Playing Fields in Winter (6 page)

They had a keen discussion and to make it quite clear to him that she did not care a great deal for the university either, Sarah even overdid her criticisms. He was certainly very funny and his caricatures of Oxford were vicious and astute. In the relief of finding common ground, they seemed to encourage each other in overstatements.

‘You walk around in glass cases, it seems to me. You’re all petrified of bumping into one another on your little island.’

And Sarah replied, ‘Would you want to bump into some of the characters strutting around here?’

‘We should talk again,’ he said, when eventually Sarah stood up to switch on the light. She had not really intended this to be a hint, but he seemed sensitively to interpret it as such.

They had talked for over an hour. It was nearly dark in the room and unwittingly an atmosphere of intimacy had been created.

‘OK,’ Sarah said guardedly, for while she had ended up enjoying herself, she could not help wondering if the Indian might not become a strain on further visits.

She had tried to manipulate the conversation in such a way that he would mention his name, which she could not remember. She was embarrassed to ask him, and now she felt she had left it too late. At the beginning, it might have been discouraging. Later, it would have been out of place.

He thanked her for the coffee and as he stood at the door, about to leave, he flashed her a bright, mischievous smile.

It was only when he was already out in the corridor that she was struck by a way of sabotaging that irritating parting impression of intimacy. On an impulse, she opened the door and called out. He turned.

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

It was almost as though she had kicked him and Sarah immediately regretted her unkind impulse. He mumbled
something which she just distinguished as ‘Ravi Kaul’ and went on his way.

She said, ‘Oh, OK, thanks’, but he walked on without any response. She realised that his offence might dissuade him from ever coming to visit her again and felt a quite unexpected pang of regret.

Ravi mulled over his mixed feelings about Sarah Livingstone for nearly a week. She had let him down; she had been silly. A flush of embarrassment still spread over him at the memory of Sarah’s face bleating from the doorway: ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I just realised that I don’t actually know your name.’ Until then, they had got on so well. She was quick and spirited and there had even been a moment – as she told him feelingly about her reactions to her first night in the college – when he had felt that they had something in common. He regretted the possibility of not seeing her again. Before her disastrous postscript, he had really thought that he liked her.

‘How’s Miss Livingstone?’ Dev teased him. ‘When are we going to be introduced?’

In the end, Ravi came to the conclusion that he and Sarah had got on best at a level of joky repartee. He decided that an approach on these lines might be a way of getting his own back on her, so he sent her a note:

Dear Sarah,

The Film Society is showing an extremely interesting Russian film this Friday:
The
Battleship
Potemkin
by Eisenstein. Would you like to come and see it? We could perhaps have a meal together afterwards.

Yours, Anonymous

And Sarah, who of her own accord would never have dreamt of going to see some obscure Russian film, considered his invitation and then wrote back:

Dear Anonymous,

I’d love to see
The Battleship Potemkin
. How, when, where?

Yours abjectly, Sarah Livingstone

After the film, Ravi took Sarah to one of the little Indian restaurants. It was a slightly aggressive thing to do; he would enjoy rubbing her nose in his pungent origins. But as he pushed open the door of the Shah Jehan and inhaled its warm fuggy air, he wondered if bringing her there was not a silly mistake.

The waiters, crude boys, did not conceal their amusement at the sight of their regular client Ravi dining with Sarah and – as ill luck would have it – Ved Sharma and his wife came in soon after them. Ved looked intrigued but made a great display of waving discreetly and not coming over to talk to them. His new wife stared at Sarah quite openly.

‘Mm, I love curry,’ Sarah said as they read the menu.

Ravi suppressed a pedantic wish to explain to her that the word ‘curry’ was a British over-simplification which had nothing to do with Indian cooking at all. But her eager appetite for what he was offering her encouraged him. He felt quite benevolent now. He was aware of Ved and Amrita discussing what he was up to on the other side of the restaurant but he rather relished the reputation he was about to acquire.

‘Do you eat Indian food quite a lot, then?’ he asked Sarah.

‘My father loves it,’ she answered, having unwittingly shown by her choice of dishes that she knew nothing about it at all. ‘He’s spent quite a bit of time in India.’

‘Has he?’ said Ravi, feeling hostility instantly well up inside him. ‘In the army or with some government outfit?’

Sarah’s laughter took him aback. How could she possibly know the image which he had in mind as he asked that question? But it turned out that she was laughing at the idea of her father, whom she described as ‘wishy-washy’, being in the army.

‘No, no,’ she explained. ‘He’s a photographer; Gareth Livingstone – you might have heard of him.’

Ravi had not, but already he imagined the photographs: India summed up in a number of big, high quality,
award-winning
pictures – temples, children, inevitably children, and if Mr Livingstone had been brave enough to leave the big cities or to travel by train, some austere artistic shots of the Indian landscape. So those were the images which Sarah
Livingstone had of India. Well, he thought wryly, probably better than Oxfam advertisements.

‘Do you like his photographs?’ he asked patronisingly. ‘Are they any good?’

Sarah recoiled a little, as though he had really asked her something rather shocking, but considered his question for a moment before she replied. ‘Well actually, they’re all rather similar, you know. I mean, people can tell if a picture’s taken by my father whether it’s in India or in Hyde Park. It’s as though he sees the same things everywhere.’

‘How can that be?’ Ravi joked. ‘Mughal monuments, yogis, elephants?’

Sarah smiled. ‘Don’t you think,’ she said, ‘that some people take their country with them everywhere?’

Their food arrived as she started to tell him about her parents and her younger brother John, their house in the white London crescent. It turned out that she was pretty curious about Ravi’s home and family too. Even if she had viewed him as a lone outsider in a vacuum to begin with, now she was clearly intrigued by the faraway place he came from.

All the dishes at the Shah Jehan were basically the same and Ravi felt a little ashamed of the way Sarah enthused about them. When they had eaten, he thought of inviting her back to his room for coffee, but rejected the
conventionality
of the gesture and walked back to her college with her. As they approached it down the silent suburban street, Ravi thought he sensed Sarah growing tense with suspicion. Surely she didn’t imagine he intended to try anything on, did she? She made an unnecessary reference to something she had to do rather early the next morning and annoyed, Ravi said facetiously, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to try and insinuate myself into your bedchamber.’

Sarah looked round at him in the dark, taken aback by the irritation in his voice. ‘Oh, but do come up for
coffee
,’ she said.

Ravi was quite disgusted by this remark. Primly he replied, ‘No thank you.’

When they reached the great front gate, he wished Sarah good night a trifle stiffly, standing very straight in front of
her. Just after she had answered ‘Good night – and thank you’, the clock boomingly struck midnight right overhead and they both laughed spontaneously. Sarah scuttled in through the gate as an elderly porter came out to close it and Ravi, looking back automatically as he walked away, caught sight of her fair hair glinting in the bright gateway.

‘Well, try anything once, I suppose,’ Sarah had said to Emily Williams when Ravi’s invitation to the film arrived.

From Sarah’s description of his visit, Emily said that the Indian sounded intense, but concluded that Sarah would probably like that.

‘Is he good-looking?’ she asked and when Sarah nodded vigorously, she exclaimed joyfully, ‘Well then, go – for heaven’s sake, go! They don’t exactly grow on trees around here, do they?’

Sarah discussed most things with Emily Williams, liking the brash comments which Emily offered. The successive disappointments of Emily’s first year had made her cultivate a cynical stance.

‘Ah well,’ said Sarah now, ‘try anything once.’

She went straight up to her room after the meal with Ravi at the Shah Jehan, but then decided to go and talk to Emily after all. She had intended to tell her what a fascinating evening it had been, how refreshing it was to have a new angle on everything. But Emily forestalled her; she had caught sight of Ravi Kaul by arrangement when he arrived to collect Sarah and she had found him ravishing. Now, having sat by herself all evening, feeling lonely and fed-up with the limitations of her life, she found the very idea of Ravi Kaul ravishing and she greeted Sarah crying, ‘He’s gorgeous, he’s absolutely delectable!’

Quite unintentionally, Sarah abandoned what she had been going to say about how stimulating it had been talking to Ravi Kaul and found herself instead enthusing about his eyes and his hair, his unusual Indian shirts and the wonderful way he threw back his head when he laughed.

The idea that she could conceivably fall in love with an Indian only then occurred to Sarah – so far, she had thought
of Ravi Kaul as a diversion. It landed on her mental landscape like a bomb. It blew out the confines of her future, destroyed the stacked years of duller expectations. But of course, Ravi was the antithesis of David Whitehead. She found the idea so exciting that she could not sleep that night for thinking about it. Lying in her lumpy bed in the dark, where David Whitehead had always complained that the broken springs hurt his rugby injury, she tried to imagine the contrast.

Ravi had planned to invite Sarah Livingstone to a concert of classical guitar music the following Friday, but she
preempted
him. On the Tuesday morning, he received a note from her in the inter-college mail, asking him to a tea-party which she was giving that Thursday. He was highly delighted by this gesture and also surprised by the promptness with which Sarah had let him know that she was interested in him. The note flattered him and it only occurred to him very briefly to wonder if he might be about to get into deep waters. But he was also vindictively glad of an early
opportunity
to remind her of his dignity. Although he would have quite liked to go to the tea-party, he was pleased that it coincided with a seminar on the recession and he was able to write back briefly saying that he could not come.

His two-line reply offended Sarah deeply. She had made a brave gesture, she felt, in asking him to tea and now, in her terms, he was playing hard to get. It did not cross her mind that Ravi’s behaviour might be quite straightforward and governed by nothing more than honesty. She decided that he was trying to lead her on.

She spent much of that week contemplating her image of a love affair between herself and Ravi Kaul. It was an alluring vision in which she, as well as her surroundings, was somehow transformed into something more elegant and interesting. Ravi she only saw as a dark foreigner and a glamorous seducer. He had no particular personal features yet; he was just the path that he could lead her down. She
was, in fact, perhaps not thinking about Ravi at all but only about her own adventure.

He arrived unexpectedly on Sunday morning, when in theory visitors were not allowed into the college. Later he claimed that he had told the portress that he had come all the way from Delhi. His first words did not placate her.

‘Tut, tut, not at church?’

It was Remembrance Sunday. In the city, near the War Memorial, a cannon had just begun booming and its solemn thuds made their conversation seem sillier than it was.

‘I never go to church,’ Sarah said defensively.

‘I never for a moment thought that you did,’ Ravi answered lightly. ‘We are two heathen together.’

He appeared not to notice Sarah’s bad temper and his cheeriness made her feel she was being crabby. She smiled. ‘You aren’t at all religious then either?’

To her puzzlement he seemed embarrassed by the
question,
although their exchange had been after all quite
light-hearted.
When he replied, ‘No, no, not at all,’ it sounded like an evasion.

They heard the cannon stop and the Silence began.

‘Did the tea-party go well?’ Ravi asked. ‘I was sorry I couldn’t make it.’

‘Oh, it was nothing much,’ Sarah said. ‘Just a few people. But it was a pity you couldn’t come; Ali Suleiman was here.’

Ravi suddenly glared at her. ‘Well, in that case, frankly I’m almost glad I wasn’t here. I’ve had more than enough of Ali Suleiman recently.’

Sarah said, ‘I thought you were good friends.’

‘Whatever gave you that impression?’ Ravi snapped. ‘Just because we’re both the same hue doesn’t mean we must like each other, you know.’

‘Oh God, why do you have to attribute such stupid motives to me?’ Sarah exclaimed. ‘You must think I’m a total moron.’

Ravi jumped. ‘Nothing of the sort,’ he answered. ‘In fact, quite the contrary. But why should you think I was such good friends with Ali Suleiman? Do we seem at all similar to you?’

‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘Yes. You came along to Simon’s
together. You’re both – serious about things. You both – you both like issues. And he’s always talking about you.’

‘Is he?
Is
he? What does he say?’