Playing Fields in Winter (3 page)

She did what everyone else did – joined societies, drank coffee and argued until two in the morning about Platonic friendships and the existence of God. She experimented with different, rather amusing personalities as the year went by; she was the sour and knowing cynic, the popular party-goer whose mantelpiece was lined with invitations, or from time to time the library recluse.

Each night there were the decreasingly palatable dinners for which they had to endure a Latin grace in Hall, Clarissa Rich’s frizzy hair left coiling in the bath at the end of the corridor and the noise of Jacqueline Poliakoff copulating excruciatingly through the thin partition wall. There were evenings as blank and desolate as the winter lawns, as cold and isolated as her college room, when everything seemed so ordered and so staid that Sarah longed for a disruption.

Not only did their past dominate their present, it cast its massive shadow on to their future too and seemed capable of dictating what Sarah Livingstone would become and who her friends would be for ever. Like the owner of the
crocheted hot-water bottle cover before her, she would sit with her knees drawn up by the two-bar fire and console herself by numbly eating chocolate biscuits.

Ravi, shivering, appalled, caught every germ malingering in the damp Thames Valley. He had only to open his mouth, it seemed, for a new permutation of cold, bronchitis or influenza to glide in; the college nurse expressed the opinion that his origins were to blame. His nose became almost
Englishly
pink. And then finally he must have run through the whole range, for he acquired immunity and the illnesses stopped. It made him quite cocky for a while.

He had never been a weakling child. His brother Ramesh had been the sickly one, stealing more than his fair share of their mother’s attention. For Ravi, an illness was a rare calamity and he hated England for having attacked him in such an underhand way. It was an insidious germ warfare, which undermined his very character and confidence. For here there was no one to bring him sweet milk drinks with cinnamon and rub his temples with tingling balm. He lay in his mediaeval bedroom and coughed and listened to the bells chiming; he thought he had never been so lonely and forlorn in his life.

It was a closed world. Was it three or four weeks after the first night dinner that her new friend Emily Williams knocked on Sarah’s door, gulping tears, at half-past one in the morning? It was a Sunday night. Her boy-friend from Surrey had come up to stay for the weekend, as promised, but after seeing her new environment and the kind of topics which were going to occupy her for the next three years, he had announced that evening as they packed up his things for the coach that he and Emily were through. She had lain in her room for two hours crying and then come running across the dark quadrangle, hating the very gravel screeching under her feet, to wake Sarah. Now she sat huddled in Sarah’s armchair, shaking with her crying and the cold as she repeated, ‘I can’t bear it, Sarah. I’d rather have him than all
this. Honestly, I shall have to leave. I just can’t stand it here without him.’

Sarah filled her kettle and then, theatrically, poured out two glasses of sherry as well. She had bought the bottle a week or so earlier and had put as much thought into arranging it with the new little glasses on her coffee table as if they were ornaments. By means of objects like the sherry glasses and her ivy, she was after all turning room Number 102 into her own backdrop, distinct from that of Clarissa Rich or Jacqueline Poliakoff. She put Emily’s glass on the table near her and sat down on the other chair opposite her, wrapping her dressing-gown closer. She noticed on her bedside alarm clock that it was nearly 2 am and felt a pleasant sense of drama.

During those early days, Emily Williams had been her one source of drama. In the first week of meetings and book lists, Emily agonised loudly over which subject she should read and whether or not she was at the right university. In the second week, after they had been set their first essay, Emily had fallen dramatically ill and then accused the college nurse of dangerous incompetence. She had had her transistor radio stolen and later escaped near rape by an engineering student at a Freshers’ party. Sarah saw that friendship with Emily would ensure some excitement, while Emily found in Sarah the impressionable audience she needed for her dramas.

She wept in front of Sarah but, after a while, started to apologise for keeping her awake.

Sarah said, ‘That’s all right. I couldn’t sleep anyway.’ Insomnia was one of the discoveries of that period – provoked at first by the unfamiliar sounds of Jacqueline Poliakoff’s pleasure and then sustained by the thought of the three hundred women lying sleeping around her.

‘Why not?’ asked Emily, who hoped for distraction.

So Sarah invented a reason. After all, she did not want to be invariably the one who listened and consoled, but never had anything to weep about. She said, ‘I’ve met this man.’ And Emily listened. The man – who had in fact barely made any impression on Sarah at all – was a History student called David Whitehead. (Or had it actually been Whitechurch? Remembering him years afterwards, she had a sudden doubt.
No, no, it must have been Whitehead, with that fair hair.) She had met him at an audition for a student play; he was going to help with the lighting and Sarah was auditioning for some minor part. So she told Emily that she had sensed something between them at once. It did sound plausible. She was making it all up, but Emily encouraged her. The thrill of misfortune and the possibility of Sarah also becoming involved in it comforted them. They drank another glass of sherry and soon Emily started to giggle through her tears. By the time she felt confident to leave and Sarah went back to bed, she really could not sleep for wondering if there might not perhaps be something between her and the History student after all.

Repelled, tantalised, Ravi was faced with plate upon plate of gristly English meat. He did not eat meat and his throat involuntarily constricted at its evil savour. But something perfectly silly forbade him to go to the Bursar and request Colonel Webb to order him a vegetarian diet. He would not single himself out among these pink, meat-eating English boys; he would not act the traditional delicate part of the good Hindu boy abroad. So he ground the foul fibrous stuff untasting between his teeth and left most of his meals uneaten. But he had not had to appeal for special treatment over something with which these hearty boys could cope. And the thought of the pious horror of his mother and his aunt at the sight of him eating steak and kidney pie perversely spurred him on.

In the afternoons, there were tea-parties. Every afternoon, in every room in Oxford, there were tea-parties. Amidst a mess of coffee mugs and gaping packets of biscuits, Sarah Livingstone and her friends discussed the question of Arts versus Sciences and whether or not to build a Channel tunnel. They toasted crumpets on unwound paper clips attached to the grilles of their two-bar fires. Late in the afternoon, they switched from tea to sherry and left for dinner, striking poses and howling at jokes which lasted for a term at a time.
Friendships began or ended at these tea-parties, love affairs were surreptitiously advanced and once – carried away by the warmth and intimacy of the gathering – Clarissa Rich recounted how she had been ‘tampered with’ as a child by her father. In David Whitehead’s room in the city centre, above a shop which sold running shoes and rucksacks and camping stoves, Sarah ate ginger nuts and drank tea from a particular kind of pottery mug which she would ever
afterwards
associate with tedium.

David’s friends formed a small, close sub-group.
Membership
was by vocabulary and however congenial a person might be, admission would only ever be granted if he used the right words in the right way. There was Anthony – whom those in the know called Ant – who would one day be a distinguished barrister and grow immensely fat; Nigel, who drank such quantities that his closest friends were scared for him; Simon, Tim and Christopher Lee-Drake. Tolerated, but never really belonging, there was also occasionally Ali, whom they had for unconventionality and flavour because he came from Pakistan.

At their tea-parties, they did not actually talk very much, being able to convey all they wanted to one another with just one or two of their private words. They lay on the floor and savoured their exclusiveness. Sarah sat with her back against the bookcase and got a reputation for being
argumentative.
David’s friends said to one another what a pain she was as, warmed by mugs of tea and crumpets, they went out into the mist.

Ravi had never imagined he would joyously sit down with a circle of assorted Indians to a meal of vegetables and rice prepared in a mucky kitchenette. He had never imagined he would ostentatiously relish chappals and kurtas just because they were Indian or bring up geographical irrelevances in his economics tutorials in order to see his impeccably English tutor, Professor Elstree, force himself to reply with feigned courtesy. He had intended to explore. But he ended up going with a party of other Indian students to a shabby cinema in a cheap district of the city, where they saw rubbishy Hindi
films shown for the benefit of immigrant workers. The students went because they were homesick and the little cinema smelt wonderfully authentically of Indian crowds and paan. They sat together at the back and jeered – just as they had done as boys in their various home towns thousands of miles away – and the rest of the audience, for whom the films were intended, turned round and cried at them to shut up.

Ravi became one of the group of expatriates who met for meals in stuffy little Indian restaurants and made fun of the badly-spelled menus, who played sitar records and argued Indian issues together. He still believed that he would
integrate
into the city, but for that to happen, the city had to show some sign that it was interested in letting him in.

Of course, that first year had a summer too; it would be wrong to portray a country of constant winter. It began suddenly, over about three days, and after those three days – even though the cold weather periodically returned – it was still unquestionably summer. The winter receded into the dimmest corners of the libraries, where only those who liked nothing else sought it out. The term they called Trinity was given over almost entirely to enjoyment. The college garden, on which Sarah had looked out in gloomy animosity since October, now became a scented expanse of rolling couples. Only occasionally a grey female don would scurry between them, almost guilty to be a reminder of study. There were parties all the time: outdoor parties on the lawns, strawberries and cream parties, vicars-and-tarts parties, boating parties. The river, which had wound brown and uninterestingly until then, became the centre of the summer as the students floated along it in punts and held more parties on its banks. There was a visible, hilarious outburst of loving. At night, with the windows open, you could almost always hear gasping in the dark.

In a straw hat and a long Edwardian skirt, Sarah enjoyed everything. She rode on her bicycle from one party to another, holding up her skirt to the handle-bars.

David Whitehead came into his own, for a boy-friend was
an important prop for the summer. He was someone to lie with beside the river, endlessly to propel a punt. Sometimes, out of idle curiosity, Sarah must have closed her eyes and imagined that he was someone else; she could not have said who, but someone less clear-cut than David who eluded her. And since by then they were both growing a little tired of each other, David probably did so too. But they looked a convincing couple and appearances were all-important in the summer. After a winter wrapped in shapeless woollen clothes, people put on flamboyant summery outfits and David and Sarah, blond and blue-eyed, looked utterly
appropriate
in cricket whites and Edwardian dresses. Bizarrely, incomprehensibly, someone called Verity Claybody tried to kill herself in one of the sunniest weeks.

Of the many parties that term, one should be mentioned in particular because it was the scene of the first gap in that closed society, although no one involved ever remembered it later. David’s friend Simon was giving the party – or maybe Simon’s friend Tim. At any rate, it was a staircase party, with more than one host; everyone living on Simon’s staircase had invited their friends and, as a result, there were a great many people there and no one clearly knew whose guests they were. The table bearing the drink was at the innermost end of three adjoining rooms and was soon drained. But David and Sarah had brought a bottle, which they kept and drank themselves. The three rooms were horribly crowded; music nearly blotted out the conversation and heat and
cigarette
smoke formed a further barrier. So they stayed near the door, held their bottle of wine and drank it. Before the party, they had had an argument and now the shared bottle was their main reason for standing together. They talked little; each hoped to drink their fair share of the acrid wine and they both looked absently about the room. David looked for Simon or Tim, because the two of them could then exclude the party from their conversation. He did not especially like parties, unless there was really plenty to drink, but he came to them because it would have seemed defeatist not to. Secretly he harboured an image of an ideal party, at which there would be no music and so no obligation to dance – in fact, no explicit jollity at all, but only a small group of
carefully chosen people discoursing brilliantly, ironically in some select location. (He would have to wait over fifteen years to realise this fantasy, almost without recognising it, at a drinks party in a government building known by its number only.)

Sarah looked for a distraction, in the vague hope of
upsetting
David by somehow involving him in the party. Over the closely packed crowd, she could see heads bobbing in the next room where people were dancing. Emily Williams, well on the way to being incapably drunk, was spreadeagled against the wall embracing a man Sarah did not recognise. There was a foreigner by the fireplace, standing alone and looking left out and slightly disapproving of the party around him. Sarah noticed him briefly; for one thing, he was a different colour from everyone else and his brown face stood out between the pink ones, flushed with exertion and drink. He was looking around the room with his chin up, either haughtily surveying the crass jollity or concealing the fact that no one had come up to talk to him behind an aloof expression. As he was rather short, he was only revealed by a gap in the crowd and after a moment the gap changed shape, leaving Sarah a view of his face alone. It was a
good-looking
face, with strong black eyebrows and what seemed in the party lighting to be quite black, shining angry eyes. A thought surfaced in Sarah’s fuddled brain, which could best be expressed as, ‘So not everyone in the world is English.’ This sounded ridiculous, but allowing for her drunkenness it must have meant that particular group of university friends rather than the entire world. And she looked on for some other way to upset David.