FLORA Oh … thank you, Your Highness, but if there are going to be conditions, I’m not sure I want to see any.

RAJAH The English ladies came, Mrs Tuke, Mrs Stokely-Smith, Mrs Blane … a dozen of them, to see the lily pools, the flower garden … They drank tea with me and I offered them fruit, but they would only eat the fruit which had a skin they could remove, you see.

FLORA Yes, I see. Then I accept. (The next car has a distinct musical horn, which makes Flora gasp and almost jump out of her chair) Oh!—I know that one!

RAJAH Of course you do, Miss Crewe!

FLORA No, I really know it. Where did you get it?

RAJAH Well … from a car shop.

FLORA Could you make him stop a moment.

Flora stands up. The Rajah signals for the car to stop and it does so, idling. Flora takes a step or two towards the unseen car.

FLORA ‘And oh my darling, it was Gus’s Bentley! I mean it was absolutely the one I broke my engagement in when I took Gus to the French paintings at Heals—it still had the A B number-plate!’

RAJAH It has memories for you, Miss Crewe?

FLORA Yes, it does. Can I go and sit in it?

RAJAH Romantic memories?

FLORA The Tottenham Court Road, ten years ago. I hit a man with my shoe in that car.

Flora, going to the car, leaves the stage.

PIKE Augustus de Boucheron enjoyed brief celebrity as a millionaire philanthropist and patron of the arts. FC met him—and received his proposal of marriage—on December 3rd 1917. The occasion was Modigliani’s first show, in Paris. FC sat for the artist soon afterwards. At the exhibition of Modern French Art at Heal and Sons in the Tottenham Court Road, London, in August 1919, Modigliani was one of several newer artists shown with the better known Matisse, Picasso and Derain. FC arrived at Heals with de Boucheron, expecting to see her portrait, but before they got out of the Bentley she discovered that her fiancé had bought the painting from the artist and, as he triumphantly confessed, taken it back to the Ritz Hotel and burned it in a bathtub. In the ensuing row, FC returned de Boucheron’s engagement ring, and made plans to sit for Modigliani again in the autumn of that year. But she delayed, arriving in Paris only on the morning of January 23rd, unaware that Modigliani had been taken to hospital. He died on the following evening, without regaining consciousness, of tuberculosis, aged thirty-five. De Boucheron, under his real name Perkins Butcher, went to prison in 1925 for issuing a false prospectus. His end is unknown.

The Rajah looks around the courtyard seeking someone … and spots Pike. Pike has not noticed him. The Rajah, soi disant, approaches Pike.

RAJAH Professor Pike … ?

PIKE (Jumping up) Oh!—indeed, yes—thank you.

RAJAH (Shaking hands) How do you do?

PIKE An honour, sir.