Playing Fields in Winter Read online

  The crescent being a select London street, the news was not swapped cheerily in front of the spear-headed black railings or passed along by neighbourly exchange. It was learnt, by some silent filtration, over the next few days and no one felt it appropriate to comment or congratulate. The Whartons’ Colombian au pair girl, letting herself into the crescent garden early one morning with the family’s King Charles spaniel, met the Cavershams’ Philippino help struggling almost tearfully with the key and in the course of a halting exchange about their employers, the two girls made the only direct public reference to the recent coincidence. They found the lack of comment peculiar. Then they talked about the smoke from the gardener’s bonfire which, rising through the yellow trees, reminded each of them of something different in their own countries.

  *

  What was it like for him in that other white house beside the gardens when the telegram arrived? It was brought in the very early, pink morning by a ‘boy’ on a bicycle, who was really thirty-two years old but cowed and thin. There was exhilaration and the proud, nearly dream-like realisation of tremendous powers. He could behave quite differently now; he was about to become part of another world. The words on the telegraph form were so botched and crooked to represent such a huge transformation. Yesterday his life had been one thing: from today, it would be something utterly superior. At the same time he felt calm satisfaction, for the world had only recognised his due – what was to be expected if you were born Ravi Kaul and had servants to cry because you were going abroad. And his father? Had he swollen even greater at this family triumph, jutting his bulbous finger at the sky to show that heaven and he understood one another? And his mother? Had she crept, pressing her sari hood to her mouth, into some back bedroom and sobbed because her eldest son was to travel so far? The pink sun came up and he rang his friends to tell them the news. When they came round to celebrate, a gulf had opened between him and those who were not going abroad, because already their lives had begun to diverge.

  The house beside the gardens in Lucknow had been home since Ravi was ten. But it was not profoundly home, the way a house in a city would be if you had been born there and your ancestors had lived in the same place. There was somewhere else, beyond reach, that was really home – Delhi, where the streets were wider and his parents were in a better mood – and Lucknow had always been second best.

  Ravi and his brother Ramesh, and later his two little sisters, had grown up feeling that they did not quite fit into their surroundings. Not only were they a Hindu family in a very Moslem city, they were a sophisticated metropolitan family in a provincial capital. Ravi had done well at school; that had been his revenge: better and better at school, to serve everybody right. In summer, when it was really too hot to study, he had continued studying to confound them. He had sat in his bedroom – actually Ramesh’s bedroom too – and scowled down at his books for hours, too hot and sweaty to take anything in but satisfied by the sounds of his mother fussing from the doorway – she would not have dared actually to come in and disturb him – and by the imagined vision of his name at the top of the termly class lists once again. Tributaries of sweat and water like the rivers whose names he memorised ran down his scrawny neck from the wet towel he wound around his head. His legs stuck painfully to his wooden chair. When his mother finally tiptoed in with a cold drink, he ferociously ignored her. His diligence naturally paid off in time. First he got into the college in Delhi and then, gloriously, Oxford. And all along no one knew, least of all his proud parents, that his motives were so unscholarly. It was not academic success he was after but his rightful horizon, which would reduce Lucknow to a picturesque childhood memory.

  When he was very small, Ravi had had a recurring nightmare. This had been brought on, he thought, by an incident on a bus journey. Where they were going or why, he could no longer remember, but he knew that the journey had been the cause of a great upset in his family; they should have been travelling in a private car and not by public bus, crowded together with all sorts of people in the worst of the hot weather. His mother was tense and upset and her unhappiness had communicated itself to him. Somewhere along the way, the bus had stopped at a roadside snack stall and his mother, screwing up her face in disgust, had taken him into the public lavatory. It was a fearsome place. There was no light in the low hut, but a fierce smell which seemed to make the darkness blacker. Small barred windows high up in the wall let in two square rays of light which showed, once your eyes were accustomed to the darkness, that around the lavatory hole the sloping floor was awash with faeces. So that he should not spoil his shiny shoes by paddling in the excrement, his mother had stood at arm’s length from the frightful hole and held up little Ravi over it to do his business as best he could, squawking and terrified.

  In his nightmare, Ravi fell and flew sickeningly down into the smelly dark shaft, falling further and further away from the light and his mother, into a bottomless black pit which he knew would eventually come out on the other side of the world.

  How many times he dreamed that dream, he had no idea, for it was reinforced so often in his waking hours. There was a dark world of dreadful filth which lay in wait for him outside his safe, clean home. There were holes in every public lavatory which led through to the other side of the world. And it was only by turning up his nose at it and sticking fast to what his parents taught him that he could steer clear of the abyss.

  *

  The college reminded her of school on the dull October day she arrived in Oxford. There was a familiar institutional smell in its long corridors – which aroused memories of lack of affection – and a disembodied jabbering, not produced by any particular voices but apparently generated perpetually by the community of females.

  She was given a room overlooking the garden. It was on the top floor of the least popular wing of the college and as well as the corridors, visitors had to negotiate a steep and rather forbidding staircase. It was room Number 102, but the girls on either side had already put up little cards saying ‘Jacqueline Poliakoff’ and ‘Clarissa Rich’. Clarissa Rich knocked while Sarah was beginning to unpack and already giving way to a fantasy of not opening her suitcases at all but seizing what she cared most about and running away. She had found a hot-water bottle in a crocheted woollen cover lying forgotten in the wardrobe. It seemed to predict such chilly, spinsterish winters in the secluded room that she had thrown it into the waste-paper basket and now she was unwilling to put her belongings into the traces left by her predecessor. Clarissa Rich put her head round the door when Sarah answered and, seen without her body, it was a slightly unnerving sight; she had a large, nearly lunar face, surrounded by an aura of pale frizzy hair. She said, ‘Hail and well met, stranger. We’re neighbours.’ Her body, which followed, was very broad and draped in a floor-length purple smock. Standing in the centre of the empty room she said, ‘Yes, just like mine, except that my bed’s over by the desk, more to the end. I think it’s nicer that way; you can use the desk light to read in bed.’

  ‘Have you got yours all fixed up then?’ Sarah asked. ‘Are you unpacked?’

  ‘Oh goodness, yes,’ Clarissa answered. ‘I came up three days early so that I could get all that out of the way before the work started.’ She looked at Sarah curiously. ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘English,’ said Sarah. ‘And you?’

  ‘History,’ replied Clarissa, ‘although I must admit I am tempted by philosophy.’ She went over to the window to see if the view differed at all from hers and then turned and asked a little awkwardly, ‘Would you like to come and have tea?’

  Because it had seemed short-sighted to offend her neighbour on the first day and so as to get out of the chilling room, Sarah followed Clarissa. She seemed very pleased to have enlisted Sarah. She showed her where the kitchen and the bathroom were. On the way back they passed a small, rather pretty dark-haired girl, who was being helped with her luggage by two laughing young men. Clarissa contented herself with a ‘Hail and well met, stranger!’ an
d a wave; then she ushered Sarah proprietorially into her room and commented, ‘Oh dear, one of those. I hope we don’t have too many of them on our corridor.’

  Oppressiveness spread from Clarissa’s pimpled forehead and sternly parted, rather oily hair. Sarah thought that maybe her mother had been right when she said it was important to get in with the right people at the very beginning. She did not want to be drawn into Clarissa’s musty orbit; it would be awful if she was seen with her at the start and considered by the interesting people to be like her.

  Clarissa offered Sarah home-made flapjacks from a big tin and took two, which she chewed with relish. ‘It’s a wonderful feeling, starting here, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘There’s so much exploration and discovery ahead of us.’

  *

  Although his college in Delhi had modelled itself on one of these, Ravi Kaul was not prepared for quite how closely the university resembled its caricatured versions overseas. It was like moving into a textbook, taking up residence on a well-worn page with all the illustrations austerely correct: chapel, quadrangles, High Table, gowns. It was astonishing how dotingly the traditions were maintained, how cosily the young Englishmen stuck to them. And Ravi, who had assumed that he knew as much about them as any John Smith, and would therefore take to them with ease and panache, found to his dismay that he disliked them intensely.

  ‘It’s eight o-clock – sir.’

  ‘Oh gosh, is it?’

  ‘It is – sir. I presume we’re up to opening our curtains this morning?’

  He had an ancient cubby-hole of a bedroom during that first year and an ancient college servant, a scout, to go with it. His name was Mr Gregory Rainbow and he waited on Ravi Kaul with resentment.

  ‘You’re from India, then, if I’ve got it right?’ he asked one morning, after bringing in Ravi’s frequent air mail letters with their Hindi cyphers.

  ‘That’s right, Mr Rainbow. Have you ever been there, by any chance?’

  ‘Indeed I have – sir. I was there in the Army, as a matter of fact, before the war.’

  ‘Did you like it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say “like” was quite the word for it. It was an interesting experience.’

  ‘Would you go back there?’

  ‘I would not.’ The stocky old man deliberated in the doorway – a rustic figure, Ravi thought, whom he liked to imagine leaning on a country gate and chewing a straw, as in a poem by Mathew Arnold or Thomas Hardy. Then, turning, he delivered a ripely matured retort, ‘I hardly need to, do I, with so many of you over here?’

  *

  Straight away Sarah found herself a boy-friend, a taciturn, blond boy-friend called David Whitehead to whom she conscientiously lost her virginity half-way into her second term. Although ‘lost’ was hardly the right word because Sarah jettisoned the virginity, whatever it was, quite deliberately. She calculated the precise circumstances in which this would take place (before David’s electric fire on a long Saturday evening) and together with her new friend Emily Williams analysed and assessed its consequences and advantages. In return, David Whitehead presented Sarah with his complete inability to give or receive emotion. He had been brought up in boarding school dormitories and all-male common rooms; he was the son of the convention that it is weak and debilitating to show one’s feelings and even when a little emotion would have been permissible, he could not produce it. His feelings had been permanently doctored. His attachment to Sarah was mainly negative; he did not repel her with sarcasm, he did not leave her room at night. Sarah was unclear about the exact nature of her feelings for him. She found his silences appealing, because they seemed to her to show he was withholding something from the unworthy world. He had a schoolboy hero’s hair. But there was never any upheaval between them. Each acquired the other gravely as a new aspect of university life, and each knew privately that they were only trying the other out … like a new subject, like another society, like most things in that first year.

  Her first year was certainly quite safe. Beginning so inauspiciously on that wet October day, it remained circumscribed and traditional, a game with antiquated rules. In later years, in fact, she often forgot about it completely when she recalled the university. She overlooked the part it must surely have played, with its dissatisfactions and limitations, in bringing about what came afterwards.

  Sarah watched the faces of the first evening develop into a narrow range of English fictional characters: the earnest, ugly blue-stocking; the socially successful but malicious beauty; the vamp. As the daughter of Gareth Livingstone, the photographer, she found herself cast as sensitive – artistically bad-tempered. In spite of herself, she had hung on her wall the two photographs which her father had given her to take to college. Her visitors said, ‘Gosh, what amazing pictures – they’re by Gareth Livingstone, aren’t they? Goodness, is he your father?’ and she thereby managed to distinguish herself from Clarissa Rich on her right and Jacqueline Poliakoff on her left.

  She did what everyone else did – joined societies, drank coffee and argued until two in the morning about Platonic friendships and the existence of God. She experimented with different, rather amusing personalities as the year went by; she was the sour and knowing cynic, the popular party-goer whose mantelpiece was lined with invitations, or from time to time the library recluse.

  Each night there were the decreasingly palatable dinners for which they had to endure a Latin grace in Hall, Clarissa Rich’s frizzy hair left coiling in the bath at the end of the corridor and the noise of Jacqueline Poliakoff copulating excruciatingly through the thin partition wall. There were evenings as blank and desolate as the winter lawns, as cold and isolated as her college room, when everything seemed so ordered and so staid that Sarah longed for a disruption.

  Not only did their past dominate their present, it cast its massive shadow on to their future too and seemed capable of dictating what Sarah Livingstone would become and who her friends would be for ever. Like the owner of the crocheted hot-water bottle cover before her, she would sit with her knees drawn up by the two-bar fire and console herself by numbly eating chocolate biscuits.

  *

  Ravi, shivering, appalled, caught every germ malingering in the damp Thames Valley. He had only to open his mouth, it seemed, for a new permutation of cold, bronchitis or influenza to glide in; the college nurse expressed the opinion that his origins were to blame. His nose became almost Englishly pink. And then finally he must have run through the whole range, for he acquired immunity and the illnesses stopped. It made him quite cocky for a while.

  He had never been a weakling child. His brother Ramesh had been the sickly one, stealing more than his fair share of their mother’s attention. For Ravi, an illness was a rare calamity and he hated England for having attacked him in such an underhand way. It was an insidious germ warfare, which undermined his very character and confidence. For here there was no one to bring him sweet milk drinks with cinnamon and rub his temples with tingling balm. He lay in his mediaeval bedroom and coughed and listened to the bells chiming; he thought he had never been so lonely and forlorn in his life.

  *

  It was a closed world. Was it three or four weeks after the first night dinner that her new friend Emily Williams knocked on Sarah’s door, gulping tears, at half-past one in the morning? It was a Sunday night. Her boy-friend from Surrey had come up to stay for the weekend, as promised, but after seeing her new environment and the kind of topics which were going to occupy her for the next three years, he had announced that evening as they packed up his things for the coach that he and Emily were through. She had lain in her room for two hours crying and then come running across the dark quadrangle, hating the very gravel screeching under her feet, to wake Sarah. Now she sat huddled in Sarah’s armchair, shaking with her crying and the cold as she repeated, ‘I can’t bear it, Sarah. I’d rather have him than all this. Honestly, I shall have to leave. I just can’t stand it here without him.’

  Sarah filled her kettle and then, theatricall
y, poured out two glasses of sherry as well. She had bought the bottle a week or so earlier and had put as much thought into arranging it with the new little glasses on her coffee table as if they were ornaments. By means of objects like the sherry glasses and her ivy, she was after all turning room Number 102 into her own backdrop, distinct from that of Clarissa Rich or Jacqueline Poliakoff. She put Emily’s glass on the table near her and sat down on the other chair opposite her, wrapping her dressing-gown closer. She noticed on her bedside alarm clock that it was nearly 2 am and felt a pleasant sense of drama.

  During those early days, Emily Williams had been her one source of drama. In the first week of meetings and book lists, Emily agonised loudly over which subject she should read and whether or not she was at the right university. In the second week, after they had been set their first essay, Emily had fallen dramatically ill and then accused the college nurse of dangerous incompetence. She had had her transistor radio stolen and later escaped near rape by an engineering student at a Freshers’ party. Sarah saw that friendship with Emily would ensure some excitement, while Emily found in Sarah the impressionable audience she needed for her dramas.

  She wept in front of Sarah but, after a while, started to apologise for keeping her awake.

  Sarah said, ‘That’s all right. I couldn’t sleep anyway.’ Insomnia was one of the discoveries of that period – provoked at first by the unfamiliar sounds of Jacqueline Poliakoff’s pleasure and then sustained by the thought of the three hundred women lying sleeping around her.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Emily, who hoped for distraction.