Playing Fields in Winter

by Helen Harris

  ‘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.

  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 p
rig’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 uninte
nded 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.