‘Beautiful?’ Hope stared down at the canvas resting at Foyle’s feet. For the first time she seemed to be making a conscious effort to take command of herself and the villa at Lizard Key. Then, accepting Foyle’s challenge, and refusing to be outfaced by his broken-lipped sneer, she said: ‘All right, Foyle. I’ll sit for you. My first portrait — you may be surprised what it sees in me.’
Little did we realize what nightmare fish would swim to the surface of these mirrors.
During the next few days our portraits emerged like pale ghosts from the paintings. Each afternoon I would see Hope in the library, when she would sit for her portrait and listen to me reading from Maldoror, but already she was only interested in watching the deserted sand-sea. Once, when she was away, sailing the empty dunes with her white rays, I hobbled up to her studio. There I found a dozen of her paintings mounted on trestles in the windows, looking out on the desert below. Sentinels watching for Hope’s phantom mariner, they revealed in monotonous detail the contours and texture of the empty landscape.
By comparison, the two portraits developing in the library were far more interesting. As always, they recapitulated in reverse, like some bizarre embryo, a complete phylogeny of modern art, a regression through the principal schools of the twentieth century. After the first liquid ripples and motion of a kinetic phase, they stabilized into the block colours of the hardedge school, and from there, as a thousand arteries of colour irrigated the canvas, into a brilliant replica of Jackson Pollock. These coalesced into the crude forms of late Picasso, in which Hope appeared as a Junoesque madonna with massive shoulders and concrete face, and then through surrealist fantasies of anatomy into the multiple outlines of futurism and cubism. Ultimately an impressionist period emerged, lasting a few hours, a roseate sea of powdery light in which we seemed like a placid domestic couple in the suburban bowers of Monet and Renoir.
Watching this reverse evolution, I hoped for something in the style of Gainsborough or Reynolds, a standing portrait of Hope wearing floral scarlet under an azure sky, a pale-skinned English beauty in the grounds of her county house.
Instead, we plunged backwards into the netherworld of Balthus and Gustave Moreau.
As the bizarre outlines of my own figure emerged I was too surprised to notice the equally strange elements in Hope’s portrait. At first glance the painting had produced a faithful if stylized likeness of myself seated on the sofa, but by some subtle emphasis of design the scene was totally transformed. The purple curtain draped behind the sofa resembled an immense velvet sail, collapsed against the deck of a becalmed ship, while the spiral bolster emerged as an ornamental prow. Most striking of all, the white lace cushions I lay against appeared as the plumage of an enormous sea-bird, hung around my shoulders like the anchor fallen from the sky. My own expression, of bitter pathos, completed the identification.
‘The Ancient Mariner again,’ Hope said, weighing my copy of Maldoror in her hand as she sauntered around the canvas. ‘Fate seems to have type-cast you, Robert. Still, that’s the role I’ve always seen you in.’
‘Better than the Flying Dutchman, Hope?’
She turned sharply, a nervous tic in one corner of her mouth. ‘Why did you say that?’
‘Hope, who are you looking for? I may have come across him.’
She walked away from me to the window. At the far end of the terrace Foyle was playing some rough game with the sandrays, knocking them from the air with his heavy hands and then pitching them out over the rock spires. The long stings whipped at his pock-marked face.
‘Hope…’ I went over to her. ‘Perhaps it’s time I left. There’s no point in my staying here. They’ve repaired the yacht.’ I pointed to the sloop moored against the quay, fresh tyres on its wheels. ‘Besides..
‘No! Robert, you’re still reading Maldoror.’ Hope gazed at me with her over-large eyes, carrying out this microscopy of my face as if waiting for some absent element in my character to materialize.
For an hour I read to her, more as a gesture to calm her. For some reason she kept searching the painting which bore my veiled likeness as the Mariner, as if this image concealed some other sailor of the sand-sea.
When she had gone, hunting across the dunes in her schooner, I went over to her own portrait. It was then that I realized that yet another intruder had appeared in this house of illusions.
