Playing Fields in Winter (16 page)

‘And I’ll only ever have known half of you. I want to see what you’re hiding.’

‘What I’m hiding?’

‘Yes, you’ve always kept your Indian life a secret from me.’

‘I’ve got a harem of nautch girls—’

‘Oh, shut up. Be serious. We’ve always been lopsided. You know where I come from and my past and my parents, but I haven’t got a clue about you.’

‘Well, come and see what there is then. Come out and
take a look, if you want to. Just don’t imagine that you’re coming for good, that’s all.’

‘All right, I will. I’ll get a job after Finals and save the air fare and I’ll come out in the autumn. For a visit.’

‘I’ll look forward to it. Is there any more of that brandy?’

After that exchange, how was it possible for them to go back to Oxford the way they did and carry on as before? How was it possible for Sarah still to fall asleep beside Ravi with one hand left across his stomach to make sure that in the morning he would still be there? And for Ravi to lie back after they had made love, still crowing triumphantly: ‘One all!’?

The summer term was pretty wretched. Overshadowed utterly by Finals, the weeks went by in a numb routine. They worked all day, as often as possible together in one or the other’s room, and only broke off to eat dully in the college dining hall. Once a week or so, they allowed themselves the treat of a visit to the Shah Jehan and at night, they made love enjoyably and often. Those were their only recreations. They had to spare a little time for Sunil, who had become alarmingly weird from overwork. He had pored over his philosophy for so long that he could no longer take any of it for granted but felt obliged to question everything. The fixed certainties of his universe were receding into a frightening void. He didn’t sleep at night, but wandered through the city streets debating with an invisible opponent. He ate his dinner at four o’clock in the morning, or not at all, took a bath at six and was found asleep in the library in mid-afternoon. Emily Williams was not coping too well with the pressure either. She found she could only sleep after sex and, in order to overcome her insomnia, embarked on a series of desperate one-night stands which racked her days with panic and remorse. She had also virtually stopped eating and her hair began to fall out. Sarah and Ravi clung to each other and felt relatively safe. In the face of such an awesome trial, they thought of little else.

Two weeks before the exams, Sunil collapsed. He walked into Dev’s room in the middle of the afternoon, announced,
‘Either you get a First or you go mad,’ and fell headlong to the floor. Horrified, Dev tried to revive him with a splashed tooth-mug of water and then ran for the college nurse. She was having tea when Dev rushed in and, he reported, when told what the trouble was she exclaimed, ‘Why do you lot have to make such a song and dance about everything?’ Sunil was taken to the college sick bay. When he came to, he was silent and inert, apparently resentful that he had been revived. Dev and Ravi, defying the nurse, came in to see him in the early evening and were shocked out of their selfishness to see how ill he looked. ‘So you’ve decided to lie back and be waited on, then?’ Ravi joked uneasily, but Sunil stared back at him quite blankly. (‘Why not get a First
and
go mad?’ Ravi said afterwards to Sarah.) The following day Emily Williams came to visit Sunil, unannounced, with her sparse hair hidden under a dramatic kerchief. From that visit a feverish affair developed, out of the unhealthy atmosphere of the sick bay, which lasted with neurotic intensity until the exams were over.

The last weekend before the exams, Ravi and Sarah took a break as recommended, but they were too keyed up to relax and enjoy it. They went to the Livingstones’ holiday cottage in Wales; Sarah had long looked forward to taking Ravi there as the consummation of her triumph over her upbringing, but they were both restless and unable to appreciate their pretty surroundings.

‘Gosh, England is so small,’ Ravi said when they arrived at the spruce cottage. ‘Everywhere is someone else’s back garden.’

Sarah said, ‘We’re not in England.’

‘We’ve come all this way,’ Ravi went on, waving around at the narrow valley. ‘Here we are in the middle of nowhere and yet it’s all neatly parcelled up. It’s all someone’s nest. Look around at that landscape,’ he said, ‘it’s all so
tidy
.’

Sarah shrugged. ‘We could have gone to Brighton if you’d preferred.’

‘And it’s all parcelled up by people like your parents,’ he continued, as they unpacked deep-frozen blackberries and Mrs Livingstone’s quiche from the freezer. ‘Have you noticed
that, at their level, everyone in England is connected? They run the country like a jolly board game.’

‘Look, I’ve got the message,’ Sarah said, ‘there’s no need to keep going on about it. Just you wait – when I come out to India, I’m going to get my own back on you!’

For three days they bickered listlessly, and the ultimate triumph which Sarah had looked forward to – making love with Ravi in the Victorian brass double bed – did not take place because he was too tired and wanted to conserve his strength.

Ravi’s exams lasted three days longer than Sarah’s, so she had to wait to celebrate until he was through. During those three days she rested, worn out, and began to wonder what would come next. She lay on the college lawn, too tired and triumphant at having survived to summon up much feeling about anything else yet. The sky overhead was a distant blue and she would never have to sit another exam again in her life. The difficulties with Ravi would be resolved. For three days, she gazed up at the sky and waited for Ravi and was content. Counted on the fingers of one idle hand against the grass, the months between the beginning of August, when Ravi would go home, and October when she would fly out to join him, were a tiny span – pitiful, a mere three dots on the lawn. In those three months she would earn her air fare, she would start learning Hindi properly and get ready to turn her back on England. For three days she practised waiting for Ravi and it was so easy, such fun on an Oxford lawn.

Ravi finished his last paper at five o’clock on a sweltering afternoon. He wrote his last sentence almost without realising it, superstitiously perfected his punctuation and when the invigilator announced that the time was up, left the hall in an estranged daze. Across the hall Dev signalled to him jubilantly and, out in the corridor, they hugged each other and beamed. Feeling almost hollow from fatigue and
exhilaration
, Ravi walked outside. On the steps, his friends were waiting to meet him. Still oddly drained of emotion, Ravi walked over to them. Their babble of greetings and
congratulations
broke over him, but for a moment he just looked
blank and almost puzzled. Of course one of them was Sarah, but in his peculiar numb state somehow he could not single her out and put his arm around her. Nanda had to push her forward bossily and say to Ravi, ‘There’s someone here who’s got something to say to you.’

‘Quite dazed, my poor Ravi,’ Sarah said, taking him in her arms and he let himself be taken as if he were paralysed. All the others cheered and Sarah lifted the foaming mouth of a bottle of champagne to his lips and fed him with it like a doll.

Gradually, his trance cleared. The joy of achievement dawned on him and celebrations started to fill the void left by the exams.

Ravi’s tutor, Professor Elstree, gave a party for his
third-year
students and halfheartedly Ravi went along. He had never had much time for the professor, whom he considered pompous and insincere. Although he had not told Sarah about it, Professor Elstree’s reaction when he discovered that his Indian student had an English girl-friend had filled Ravi with an unforgettable rage. Sarah had been introduced to the professor at Christmas at a drinks ‘do’ he had held for his students. Ruddy and genial as always, he had shaken hands with her and later in the evening, when the mulled wine had dissolved his reserve, he had come across to Ravi – quite bluff and congratulatory – and, clapping him on the shoulder, had nodded at Sarah who was talking animatedly to his wife and declared jokily, ‘You’ve done very well for yourself there, Ravi my boy!’ The implication, as Ravi promptly saw it, that he should be grateful for having won Sarah, that she was somehow a trophy he should acknowledge with humble pride, had cut him to the quick. He had looked back at Professor Elstree with a frozen face and wished he could vomit the Christmas cake and the mulled wine, vomit the party from his consciousness. Since he told no one about this incident, it rankled with him for a long time and although Sarah never knew about it and certainly could not have been held responsible, it came between them insidiously.

The party for the third-years was held in the garden of Professor Elstree’s sprawling, suburban house; there were jugs of fruit punch on a table covered by a floral cloth and,
in the dining room, a buffet of cold meats and flans. ‘Hey, a great spread,’ Sarah murmured to him as they were shown through into the garden. When the time came, she heaped her plate with game pie and multi-coloured salads and Ravi, who helped himself rather frugally as a matter of pride, found the sight of her sitting on the verandah steps and tucking into Mrs Elstree’s handiwork unreasonably annoying. He could hardly blame her, of course; he had not explained to her that she was feasting on an enemy’s offerings. But quite unfairly, he was prepared to find her irritating.

Professor Elstree came up to them as they were eating and boomed, ‘Well, what are you two going to do?’

‘I’m going back to India,’ Ravi said quickly.

And Sarah had to chip in, ‘And I’m going out there in the autumn.’

‘Are you?’ said Professor Elstree. ‘How fascinating!’ He turned to Ravi and asked, ‘What have you got in mind? The Civil Service?’

Although Ravi had of course considered taking the Civil Service exams, he found the assumption that he would be such a run-of-the-mill conformist rather galling. ‘No,’ he answered impetuously, ‘I was thinking of giving journalism a go.’

He sensed Sarah looking round at him in surprise. ‘It’s one of several ideas I’m playing with at the moment,’ he went on airily. ‘It all depends which way the wind’s blowing when I get back.’ It pleased him to imply that there were things about India that Professor Elstree could not understand.

‘Really?’ Professor Elstree said. ‘But it’s definitely to be India, is it? No question of staying on, as it were?’

Ravi’s toes curled with relish at the possibility of snubbing Professor Elstree. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I think three years here is quite long enough.’

If he was slighted, what with bonhomie and punch, Professor Elstree gave no sign of it but laughed heartily and soon moved away to another group.

‘Honestly!’ Sarah said to Ravi afterwards, ‘did you have to say that to Professor Elstree? You might need him for a reference one day, you know.’

Although the thought did give Ravi a momentary qualm, he answered hotly, ‘Professor Elstree’s one of the main reasons why I shall be glad to shake the dust of this place from my feet.’

Their last afternoon in Oxford was spent, as Sarah had once sadly predicted, packing Ravi’s stuff. Mrs Livingstone had driven up to collect Sarah’s belongings the previous day and commented wistfully that it seemed only yesterday when she had brought her there for the first time. Querulously, she expressed concern that Sarah should be leaving the university with her future so undecided. Sarah was rude to her, annoyed that her mother should have identified her own worry so accurately. She helped Ravi sort his belongings into those worth packing and sending home and those to be left behind. He did not suggest that she took anything as a keepsake, but then that was not his way. And what would have been the point, anyway, when they were only parting until the autumn? Both of them hated sentimentality, above all. Sarah had to wait until Ravi was temporarily out of the room in order surreptitiously to retrieve a slightly torn silk kurta from the discarded pile and slip it into her handbag. Mended, she would wear it as a nightshirt until October.

In the evening, of course, they went to the Shah Jehan: Ravi, Sarah, Sunil, Dev, Dilip, Rajiv and Nanda. Sunil, wonderfully recovered, had been offered a grant to stay on and study for a doctorate. He viewed everyone else’s emotion at leaving with patronising phlegm; he had evaded the future which terrified him. Dev was going to America. He would stay for a while with his married sister in Washington and then he planned to travel for a bit, to see something of the world. Dilip, Rajiv, Nanda and Ravi were going home. And although this struck Sarah as the most cowardly option, she noticed that they seemed to treat the others with a kind of contempt, as though they were the cowards dodging the issue, while the four of them had taken up an invigorating challenge. Nanda was going to be a teacher (the most
unadventurous
profession imaginable, Sarah thought) and yet she seemed the most stridently convinced of them all that her path was the most challenging, the most irreproachable. It was almost excessively tolerant, Sarah thought, the way no
one disagreed with her. When they had had some wine and lager, because it was their very last evening, Nanda even became rather shrill, shrieking, ‘Rats! Rats leaving the sinking ship!’ and giggling hysterically.

Sunil said, ‘Ah, you’ll all end up wishing you were me, well out of the hurly-burly in my little academic niche.’

Dev clapped him on the shoulder. ‘That’s right, you’ll be our shining star, Mr Sircar, a scholar of world renown. We shall look out for your name in the newspapers.’

‘Rat!’ giggled Nanda. ‘Rodent!’

‘You mustn’t have any more wine,’ Sarah said to her with mock solemnity. ‘You’re becoming an embarrassment.’

‘Oh, leave her alone,’ said Ravi. ‘She’s not doing anyone any harm.’

‘He springs to my defence!’ Nanda boasted.
‘He’s
not a rat.’

‘No, he’s a lizard,’ Sarah said, ‘wriggling quickly out of reach because he’s frightened of being caught and losing his tail.’

Those who had heard burst out laughing and Ravi flushed with annoyance.