Playing Fields in Winter Read Free Page B

without her body, it was a slightly unnerving sight; she had a large, nearly lunar face, surrounded by an aura of pale frizzy hair. She said, ‘Hail and well met, stranger. We’re neighbours.’ Her body, which followed, was very broad and draped in a floor-length purple smock. Standing in the centre of the empty room she said, ‘Yes, just like mine, except that my bed’s over by the desk, more to the end. I think it’s nicer that way; you can use the desk light to read in bed.’
    ‘Have you got yours all fixed up then?’ Sarah asked. ‘Are you unpacked?’
    ‘Oh goodness, yes,’ Clarissa answered. ‘I came up three days early so that I could get all that out of the way before the work started.’ She looked at Sarah curiously. ‘What are you reading?’
    ‘English,’ said Sarah. ‘And you?’
    ‘History,’ replied Clarissa, ‘although I must admit I am tempted by philosophy.’ She went over to the window to see if the view differed at all from hers and then turned and asked a little awkwardly, ‘Would you like to come and have tea?’
    Because it had seemed short-sighted to offend her neighbour on the first day and so as to get out of the chilling room, Sarah followed Clarissa. She seemed very pleased to have enlisted Sarah. She showed her where the kitchen and the bathroom were. On the way back they passed a small, rather pretty dark-haired girl, who was being helped with her luggage by two laughing young men. Clarissa contented herself with a ‘Hail and well met, stranger!’ and a wave;then she ushered Sarah proprietorially into her room and commented, ‘Oh dear, one of those. I hope we don’t have too many of them on our corridor.’
    Oppressiveness spread from Clarissa’s pimpled forehead and sternly parted, rather oily hair. Sarah thought that maybe her mother had been right when she said it was important to get in with the right people at the very beginning. She did not want to be drawn into Clarissa’s musty orbit; it would be awful if she was seen with her at the start and considered by the interesting people to be like her.
    Clarissa offered Sarah home-made flapjacks from a big tin and took two, which she chewed with relish. ‘It’s a wonderful feeling, starting here, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘There’s so much exploration and discovery ahead of us.’
    *
    Although his college in Delhi had modelled itself on one of these, Ravi Kaul was not prepared for quite how closely the university resembled its caricatured versions overseas. It was like moving into a textbook, taking up residence on a well-worn page with all the illustrations austerely correct: chapel, quadrangles, High Table, gowns. It was astonishing how dotingly the traditions were maintained, how cosily the young Englishmen stuck to them. And Ravi, who had assumed that he knew as much about them as any John Smith, and would therefore take to them with ease and panache, found to his dismay that he disliked them intensely.
    ‘It’s eight o-clock – sir.’
    ‘Oh gosh, is it?’
    ‘It is – sir. I presume we’re up to opening our curtains this morning?’
    He had an ancient cubby-hole of a bedroom during that first year and an ancient college servant, a scout, to go with it. His name was Mr Gregory Rainbow and he waited on Ravi Kaul with resentment.
    ‘You’re from India, then, if I’ve got it right?’ he asked one morning, after bringing in Ravi’s frequent air mail letters with their Hindi cyphers.
    ‘That’s right, Mr Rainbow. Have you ever been there, by any chance?’
    ‘Indeed I have – sir. I was there in the Army, as a matter of fact, before the war.’
    ‘Did you like it?’
    ‘I wouldn’t say “like” was quite the word for it. It was an interesting experience.’
    ‘Would you go back there?’
    ‘I would not.’ The stocky old man deliberated in the doorway – a rustic figure, Ravi thought, whom he liked to imagine leaning on a country gate and chewing a straw, as in a poem by Mathew Arnold or