Playing Fields in Winter (11 page)

They clutched each other. They fell laughing onto each other. And then each began to look seriously at the new body they had acquired. Ravi was opaque and smooth. Sarah felt herself momentarily repugnantly white and bony on the much-laundered sheets. But Ravi explored her. He put one finger to her acutely pink nipples and slid his palm down over her pale stomach. And Sarah, gradually thawing out of her nervous stiffness, reached over to discover him too. Their faces were deadly serious and this went on for a long time.

It was no one’s decision when Ravi moved inside her. He did not offer, she did not invite him. His hand was already long between her legs and all of her appreciating him. He entered her, and in the moment while he felt and found, during the gap between his fingers and himself, they looked into each other’s eyes and grinned.

Then it was nothing like being with David Whitehead, Sarah’s only other lover. It was nothing like being a receptacle, a sack jolted up and down in a series of sore, mechanical jerks for a few perfunctory moments. Now she was an
orange, whose segments were separated by feeding fingers. Now she was waiting earth in which a man was planting a tree. Inside her, the trunk of the great tree swelled and its branches stretched out; her body, the branches, her hands, fingers, twigs, leaves in her heart. Now she and the tree were the same substance, the same movement as together they grew and spread. There were all the seasons, fast after one another and at once, buds and thunderstorms, and there were roots tickling her and nothing, everything. She and the tree, she and the tree, she and the tree burst into flames.

In the dark, two people, stranded, thrown up by a typhoon, lay one of top of the other and did not say a word. Hot, sticky and wet, they lay breathless and their lives from beforehand came back to them.

‘Ravi?’

‘Sarah.’

‘Oh, Ravi.’

‘How do you do?’

Later, they talked. Later, they said they loved each other, that they would not let outside things intervene any more and that, from now on, the two of them would be stronger than everything else. They said that they would surely not last out the summer vacation apart. And Sarah foresaw, jokingly, her parents’ reaction when Ravi came to London to visit her. They laughed at themselves, because it seemed typical of the way they were determinedly at odds with everything that when at last they had managed to achieve this triumph, there were only three more weeks of the term left.

Ravi went back to his college in the morning. Walking through the faint mist, he felt thrilled and smug and secretive and tired. There was an uncanny absence of friends in his room. He had a shower at the end of the corridor, humming under the hot stream and then, shutting the door of his room on everyone, sat down to work with gusto. In the late afternoon Dev wandered in and, from his evasive manner, it was obvious that he had guessed. He sat down on Ravi’s bed and, for a moment, pretended to look at the books scattered
over it. Then he tilted his head at Ravi and at first Ravi raised his chin defiantly but then, succumbing to camaraderie, pretended to put on a show of modesty and sheepishly grinned.

Dev stroked his small moustache with the tip of his index finger. It was the slightly self-conscious gesture of someone too plump who has just eaten a most enjoyable sweet.

Clarissa Rich looked down from the library window at the dappled lawn. That silly blonde Sarah Somebody, whom she had lived next to in the first year, came sauntering across it arm-in-arm with her Indian boy-friend. Clarissa’s attention left her Stoics text – which truth to tell was not tremendously stimulating although she was glad, she was glad she had changed to Philosophy – and she stared out intently at the pair of them. They zigzagged across the lawn, going nowhere, clearly quite absorbed in their own contentment. Sarah looked up at the Indian boy, laughing, and he ruffled her hair. Clarissa watched them greedily until they
disappeared,
frolicking, around the corner of the college
boat-house
. She could tell by the way they walked what had recently happened between them. She recognised the moment when two people walking together quite publicly became one. She drew herself up stiffly and went back to her reading. But, suddenly, she felt herself engulfed in a wave of despair; oh God, would anything like that ever,
ever
happen to her?

In the exhilaration of their progress, they expected sunshine but for a while it stayed cold. Improbably, auditions began for open-air productions in the college gardens at the end of term. All the gauzy clothes bought for imaginary summer days hung pathetically inside the musty antique wardrobes. But then on about the seventh of June, something happened; the sky turned blue and from a thin haze, the sun shone out on the city. By two o’clock in the afternoon, the lawn under Sarah’s bedroom window was dotted with girls on rugs, still wearing cardigans but doggedly making the most of the
sunshine. Half the windows in that wing had been opened wide and cheerily assorted music could be heard.

Sarah cycled over to Ravi’s college, tilting up her face at the sunlight. Exclaiming, ‘Oh isn’t this gorgeous?’ she raced into Ravi’s room and flung open the window. She stuck her head out into the sunshine again and savoured the light. ‘Mmm!’

‘Isn’t what gorgeous?’ Ravi asked from his desk, watching Sarah’s antics with affectionate amusement.

‘Wake up!’ Sarah exclaimed. ‘It’s summer! Look, come and have a look.’

‘Summer?’ Ravi said, joining her at the window. ‘Where?’

Sarah seized him exuberantly. ‘Don’t be so snobbish, Ravi. It’s wonderful!’

Ravi shook his head disbelievingly. ‘We’ll have to get you to India one day, so that you can see what a proper summer is like,’ he said. He was quite unprepared for the way his comment made Sarah, over-excited as she was, fling her arms around him and cover him with kisses.

It stayed fine – in Sarah’s terms, gorgeous. For three or four days the sun shone steadily, the temperature rose and the city was transformed. Sarah persuaded Ravi – reluctant to admit that anything as slight as this should be welcomed so extravagantly – out into the garden, the park. Her pleasure infected him and they fell on to the grass (damp, Ravi warned) and gave in to exuberance. Sarah held up her white arm against Ravi’s, rejoicing, ‘If it stays like this, I’ll start to go brown too!’

‘I had forgotten,’ Ravi said wonderingly, ‘how everyone goes crazy here at the first ray of sunshine.’

And they did go crazy. By the end of the first week of the fine weather, girls were appearing in backless T-shirts,
cutaway
dresses and gaudy, flowing ethnic skirts. They bicycled through the streets with a beatific look on their pale faces. Then they came out into the college gardens in bikinis, displaying their impossibly white skin to an equally pale sun.

Ravi watched them with amusement: the white larvae of the winter disporting themselves in the sunshine. He found them funny, but also a little touching; their happiness was so earnest. Physically too, the girls were transformed.
Perhaps the sunlight showed up shades of difference which he had not noticed before. He saw dull hair flare into splendid yellow and puddle-brown eyes turn out to be green. All of them went an excited pink. He made fun of them; their sillier excesses were extraordinary, but he also felt a pitying fondness for them all, driven crazy by such a small promise of summer. Blithely, they were utterly unaware of how ridiculous they seemed.

Sarah started to experience a new source of discontent around this time; she wished that she was not white. There were various incidents which prompted this; Nanda comparing their bodies when Sarah tried on one of her saris for fun, waggling her head and exclaiming, ‘So – oh pale!’; Ravi commenting jokingly again on the pinkness of her nose on a cold day. Being white began to be associated for her with being vulnerable and ridiculous. Her skin could not conceal its flustered reactions to climate, to emotions, to Ravi Kaul. In bright sunshine, she would burn. She was condemned to silly transparent obviousness. The Indians, with their camouflage of opaque skin, were more at ease in the world than she was.

She had an urge to buy herself some new clothes. Last summer, she had mainly worn a broderie anglaise Edwardian outfit alongside David Whitehead’s cricket whites. But this now seemed quite inappropriate. So she went to a boutique and bought a dress of Indian fabric – thin, violently coloured cotton with small circles of mirror sewn to the skirt. She put it on as a surprise for Ravi when they went together to a party given by Ved Sharma to celebrate the news that his wife Amrita was expecting a baby. To Sarah it seemed a remote and unlikely theme for a party, but it was a festive occasion. All the Indian students she knew were there and Amrita, the star of the evening, served them delicious snacks and smilingly received their compliments. Sarah enjoyed the feeling of privilege which came from participating as a member at someone else’s private ceremony. It made up for the earlier disappointment, when Ravi had reacted almost teasingly to her enthusiastic new dress.

Most of the parties that summer were different. The garden parties, the strawberries and Pimms parties went on, but
Sarah felt she was on the outside of them now and no longer part of the fun. She strained to experience the parties as Ravi must experience them. Often it seemed that Ravi enjoyed them in the end much more than she did, for he could be quite spontaneous whereas she felt obliged to monitor her every move.

One evening, going down the river in a punt with Ravi, Sunil and Dilip Joshi, she saw David Whitehead and Simon Satchell punt past them. On the one hand, she felt glad and defiant that David should see her sitting happily next to Ravi, but on the other she felt a moment of sneaking
embarrassment
that David should punt so expertly past them, while Sunil splashed experimentally along.

‘Tell me more about your family. You’ve got two sisters, haven’t you?’

They were lying in bed in Sarah’s room one Sunday morning and summer rain was spattering the window. By keeping the curtains drawn, they could pretend they were somewhere else.

‘Yes, and a brother Ramesh.’

‘How old are they all?’

‘Oh, goodness! Ramesh is nearly nineteen, Asha’s fifteen and Shakuntala’s thirteen, I think.’

‘Do you get on quite well with all of them?’

‘Yes, actually I do. I mean, it’s a bit difficult with Asha and Shakun; they’re a lot younger and I was always away from home so much when they were growing up. I think they look on me as much as an uncle as a brother, you know; a distant figure returning from afar and bringing gifts.’

‘Do they look up to you?’

‘Well, yes, if you put it like that, I suppose they do. They’re awfully sweet and fight to look after me when I come home.’

‘Huh, no wonder you’re so spoilt! Do you have people waiting on you hand and foot?’

‘Naturally. We live like maharajahs, you know.’

‘No, don’t make fun of me. I mean, do you have servants?’

‘Three.’

‘Three? Is that all? I imagined lots. Are they faithful family retainers? Or sort of short-term, like au pair girls?’

‘No, they’ve been with us for years. Ila cried when I came to England.’

‘Ah, how touching; the young master leaving the family home. It’s like a Victorian novel.’

‘But Sarah, she was really sad. You don’t understand how strong those ties are there. It’s nothing like you imagine.’

‘Well, I certainly can’t imagine any of our au pair girls shedding bitter tears if I was going off to India. Tell me about your brother. What’s he like?’

‘Ramesh is a good sort. He’s very serious, though, not like me at all. He takes everything terribly seriously and always weighs up all the pros and cons before he acts. He should have been the eldest; I think he considers me a bit of a tearaway. We’re very different, but he’s a great chap.’

‘What does he do?’

‘Oh, he’s still at college in Delhi, the same college I went to actually, trying to live down his big brother’s terrible reputation.’

‘
Did
you have a terrible reputation?’

‘Oh, not really, I was just very argumentative. I wouldn’t accept all the rules and regulations without a fuss. We were a group, actually, about ten of us, and we started a kind of reform movement in the college. A lot of the students there had a terrible bureaucratic mentality; they were just interested in sitting on their backsides and getting a piece of paper at the end to show that they had done it. They only studied within the strict limits of what was laid down in the curriculum; they weren’t interested in branching out, leaving the beaten track, beaten to death, and – gracious! – possibly discovering something! And most of our teachers were just as bad. They kept to the narrow path of their textbooks, never looking up, never looking out, teaching in a vacuum, never incorporating a scrap of contemporary comment into their classes. So the group of us devised a new method of non-violent protest; it was intended to draw those imbeciles’ attention to what was going on around them in the country, to the fact that you can’t teach all subjects in a vacuum, that sometimes you have to take day-to-day events into account.
We used to smuggle a radio into the classroom and turn it on suddenly full volume for the news, disrupt all that dead rote learning with the clamour of outside reality. That was the idea. We kept it on just long enough for the first headlines – usually that wasn’t long enough for the lecturer to pinpoint exactly who was responsible – and then we’d snap it off. Everyone knew who it was, but we took it in turns to hide the radio so they could never put the blame on just one of us. And it shook them. It was such a prestigious place, you see. We were supposed to be grateful to be there and concentrate on our books, not actually agitate for
improvements.
Once one of the history lecturers – he was the worst offender – did something particularly blatant: there had been a decree in Parliament the very day before his class, which had direct relevance to the subject he was talking about – and he ignored it. He talked for a whole hour – skirting round the issues, nimbly dodging every possible reference to the decree and never once suggesting that the topic had anything to do with our lives. Even some of the duller students saw what he was up to. That night, we cut all the pages dealing with the decree out of the newspapers and went and stuck them over the windows of his college room – he was a widower, you see, he lived in the college and supplemented his salary with disciplinary duties – so that in the morning when he opened the curtains, he couldn’t see out because all the headlines about the decree were glued fast to the pane.’