Playing Fields in Winter (12 page)

‘I wonder if I would have liked you if I’d met you then.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Well, you sound so cocky and arrogant. I mean, I don’t think I’d like you if you were like that here.’

‘Like what? I’m exactly the same here as I was over there … I think.’

‘You can’t be! You’d never have anything to do with the people who do things like that here.’

‘Ah, that’s only the context, Sarah. I’m exactly the same here, but my surroundings are different. Pasting over
someone’s
window here might be an obnoxious thing to do, but it would be done by drunken rugger types after a party,
wouldn’t it, and they’d stick up pictures from girlie mags. That’s the difference, surely, not me?’

‘I see what you mean. I think I like you anyway.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. Because, actually, I think this place could do with a little of the clamour of outside reality too.’

‘Show me where you live on the map. It’s in the North, isn’t it?’

The blue sliver of an air-letter, used as a bookmark, frequently reminded Sarah of the country she knew nothing about. Even the air-letter paper was different from the smooth blue she was used to; it was rougher and grainy, with incomprehensible Hindi ciphers, and where Ravi opened it impatiently the paper always tore.

‘Yes, roughly.’

‘Show me on the map.’

‘You get the map. I feel too lazy.’

‘Here. There – India Plains, plate thirty. Is it on this page?’

‘Yes, there. That’s where I live.’

‘Lucknow. Is it nice?’

‘On the whole, no. The part we live in is lovely though. It used to be called the City of Gardens. Now it’s more like the City of Shacks. But our neighbourhood is still pretty nice.’

‘Tell me about it. Tell me about your house.’

‘What do you want to know? It’s nothing special.’

‘No, but describe it to me. I want to be able to imagine you there during the Long Vac.’

‘Goodness!’

‘Well, go on, it’s only fair. You know what my home’s like.’

‘Well, it’s in a district a little way away from the centre, quite near the river. The houses are mostly quiet, white bungalow-type places in gardens. Ours is one of those.’

‘Is it quite big?’

‘No, not really. In fact, you’d probably find it rather small by your standards.’

‘But it has a garden?’

‘Goodness, you’re really interrogating me.’

‘Well, I want to know. I can’t imagine what it’s like there. I mean, you might as well come from the moon for all I know about it.’

‘Oh, the moon’s more romantic.’

‘I heard from my father this morning.’

‘Did you? What did he have to say?’

‘Nothing much. He hopes that I’m working hard and making the most of my time here.’

‘Well, you are, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I suppose I am. Though not exactly what he had in mind.’

‘How would he feel if he knew about us?’

‘Oh, he’d be horrified. He’d probably think I was on the road to ruin.’

‘Does he write to you often?’

‘On the first of the month.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. It’s hardly a letter actually, more of a bulletin. I mean, it’s not written because he felt like sitting down and writing to me or because he has anything in particular to communicate; he writes because it’s the first of the month and when I left, he
said
he would write to me on the first of the month.’

‘Good heavens! Do you get on well with him?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Well, I don’t know. I think he sounds rather daunting.’

‘He’s not daunting; he’s too predictable to be daunting. He’s just very stuck in his ways and clings on to all the old traditions. He’s petrified of letting go in case he finds himself adrift in a world he can’t cope with.’

‘What does he do?’

‘He’s a civil servant, he works for the State government. What exactly he does, I’ve never been too clear. When I was little, I thought he just drove around in a big car with net curtains, shooing people off the road. Maybe I was right.’

‘How about your mother? What’s she like?’

‘She’s wonderful, a real darling.’

‘Does she write to you a lot?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘More or less than your father?’

‘Oh, much less.’

‘Why, if she’s so much nicer? Why doesn’t she write to you on the first of the month instead of your father and just let him send you an occasional sermon?’

‘My father doesn’t know she writes to me. She’s very shy and secretive about her letters and she gets one of my sisters to post them without Daddy knowing. They’re her little indulgence.’

‘But, good heavens, you’re her son. Why shouldn’t she send you letters?’

‘Oh, my father would insist on reading them if he knew.’

‘
What!
’

‘Don’t sound so amazed. In India most fathers are tyrants, especially fathers like mine who feel threatened by the big wide world. They like having a little universe in which they can be top dog.’

‘But why does she put up with it?’

‘She has no option.’

‘But—’

‘But what? Of course it’s shameful, but after all, there are worse things. He’s not an unkind man, he’s not harsh to her, he’s just a petty dictator.’

‘But, Ravi, it’s such an intrusion; it’s as though she had no right to her own affairs.’

‘Of course. But you know, he’s not unique. Lots of husbands in India are like that, in his generation anyway. He doesn’t see anything wrong in what he’s doing and I’m not sure that she does either.’

‘Does he read the rest of the family’s mail as well?’

‘Oh yes, I’m sure of it. I get two quite different kinds of letters from my sisters – those written for Daddy’s inspection and those they’ve smuggled out. You can tell the difference straight away.’

‘Gosh, I think that’s awful!’

‘The close-knit Indian family.’

‘It sounds suffocating.’

‘I suppose it must to you. It can be, of course. But you
don’t know the positive side of it; people aren’t so lonely there.’

‘I’d rather be lonely.’

‘Would you? Would you really?’

‘Yes, I would! I mean, I just can’t imagine my father spying on my mother’s correspondence. Frankly, he couldn’t care less; it wouldn’t even bother him, I don’t think, if she was writing passionate love letters to someone. He wouldn’t even notice.’

‘There you are! Is that any better?’

‘Yes, it’s infinitely better.’

‘I’m not absolutely sure.’

‘How can you
say
that?’

‘Sarah, you don’t know anything about India; you’ve never been there. You know, you can’t judge everything over there by the standards you would here. In a way, you can’t judge
anything
by the standards you would here.’

The final weeks of term were wonderful. As well as garden parties, there were dinners of vegetable curries and lentils, gatherings to share newly arrived Indian sweets or rare records or letters of common interest. Sarah was taken to the shabby little cinema in the outskirts and found herself the only non-Indian in the audience. It was a revelation, showing her that her geography had been self-imposed all along.

The background stayed the same. One particularly warm evening, David Whitehead saw Sarah and Ravi walking hand in hand on the opposite side of the river. He found the sight oddly satisfying and gloated over their silly, oblivious smiles. If Sarah Livingstone was now going around with that Indian chap, then as far as he was concerned she could be after only one thing – and if that was what she was really like, then she could never have been up to much after all.

There was still punting and cricket in the park. Sarah and Ravi lay on the grass and made fun of the cricketers. At first, it struck Sarah as funny that Ravi should know the rules of cricket so much better than she did, but he got quite angry with her when she laughed about it. It stayed fine and Sarah wore her Indian dress and open sandals. Ravi wore his light
muslin kurtas and later Sarah wore one of them too. The weather was exceptionally warm, almost close. They went to an open-air performance of Chaucer’s
The
Franklin’s
Tale.
In the middle of the play a thunderstorm broke and they giggled at the way the audience stoically brought out umbrellas and plastic macs and no one ran away. After the thunderstorm the weather cleared again and, in the morning, the smell of lukewarm drying grass was nearly intoxicating. It was warm enough for picnics, warm enough for bare arms at night. Bizarrely, incomprehensibly, someone called Verity Claybody tried to kill herself in one of the sunniest weeks.

But in that similar summer, Sarah was travelling.
Apparently
stationary amongst the same quadrangles and the same cavorting, she felt her distance from them grow. She could even less wholeheartedly be part of all that, now that she was part of Ravi. A childhood memory of carrying a frog into one of her mother’s polite fund-raising coffee mornings and all the ladies recoiling in squeamish alarm surfaced
strangely
when she arrived at a certain kind of party together with Ravi. She sensed the same instant of shock, the same social perplexity over what would be the right reaction. And then the swift efforts to crowd around the frog and cry, ‘How sweet, how educational!’ also echoed that earlier memory. Sarah felt she was on the brink of a departure. But it was in fact Ravi’s departure for, on July the first, he would be going back to India for the Long Vacation.

Ravi felt that the summer was closing in on him. It was gorgeous (to quote Sarah), it was beautiful, but it was closing in on him and he was secretly looking forward to flying home. His affair with Sarah Livingstone had been like a second private summer, running alongside the risible public one and giving it a mischievous capering shadow. It had turned the long succession of floral hats and strawberries into a celebration in which he could smilingly participate. He had never imagined that he would live like this. When he woke up in the morning and found Sarah beside him, smiling in her sleep, he could still hardly believe it. When she came running into his room, where her intimate possessions lay
openly for everyone to see, each time he felt a jump of joy. He would catch sight of her in the street, across gardens, as though they were total strangers, smiling and chattering, and the connection between them repeatedly amazed him. She was tremendous. The ease, the happiness with which she had taken up his way of life here touched him deeply. It was a compliment to him, he knew, to see her mixing rice and vegetables on her plate with her fingers or kicking off her sandals to sit down barefoot on the floor, even if it looked a little silly. He had had to accommodate to her ways really remarkably little. What was the point, when she was so eager to shake them off? The two of them enjoyed their private summer and Dev and Sunil, who had begun by looking askance, now watched his happiness with envy and admiration.

But vaguely disquieting – no, almost too unimportant to be disquieting – was any suggestion of permanence, any accidental assumption by Sarah that this idyll would continue elsewhere. Ravi knew that it was inseparably part of the university, as much as the student plays and the garden parties. Like them, it would be inconceivable outside the city. They both knew this, of course, must know this, but on some of the more rapturous nights it would have been so easy to forget it. By himself afterwards, Ravi sometimes worried that Sarah had long forgotten it and that it was really his duty to remind her. But he had been drawn to her originally for her independence, her bright resilience and he reassured himself now that those qualities would see her through when it all came to an end. Besides, how could anything so good-humoured possibly end in acrimony? When their different destinations inevitably recalled them, Sarah would cope. This was not the first time for her, after all. So he said nothing to remind her; it seemed unkind. By going back to India for the summer, he thought, he was doing enough to remind her that he belonged somewhere else.

She went to see him off at the airport, a forlorn ritual which only reinforced the impression of Ravi’s debonair departure
and her sad remaining. When he had gone, she shut herself in a lavatory and cried. Outside the door, a grey mop pushed by a doleful-eyed Indian woman slopped to and fro and when Sarah came out of the cubicle, red-eyed, the woman stared at her with an unremittingly gloomy gaze. Sarah cried not only for the loss of Ravi, which was awful enough, but also for the return to monotony, for the humiliating relapse into everyday blandness which enclosed her as she rode back into London on the Underground.

‘So tell us more about him, darling. He sounds quite fascinating.’

‘Oh, Mummy, he’s not some exotic creature! You don’t have to talk about him as if he were an unusual specimen of pond life.’

‘But Sarah, I’m not doing anything of the sort. We just need to know a little more about him, don’t we, so that we can make conversation when he comes here. You said he’s reading Politics and Economics?’

‘You don’t need to “make conversation”, Mummy. Can’t you just be perfectly natural with him? He doesn’t need to be handled with kid gloves.’

‘I’m not going to handle him with kid gloves. Gracious, you’re so prickly and over-sensitive these days, Sarah.
Whereabouts
in India did you say he comes from?’

‘Lucknow. But originally—’

‘Lucknow!’ Sarah’s father interrupted joyfully. ‘God, I remember Lucknow. I could tell you some funny stories about Lucknow …’

4 July, London

Darling Ravi,

How can I
possibly
last until September 30th? It is only three days since you left and already I miss you so much that I can’t concentrate on anything. (I hope it wears off!) I should be reading on ‘The Modern Novel’, but instead I’m afraid I’m just drifting around the house wishing it were already August, because then at least I’d have my holiday
with Emily to look forward to. As it is, everything feels really
moribund
here; a lot of people are away and I’m pretty much cloistered in the house with my dear Mama, who is driving me slowly berserk. She keeps cross-questioning me about you,
viz
. ‘Does he drink? Does he smoke? Is he a vegetarian? Oh well, it’ll give me a chance to try out some of my new wholefood recipes. Is he very pernickety about his food? They usually are, aren’t they? Is he frightfully well off?’ She imagines you are some kind of maharajah, I think, since she supposes that’s the only kind of Indian who comes to Oxford. (She’s got no idea about scholarships.) I can tell the whole idea is starting rather to appeal to her, actually, so I haven’t bothered to disillusion her (much!). Now she’s wandering around the house looking smug and virtually humming songs from
The
King
and
I.
You see, you really have
no
need
to worry about staying here when you come back. You don’t need to ‘keep a low profile’ as you put it. You’ll get a VIP reception!