by Helen Harris
She grinned when she saw them both sitting blushing on the carpet.
‘Oh, do send me away if I’ve come at the wrong moment,’ she exclaimed theatrically.
Sarah and Ravi laughed.
‘What nonsense,’ said Ravi.
‘Do you want some coffee?’ Sarah asked.
Emily plumped herself down in the armchair. ‘Are you sure? I mean, I’m quite happy to go away again if I’m interrupting. I was just dropping in.’
‘Shut up,’ Sarah said.
Ravi chuckled. ‘You’ll embarrass her if you keep on like that.’
Emily giggled conspiratorially. ‘Well, guess what? I’ve just picked up a very interesting little titbit on the grapevine.’
‘Ooh, what?’ asked Sarah.
‘Can I speak quite freely in front of you, Ravi? You won’t be shocked by our decadence? Louise Cotton is having it off with Dr Latour!’
‘You’re joking!’ Sarah exclaimed.
That, Ravi thought, was a prime example of his reasons for disliking Emily Williams: in her company, Sarah reverted to a tittering English schoolgirl. His face stayed solemn.
‘No, I promise,’ Emily continued. ‘According to a reliable source, they were seen leaving his rooms at half-past nine this morning. His Pop Art tie is apparently on display in her room. Honestly, that girl!’
‘What a slag!’ Sarah said. She turned to Ravi: ‘You haven’t met Louise Cotton, have you? She’s slept with nearly everyone who’s taught her, but no one below the rank of a college Fellow.’
‘And what’s this Dr Latour like?’ Ravi asked a little stiffly.
Emily and Sarah hugged their knees.
‘He’s gorgeous,’ Emily answered. ‘He’s the archetypal vague, blond intellectual heart-throb. We’ve all had our eye on him.’
‘You too?’ Ravi said jokingly to Sarah.
‘Oh yes,’ she answered provocatively. ‘I think he’s lovely.’
All three of them laughed.
‘Still, you can’t have your cake and eat it, can you?’ Emily said to Sarah in a mock reproving voice, giving a mischievous nod in Ravi’s direction.
They laughed again in satisfied acknowledgement of Ravi’s new position.
When Emily Williams had gone (to spread the glad tidings down the corridor, Ravi commented dryly), they were left with their realisation. The afternoon seemed to have lasted an extraordinarily long time and Ravi’s misgivings were already out of date. The new situation had overtaken them and now he and Sarah had to learn how to face up to it. They agreed to meet for lunch the next day.
*
‘How come you’re so against England when you’re so English?’ Ravi asked Sarah.
They had eaten lunch in his college dining hall for three weeks running, surrounded by young sportsmen and the portraits of their florid-faced ancestors. Sarah had kept up a cheery commentary on their characters and conversations, on the similarity between the slabs of steak and kidney pie and the faces above them.
‘I’m not so English,’ she answered defensively.
‘Yes, of course you are.’
‘No, I’m not. Do I neigh with laughter? Do I toss my mane and whinny?’
‘That’s beside the point, Sarah. You are English; in some ways, you’re the absolute epitome of the English—’
‘Huh, thank you very much.’
‘But somehow, you seem to have disowned the place. Why?’
‘I don’t want to be defined by here. Being English isn’t enough. I mean, here we are on a foggy little island, sinking down fast into the nineteen-seventies, at the end of our era of greatness, and it just seems so … so pathetic to pull up the drawbridge and wallow in it. Don’t you ever feel that being Indian isn’t enough? You must do, or you wouldn’t be here.’
‘That’s not why I came here,’ Ravi protested indignantly.
‘Then why did you come? Wasn’t it to escape from a stereotype and get a chance to be something different – more?’
‘No! I came … because I’d have been a fool not to – but I didn’t come to change my nature or to reject what I was.’
‘But you don’t intend to go back unchanged, do you? Or just keep your old self safely intact somewhere? I mean,’ flirtatiously, ‘do you?’
‘Of course not. Naturally I’ll experiment, I’ll explore. But that doesn’t mean I have to reject everything in my life up to now, does it?’
‘Well, it does a bit.’
‘How can you reject something “a bit”? Either you reject it, surely, or you don’t?’
‘No, that’s what I’m doing; I’m rejecting England a bit. Maybe one day when I’m middle-aged, I’ll start yearning for Home Counties respectability and face flannels. But I doubt it.’
‘Well, I shan’t put on some plummy-voiced personality or turn into a substitute Englishman like Ali Suleiman either.’
After lunch, in the slight privacy of his room, Ravi’s finger found the back of Sarah’s bra under her pullover and greeted it with a playful ping.
*
‘Those people who gave the party where I first met you – Simon Satchell and his lot – did you ever really like them?’
They were walking back to Sarah’s room after a supper party with friends of hers and Ravi chose the dark to ask his question – not so much to spare Sarah embarrassment as to hide his own discomfort. He felt it was really a dishonourable and prying question to put to her, but something in the memory of that group nagged him persistently.
Sarah considered her answer and characteristically, Ravi thought, it was honest when it came. ‘No, not really, I don’t think so. I wasn’t actually part of that group. I went around with them quite a bit last year, I suppose, and I went out with one of them.’
Ravi had prepared other, more delicate ways of obtaining this reply: ‘Don’t get annoyed, but there’s something silly Ali Suleiman once said to me.’ ‘You won’t be cross with me, will you; is it true you were … friends with one of them?’ He was startled by the promptness with which Sarah gave him his answer. Obviously she saw no need for coyness or concealment. (But would he ever have told her about the crazy girl Shakuntala when he had been at college in Delhi?) He walked on a few steps in a silence intended to be casual.
‘Which one?’
‘Are you jealous?’ Sarah joked.
‘Why should I be jealous? He hasn’t got you any more and I hope I have.’
‘His name was David, David Whitehead. Did you meet him?’
Ravi pretended that this name was strange and new, although he had in fact remembered it with odd clarity ever since Ali Suleiman had casually referred to Sarah as ‘David Whitehead’s girl’. The name had aroused antagonism in him then, conveying the image of a lumbering figure with thatched fair hair like a country cottage roof, and he did not like the sound of it any better now when spoken reminiscently by Sarah.
‘What did he look like?’
‘Blond, quite tall I suppose, with blue eyes, but not really what you’d call good-looking.’
‘Um, I don’t think I did meet him.’
‘He would have been at that tea-party.’
‘Yes, but they all looked pretty much alike to me.’
Sarah gave a triumphant little skip and laughed. ‘That’s what English people are supposed to say about you – that you can’t tell one brown face from another.’
‘That’s not what I meant, Sarah. They weren’t so much physically alike, but they all behaved in the same way. They had the same voice and manner. That’s why I asked if you really got on with them; they seemed so narrow and self-satisfied.’
Again, Sarah considered her answer. ‘In a way, I did. I mean, it was nice to have a toehold in a group that was hard to get into. But I’m not sure if I ever fitted in. I think they thought I was a bit of a pain, actually. I was really only there because of David; it was an immature relationship.’
Something about the way she said that repelled Ravi unreasonably and he gave a wry little nod. He did no
t like to hear Sarah dismiss a whole romance in those terms. For all his antagonism towards the thatched blond boy, he felt momentary sympathy for him; Sarah had made their feelings for one another sound like a mere aberration, a discarded garment which she had outgrown. He was moved by something like premature jealousy. Would she one day dismiss him in the same way?
They returned to her room. A little more boldly than so far, Ravi reached inside Sarah’s blouse as he hugged her good night.
*
‘Of course we like her,’ Sunil told Ravi in the last week of that term. ‘What rubbish! If you don’t mind my saying so, you’re becoming completely paranoid, old chap.’
‘Well, if you like her,’ Ravi answered, ‘why can’t you make more of an effort to let it show? You know what she said to me the other day? “Do Sunil and Dev resent my being there?” You make her feel uncomfortable with your censorious attitudes.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Sunil replied. ‘What have I said or done that’s censorious?’
‘It’s the way you react if she’s there when you come in. You know perfectly well what I mean; you put on this polite, tut-tutting sort of face …’
Sunil burst out laughing. ‘Rubbish, nonsense!’ he cried in Hindi. ‘You’re just imagining these things because you feel guilty.’
*
‘So things are really hotting up with Ravi?’ Emily Williams asked Sarah at the start of the summer term.
She had recently embarked on an adventure herself – with an eccentric postgraduate music student – and it bothered her faintly that Sarah’s initial impetus seemed to have slackened.
Sarah nodded happily.
‘Great,’ Emily said. She stirred her coffee. ‘Soon?’
Sarah fidgeted. ‘I’m not going to give you a time and a place,’ she demurred.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ Emily apologised. ‘But you must admit, it’s so romantic.’
The two friends laughed. Sarah was enjoying being a subject of college gossip. She knew, pleasurably, that when she and Ravi walked into the front quadrangle with their arms around each other people noticed them. People who previously had had no idea who Sarah Livingstone was, now knew of her attachment. Ravi remained anonymous; the mere sight of him with his arm around Sarah constituted his interest.
Sarah’s friends thought Ravi was terribly sweet. While all of them could have given a reason why he was not for them – too argumentative, too suave to be trustworthy, too short – they all agreed he was sweet. They rather admired Sarah for falling in love with him and were more tolerant of her character failings now that she was known to be daring.
*
‘Will you come round to my room tonight or shall I come round to yours?’
‘Will Sunil and Dev be there?’
‘Most likely.’
‘Oh, come to mine, come to mine for a change. Then I can have you all to myself.’
‘Aha, and what, pray, do you intend to do with me?’
He did not yet know when he could expect to get into bed with Sarah. She had a timetable, but he was not to know that. Sarah’s timetable planned the event provisionally for the start of summer proper, but she expected Ravi to initiate it. Ravi was confident that the event would surely take place soon, but he was not clear when he could expect Sarah to consent to it. He had never slept before with a girl who loved him.
‘I’ll seduce you, of course.’
‘Will you indeed? I must remember to change my shirt before I come over.’
The weeks had brought them enjoyably closer. Their friends, by their lack of understanding, gave them the closeness of isolation. And their private enjoyment of discovery united them until, in the end, it seemed that only days, as thin as nylon, separated them.
*
‘What does “satyagraha” mean?’
‘Oh gosh, you’re not still reading those wretched books, are you? Doing your background research on Ravi Kaul?’
‘Come on, come on, shut up. What does “satyagraha” mean?’
‘Passive resistance.’
‘Passive resistance? That sounds awfully provocative; like fending someone off with one limp white hand but lying back and letting him have his wicked way all the same. Have I said something wrong? Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘Sometimes you come out with the most incredible statements! You can be so silly, you behave as if you had only one thing on your mind.’
‘Oh, but I do have only one thing on my mind. Don’t you? Ow, get off! No, stop it Ravi, I’m reading. I’m reading about passive resistance. Oh my God, what a moment to choose. Listen Ravi, you’ll get more than you bargained for – I warn you, I’m not going to offer you any passive resistance!’
*
Sarah could not have explained at the time why she panicked. It seemed to be outside her control. Perhaps it was a final farcical attempt by the pattern to reassert itself, before lying low for years until a more propitious time. But one night she ran away from Ravi. They had lain side by side in front of his fire for hours. It was really late, after one or two in the morning, and getting out of his college had been a frightful business. But she had insisted. Gripped by panic, she had taken her bicycle and ridden back to her college in the dark. She was pursued by a vision of her lunacy; what, for God’s sake, was she doing? Why ever had she allowed things with Ravi to get this far? Now everything, everything was out of control and she was obviously on the verge of a disaster. The glaring clarity of her madness astounded her. Yes, she must have been out of her mind to have imagined that she could take up with Ravi Kaul as if he were another blond schoolfellow. He was from another world and she knew nothing about him at all. She could not sleep for the proximity of the danger, and next day she was still awed and shaken by the enormity of it. She tiptoed around the city with frigid care, cringingly aware of how close she had come to abandoning it.
Ravi was staggered. As far as he could work out, there was no earthly reason why Sarah should suddenly have run out on him. It was a horrible, crazy thing to have done. They had been enjoying a wonderful evening; gloriously, endlessly rolling and kissing and fondling on his floor, while the clock covered giant circles of time and the electric fire scorched one side of them. He had told Dev and Sunil that he had an urgent essay to write and he had locked the door. That night, he had thought, the grand finale could not be far off. He had been so sure, he thought, of what Sarah felt for him. In a period somewhere between midnight and one o’clock, it seemed to him that he had as good as made love to her already. She had never objected to his probing fingers; she had taken them and welcomed them to her body. She had enjoyed his fingers. She had let him reach into her underclothes. She had risen and wriggled appreciatively. He recalled that maybe she had stiffened ever so slightly when he first reached inside her pants, but that was only natural; a little modesty was necessary after all. Perhaps her conscience had fleetingly stirred, had reminded her of her upbringing, reminded her that what she was about to do would have scandalised her forebears. But she seemed to have overcome it. She had held Ravi close against her and relished him. Their tongues had seldom left each other’s mouths; afterwards his face was sticky and stiff with repetition. As far as he could see, in a few days – in a week at the very most – Sarah Livingstone would be his.
But now that prospect had been snatched away and he racked his brains trying to work out what he had done wrong, but could not think of anything. He was at a loss. Had Sarah misled him with her seeming acquiescence? Was she – impossible – not intending to come to bed with him at all? Was that not part of her idea of their adventure? Or had she had second thoughts about him at this late stage? He felt humiliated. On the way out they had passed Dev, wide-eyed, returning from the vending machine with his hands full of chocolate and he had beamingly offered them a bar. Ravi felt a sudden surge of anger at Sarah; what the hell was she playing at? Up till now, he had thought he understood exactly what was happening. He had known where he and Sarah were he
ading and he was enjoying the journey. Now he was stumped.
His bewilderment kept him awake and, in the morning, turned to anger. Sarah had no right to do this to him. He thought of her across the city; she had become a picture again, as at the very beginning, for he could not imagine what she must be feeling this morning, what she could be thinking. He saw an agitated blonde girl at a breakfast table, confiding her night’s escapade to her tittering girl-friend Emily. The girl at the breakfast table was not nearly as brave and unconventional as she had made herself out to be; beneath her daring exterior, inherited prejudices still held her in their sway.
His anger grew and, by the afternoon, became a decision to confront Sarah. She jolly well owed him an explanation and he would make her tell him what was up. As late as possible, for he had told himself that he would get it over with before dinner, he walked out to her college. On the way he stoked his rage with the blithely weaving cyclists and the rain, but still he felt fearfully apprehensive as he drew nearer. What if she threw a screaming scene? What if she just refused to let him in?
She knew he would come. Of course she knew he would come. She had tried to prepare the scene a dozen times, but there was a point at which her imagination stuck: how would she feel when Ravi walked into her room? In her mind, Ravi climbed the stairs again and again. (In desperation? In anger?) He knocked at her door. (Timidly? Furiously?) And he came in. There she stopped, because she could not imagine what that moment would feel like. With her eyes shut, she tried to see Ravi’s face. To her astonishment, she could not. The shape of his hairstyle formed around his dark face; she could catch bits of his features, his nose, his teeth, but the real expression that was Ravi would not come. As an experiment she reproduced in her head the faces of her parents, of Emily Williams, even of David Whitehead, and they all swam up obediently from the dark. She tried to make Ravi’s again, but only his would not appear. Peculiarly upset, she wondered if this was a sign of subconscious racial prejudice which she had only now discovered.
