Playing Fields in Winter (5 page)

What happened next was a coincidence but, in a small city, perfectly feasible. Ravi was walking along the street to an economics lecture with Dev Mehdi and Sunil Sircar. They turned to cross over and he saw Sarah waiting at the traffic
lights on her bicycle. She was looking at him with an expression that included recognition and apprehension, but she did not call out ‘Hello’ – possibly because she was not sure if he would remember her. She might also have been embarrassed to be met on her bicycle wearing – he could not help noticing – bicycle clips around her jeans. She looked rather dashing, actually. The temptation to show off to Dev and Sunil was too much.

Ravi called out, ‘Hi Sarah!’ and saw a look of relief cross her face. She answered, ‘Hello!’

He gave her a cheery wave and walked on with his friends.

‘Who was that?’ they both asked in Hindi. In their group, they knew all of one another’s friends.

Ravi said, ‘Sarah Livingstone. A girl I know slightly.’

‘Aha,’ said Dev Mehdi, ‘but whom we don’t.’

‘A clandestine association,’ commented Sunil Sircar, joining in the teasing. ‘What exactly are you up to, Mister Kaul?’

Revi laughed, enjoying the game. ‘Now, wouldn’t you like to know?’

‘Well, your nefarious pursuits are no concern of mine,’ said Sunil.

‘Just don’t think they’ve escaped our notice,’ said Dev, and they all laughed.

‘Sarah Livingstone,’ Sunil repeated with relish. ‘And which college is she at?’

It was only then that Ravi realised that he didn’t know.

Ali Suleiman knew, but Ravi was quite sick of that prig’s company. In any case, why should he want to find out? It was not as if he were going to march round to Sarah’s room and have afternoon tea with her; he had had enough of that scene. By and large, the girls he had met in Oxford did not appeal to him and after the disappointments of his first year, he had no intention of letting himself in for any more. The girls were mostly too explicit; like a display of bright sweets spread too long in the glaring sun, they did not rouse his appetite. After a few exploratory encounters at the beginning, he had wryly recalled a vague promise made to his father before leaving India that, whatever youthful excesses he might succumb to while he was away, he must never forget
that his ultimate duty in that respect would always be awaiting him at home. At the time Ravi had laughed to himself, partly because of the roundabout way in which his father – a pompous man – had broached the subject and partly because he had no intention of being so unimaginative. He had talked to chaps who had been away and he knew what treats were in store for him, if he so chose. It was all part of the adventure of three years abroad, although he could hardly expect his reactionary father to understand that. But as it happened, he was not often tempted to break his promise. First-hand experience changed his views; treats there might be – and he knew one or two guys who availed themselves of these quite shamelessly – but they were not for Ravi.

There was another obstacle as well. Most of the girls he had met here could not shake off a severely limited attitude towards him; an Indian male was somehow not quite a normal male in their eyes and they behaved on the whole much more primly towards him than to their own kind. The one thing that he found secretly thrilling – their visible generosity with their favours – was not usually offered to him.

Ved Sharma had had a fling with an English girl before he went home to get married. None of his group had thought much of her or, for that matter, of Ved either, who was generally thought to be making a classic fool of himself.

A girl whom Ravi had nearly gone to bed with in the first term, out of sheer excitement, had utterly repelled him as they lay entwined on the floor of her room by saying, ‘Oh Ravi, this is amazing! I’ve been with two white guys, a black guy and now an Indian. All that’s left now will be a
laid-back
Chinese!’ Two other girls, who had been very friendly to him early on and had sent him invitations to coffee, had later turned out to be keen on converting him. The rest simply were not interested; they consorted with their own kind and, sexually speaking, they looked through Ravi, as if he were made of a completely unfeasible material. Of course, he found them mainly unattractive in any case. They tended to wear unflattering clothes; they went in for freakishly bushy, far-fetched hairstyles; above all they made an awful
lot of noise, screeching and cackling and thrusting themselves forward in discussions in a loud, abrasive way.

Ravi remembered all this and then curiosity got the better of him. Sarah Livingstone
had
seemed more interested than the others. After all, he kidded himself, she was a way of widening his circle of acquaintances too. So he dropped in on Ali Suleiman.

Sarah’s room was right at the top of one of the grimmer buildings of the women’s colleges. He had not sent her a note beforehand, in case it looked as though he were unsure of himself and since he was a little, he told himself as he knocked that she would be out. But she was not; he liked the way she shouted, ‘Come in?’ It sounded as if she was glad to be interrupted at whatever it was she was doing. She was sitting at her desk by the window, with the chair half turned round to see who was at the door. When she saw it was Ravi, she got up quickly.

He said something pitifully silly, which had occurred to him when Ali told him Sarah’s surname, but which he had promised himself on the way over that he would not use. ‘Ah, Miss Livingstone, I presume?’

She went ‘Tsk!’ She must have heard the quip a hundred times before, but she smiled, at herself and at him. ‘Come in, sit down.’

Ravi did both. ‘You remember, we met?’

‘Yes, of course. At Simon’s. We talked about hunting.’

Ravi smiled, then heard himself say something appalling: ‘Now I expect you think I’ve come to do some hunting myself.’

Sarah looked taken aback, but quickly said flippantly, ‘So long as you haven’t come armed!’

They faced each other. For a moment, it seemed as if they were going to dislike each other after all.

‘Only with my monetarism file,’ Ravi replied in kind. ‘I was on my way back from a seminar,’ he explained
untruthfully,
‘and I thought I remembered this was your college. Not the most welcoming of entrances, if I may say so.’

Sarah agreed readily, clearly relieved that Ravi had moved
on to such a simple subject. ‘It’s ghastly, isn’t it? You know it used to be a lunatic asylum?’

‘No!’

‘Yes, it did. At least, that’s the story – well, not this wing, but Quincy opposite. Did you see it on the way in?’

‘The older one?’

‘Yes, that’s right. It’s supposed to be haunted; apparently a mad woman in a long white dress sometimes walks and weeps there at night.’

‘You’re having me on.’

‘No, no, that’s what people say. Mind you …’

They both laughed. For a moment, there was nothing to talk about again. Then Sarah said slightly artificially, ‘I don’t remember – which college did you say you were at? Have you got any ghosts?’

‘Only live ones, as far as I know,’ Ravi said.

‘Oh, we have them here too,’ said Sarah, gesturing
distastefully
at the wall. ‘In fact, I’ve got one next door.’

‘Ah, I passed a rather funny-looking female on the way up,’ Ravi said. ‘A moony sort of girl. She looked a little like an exhibit gone missing from a waxworks museum.’

‘Oh, lovely!’ Sarah said. ‘In a long purple dress? That was her.’

She poured coffee and put Ravi’s mug on the low table in front of him.

‘I’m afraid I haven’t got any biscuits. I’m frightened of keeping them in my room.’

Ravi laughed. ‘How funny; you seem quite cool about ghosts, but biscuits really rattle you!’

Sarah was reaching out onto the window-sill for a carton of milk. She straightened up to explain seriously, ‘Ghosts don’t contain calories. They’re not fattening and I’m petrified of getting fat.’

‘Well, you don’t need to worry about that,’ Ravi said. ‘You’re very thin.’

Sarah looked delighted. ‘Thank you,’ she answered, although in fact Ravi had not especially intended the remark as a compliment at all.

‘Being fat is really an obsession here, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘You’re all so guilty about your size. I mean, even a slip of
a thing like you. Everyone is weighed down by a great burden of guilt they’re trying to shake off. What is it? A bad conscience as an individual or a historical legacy?’

Sarah considered the issue. ‘But why is it almost exclusively women?’ she said. ‘If it’s a matter of guilt, why should we carry all the burden?’

There was something very nice about the way she said that, Ravi thought, leaning forward and challenging him with her pleading eyes.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘Maybe because the women here are more sensitive than the men, more susceptible to moral qualms.’

Sarah gave a flattered, disbelieving laugh. ‘Do you find them insensitive, then?’ she asked him. ‘The men here?’

Ravi barely hesitated. He had thought about the topic so much. He knew this girl would relish an attack on her own kind. ‘Totally,’ he declared, ‘and proud of it!’

‘You’re in your second year, aren’t you?’ she asked and that annoyed him; checking up on his right to make such an accusation, aligning herself with those he attacked.

‘Yes,’ he answered drily. ‘My comments are the considered judgement of a year’s observation.’

Sarah smiled, embarrassed by his touchiness. ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘I’m interested.’

And Ravi swallowed her unintended insult and continued. So what if she first felt it necessary to check on his credentials, he could shake her from her smugness. Vengefully, he
launched
into one of his withering verbal caricatures of Oxford. He showed her an antiquated city, peopled by museum
exhibits
who went through the motions of being alive inside the safety of their glass cases. As he talked, instead of dismay, he saw Sarah Livingstone’s face light up with the joy of recognition.

They led each other on to wilder denunciations. It was as if, for the past year, they had been waiting on the sidelines, filled with self-righteous indignation at the pageant in front of them. And they loved denouncing it – witty, unkind jibes seemed to come naturally from both of them.

‘We should talk again,’ Ravi said easily when he decided
to leave. Briefly, they had really enjoyed themselves and now they exchanged slightly self-conscious smiles.

‘OK,’ agreed Sarah.

Ravi felt rather pleased with the way things had gone; virtually no awkwardness, no artificiality – they had just had a good time together. But because he did not want to seem eager or enthusiastic, he left without arranging anything further.

The door of Sarah’s room opened behind him as he walked away down the corridor and her blushing, flustered face appeared.

‘Sorry!’

Ravi waited.

‘I’m terribly sorry, but I just realised that I don’t actually know your name!’

It came like a blow beneath the belt and left Ravi
momentarily
too winded to reply. Why hadn’t she said anything earlier on? The revelation undermined his impression of the whole afternoon; why had she sat there right through their conversation without asking him? If he had been one of her English chums, she would have said straight away, ‘What did you say your name was?’ And why had he not thought to introduce himself, instead of confidently assuming that she would remember his name? Of course, anything other than English certainty was unpronounceable. The little bitch! She had been so full of unctuous eagerness, of Girl Guide brightness that she had quite forgotten he was an individual with anything so distinctive as a name. She was just being nice to a poor foreigner; she was no different from all the rest.

‘Ravi Kaul,’ he said stiffly and then continued a little abruptly down the corridor.

It was only as he walked back into town, through the transparent drizzle, that it struck him that Sarah had had no need to reveal what she had done. She could perfectly well have stayed quietly ignorant in her room. The fact that she had come out after him to retrieve his name meant that she expected to see him again.

The arrival of the good-looking Indian from Simon’s
tea-party
at her door had astounded Sarah. They had had a rather stilted social conversation together and she had registered almost nothing of his personality at all. She remembered only that he had been slightly aggressive, which she had liked, since this was directed at David’s friends. He had also seemed somehow rigid, she recalled, as though he were keeping his real reactions in check. She had not noticed any sign of interest in her which might have led her to expect him to turn up at her door.

She said, ‘Come in, sit down,’ a little at a loss.

Very formally, he said, ‘You remember, we met?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Sarah said quickly. ‘At Simon’s. We talked about hunting.’

She wanted to put him at his ease by showing what a clear impression he had made on her. Apparently flattered, he giggled and quickly showed her that he was quite at ease and she need not have made the effort.

‘Now I expect you think I’ve come to do some hunting myself?’

‘Oh God,’ Sarah thought. ‘I’m not going to be pursued by one of those, am I?’ By which she meant a poseur, a social performer who would pester her with visits and letters, but nothing racial at all.

‘So long as you haven’t come armed,’ she responded flippantly.

She had hoped he might be excitingly unconventional – being Indian, she felt he ought to be – but this was an opening of the most predictable kind.

Hostility flickered momentarily between them and a little resentfully – she had been trying to write an essay – Sarah started to prepare coffee. They made small talk about the college buildings, about the other students. Since she now thought he was bound to be a traditional sort, Sarah
apologised
for not having anything to offer him for tea.

To her surprise, he started to make fun of her. Her initial behaviour, she realised, had been patronising, but she was still slightly annoyed to be seen so unquestioningly as a typical English young lady, who entertained gentlemen to afternoon tea and whose social behaviour was totally
governed by convention. When he began to make fun of the university, she felt oddly defensive even though she knew that in principle she was equally fiercely against what he was mocking. That was because he included her in it.