Playing Fields in Winter Read Online Free PDF

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 ofcarefully 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.
    They left the party early. An alternative would have been to stay extremely late and obliterate their disagreement with fatigue and alcohol. Instead, to round off their argument, they each went back to their own college. David found his friend Simon Satchell in his room and challenged him: ‘I thought you were supposed to be giving the party?’
    ‘I am,’ Simon said. He was virtually lying in an armchair. ‘I’m waiting to see how long it takes before someone notices I’m not there.’
    They opened some beer and sat companionably in silencefor a time. After a while Simon said – just to point out to David that his evening did not appear to have been completely successful either – ‘What have you done with Sarah?’
    David laughed, to give himself time to arrange the right answer, then he said, ‘Sent her home to bed. I needed some peace and quiet!’
    Simon chuckled understandingly. For lack of any impulse to move, they sat there together until half-past three.
    *
    Sarah thought of dropping in on Emily Williams to ask her about the unknown man, but she had not come back to her room. In the room next door to her own, Jacqueline Poliakoff was being simultaneously tickled and throttled. Impetuously, Sarah’s winter dissatisfaction returned. She considered crying, but felt too lazy, so she made herself a cup of coffee and went to bed.
    The next day, or the day after, there was a picnic to which Sarah and David had already agreed to go.