Tom Stoppard Plays 2

by Tom Stoppard

  FLORA: I preferred it. I had more what-do-you-call-it.

  DAS: Rasa.

  FLORA: (Laughs quietly) Yes, rasa.

  SCENE TEN: ENGLAND

  MRS SWAN: I remember the frock. It was not quite such a royal blue. Her cornflower dress, she called it.

  ANISH: And her? Is it a good likeness?

  MRS SWAN: Well, it’s certainly Flora. She always sat upright and square to the table; she hated slouchers. She would have made a good schoolmistress, except for the feet. She always slipped her shoes off to work, and placed them neatly to one side like that. Yes, it’s a very faithful portrait.

  ANISH: But unfinished.

  MRS SWAN: Is it? Why do you say that?

  ANISH: It wasn’t clear from the book, the way they cropped the painting. See here, my father has only indicated the tree – and the monkey – especially the doorway beyond …

  MRS SWAN: Oh, but it’s a portrait of her.

  ANISH: Yes but he wasn’t satisfied with her. He would have gone back to complete the background only when he considered the figure finished. Believe me. My father abandoned this portrait. I wondered why he hadn’t signed it. Now I know. Thank you for showing it to me.

  MRS SWAN: Mr Das, you said you had come to show me something. Evidence you said –

  ANISH: Yes! I did. Come into the hall, Mrs Swan. Can you guess what it is?

  MRS SWAN: A photograph of your father looking like Charlie Chaplin.

  ANISH: (Off) No, better evidence than that. You may be shocked.

  MRS SWAN: (Approaching) Oh dear, then you had better prepare me.

  ANISH: It’s a painting of course … wrapped up in this paper for sixty years.

  (He unwraps the paper.) We need a flat surface, in the light –

  MRS SWAN: The table in the bay …

  ANISH: Yes, please come to the window –

  (They are moving, she with her stick.)

  May I use the elephants? To hold it flat.

  MRS SWAN: Very suitable.

  ANISH: And there you are, then.

  MRS SWAN: (Taken aback) Oh, good heavens.

  ANISH: A second portrait of Flora Crewe.

  MRS SWAN: Oh … How like Flora.

  ANISH: More than a good likeness, Mrs Swan.

  MRS SWAN: No … I mean how like Flora!

  SCENE ELEVEN: INDIA

  DAS: (Approaching) Nazrul has returned, most fortunately. I was able to unlock the refrigerator. I have the soda water.

  FLORA: Thank you. You must have some too.

  DAS: I will put it on the table.

  FLORA: Yes. No – no, the table by me. It’s quite safe, I’ve covered myself.

  DAS: May I move this book?

  FLORA: Thank you. Do you know it? I found it here.

  DAS: Up the Country… No. It looks old.

  FLORA: A hundred years before my time, but it’s just my book.

  DAS: Oh – let me – let me pour the water for you.

  FLORA: Thank you.

  DAS: (While pouring water from the bottle into a glass) Nazrul was delayed at the shops by a riot, he says. The police charged the mob with lathis, he could have easily been killed, but by heroism and inspired by his loyalty to the memsahib he managed to return only an hour late with all the food you gave him money for except two chickens which were torn from his grasp.

  FLORA: Oh dear … you thanked him, I hope.

  DAS: I struck him, of course. You should fine him for the chickens.

  FLORA: (Drinking) Oh, that’s nice. It’s still cold. Perhaps there really was a riot.

  DAS: Oh, yes. Very probably. I have sent Nazrul to fetch the dhobi – you must have fresh linen for the bed. Nazrul will bring water but you must not drink it.

  FLORA: Thank you.

  (The noise of the punkah begins quietly.)

  DAS: I’m sure the electricity will return soon and the fan will be working.

  FLORA: What’s that? Oh, the punkah!

  DAS: I have found a boy to be punkah-wallah.

  FLORA: Yes, it makes a draught. Thank you. A little boy?

  DAS: Don’t worry about him. I’ve told him the memsahib is sick.

  FLORA: The memsahib. Oh dear.

  DAS: Yes, you are memsahib. Are you all right now, Miss Crewe?

  FLORA: Oh yes. I’m only shamming now.

  DAS: May I return later to make certain?

  FLORA: Are you leaving now? Yes, I’ve made you late.

  DAS: No, not at all. There is no one waiting for me. But the servants will return and … we Indians are frightful gossips, you see.

  FLORA: Oh.

  DAS: It is for yourself, not me.

  FLORA: I don’t believe you, Mr Das, not entirely.

  DAS: To tell you the truth, this is the first time I have been alone in a room with an Englishwoman.

  FLORA: Oh. Well, you certainly started at the deep end.

  DAS: We need not refer to it again. It was an accident.

  FLORA: I didn’t think you blushed.

  DAS: (Coldly) Oh, yes. I assure you our physiology is exactly the same as yours.

  FLORA: Well said, but I didn’t mean that. I was being personal. I didn’t expect an artist to blush.

  DAS: Then perhaps I am not an artist, as you said.

  FLORA: I did not. All I did was hold my tongue and you wanted to cut and run. What would you have done in the ordinary rough and tumble of literary life in London – on which, as you know, I am an expert. I give lectures on it. I expect you would have hanged yourself by now. When Nymph In Her Orisons came out one of the reviewers called it Nymph In Her Mania, and made some play with ‘free verse’ and ‘free love’, as if my poems, which I had found so hard to write, were a kind of dalliance, no more than that. I cried a bit too. I wanted to cut and run. Oh, the dreadful authority of print. It’s bogus. If free verse and free love have anything in common it’s a distrust of promiscuity. Quite apart from it not applying to me …

  DAS: Of course not!

  FLORA: Bogus and ignorant. My poems are not free verse.

  DAS: Oh …

  FLORA: I met my critic somewhere a few months later and poured his drink over his head and went home and wrote a poem. So that was all right. But he’d taken weeks away from me and I mind that now.

  DAS: Oh! You’re not dying are you?

  FLORA: I expect so, but I intend to take years and years about it. You’ll be dead too, one day, so let it be a lesson to you. Ignore everything, including silence. I was silent about your painting, if you want to know, because I thought you’d be an Indian artist.

  DAS: An Indian artist?

  FLORA: Yes. You are an Indian artist, aren’t you? Stick up for yourself. Why do you like everything English?

  DAS: I do not like everything English.

  FLORA: Yes, you do. You’re enthralled. Chelsea, Bloomsbury, Oliver Twist, Goldflake cigarettes … even painting in oils, that’s not Indian. You’re trying to paint me from my point of view instead of yours – what you think is my point of view. You deserve the bloody Empire!

  DAS: (Sharply) May I sit down, please?

  FLORA: Yes, do. Flora is herself again.

  DAS: I will move the chair near the door.

  FLORA: You can move the chair on to the verandah if you like, so the servants won’t –

  DAS: I would like to smoke, that is what I meant.

  FLORA: Oh. I’m sorry. Thank you. In that case, can you see me through the net from over there?

  DAS: Barely.

  FLORA: Is that no or yes? Oof! That’s better! That’s what I love about my little house – you can see out but you can’t see in.

  DAS: (Passionately) But you are looking out at such a house! The bloody Empire finished off Indian painting! (Pause.) Excuse me.

  FLORA: No, I prefer your bark.

  DAS: Perhaps your sister is right. And Mr Chamberlain. Perhaps we have been robbed. Yes; when the books are balanced. The women here wear saris made in Lancashire. The cotton is Indian but we cann
ot compete in the weaving. Mr Chamberlain explained it all to us in simple Marxist language. Actually, he caused some offence.

  FLORA: Yes, you mean the Rajah …

  DAS: No, no – he didn’t realize we had Marxists of our own, many of them in the Jummapur Theosophical Society. For some, Marx is the god whose wisdom the Society honours in its title!

  FLORA: Mr Coomaraswami …?

  DAS: No, not Mr Coomaraswami. His criticism is that you haven’t exploited India enough. ‘Where are the cotton mills? The steel mills? No investment, no planning. The Empire has failed us!’ That is Mr Coomaraswami. Well, the Empire will one day be gone, like the Mughal Empire before it, and only their monuments remain – the visions of Shah Jahan! – of Sir Edwin Lutyens!

  FLORA: ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’

  DAS: (Delighted) Oh, yes! Finally like the empire of Ozymandias! Entirely forgotten except in a poem by an English poet. You see how privileged we are, Miss Crewe. Only in art can empires cheat oblivion, because only the artist can say, ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’

  FLORA: Well, it helps if he happens to be Shelley.

  DAS: There are Mughal paintings in the museum in London.

  FLORA: Yes. Rajput miniatures in the Victoria and Albert.

  DAS: You have seen them?

  FLORA: Yes.

  DAS: And you like them, of course.

  FLORA: Yes. Very much.

  DAS: Eighteenth and early nineteenth century, or earlier, nothing much good later.

  FLORA: I didn’t mean I expected you to paint like that. I just didn’t like you thinking English was better because it was English. If that is what you were thinking. Did you consider my question?

  DAS: What question?

  FLORA: Can’t you paint me without thinking of Rossetti or Millais? Especially without thinking of Holman Hunt. Would your nudes be Pre-Raphaelite too?

  DAS: The Pre-Raphaelites did not paint nudes. Their models were clothed.

  FLORA: Oh, yes, weren’t they though! The Brotherhood painted life as if it were a costume drama put on by Beerbohm Tree. I knew him, you know. He gave me my first job. And my second. All right, Alma-Tadema, then. I bet you like Alma-Tadema.

  DAS: Yes, very much. When you stood … with the pitcher of water, you were an Alma-Tadema.

  FLORA: Well, I don’t want to be painted like that either – that’s C. B. Cochran, if only he dared.

  DAS: I don’t understand why you are angry with me.

  FLORA: You were painting me as a gift, to please me.

  DAS: Yes. Yes, it was a gift for you.

  FLORA: If you don’t start learning to take you’ll never be shot of us. Who whom? Nothing else counts. Mr Chamberlain is bosh. Mr Coomaraswami is bosh. It’s your country, and we’ve got it. Everything else is bosh. When I was Modi’s model I might as well have been a table. ‘Lie down – thrust your hips.’ When he was satisfied, he got rid of me. There was no question who whom. You’d never change his colour on a map. But please light your Goldflake.

  (Pause. DAS lights his cigarette with a match.)

  DAS: I like the Pre-Raphaelites because they tell stories. That is my tradition too. I am Rajasthani. Our art is narrative art, stories from the legends and romances. The English painters had the Bible and Shakespeare, King Arthur … We had the Bhagavata Purana, and the Rasikpriya, which was written exactly when Shakespeare had his first play. And long before Chaucer we had the Chaurapanchasika, from Kashmir, which is poems of love written by the poet of the court on his way to his execution for falling in love with the king’s daugher, and the king liked the poems so very much he pardoned the poet and allowed the lovers to marry.

  FLORA: Oh …

  DAS: But the favourite book of the Rajput painters was the Gita Govinda, which tells the story of Krishna and Radha, the most beautiful of the herdswomen.

  (The ceiling-fan starts working.)

  FLORA: The fan has started. The electricity is on.

  DAS: You will be a little cooler now.

  FLORA: Yes. I might have a sleep.

  DAS: That would be good.

  FLORA: Mr Durance has invited me to dinner at the Club.

  DAS: Will you be well enough?

  FLORA: I am well now.

  DAS: That is good. Goodbye, then.

  FLORA: Were Krishna and Radha punished in the story?

  DAS: What for?

  FLORA: I should have come here years ago. The punkah boy can stop now. Will you give him a rupee? I’ll return it tomorrow.

  DAS: I will give him an anna. A rupee would upset the market.

  SCENE TWELVE: ENGLAND

  ANISH: I was in England when my father died. It was Christmas day, 1967. My first Christmas in London, in a house of student bedsits in Ladbroke Grove. An unhappy day.

  MRS SWAN: Yes, of course.

  ANISH: I mean it was already unhappy. The house was cold and empty. All the other students had gone home to their families, naturally. I was the only one left. No one had invited me.

  MRS SWAN: Well, having a Hindu for Christmas can be tricky. Francis would invite his Assistant for Christmas lunch, and I always felt I should be apologizing for rubbing something in which left him out, if you follow me. It quite spoiled the business of the paper hats too. There’s nothing like having an Indian at table for making one feel like a complete ass handing round the vegetables in a pink paper fez. That was after I-zation, of course.

  ANISH: I heard the telephone …

  MRS SWAN: Did you? Well, it’s stopped now. The mistletoe was another problem.

  ANISH: … no, there was a coin box in the hall. I could hear it ringing all day. It would stop and then start again. I ignored it. The phone was never for me. But finally I went up and answered it, and it was my uncle calling from Jummapur to say my father was dead.

  MRS SWAN: Oh, how sad. Did you go home?

  ANISH: Yes. There was great sadness in our house.

  MRS SWAN: Of course …

  ANISH: I’m ashamed of it but I found the rituals of death and grief distasteful. I wanted to return to England. And I did, as soon as permitted. There were legal matters which I was grateful to leave to my father’s elder brother. So I was in England again when I learned that I had a legacy from my father. He had left me his tin trunk which had always stood at the foot of his bed.

  MRS SWAN: Ah, yes …

  ANISH: It arrived finally and it was locked. There had been no mention of a key. So I broke the hasp. There was nothing of value in the trunk that I could see.

  MRS SWAN: You were disappointed?

  ANISH: Well, yes. It was mainly letters and old bills, my report cards from school, and so on. But at the bottom of everything was a painting rolled up in paper. An extraordinary painting, a nude, a portrait of a woman. Even more amazing, a European woman, apparently painted many years before. I couldn’t imagine who she was or what it meant.

  MRS SWAN: Did you ask anyone? Your uncle?

  ANISH: No. It was clear that this was something my father was sharing with me alone. A secret he was passing on. So I rolled the picture up again and put it away. I never hung it, of course. I never showed it to anyone, until years later I showed it to my wife.

  MRS SWAN: Until now.

  ANISH: Yes, until a week ago. The book in the shop window. It was like seeing a ghost. Not her ghost; his. It was my father’s hand – his work – I had grown up watching him work, his portrait-work, in oils – local bigwigs, daughters of well-to-do businessmen. I had seen a hundred original Nirad Dases, and here was his work, not once but repeated twenty times over. It filled the window of the bookshop, a special display … The Selected Letters of Flora Crewe, and in the next instant I saw it was the same woman.

  MRS SWAN: Yes. Oh, yes, it’s Flora. It’s as particular as an English miniature. A watercolour, isn’t it?

  ANISH: Watercolour and gouache, on paper.

  MRS SWAN: It’s fascinating. It looks Indian but he hasn’t made her Indian.

&nb
sp; ANISH: Well, she was not Indian.

  MRS SWAN: Yes, I know. I’m not gaga, I’m only old. I mean he hasn’t painted her flat. But everything else looks Indian, like enamel … the moon and stars done with a pastry cutter. And the birds singing in the border. Or is that the ceiling of the room, that line?

  ANISH: I’m not sure.

  MRS SWAN: And the foliage in bloom, so bright. Is it day or night? I know what’s odd. The different parts are on different scales. The tree is far too small, or it’s the right size too close. You can’t tell if the painter is in the house or outside looking in.

  ANISH: She is in a house within a house … look.

  MRS SWAN: This edge must be the floor. Flora wrote about animals scratching about under the bungalow. There’s a snake, look. Oh, but there couldn’t have been gazelles under the house, could there? Perhaps it’s a border after all … or a touch of fancy.

  ANISH: Symbolism, yes.

  MRS SWAN: I like the book on the pillow. That’s Flora.

  ANISH: And a pitcher on the table next to her, and bread on the plate … Do you see the lettering on the book?

  MRS SWAN: Too small. I could find a magnifying glass …

  ANISH: It says ‘Eden’.

  MRS SWAN: Eden? …(Understanding.) Oh!

  ANISH: A book of verses underneath the bough, a jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou beside me singing in the wilderness!

  MRS SWAN: That’s not Indian.

  anish: No. The Mughals brought miniature painting from Persia when they made their Indian empire. But Muslim and Hindu art are different. The Muslim artists were realists. To a Hindu every object has an inner meaning, everything is to be interpreted in a language of symbols –

  MRS SWAN: Which you understand, Mr Das?

  ANISH: Not in detail. I’d have to look it up.

  MRS SWAN: (Amused) Look it up! (Apologizing.) Oh, I’m sorry.

  ANISH: But this flowering vine that winds itself around the dark trunk of the tree …

  MRS SWAN: Oh …

  ANISH: The vine is shedding its leaves and petals, look where they’re falling to the ground. I think my father knew your sister was dying.

  MRS SWAN: It upsets me, to see her nakedness.

  ANISH: Yes … it’s unguarded; she is not posing but resting –