Tom Stoppard Plays 2

by Tom Stoppard

MRS SWAN: No, I did not mean that. I don’t make presumptions.

  ANISH: Oh … but …

  MRS SWAN: I was not there to nurse her … bathe her … I never saw her body at the end.

  ANISH: Yes. Let me put it away now.

  MRS SWAN: No, leave it, please. I want to look at it more. Yes. Such a pretty painting.

  ANISH: It was done with great love.

  MRS SWAN: He was certainly taken with her. Whether she posed for him, or whether it’s a work of the imagination …

  ANISH: Oh … but the symbolism clearly –

  MRS SWAN: Codswallop. Your ‘house within a house’, as anyone can see, is a mosquito net. I had one which was gathered at the top in exactly that way. And a drink and a sandwich don’t add up to the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám by a long chalk. Eden, indeed! Why would a Hindu call it Eden?

  ANISH: Her paradise, not his –

  MRS SWAN: Don’t be a fool. The book is a volume of Indian travels. It was Flora’s bedside reading. She mentions it in one of her letters – you should read the footnotes.

  SCENE THIRTEEN: INDIA

  FLORA: ‘Jummapur. Sunday. April 6th. Darling Nell, I posted a letter only hours ago – at least I put it in the box at the Club last night and no doubt it’s still there – but I’ll make this the next page of my journal and probably post it when I leave Jummapur. We had an excitement in town yesterday morning, a riot, and half a street of shops burned to the ground, with the police out in force – the Rajah’s police. The Rajah of Jummapur is Hindu (otherwise it would more likely be Jummabad – not – pur) but the Muslims got the best of it according to my cook, who was in the heat of the battle. The Brits here shake their heads and ask where will it all end when we’ve gone, because going we are. That’s official. Tell Josh. I got it from the Resident, whose view is that (a) it is our moral duty to remain and (b) we will shirk it. So now it’s Sunday after breakfast, and I’ve been horse riding! – in a long skirt like the Viceroy’s daughters twenty years ago, the first women to ride astride in India. Do you remember Llandudno? No, you surely can’t. I think that was the last time I was ever on anything resembling a horse.’

  PIKE: The Crewe family spent August at the seaside resort in North Wales from 1904 until 1911, the year of Mrs Crewe’s elopement. FC’s allusion is evidently to donkey rides on the sands, and her comment is of some interest, since, if she is right, a recently published photograph described as showing FC and Maynard Keynes on horseback at Garsington in 1924 (Ottoline Morrell and Her Circle in Hell, by Toshiro Kurasaki, 1988) misidentifies her; if not him.

  FLORA: ‘If I start coming over a bit dated it’s because in my bungalow, which is not duck but dak, i.e. for travellers (as Josh has probably told you by now), I have discovered among a box of dilapidated railway novels a book of letters written from India a hundred years ago by an English spinster – hand on my heart – to her sister Eleanor in London, and this is now my only reading.’

  PIKE: The spinster was Emily Eden and the book was Up the Country, 1866. The Hon. Miss Eden was accompanying her brother, the Governor-General Lord Auckland, on an official progress up country. The tour, supported by a caravan of ten thousand people, including Auckland’s French chef, and almost as many animals, lasted thirty months, from October 1837, and Emily wrote hundreds of letters to sisters and friends at home, happily unaware that the expedition’s diplomatic and strategic accomplishment was to set the stage for the greatest military disaster ever to befall the British under arms, the destruction of the army in Afghanistan.

  FLORA: ‘I shall steal the book when I leave here in a day or two and pick up Emily’s trail in Delhi and Simla and up into the Punjab, where the literary societies are holding their breath. Speaking of which, I am doing pretty well with mine, well enough to go dancing last night. My suitor (I suppose I must call him that, though I swear I did nothing to encourage him) came to fetch me in an enormous open Daimler which drew a crowd.’

  (Sound of the Daimler and the crowd.)

  (Calling out from off) You wangled it!

  (Sounds of DURANCE opening the driver’s door and closing it again. FLORA has opened the passenger door, got into the car and slammed the door. The ambience is the hubbub of Indian voices, children, dogs, chickens … general excitement.)

  Can I drive?

  DURANCE: Next time. Is that a bargain?

  FLORA: It’s a bargain.

  DURANCE: Done. By the way, I hope you’ll call me David. First names are generally the drill with us.

  FLORA: David.

  (Sounds of DURANCE shouting, in Urdu, to clear a path. The car honks its horn and moves.)

  ‘And off we went, pushing through the mob of curiosity seekers, scattering children and dogs and chickens right and left, rather like leaving Bow Street in a police van. My God, how strange; that was ten years ago almost to the day.’

  PIKE: In fact, nine. See ‘The Woman Who Wrote What She Knew’, by E. C. Pike (Maryland Monographs, UMP, 1981).

  FLORA: ‘I fully expected the Club to be like a commercial hotel in the hotter part of Guildford, but not at all – it’s huge and white and pillared, just like the house of your first memory, perhaps – poor mama’s nearly-house, which was ours for six months and then no more. I’ve never been back to Maybrook, perhaps we should make a pilgrimage one day.’

  PIKE: The Crewe family met Sir George Dewe-Lovett of Maybrook Hall, Lancashire, on the promenade at Llandudno in August 1911. Catherine Crewe never returned to the house at Ashbourne. She eloped with Dewe-Lovett, a director of the White Star Shipping Line, and took her daughters, who were aged four and sixteen, to live at Maybrook. Percival Crewe proved to be unacrimonious and divorce proceedings were under way when the girls returned to Ashbourne to stay with their father for the Easter holidays of 1912, while their mother joined Dewe-Lovett at Southampton. The Titanic sailed on April 10th and FC never saw her mother or Maybrook again.

  FLORA: ‘And everyone at the Club was very friendly, going out of their way to explain that although they didn’t go in much for poetry, they had nothing against it, so that was all right, and dinner was soup, boiled fish, lamb cutlets, sherry trifle and sardines on toast – eight of us at the Resident’s table –’

  WOMAN: Are you writing a poem about India, Flora?

  FLORA: Trying to.

  MAN: Kipling – there’s a poet! ‘And the dawn comes up like thunder on the road to Mandalay!’

  WOMAN: I thought that was a song.

  FLORA: ‘The Resident was a different matter –’

  RESIDENT: The only poet I know is Alfred Housman. I expect you’ve come across him.

  FLORA: Of course!

  RESIDENT: How is he nowadays?

  FLORA: Oh – come across him –

  RESIDENT: He hauled me through Ars Amatoria when I was up at Trinity –

  FLORA: The Art of Love?

  RESIDENT: When it comes to love, he said, you’re either an Ovid man or a Virgil man. Omnia vincit amor– that’s Virgil – ‘Love wins every time, and we give way to love’ – et nos cedamus amori. Housman was an Ovid man – et mihi cedet amor– ‘Love gives way to me’.

  FLORA: I’m a Virgil man.

  RESIDENT: Are you? Well, you meet more people that way.

  FLORA: ‘– and his sources of information were impressive.’

  RESIDENT: I believe you’re here on doctor’s orders.

  FLORA: Why … yes … how …?

  RESIDENT: If there’s anything you need or want, you tell David – right, David?

  DURANCE: Yes, sir.

  FLORA: Thank you. He’s already promised me a go in the Daimler.

  DURANCE: (Embarrassed) Oh …

  RESIDENT: If you like cars, the Rajah has got about eighty-six of them – Rollses, the lot. With about ten miles on the clock. Collects them like stamps. Well, don’t let me stop you enjoying yourselves.

  DURANCE: Would you like to dance, Flora?

  FLORA: ‘And it turned out to be an easy evening to get through, wh
ich only goes to show, when in Rome, etc., and I wish I’d remembered that when I was in Rome.’

  PIKE: FC was in Rome twice, in 1920 and 1926, en route to Capri in each case. It is unclear what she means here.

  FLORA: ‘Interrupted!’

  (The gramophone dance music, which has been in the background, becomes the dominant sound as DURANCE and FLORA begin to dance.)

  DURANCE: Do you mean you’ve come to India for your health?

  FLORA: Is that amusing?

  DURANCE: Well, it is rather. Have you seen the English cemetery?

  FLORA: No.

  DURANCE: I must take you there.

  FLORA: Oh.

  DURANCE: People here drop like flies – cholera, typhoid, malaria – men, women and children, here one day, gone the next. Are you sure the doctor said India? Perhaps he said Switzerland and you weren’t paying attention.

  FLORA: He didn’t say India. He said a sea voyage and somewhere warm – but I wanted to come to India.

  DURANCE: Then good for you. Live dangerously, why not?

  FLORA: Oh – you’re too energetic for me – slow down!

  DURANCE: Well, I suppose this is somewhere warm. In a month you can’t imagine it – but you’ll be gone to the hills, so you’ll be all right.

  FLORA: Yes. Let’s sit down.

  DURANCE: Slow one coming up …?

  FLORA: No, I’m out of puff.

  (They stop dancing.)

  DURANCE: Yes, of course. You’re not really bad, are you, Flora?

  FLORA: No, but I’d rather sit down. Do you think there might be more air outside?

  DURANCE: On the verandah? Any air that’s going. Should we take a peg with us?

  (He calls to a servant.)

  Koi-hai! Thank you – two burra pegs.

  SERVANT: Yes, sir.

  FLORA: Lots of soda with mine, please.

  (They move further away from the music, which has continued, and come to the exterior, which makes its own noise, crickets, insects, leaves …)

  DURANCE: There we are. Long-sleever? Good for putting the feet up.

  FLORA: Yes – long-sleever. Thank you. How pretty the lanterns …

  DURANCE: I hope you don’t mind the moths.

  FLORA: No, I like moths.

  DURANCE: If they make a whining noise, kill them.

  FLORA: It’s a nice Club.

  DURANCE: Yes, it’s decent enough. There are not so many British here so we tend to mix more.

  FLORA: With the Indians?

  DURANCE: No. In India proper, I mean our India, there’d be two or three Clubs. The box-wallahs would have their own and the government people would stick together, you know how it is – and the Army …

  FLORA: Mr Das called you Captain.

  DURANCE: Yes, I’m Army. Seconded, of course. There are two of us Juniors – political agents we call ourselves when we’re on tour round the states. Jummapur is not one of your twenty-one-gun salute states, you see – my Chief is in charge of half-a-dozen native states.

  FLORA: In charge?

  DURANCE: Oh yes.

  FLORA: Is he Army? No – how silly –

  DURANCE: He’s ICS. The heaven-born. A Brahmin.

  FLORA: Not seriously?

  DURANCE: Yes, seriously. Oh no, not a Brahmin seriously. But it might come to that with I-zation.

  (FLORA is puzzled by the word.)

  Indianization. It’s all over, you know. We have Indian officers in the Regiment now. My fellow Junior here is Indian, too, terribly nice chap – he’s ICS, passed the exam, did his year at Cambridge, learned polo and knives-and-forks, and here he is, a pukka sahib in the Indian Civil Service.

  FLORA: But he’s not here.

  DURANCE: At the Club? No, he can’t come into the Club.

  (The SERVANT arrives.)

  Ah, here we are. Thank you …

  (The SERVANT leaves.)

  Cheers. Your health, Flora. I drink to your health for which you came. I wish you were staying longer. I mean, only for my sake, Flora.

  FLORA: Yes, but I’m not. So that’s that. Don’t look hangdog. You might like me less and less as you got to know me.

  DURANCE: Will you come riding in the morning?

  FLORA: Seriously.

  DURANCE: Yes, seriously. Will you?

  FLORA: In the Daimler?

  DURANCE: No. Say you will. We’ll have to go inside in a minute if no one comes out.

  FLORA: Why?

  DURANCE: There’s nothing to do here except gossip, you see. Everyone is agog about you. One of the wives claims … Were you in the papers at home? Some scandal about one of your books, something like that?

  FLORA: I can see why you’re nervous, being trapped out here with me – let’s go in –

  DURANCE: No – I’m sorry. Flora …? Pax? Please.

  FLORA: All right. Pax.

  (He kisses her, uninvited, tentatively.)

  DURANCE: Sealed with a kiss.

  FLORA: No more. I mean it, David. Think of your career.

  DURANCE: Are you really a scandalous woman?

  FLORA: I was for a while. I was up in court, you know. Bow Street.

  DURANCE: (Alarmed) Oh, not really?

  FLORA: Almost really. I was a witness. The publisher was in the dock, but it was my poems – Venus In Her Season, my first book.

  DURANCE: Oh, I say.

  FLORA: The case was dismissed on a technicality, and the policemen were awfully sweet; they got me away through the crowd in a van. It was all most enjoyable actually, and it gave me an entrée to several writers I admired, most of whom, it turned out, were hoping it worked the other way round. My sister was asked to leave school. But that was mostly my own fault – the magistrate asked me why all the poems seemed to be about sex, and I said, ‘Write what you know’ – just showing off, I was practically a virgin, but it got me so thoroughly into the newspapers my name rings a bell even with the wife of a bloody jute planter or something in the middle of Rajputana, damn, damn, damn. No, let’s go inside.

  DURANCE: Sit down, that’s an order. How’s your whisky?

  FLORA: Excellent. All the better for being forbidden. My God, where did that moon come from?

  DURANCE: Better. I love this country, don’t you?

  FLORA: Yes, I think I do. What’s going to happen to it? The riot in town this morning … does that happen often?

  DURANCE: Not here, no. The gaols are filling up in British India.

  FLORA: Well, then.

  DURANCE: It wasn’t against us, it was Hindu and Muslim. Gandhi’s salt march reached the sea today, did you hear? Our Congress Hindus closed their shops in sympathy, and the Muslims wouldn’t join in, that’s all it was about. The Indian National Congress is all very well, but to the Muslims, Congress means Gandhi … a Hindu party in all but name.

  FLORA: Will Gandhi be arrested?

  DURANCE: No, no. The salt tax is a lot of nonsense actually.

  FLORA: Yes, it does seem hard in a country like this.

  DURANCE: Not that sort of nonsense. It works out at about four annas a year. Most Indians didn’t even know there was a salt tax.

  FLORA: Well, they do now.

  DURANCE: Yes. They do now. Would you like one more turn round the floor before they play the King?

  FLORA: No, I’m tiring. (She gets up.) Will you finish my whisky? I’d like to go back to my little house.

  DURANCE: Yes, of course. Would you mind saying goodnight to my Chief? It would go down well.

  FLORA: I’d like to. The Brahmin.

  DURANCE: Yes. The highest caste of Hindu, you see, and the ICS are the highest caste of Anglo-India. There’s about twelve hundred ICS and they run the continent. That’s three for every million Indians.

  FLORA: Why do the Indians let them?

  DURANCE: Why not? They’re better at it.

  FLORA: Are they?

  DURANCE: Ask them.

  FLORA: Who?

  DURANCE: The natives. Ask them. We’ve pulled this country t
ogether. It’s taken a hundred years with a hiccup or two but the place now works.

  FLORA: That’s what you love, then? What you created?

  DURANCE: Oh no, it’s India I love. I’ll show you.

  (A sudden combination of animal noises is heard – buffalo snorting, horses whinnying, Flora crying out. FLORA and DURANCE on horseback.)

  DURANCE: Did he frighten you? He’s big but harmless.

  FLORA: Oh my!

  DURANCE: We surprised him in his bath.

  FLORA: He’s immense! Thank you!

  DURANCE: Me?

  FLORA: He was my surprise really.

  DURANCE: Oh yes. Just for you.

  FLORA: I’ve never been given a buffalo before.

  DURANCE: Look – sand grouse! (He makes a noise to represent the firing of a shotgun, both barrels.) A nice left and right!

  FLORA: Don’t shoot them, they’re mine! (Her interior voice comes in, ‘inside’ the scene itself.)

  ‘Where life began at the lake’s edge,

  water and mud convulsed,

  reared itself and became shaped

  into buffalo.

  The beast stood dismayed,

  smeared with birth, streaming

  from his muzzle like an infant, celebrated

  with lily flowers about his horns.

  So he walked away to meet his death

  among peacocks, parrots, antelopes.

  We watched him go, taller than he,

  mounted astride, superior beasts.’

  DURANCE: Time to trot – sun’s up.

  FLORA: Oops – David – I’ll have to tell you – stop! It’s my first time on a horse, you see.

  DURANCE: Yes, I could tell.

  FLORA: (Miffed) Could you? Even walking? I felt so proud when we were walking.

  DURANCE: No, no good, I’m afraid.

  FLORA: Oh, damn you. I’m going to get off.

  DURANCE: No, no, just sit. He’s a chair. Breathe in. India smells wonderful, doesn’t it?

  FLORA: Out here it does.

  DURANCE: You should smell chapattis cooking on a camel-dung fire out in the Thar Desert. Perfume!

  FLORA: What were you doing out there?

  DURANCE: Cooking chapattis on a camel-dung fire. (Laughs.) I’ll tell you where it all went wrong with us and India. It was the Suez Canal. It let the women in.

  FLORA: Oh!