Playing Fields in Winter

by Helen Harris

‘Well, I thought you were both exiles in a foreign land. And he brought you along to Simon’s that time, didn’t he? I thought maybe you had taken him under your wing or something.’

  They united in attacking a third party, as their attack on the university had united them before. The easy game of doing down poor Ali Suleiman, who had played a fool’s part in bringing them together, put an end to their hostility. Ravi dealt with his single twinge of guilt by thinking that Ali was a pretty low sort of character in any case.

  When it was nearly lunchtime, he suggested that they walk to a country pub for lunch. On the way there they were still self-conscious, aware of the quarrel they had just patched up. They were too obligingly amused by each other, too jovial, while at the back of both their minds there was still a score to settle. But the pub was busy, it was a favourite Sunday lunch-time outing and it took them a while to order drinks and food and to find a place to sit down. By the time all that was done and they were wedged beside each other on an antique wooden seat, they seemed to be like minds once more in a laughable universe.

  Ravi said with amusement, ‘Ploughman’s Lunch!’ and lightly prodded his plate of symmetrically arranged cheese.

  Sarah had a sudden insight then into what it was to be a foreigner in her own country. The sight of Ravi Kaul looking down laughing at that blandly mundane object made a lasting impression on her. Even as she giggled appreciatively, she began to see how time spent with Ravi Kaul would be time in a different country; England would not be familiar and hidebound any more, seen through Ravi’s eyes.

  Out of keeping with her thoughts, her mouth said, ‘What would that be in India? A ploughman’s lunch?’ And when Ravi snorted sardonically and started to explain to her how meagre and frugal it would be, she tasted another aspect of the future – how enjoyably she would do penance for the historical legacy of guilt which Ravi had identified in her.

  She ate his pickled onions, which he left, and was aware that, for some unknown reason, he found this little piece of flirtatious greed immensely pleasing.

  ‘Have some more,’ he said. ‘I’ll order you a whole plateful.’

  ‘Oh God, no! You’ll have to walk upwind of me all the way back.’

  ‘And, above all, not try to kiss you.’

  ‘Oh, were you planning to?’

  ‘Do you like sharp tastes then? I have a pickle sent to me from home which you must try if you do. It’s my mother’s speciality; one little bite and you can never forget it. I think she sent it to make sure I didn’t forget my home.’

  ‘Does she send you lots of stuff?’

  ‘No, no, only when someone comes. You can’t send things like that through the post, you know. Your customs men don’t like these dirty, unhygienic foreign treats …’

  ‘They’re not my customs men. They wouldn’t like my treats any better if I tried to bring them back from abroad.’

  ‘That’s what you think. Anyway, they are your customs men. They are protecting the sterility of your sceptred isle. And Indian pickles in unlabelled jars are a threat which might pollute it. We have to hide them in our washing.’

  ‘Well, I dissociate myself from them.’

  ‘That’s fine by me, Sarah.’

  ‘Does she think you might forget your home, then? Or were you just joking?’

  ‘Well, four thousand miles is a long way, you know. I wouldn’t be the first to forget his way back.’

  ‘Do you think you might?’

  ‘Never. I mean … sometimes, obviously, I imagine it. I imagine staying here or going on to America and the idea seems quite fun. But after all, India’s where I belong, isn’t it? Would you ever leave England and go off for good and settle somewhere else?’

  ‘Oh, tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow? That’s what you say. But you’ve never tried it, have you? I bet you’d find you couldn’t, actually. You’d wake up one morning in Timbuctoo and find you missed something which you just couldn’t get there. And you’d have to go home to find it.’

  ‘Like pickle?’

  ‘As a symbol, pickle will do.’

  ‘Well, I think you’re wrong. There’s nothing English I would wake up craving for in Timbuctoo.’

  ‘Ah, that’s so easily said, Sarah. It’s nice to imagine you’re quite fancy-free. But what about afternoon tea or face flannels?’

  ‘Face flannels?’

  ‘Face flannels – that’s what you call them, isn’t it – have always struck me as being quintessentially English.’

  ‘I could manage perfectly well without face flannels.’

  ‘Well, if you’re so certain, then maybe you should try it out one day and see.’

  ‘I intend to.’

  They grinned at each other across the pub table, flanked by contented Englishmen with beer mugs – taking each other on as a challenge, as a dare.

  *

  Ravi returned to his college and, to his slight annoyance, found Sunil Sircar in his room, lying on the bed with the radio on, waiting for him to come back.

  ‘The man himself! Where have you been?’ Sunil asked, scarcely glancing up from a book of Ravi’s which he was reading.

  Although Ravi usually enjoyed the conviviality of Sunil’s and Dev’s long visits, for once he would have been glad to have his room to himself. He had been taken almost unawares by his liking for Sarah Livingstone and needed to work out where it left him.

  ‘To London to see the Queen!’ he snapped.

  Sunil looked up from the book and asked, ‘What’s bitten you?’

  Ravi took off his jacket and glared at Sunil. ‘Nothing,’ he said furiously. ‘Maybe I would just like to lie down on my bed, read a book and listen to the radio.’

  Sunil gesticulated generously and rolled closer to the wall. ‘There’s room for two here.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Ravi, ‘you’re the end!’

  Sunil narrowed his eyes. ‘Has something happened?’

  He pushed away Ravi’s jacket – which landed over his face – and burst into a loud, smug laugh.

  ‘Shut up!’ Ravi cried and told him to go away and leave him alone, which offended Sunil, privacy being a taste which Ravi Kaul had only very recently begun to develop.

  *

  Sarah locked her door and did not answer when Emily Williams knocked on it. She wanted to relive the pub and the walk again in her memory, so as to be certain of what she had felt: aghast excitement and fascination with the foreign profile beside her. Ravi Kaul must be the more interesting version of her life for which she had long hoped. Although she had boasted to him that she would leave England without a backward glance, now she was frightened by the prospect of even looking out to sea.

  It was almost, ridiculously, as if both of them knew and were terrified that already they had gone too far.

  For the rest of that term, they continued to meet tentatively once or twice a week, quietly amazed to feel their interest growing to obsession.

  Afterwards, it seemed to have been a time of caution, approaching each other with infinite care. Ravi sent notes and paid visits; Sarah still deliberated if she would be in or out. But things which they could not predict made all their caution ridiculous – the joy of their own contrast when they began to walk side by side, she so blonde and he so dark and different; the sound of the other’s voice infinitesimally mispronouncing their name and the dangerous, irresistible depths of a person inside whom was an unknown country.

  *

  In the last week of term, Sarah invited Ravi to a mince-pie party given by a girl called Joanna Richardson. As he walked out to her college in the dark, it occurred to Ravi that this would probably be the last time he and Sarah saw each other before the end of term and he could not help feeling a little relief, as well as wistfulness. It was all tremendous, but it was getting out of hand. He was fond of Sarah and Sarah was undoubtedly fond of him, but would it not perhaps be better to leave it at that? Student couples passed him in the dark, holding on to each other and laughing loudly to
parade their happiness. Ravi imagined what it would be like to be fully part of the strolling street. No, it would be small-minded to back out now.

  The party was held in Joanna Richardson’s room after dinner, with records of Christmas carols and candlelight. Joanna was a large, clean-faced, kindly girl who seemed too motherly for an environment of spinsters. Her guests sat on the floor, their faces shining with the season as they laughingly recalled Christmases of their childhood. Joanna passed round trays of her sugary, white misshapen pies. Whether he wanted to or not, Ravi stood out like a ghost at their feast and inevitably drew Sarah out with him. Sitting in her room beforehand, waiting for him to arrive, she had enjoyed the realisation that she was very much looking forward to it. She had also enjoyed arriving at the party with Ravi, her friends’ momentary and almost imperceptible confusion and their instant reassessment of both of them. Now she sat close to him and enjoyed the way his presence separated her from her companions. Ravi had not known the shape of a tangerine in his stocking on a peculiar morning, nor the annual bilious excess of sweet mincemeat. When Joanna Richardson asked him with painstaking politeness, ‘What festivals do you celebrate?’, Sarah enjoyed the collusion with which their feet impulsively nudged. Although she did not know which festivals Ravi celebrated either, they had already made fun of that politeness; they called it ‘Feed the Faint and Hungry Heathen’ and Sarah would never use it again. Ravi told Joanna one or two strange names and she exclaimed, ‘How interesting!’ Sarah smiled condescendingly at her and felt proud to have access to Ravi’s world. This must be the crossing-over time, she thought, feeling stranded in a heady vacuum; she had left England behind her already, but she had no idea of India. She watched Ravi’s laughing face in the candlelight as he listened to the distorted schoolboy versions of Christmas carols; she knew what he was laughing at, but the singers raising their glasses of mulled wine and roaring, ‘A bar of Sunlight Soap came down and they began to scrub,’ had no idea. She let her gaze feed on Ravi’s brown face and the twin pinpoints of light in his eyes. She saw in them such a potent, such a huge alternative to the faces of the roistering chorus that she was transfixed. Feeling her stare, Ravi turned and read in it such an extent of unuttered longing that he was shaken. Moved by affection, gratification and pity, he reached over and vigorously squeezed Sarah’s hand.

  It was wonderfully cosy going back to her room together afterwards, drinking coffee and making fun of the mince-pie party. Sarah was elated because she imagined then that she had escaped at last. Ravi kissed her goodbye slowly and carefully and, walking back to his college, he whistled in the night.

  *

  And then there was Christmas, bloody Christmas, just as things were getting exciting. Sarah went home to a house about to be cheerily decorated with crêpe paper and tinsel, with a lighted tree in the living-room and holly around the frames of her father’s favourite photographs. Ravi went to stay with a friend’s cousin’s family in Sheffield into whose hermetically Indian home, despite many children, Christmas hardly permeated at all.

  Sarah thought about Ravi every day. Ravi thought about Sarah less, not because he was any less interested at that stage, but because for him she was part of the university and the university did not extend as far as Sheffield. For Sarah, the university was that period of her life and she took it with her everywhere. Mr and Mrs Livingstone entertained a good deal at Christmas time and as Sarah had once gloomily predicted, they brought her into the conversation with, ‘You know Sarah’s up at Oxford now? Doesn’t it make one feel old?’ Sarah smiled and held out trays of canapés to personalities her father had photographed and did her best to convey the impression that away at university she led an exotic secret life. She imagined Ravi surveying her parents’ parties with amused scorn and she surveyed them with amused scorn in his place. In Sheffield, Ravi saw a different England. He had few reasons to venture out into what seemed to him a hostile Northern city. His friend’s cousin’s family wrapped him in the continuous round of their activities. Late one night, a shaven-headed boy spat at him as he walked home and jeered, ‘Paki!’ Ravi told this story afterwards in Oxford, laughing so as to obtain the maximum discomfort from his English audience. He lay on his bed and read. The vacation lasted six weeks.

  *

  The sight of each other on the first day of the next term put an end to their caution. A few hours after they arrived back in Oxford, Ravi set out on foot to Sarah’s college and Sarah got onto her bicycle to ride round to his. They met at the corner of two central streets and broke into a helpless grin at the ridiculous recognition of their happiness. Sarah looked just as Ravi liked to think of her – pink-cheeked with cold and exercise, her fair hair ruffled by her bicycle ride. She was the picture of a jolly English girl on a hockey pitch who, by some freak of fortune, had landed in his path. And Ravi stood on the kerb as he had stayed all through the vacation in Sarah’s imagination – the foreigner who was going to transform her and her surroundings.

  ‘Ravi!’

  ‘Sarah!’

  Her bicycle wobbled in to the kerb. A delivery van, driven by a malignant grocer who hated students, braked excessively sharply and hooted at them.

  ‘Look out! You’ll get yourself knocked down.’

  ‘Who cares! Did you have a good vac?’

  ‘So-so. And yours?’

  ‘Dreadful. Tedious. Boring. I couldn’t wait to get back.’

  ‘That bad?’ He asked mischievously. ‘Didn’t you enjoy your Christmas?’

  ‘Oh, Ravi—’ Sarah was still on her bicycle, beaming at Ravi as he stood by the handlebars and grinned back at her. He flipped her arm teasingly and as she made to return his nudge, they toppled into the beginning of an embrace.

  ‘Hello, hello!’

  ‘Get off your bike before we have an accident. Imagine the indignity; having a bike accident when you aren’t even moving.’

  ‘I’d blame it on you. Let me get off then.’

  Ravi’s arm around Sarah’s shoulders, Sarah’s arm around Ravi’s waist, they walked to his college which was the nearer. As they came into the front quadrangle, Dev Mehdi saw them linked for the first time and a new era began.

  They went up to Ravi’s room and he made tea. But he kept interrupting to look round at Sarah and grin. Everything was so funny – the thick dust of his uninhabited room, the lack of milk. They examined each other with delight. The Christmas vacation behind them was their joint achievement and they wanted to crow over it.

  ‘I was coming round to see you,’ Sarah admitted.

  ‘Were you?’ Ravi exclaimed joyfully. ‘Were you?’

  ‘Yes, really I was. I bet you were on your way out to see me? Admit it.’

  ‘No, actually, I wasn’t. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but actually I wasn’t … Mind you, I probably wouldn’t have been long in coming.’

  ‘They’ve repainted my corridor.’

  ‘A treat in store for me.’

  ‘They’ve painted it the colour of grass-snake’s puke. I don’t know who chose it; it’s disgusting.’

  ‘Well, maybe you’d better continue to come round here instead.’

  ‘I see. Any excuse for not trekking all the way out to college. What if I can’t be bothered to come here either?’

  ‘I shall die of a broken heart,’ said Ravi, spooning three steep heaps of sugar into his tea.

  They laughed triumphantly and Ravi said, ‘Sit closer.’ He could not help marvelling at the uninhibited promptness with which Sarah did. Experimentally, he put his arm around her shoulders again and started to muddle her hair. She looked round at him and giggled.

  ‘Tell me what you did in Sheffield.’

  ‘Not a great deal. You know, it’s not much of a place.’

  ‘I’ve never been there. I don’t know the North of England.’

  ‘No? It’s not very far away; but I think it’s another country. The people I met seemed quite different from you snooty lot down here. They’re more friendly, I think. At least, s
ome of them. But you know someone spat at me one night and called me “Paki”?’

  ‘No! Ravi, that’s terrible.’

  ‘I think it’s rather funny. “Paki”! I could hardly stop him and give him a little lecture about Partition. I don’t think he would have taken that very kindly. I must remember to tell Ali Suleiman that I’ve been promoted to be his honorary compatriot.’

  ‘Ugh, I think that’s horrible. How can you joke about it?’

  ‘Why are you getting so upset? You must know that kind of thing happens all the time.’

  ‘What was that you said – partition? What is that? Is it like apartheid?’

  In the shadow of the winter afternoon, the distance between them was suddenly vast. ‘You haven’t heard of Partition?’

  ‘I told you, I don’t know anything about India. You’ll have to teach me.’

  ‘This involved Britain as well, you know.’

  ‘Did it? Oh dear. Well, I’m afraid I’m terribly ignorant. Is there a good book I could read about it?’

  Was the most dangerous difference between them this – that Ravi knew about Sarah’s origins because they were laid out all around for him to see, but Sarah had no idea of what had given rise to Ravi? If so, Ravi was at an advantage from the beginning.

  ‘I’ll lend you one. If you really want to read about it.’

  ‘I do, I do. It’s awful how little I know.’

  ‘Awful,’ Ravi agreed teasingly, taking a strand of yellow hair and twisting it between his ringers. ‘But I’ll forgive you.’

  ‘That’s as well. Make me some more tea, then.’

  ‘Why was your vacation so dreadful? Didn’t you have a good time at home?’

  ‘Oh Ravi, you can’t imagine what Christmas at home is like. My parents invite all the most inane people whom they couldn’t bear to entertain all the rest of the year and they have these big boring parties where everyone circulates, repeating to one another what the last person has just said to them. Oh God! I only got through it by imagining what we’d make of it if you were there and having this satirical running commentary going in my head.’