Playing Fields in Winter Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 Hindifilms 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 wasan 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;