Free Playing Fields in Winter by Helen Harris

fond of Sarah and Sarah was undoubtedly fond of him, but would it not perhaps be better to leave it at that? Student couples passed him in the dark, holding on to each other and laughing loudly to parade their happiness. Ravi imagined what it would be like to be fully part of the strolling street. No, it would be small-minded to back out now.
    The party was held in Joanna Richardson’s room after dinner, with records of Christmas carols and candlelight. Joanna was a large, clean-faced, kindly girl who seemed too motherly for an environment of spinsters. Her guests sat on the floor, their faces shining with the season as they laughingly recalled Christmases of their childhood. Joanna passed round trays of her sugary, white misshapen pies. Whether he wanted to or not, Ravi stood out like a ghost at their feast and inevitably drew Sarah out with him. Sitting in her roombeforehand, waiting for him to arrive, she had enjoyed the realisation that she was very much looking forward to it. She had also enjoyed arriving at the party with Ravi, her friends’ momentary and almost imperceptible confusion and their instant reassessment of both of them. Now she sat close to him and enjoyed the way his presence separated her from her companions. Ravi had not known the shape of a tangerine in his stocking on a peculiar morning, nor the annual bilious excess of sweet mincemeat. When Joanna Richardson asked him with painstaking politeness, ‘What festivals do you celebrate?’, Sarah enjoyed the collusion with which their feet impulsively nudged. Although she did not know which festivals Ravi celebrated either, they had already made fun of that politeness; they called it ‘Feed the Faint and Hungry Heathen’ and Sarah would never use it again. Ravi told Joanna one or two strange names and she exclaimed, ‘How interesting!’ Sarah smiled condescendingly at her and felt proud to have access to Ravi’s world. This must be the crossing-over time, she thought, feeling stranded in a heady vacuum; she had left England behind her already, but she had no idea of India. She watched Ravi’s laughing face in the candlelight as he listened to the distorted schoolboy versions of Christmas carols; she knew what he was laughing at, but the singers raising their glasses of mulled wine and roaring, ‘A bar of Sunlight Soap came down and they be gan to scrub,’ had no idea. She let her gaze feed on Ravi’s brown face and the twin pinpoints of light in his eyes. She saw in them such a potent, such a huge alternative to the faces of the roistering chorus that she was transfixed. Feeling her stare, Ravi turned and read in it such an extent of unuttered longing that he was shaken. Moved by affection, gratification and pity, he reached over and vigorously squeezed Sarah’s hand.
    It was wonderfully cosy going back to her room together afterwards, drinking coffee and making fun of the mince-pie party. Sarah was elated because she imagined then that she had escaped at last. Ravi kissed her goodbye slowly and carefully and, walking back to his college, he whistled in the night.
    *
    And then there was Christmas, bloody Christmas, just as things were getting exciting. Sarah went home to a house about to be cheerily decorated with crêpe paper and tinsel, with a lighted tree in the living-room and holly around the frames of her father’s favourite photographs. Ravi went to stay with a friend’s cousin’s family in Sheffield into whose hermetically Indian home, despite many children, Christmas hardly permeated at all.
    Sarah thought about Ravi every day. Ravi thought about Sarah less, not because he was any less interested at that stage, but because for him she was part of the university and the university did not extend as far as Sheffield. For Sarah, the university was that period of her life and she took it with her everywhere. Mr and Mrs Livingstone entertained a good deal at Christmas time and as Sarah had once gloomily predicted, they brought her into