DILIP I’m sure. Let me go and see.

Dilip leaves.

FLORA ‘Darling, you musn’t expect me to be Intelligence from Abroad. You obviously know much more about the Salt March than I do.’

PIKE Gandhi’s ‘March to the Sea’ to protest the Salt Tax began at Ahmedabad on March 12th. He reached the sea on the day this letter was written.

FLORA ‘Nobody has mentioned it to me. If I remember I’ll ask at the Club tonight—I’ve had a visit from a clean young Englishman who asked me to dinner. It was a bit of an afterthought really. I think I made a gaffe by not announcing myself to the Resident, and the young man, he was on a horse, was sent to look me over. I think he ticked me off but he was so nice it was hard to tell. I’ve a feeling I’m going to have to stop in a minute. My artist is frowning at me and then at the canvas as if one of us is misbehaving. He is charming and eager and reminds me of Charlie Chaplin, not the idiotic one in the films, the real one who was at the Trees’ lunch party.’

PIKE It was Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree who, soon after the Crewe family arrived in London from Derbyshire, gave FC her first employment, fleetingly as a cockney bystander in the original production of Pygmalion, and, after objections from Mrs Patrick Campbell, more permanently ‘in the office’. It was this connection which brought FC into the orbit of Tree’s daughter Iris and her friend Nancy Cunard, and thence to the Sitwells, and arguably to the writing of poetry.

FLORA ‘My poem, the one I’m not writing, is about sitting still and being hot. It got defeated by its subject matter, and I should be gone to the hills, I’m only waiting for my artist to finish. The Hot Weather, they tell me, is about to start, but I can’t imagine anything hotter than this, and it will be followed by the Wet Season, though I already feel as though I’m sitting in a puddle. I don’t think this is what Dr Guppy meant by a warm climate.’

PIKE Dr Alfred Guppy had been the Crewe family doctor since the move from Derbyshire to London in 1913. His notes on FC’s illness, with reference to pulmonary congestion, are first dated 1926.

FLORA Oh, shut up!

It is as though she has turned on Pike. Simultaneously, Das, losing his temper, is shouting in Hindi, ‘Get off! Get off!’ But they are both shouting at a couple of unseen pi-dogs who have been heard yapping and barking and are now fighting under the verandah. In the middle of this, Dilip calls out for ‘Eldon!’. The fuss resolves itself. Pike follows Dilip off. The dogs go whining into oblivion.

DAS Oh—fiddlesticks!

FLORA I’m sorry—is it my fault?

DAS No—how can it be?

FLORA Is that so silly?

DAS No … forgive me! Oh dear, Miss Crewe! Yesterday I felt … a communion and today—