Free Playing Fields in Winter by Helen Harris Page A

the conversation with, ‘You know Sarah’s up at Oxford now? Doesn’t it make one feel old?’ Sarah smiled and held out trays of canapés to personalities her father had photographed and did her best to convey the impression that away at university she led an exotic secret life. She imagined Ravi surveying her parents’ parties with amused scorn and she surveyed them with amused scorn in his place. In Sheffield, Ravi saw a different England. He had few reasons to venture out into what seemed to him a hostile Northern city. His friend’s cousin’s family wrapped him in the continuous round of their activities. Late one night, a shaven-headed boy spat at him as he walked home and jeered, ‘Paki!’ Ravi told this story afterwards in Oxford, laughing so as to obtain the maximum discomfort from his English audience. He lay on his bed and read. The vacation lasted six weeks.
    *
    The sight of each other on the first day of the next term put an end to their caution. A few hours after they arrived back in Oxford, Ravi set out on foot to Sarah’s college and Sarah got onto her bicycle to ride round to his. They met at the corner of two central streets and broke into a helpless grin at the ridiculous recognition of their happiness. Sarah looked just as Ravi liked to think of her – pink-cheeked with coldand exercise, her fair hair ruffled by her bicycle ride. She was the picture of a jolly English girl on a hockey pitch who, by some freak of fortune, had landed in his path. And Ravi stood on the kerb as he had stayed all through the vacation in Sarah’s imagination – the foreigner who was going to transform her and her surroundings.
    ‘Ravi!’
    ‘Sarah!’
    Her bicycle wobbled in to the kerb. A delivery van, driven by a malignant grocer who hated students, braked excessively sharply and hooted at them.
    ‘Look out! You’ll get yourself knocked down.’
    ‘Who cares! Did you have a good vac?’
    ‘So-so. And yours?’
    ‘Dreadful. Tedious. Boring. I couldn’t wait to get back.’
    ‘That bad?’ He asked mischievously. ‘Didn’t you enjoy your Christmas?’
    ‘Oh, Ra vi—’ Sarah was still on her bicycle, beaming at Ravi as he stood by the handlebars and grinned back at her. He flipped her arm teasingly and as she made to return his nudge, they toppled into the beginning of an embrace.
    ‘Hello, hello!’
    ‘Get off your bike before we have an accident. Imagine the indignity; having a bike accident when you aren’t even moving.’
    ‘I’d blame it on you. Let me get off then.’
    Ravi’s arm around Sarah’s shoulders, Sarah’s arm around Ravi’s waist, they walked to his college which was the nearer. As they came into the front quadrangle, Dev Mehdi saw them linked for the first time and a new era began.
    They went up to Ravi’s room and he made tea. But he kept interrupting to look round at Sarah and grin. Everything was so funny – the thick dust of his uninhabited room, the lack of milk. They examined each other with delight. The Christmas vacation behind them was their joint achievement and they wanted to crow over it.
    ‘I was coming round to see you,’ Sarah admitted.
    ‘Were you?’ Ravi exclaimed joyfully. ‘ Were you?’
    ‘Yes, really I was. I bet you were on your way out to see me? Admit it.’
    ‘No, actually, I wasn’t. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but actually I wasn’t … Mind you, I probably wouldn’t have been long in coming.’
    ‘They’ve repainted my corridor.’
    ‘A treat in store for me.’
    ‘They’ve painted it the colour of grass-snake’s puke. I don’t know who chose it; it’s disgusting.’
    ‘Well, maybe you’d better continue to come round here instead.’
    ‘I see. Any excuse for not trekking all the way out to college. What if I can’t be bothered to come here either?’
    ‘I shall die of a broken heart,’ said Ravi, spooning three steep heaps of sugar into his tea.
    They laughed triumphantly and Ravi said, ‘Sit closer.’ He could not help