MRS SWAN I’m sure I never saw it. I would have remembered if it had been among what was called her effects. It was only one suitcase.

PIKE Do you still have it?

MRS SWAN What? Her suitcase? Heavens, it was a battered old thing even then, and being always on the move, Eric and I, one sheds things …

PIKE You threw away Flora Crewe’s suitcase?

MRS SWAN What is it you’re up to, Eldon? A luggage museum? Really, you’re like an old woman about her; except, of course, that I’m not.

PIKE But she was Flora Crewe!

MRS SWAN (Crisply) Well, if so, where was everybody sixty years ago?

Mrs Swan replenishes the teacups, Pike takes one or two more letters from the shoebox and scans them.

At the guesthouse, Nirad Das arrives by bicycle. He has his wooden workbox strapped to the pillion-rack. His folded easel is strapped to his back. He rides one-handed, holding a canvas in his free hand. Flora, in her cornflower-blue dress, comes out from the interior.

FLORA Good morning!

DAS Miss Crewe! Here I am! A little late! Forgive me!

FLORA I didn’t realize—I’ve been writing a letter. Does this look all right?

DAS (Nervously) Very, very good.

FLORA Now … this will be nice, we’ll both be working. Poet and painter. Work in progress.

Das unstraps his workbox and establishes himself on the verandah. Flora establishes herself at her work table. Pike is puzzling over a letter.

PIKE She says paint on paper.

MRS SWAN Yes.

PIKE ‘… a smudge of paint on paper …’—’Perhaps my soul will stay behind as a smudge of paint on paper’ … She’s referring to an actual painting, isn’t she?

MRS SWAN I don’t know.

PIKE And ‘undressed’. She says ‘undressed’. Like a nude. On paper. That would be a watercolour, wouldn’t it?

MRS SWAN What would? There isn’t any ‘it’.

PIKE Well, if it doesn’t mean a portrait of Flora undressed, what do you think it means?

MRS SWAN As much or as little as you like. Isn’t that the point of being a poet?

PIKE I don’t know, I’m not a poet, but it reads quite specific, the deserted house … where is the bit?

MRS SWAN Between your teeth, Eldon.

PIKE Here. ‘In an empty house …’—’Perhaps my soul will stay behind as a smudge of paint on paper, as if I’d always been here, like … Radha?’

MRS SWAN Radha.

PIKE ‘—the most beautiful of the herdswomen, undressed—’

MRS SWAN (Interrupting, briskly) Well, the portrait, as it happens, is on canvas and Flora is wearing her cornflower dress.

PIKE Portrait?

MRS SWAN She mentions the portrait somewhere. It was rolled up in the suitcase.

PIKE Eleanor … do you mean there’s a portrait of Flora?

MRS SWAN Would you like to see it?

PIKE Oh my God.

MRS SWAN It’s fairly ghastly, like an Indian cinema poster. I think I know where it is but I’ll need you to get it down for me. Should we go in? We’re about to lose the sun.