Playing Fields in Winter Read Free

‘You know Sarah’s up at Oxford now? Doesn’t it make one feel old?’ The boundaries of their expectations extended far beyond the house and her childhood. Her escape plans had been detected and foiled long ago.
    The house from which Sarah was planning to escape stood towards one end of a white London crescent. On the morning she received her telegram, two other children in the crescent heard that they had been admitted to Oxbridge too. At Number 24 Jonathan Wharton – son of Ian Wharton, the Conservative MP – learnt that he had won a scholarship to Downing College, Cambridge; and at Number 2 Roger Caversham, the son of Miles and Irene Caversham, heard that he had been accepted by his father’s old college. Sarahwas Sarah Livingstone, the daughter of Gareth Livingstone the photographer.
    The crescent being a select London street, the news was not swapped cheerily in front of the spear-headed black railings or passed along by neighbourly exchange. It was learnt, by some silent filtration, over the next few days and no one felt it appropriate to comment or congratulate. The Whartons’ Colombian au pair girl, letting herself into the crescent garden early one morning with the family’s King Charles spaniel, met the Cavershams’ Philippino help struggling almost tearfully with the key and in the course of a halting exchange about their employers, the two girls made the only direct public reference to the recent coincidence. They found the lack of comment peculiar. Then they talked about the smoke from the gardener’s bonfire which, rising through the yellow trees, reminded each of them of something different in their own countries.
    *
    What was it like for him in that other white house beside the gardens when the telegram arrived? It was brought in the very early, pink morning by a ‘boy’ on a bicycle, who was really thirty-two years old but cowed and thin. There was exhilaration and the proud, nearly dream-like realisation of tremendous powers. He could behave quite differently now; he was about to become part of another world. The words on the telegraph form were so botched and crooked to represent such a huge transformation. Yesterday his life had been one thing: from today, it would be something utterly superior. At the same time he felt calm satisfaction, for the world had only recognised his due – what was to be expected if you were born Ravi Kaul and had servants to cry because you were going abroad. And his father? Had he swollen even greater at this family triumph, jutting his bulbous finger at the sky to show that heaven and he understood one another? And his mother? Had she crept, pressing her sari hood to her mouth, into some back bedroom and sobbed because her eldest son was to travel so far? The pink sun came up and he rang his friends to tell them the news. When they came round to celebrate, a gulf had opened between him and thosewho were not going abroad, because already their lives had begun to diverge.
    The house beside the gardens in Lucknow had been home since Ravi was ten. But it was not profoundly home, the way a house in a city would be if you had been born there and your ancestors had lived in the same place. There was somewhere else, beyond reach, that was really home – Delhi, where the streets were wider and his parents were in a better mood – and Lucknow had always been second best.
    Ravi and his brother Ramesh, and later his two little sisters, had grown up feeling that they did not quite fit into their surroundings. Not only were they a Hindu family in a very Moslem city, they were a sophisticated metropolitan family in a provincial capital. Ravi had done well at school; that had been his revenge: better and better at school, to serve everybody right. In summer, when it was really too hot to study, he had continued studying to confound them. He had sat in his bedroom – actually Ramesh’s bedroom too – and scowled down at his books for hours, too hot and sweaty to take