Playing Fields in Winter (2 page)

Yet she had looked forward to her escape for years, reminded her parents of it in every argument, planned for it and dwelt with relish on its dramatic form. But now her parents seemed to have stage-managed her escape as well; it became just another part of their set-up. At dinner parties, it would fit easily into the conversation: ‘You know Sarah’s up at Oxford now? Doesn’t it make one feel old?’ The boundaries of their expectations extended far beyond the house and her childhood. Her escape plans had been detected and foiled long ago.

The house from which Sarah was planning to escape stood towards one end of a white London crescent. On the morning she received her telegram, two other children in the crescent heard that they had been admitted to Oxbridge too. At Number 24 Jonathan Wharton – son of Ian Wharton, the Conservative MP – learnt that he had won a scholarship to Downing College, Cambridge; and at Number 2 Roger Caversham, the son of Miles and Irene Caversham, heard that he had been accepted by his father’s old college. Sarah
was Sarah Livingstone, the daughter of Gareth Livingstone the photographer.

The crescent being a select London street, the news was not swapped cheerily in front of the spear-headed black
railings
or passed along by neighbourly exchange. It was learnt, by some silent filtration, over the next few days and no one felt it appropriate to comment or congratulate. The
Whartons’
Colombian au pair girl, letting herself into the crescent garden early one morning with the family’s King Charles spaniel, met the Cavershams’ Philippino help struggling almost tearfully with the key and in the course of a halting exchange about their employers, the two girls made the only direct public reference to the recent coincidence. They found the lack of comment peculiar. Then they talked about the smoke from the gardener’s bonfire which, rising through the yellow trees, reminded each of them of something different in their own countries.

What was it like for him in that other white house beside the gardens when the telegram arrived? It was brought in the very early, pink morning by a ‘boy’ on a bicycle, who was really thirty-two years old but cowed and thin. There was exhilaration and the proud, nearly dream-like realisation of tremendous powers. He could behave quite differently now; he was about to become part of another world. The words on the telegraph form were so botched and crooked to represent such a huge transformation. Yesterday his life had been one thing: from today, it would be something utterly superior. At the same time he felt calm satisfaction, for the world had only recognised his due – what was to be expected if you were born Ravi Kaul and had servants to cry because you were going abroad. And his father? Had he swollen even greater at this family triumph, jutting his bulbous finger at the sky to show that heaven and he understood one another? And his mother? Had she crept, pressing her sari hood to her mouth, into some back bedroom and sobbed because her eldest son was to travel so far? The pink sun came up and he rang his friends to tell them the news. When they came round to celebrate, a gulf had opened between him and those
who were not going abroad, because already their lives had begun to diverge.

The house beside the gardens in Lucknow had been home since Ravi was ten. But it was not profoundly home, the way a house in a city would be if you had been born there and your ancestors had lived in the same place. There was somewhere else, beyond reach, that was really home – Delhi, where the streets were wider and his parents were in a better mood – and Lucknow had always been second best.

Ravi and his brother Ramesh, and later his two little sisters, had grown up feeling that they did not quite fit into their surroundings. Not only were they a Hindu family in a very Moslem city, they were a sophisticated metropolitan family in a provincial capital. Ravi had done well at school; that had been his revenge: better and better at school, to serve everybody right. In summer, when it was really too hot to study, he had continued studying to confound them. He had sat in his bedroom – actually Ramesh’s bedroom too – and scowled down at his books for hours, too hot and sweaty to take anything in but satisfied by the sounds of his mother fussing from the doorway – she would not have dared
actually
to come in and disturb him – and by the imagined vision of his name at the top of the termly class lists once again. Tributaries of sweat and water like the rivers whose names he memorised ran down his scrawny neck from the wet towel he wound around his head. His legs stuck painfully to his wooden chair. When his mother finally tiptoed in with a cold drink, he ferociously ignored her. His diligence naturally paid off in time. First he got into the college in Delhi and then, gloriously, Oxford. And all along no one knew, least of all his proud parents, that his motives were so unscholarly. It was not academic success he was after but his rightful horizon, which would reduce Lucknow to a picturesque childhood memory.

When he was very small, Ravi had had a recurring
nightmare
. This had been brought on, he thought, by an incident on a bus journey. Where they were going or why, he could no longer remember, but he knew that the journey had been the cause of a great upset in his family; they should have been travelling in a private car and not by public bus,
crowded together with all sorts of people in the worst of the hot weather. His mother was tense and upset and her unhappiness had communicated itself to him. Somewhere along the way, the bus had stopped at a roadside snack stall and his mother, screwing up her face in disgust, had taken him into the public lavatory. It was a fearsome place. There was no light in the low hut, but a fierce smell which seemed to make the darkness blacker. Small barred windows high up in the wall let in two square rays of light which showed, once your eyes were accustomed to the darkness, that around the lavatory hole the sloping floor was awash with faeces. So that he should not spoil his shiny shoes by paddling in the excrement, his mother had stood at arm’s length from the frightful hole and held up little Ravi over it to do his business as best he could, squawking and terrified.

In his nightmare, Ravi fell and flew sickeningly down into the smelly dark shaft, falling further and further away from the light and his mother, into a bottomless black pit which he knew would eventually come out on the other side of the world.

How many times he dreamed that dream, he had no idea, for it was reinforced so often in his waking hours. There was a dark world of dreadful filth which lay in wait for him outside his safe, clean home. There
were
holes in every public lavatory which led through to the other side of the world. And it was only by turning up his nose at it and sticking fast to what his parents taught him that he could steer clear of the abyss.

The college reminded her of school on the dull October day she arrived in Oxford. There was a familiar institutional smell in its long corridors – which aroused memories of lack of affection – and a disembodied jabbering, not produced by any particular voices but apparently generated perpetually by the community of females.

She was given a room overlooking the garden. It was on the top floor of the least popular wing of the college and as well as the corridors, visitors had to negotiate a steep and rather forbidding staircase. It was room Number 102, but
the girls on either side had already put up little cards saying ‘Jacqueline Poliakoff’ and ‘Clarissa Rich’. Clarissa Rich knocked while Sarah was beginning to unpack and already giving way to a fantasy of not opening her suitcases at all but seizing what she cared most about and running away. She had found a hot-water bottle in a crocheted woollen cover lying forgotten in the wardrobe. It seemed to predict such chilly, spinsterish winters in the secluded room that she had thrown it into the waste-paper basket and now she was unwilling to put her belongings into the traces left by her predecessor. Clarissa Rich put her head round the door when Sarah answered and, seen without her body, it was a slightly unnerving sight; she had a large, nearly lunar face, surrounded by an aura of pale frizzy hair. She said, ‘Hail and well met, stranger. We’re neighbours.’ Her body, which followed, was very broad and draped in a floor-length purple smock. Standing in the centre of the empty room she said, ‘Yes, just like mine, except that my bed’s over by the desk, more to the end. I think it’s nicer that way; you can use the desk light to read in bed.’

‘Have you got yours all fixed up then?’ Sarah asked. ‘Are you unpacked?’

‘Oh goodness, yes,’ Clarissa answered. ‘I came up three days early so that I could get all that out of the way before the work started.’ She looked at Sarah curiously. ‘What are you reading?’

‘English,’ said Sarah. ‘And you?’

‘History,’ replied Clarissa, ‘although I must admit I am tempted by philosophy.’ She went over to the window to see if the view differed at all from hers and then turned and asked a little awkwardly, ‘Would you like to come and have tea?’

Because it had seemed short-sighted to offend her
neighbour
on the first day and so as to get out of the chilling room, Sarah followed Clarissa. She seemed very pleased to have enlisted Sarah. She showed her where the kitchen and the bathroom were. On the way back they passed a small, rather pretty dark-haired girl, who was being helped with her luggage by two laughing young men. Clarissa contented herself with a ‘Hail and well met, stranger!’ and a wave;
then she ushered Sarah proprietorially into her room and commented, ‘Oh dear, one of those. I hope we don’t have too many of
them
on our corridor.’

Oppressiveness spread from Clarissa’s pimpled forehead and sternly parted, rather oily hair. Sarah thought that maybe her mother had been right when she said it was important to get in with the right people at the very beginning. She did not want to be drawn into Clarissa’s musty orbit; it would be awful if she was seen with her at the start and considered by the interesting people to be like her.

Clarissa offered Sarah home-made flapjacks from a big tin and took two, which she chewed with relish. ‘It’s a wonderful feeling, starting here, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘There’s so much exploration and discovery ahead of us.’

Although his college in Delhi had modelled itself on one of these, Ravi Kaul was not prepared for quite how closely the university resembled its caricatured versions overseas. It was like moving into a textbook, taking up residence on a
well-worn
page with all the illustrations austerely correct: chapel, quadrangles, High Table, gowns. It was astonishing how dotingly the traditions were maintained, how cosily the young Englishmen stuck to them. And Ravi, who had assumed that he knew as much about them as any John Smith, and would therefore take to them with ease and panache, found to his dismay that he disliked them intensely.

‘It’s eight o-clock – sir.’

‘Oh gosh, is it?’

‘It is – sir. I presume we’re up to opening our curtains this morning?’

He had an ancient cubby-hole of a bedroom during that first year and an ancient college servant, a scout, to go with it. His name was Mr Gregory Rainbow and he waited on Ravi Kaul with resentment.

‘You’re from India, then, if I’ve got it right?’ he asked one morning, after bringing in Ravi’s frequent air mail letters with their Hindi cyphers.

‘That’s right, Mr Rainbow. Have you ever been there, by any chance?’

‘Indeed I have – sir. I was there in the Army, as a matter of fact, before the war.’

‘Did you like it?’

‘I wouldn’t say “like” was quite the word for it. It was an interesting experience.’

‘Would you go back there?’

‘I would not.’ The stocky old man deliberated in the doorway – a rustic figure, Ravi thought, whom he liked to imagine leaning on a country gate and chewing a straw, as in a poem by Mathew Arnold or Thomas Hardy. Then, turning, he delivered a ripely matured retort, ‘I hardly need to, do I, with so many of you over here?’

Straight away Sarah found herself a boy-friend, a taciturn, blond boy-friend called David Whitehead to whom she conscientiously lost her virginity half-way into her second term. Although ‘lost’ was hardly the right word because Sarah jettisoned the virginity, whatever it was, quite
deliberately
. She calculated the precise circumstances in which this would take place (before David’s electric fire on a long Saturday evening) and together with her new friend Emily Williams analysed and assessed its consequences and
advantages
. In return, David Whitehead presented Sarah with his complete inability to give or receive emotion. He had been brought up in boarding school dormitories and all-male common rooms; he was the son of the convention that it is weak and debilitating to show one’s feelings and even when a little emotion would have been permissible, he could not produce it. His feelings had been permanently doctored. His attachment to Sarah was mainly negative; he did not repel her with sarcasm, he did not leave her room at night. Sarah was unclear about the exact nature of her feelings for him. She found his silences appealing, because they seemed to her to show he was withholding something from the unworthy world. He had a schoolboy hero’s hair. But there was never any upheaval between them. Each acquired the other gravely as a new aspect of university life, and each knew privately that they were only trying the other out … like a new
subject, like another society, like most things in that first year.

Her first year was certainly quite safe. Beginning so
inauspiciously
on that wet October day, it remained circumscribed and traditional, a game with antiquated rules. In later years, in fact, she often forgot about it completely when she recalled the university. She overlooked the part it must surely have played, with its dissatisfactions and limitations, in bringing about what came afterwards.

Sarah watched the faces of the first evening develop into a narrow range of English fictional characters: the earnest, ugly blue-stocking; the socially successful but malicious beauty; the vamp. As the daughter of Gareth Livingstone, the photographer, she found herself cast as sensitive – artistically bad-tempered. In spite of herself, she had hung on her wall the two photographs which her father had given her to take to college. Her visitors said, ‘Gosh, what amazing pictures – they’re by Gareth Livingstone, aren’t they? Goodness, is he your father?’ and she thereby managed to distinguish herself from Clarissa Rich on her right and Jacqueline Poliakoff on her left.