he knew of the story than Ravi did, ‘He’s better off without her, if you ask me. She’s a trying girl.’

‘Trying?’ asked Ravi.

‘Yes,’ Ali said. ‘She could be very difficult. Not my sort at all. Always raising heavy issues when you felt like relaxing, never content just to sit and let things be.’

Only because it was Ali Suleiman who was doing her down, Ravi defended the girl. ‘I don’t know, she seemed quite pleasant to me.’

‘Well, you hardly met her,’ Ali said crisply.

‘Yes, but one gains an impression.’

‘A wrong one,’ said Ali. And, with a knowing lift of his eyebrows, which he often assumed as a worldly expression, ‘She is,’ he added, ‘too scrawny.’

Ravi did not intend to return to that gathering, although now he easily could have unasked. He caught sight of Simon Satchell once or twice in the library and deliberately made little effort to say hello to him. Since Simon behaved like that to everyone, they stopped acknowledging each other and soon all contact between them ceased.

Ravi did not give Sarah another thought. He had sniggered slightly when Ali Suleiman told him that her surname was Livingstone because of the obvious adventurous connotation, which somehow confirmed his own impression of what kind of a girl she must be. He had come across them quite often here – tense, possibly pretty but above all intellectual girls, who seemed to sense there was something missing here, could not identify it and consequently thrashed about a lot trying to make sense of their predicament. They lived out of town in those grim women’s colleges whose corridors smelt quite excruciatingly dreary and they ranged in type from positively forbidding to desperately oversexed. After a little
consideration,
Ravi put Sarah Livingstone towards the kinder end of the spectrum and then forgot about her.