Playing Fields in Winter Read online

So Sarah invented a reason. After all, she did not want to be invariably the one who listened and consoled, but never had anything to weep about. She said, ‘I’ve met this man.’ And Emily listened. The man – who had in fact barely made any impression on Sarah at all – was a History student called David Whitehead. (Or had it actually been Whitechurch? Remembering him years afterwards, she had a sudden doubt. No, no, it must have been Whitehead, with that fair hair.) She had met him at an audition for a student play; he was going to help with the lighting and Sarah was auditioning for some minor part. So she told Emily that she had sensed something between them at once. It did sound plausible. She was making it all up, but Emily encouraged her. The thrill of misfortune and the possibility of Sarah also becoming involved in it comforted them. They drank another glass of sherry and soon Emily started to giggle through her tears. By the time she felt confident to leave and Sarah went back to bed, she really could not sleep for wondering if there might not perhaps be something between her and the History student after all.

  *

  Repelled, tantalised, Ravi was faced with plate upon plate of gristly English meat. He did not eat meat and his throat involuntarily constricted at its evil savour. But something perfectly silly forbade him to go to the Bursar and request Colonel Webb to order him a vegetarian diet. He would not single himself out among these pink, meat-eating English boys; he would not act the traditional delicate part of the good Hindu boy abroad. So he ground the foul fibrous stuff untasting between his teeth and left most of his meals uneaten. But he had not had to appeal for special treatment over something with which these hearty boys could cope. And the thought of the pious horror of his mother and his aunt at the sight of him eating steak and kidney pie perversely spurred him on.

  *

  In the afternoons, there were tea-parties. Every afternoon, in every room in Oxford, there were tea-parties. Amidst a mess of coffee mugs and gaping packets of biscuits, Sarah Livingstone and her friends discussed the question of Arts versus Sciences and whether or not to build a Channel tunnel. They toasted crumpets on unwound paper clips attached to the grilles of their two-bar fires. Late in the afternoon, they switched from tea to sherry and left for dinner, striking poses and howling at jokes which lasted for a term at a time. Friendships began or ended at these tea-parties, love affairs were surreptitiously advanced and once – carried away by the warmth and intimacy of the gathering – Clarissa Rich recounted how she had been ‘tampered with’ as a child by her father. In David Whitehead’s room in the city centre, above a shop which sold running shoes and rucksacks and camping stoves, Sarah ate ginger nuts and drank tea from a particular kind of pottery mug which she would ever afterwards associate with tedium.

  David’s friends formed a small, close sub-group. Membership was by vocabulary and however congenial a person might be, admission would only ever be granted if he used the right words in the right way. There was Anthony – whom those in the know called Ant – who would one day be a distinguished barrister and grow immensely fat; Nigel, who drank such quantities that his closest friends were scared for him; Simon, Tim and Christopher Lee-Drake. Tolerated, but never really belonging, there was also occasionally Ali, whom they had for unconventionality and flavour because he came from Pakistan.

  At their tea-parties, they did not actually talk very much, being able to convey all they wanted to one another with just one or two of their private words. They lay on the floor and savoured their exclusiveness. Sarah sat with her back against the bookcase and got a reputation for being argumentative. David’s friends said to one another what a pain she was as, warmed by mugs of tea and crumpets, they went out into the mist.

  *

  Ravi had never imagined he would joyously sit down with a circle of assorted Indians to a meal of vegetables and rice prepared in a mucky kitchenette. He had never imagined he would ostentatiously relish chappals and kurtas just because they were Indian or bring up geographical irrelevances in his economics tutorials in order to see his impeccably English tutor, Professor Elstree, force himself to reply with feigned courtesy. He had intended to explore. But he ended up going with a party of other Indian students to a shabby cinema in a cheap district of the city, where they saw rubbishy Hindi films shown for the benefit of immigrant workers. The students went because they were homesick and the little cinema smelt wonderfully authentically of Indian crowds and paan. They sat together at the back and jeered – just as they had done as boys in their various home towns thousands of miles away – and the rest of the audience, for whom the films were intended, turned round and cried at them to shut up.

  Ravi became one of the group of expatriates who met for meals in stuffy little Indian restaurants and made fun of the badly-spelled menus, who played sitar records and argued Indian issues together. He still believed that he would integrate into the city, but for that to happen, the city had to show some sign that it was interested in letting him in.

  *

  Of course, that first year had a summer too; it would be wrong to portray a country of constant winter. It began suddenly, over about three days, and after those three days – even though the cold weather periodically returned – it was still unquestionably summer. The winter receded into the dimmest corners of the libraries, where only those who liked nothing else sought it out. The term they called Trinity was given over almost entirely to enjoyment. The college garden, on which Sarah had looked out in gloomy animosity since October, now became a scented expanse of rolling couples. Only occasionally a grey female don would scurry between them, almost guilty to be a reminder of study. There were parties all the time: outdoor parties on the lawns, strawberries and cream parties, vicars-and-tarts parties, boating parties. The river, which had wound brown and uninterestingly until then, became the centre of the summer as the students floated along it in punts and held more parties on its banks. There was a visible, hilarious outburst of loving. At night, with the windows open, you could almost always hear gasping in the dark.

  In a straw hat and a long Edwardian skirt, Sarah enjoyed everything. She rode on her bicycle from one party to another, holding up her skirt to the handle-bars.

  David Whitehead came into his own, for a boy-friend was an important prop for the summer. He was someone to lie with beside the river, endlessly to propel a punt. Sometimes, out of idle curiosity, Sarah must have closed her eyes and imagined that he was someone else; she could not have said who, but someone less clear-cut than David who eluded her. And since by then they were both growing a little tired of each other, David probably did so too. But they looked a convincing couple and appearances were all-important in the summer. After a winter wrapped in shapeless woollen clothes, people put on flamboyant summery outfits and David and Sarah, blond and blue-eyed, looked utterly appropriate in cricket whites and Edwardian dresses. Bizarrely, incomprehensibly, someone called Verity Claybody tried to kill herself in one of the sunniest weeks.

  Of the many parties that term, one should be mentioned in particular because it was the scene of the first gap in that closed society, although no one involved ever remembered it later. David’s friend Simon was giving the party – or maybe Simon’s friend Tim. At any rate, it was a staircase party, with more than one host; everyone living on Simon’s staircase had invited their friends and, as a result, there were a great many people there and no one clearly knew whose guests they were. The table bearing the drink was at the innermost end of three adjoining rooms and was soon drained. But David and Sarah had brought a bottle, which they kept and drank themselves. The three rooms were horribly crowded; music nearly blotted out the conversation and heat and cigarette smoke formed a further barrier. So they stayed near the door, held their bottle of wine and drank it. Before the party, they had had an argument and now the shared bottle was their main reason for standing together. They talked little; each hoped to drink their fair share of the acrid wine and they both looked absently about the room. David looked for Simon or Tim, because the two of them could then exclude the party fr
om their conversation. He did not especially like parties, unless there was really plenty to drink, but he came to them because it would have seemed defeatist not to. Secretly he harboured an image of an ideal party, at which there would be no music and so no obligation to dance – in fact, no explicit jollity at all, but only a small group of carefully chosen people discoursing brilliantly, ironically in some select location. (He would have to wait over fifteen years to realise this fantasy, almost without recognising it, at a drinks party in a government building known by its number only.)

  Sarah looked for a distraction, in the vague hope of upsetting David by somehow involving him in the party. Over the closely packed crowd, she could see heads bobbing in the next room where people were dancing. Emily Williams, well on the way to being incapably drunk, was spreadeagled against the wall embracing a man Sarah did not recognise. There was a foreigner by the fireplace, standing alone and looking left out and slightly disapproving of the party around him. Sarah noticed him briefly; for one thing, he was a different colour from everyone else and his brown face stood out between the pink ones, flushed with exertion and drink. He was looking around the room with his chin up, either haughtily surveying the crass jollity or concealing the fact that no one had come up to talk to him behind an aloof expression. As he was rather short, he was only revealed by a gap in the crowd and after a moment the gap changed shape, leaving Sarah a view of his face alone. It was a good-looking face, with strong black eyebrows and what seemed in the party lighting to be quite black, shining angry eyes. A thought surfaced in Sarah’s fuddled brain, which could best be expressed as, ‘So not everyone in the world is English.’ This sounded ridiculous, but allowing for her drunkenness it must have meant that particular group of university friends rather than the entire world. And she looked on for some other way to upset David.

  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.