‘Robert Melville — are you a poet? You were talking about the Ancient Mariner when we found you.’

I gestured vaguely. ‘It was a joke. On myself.’ I could hardly tell this remote but beautiful young woman that I had first seen her as Coleridge’s nightmare witch, and added: ‘I killed a sand-ray that was circling my yacht.’

She played with the jade pendants lying in emerald pools in the folds of her white dress. Her eyes presided over her pensive face like troubled birds. Apparently taking my reference to the Mariner with complete seriousness, she said: ‘You can rest at Lizard Key until you’re better. My brother will mend your yacht for you. I’m sorry about the rays they mistook you for someone else.’

As she sat there, staring through the porthole, the great schooner swept silently over the jewelled sand, the white rays moving a few feet above the ground in our wake. Later I realized that they had brought back the wrong prey for their mistress.

Within two hours we reached Lizard Key where I was to stay for the next three weeks. Rising out of the thermal rollers, the island seemed to float upon the air, the villa with its terrace and jetty barely visible in the haze. Surrounded on three sides by the tall minarets of the sand-reefs, both villa and island had sprung from some mineral fantasy of the desert. Rock spires rose beside the pathway to the villa like cypresses, pieces of wild sculpture growing around them.

‘When my father first found the island it was full of gila monsters and basilisks,’ Hope explained as I was helped up the pathway. ‘We come here every summer now to sail and paint.’

At the terrace we were greeted by the two other tenants of this private paradise — Hope Cunard’s half-brother, Foyle, a young man with white hair brushed forward over his forehead, a heavy mouth and pocked cheeks, who stared down at me from the balcony like some moody beach Hamlet; and Hope’s secretary, Barbara Quimby, a plain-faced sphinx in a black bikini with bored eyes like two-way mirrors.

Together they watched me being brought up the steps behind Hope. The look of expectancy on their faces changed to polite indifference the moment I was introduced. Almost before Hope could finish describing my rescue they wandered off to the beach-chairs at the end of the terrace.

During the next few days, as I lay on a divan near by, I had more time to examine this strange menage. Despite their dependence upon Hope, who had inherited the island villa from her father, their attitude seemed to be that of palace conspirators, with their private humour and secret glances. Hope, however, was unaware of these snide asides. Like the atmosphere within the villa itself, her personality lacked all focus and her real attention was elsewhere.

Whom had Foyle and Barbara Quimby expected Hope to bring back? What navigator of the sand-sea was Hope Cunard searching for in her schooner with her flock of white rays? To begin with I saw little of her, though now and then she would stand on the roof of her studio and feed the rays that flew across to her from their eyries in the rock spires. Each morning she sailed off in the schooner, her opal-haired figure with its melancholy gaze scanning the desert sea. The afternoons she spent alone in her studio, working on her paintings. She made no effort to show me any of her work, but in the evenings, as the four of us had dinner together, she would stare at me over her liqueur as if seeing my profile within one of her paintings.

‘Shall I do a portrait of you, Robert?’ she asked one morning. ‘I see you as the Ancient Mariner, with a white ray around your neck.’

I covered the plaster on my feet with the dragon-gold dressing gown — left behind, I assumed, by one of her lovers. ‘Hope, you’re making a myth out of me. I’m sorry I killed one of your rays, but believe me, I did it without thinking.’

‘So did the Mariner.’ She moved around me, one hand on hip, the other touching my lips and chin as if feeling the contours of some antique statue. ‘I’ll do a portrait of you reading Maldoror.’

The previous evening I had treated them to an extended defence of the surrealists, showing off for Hope and ignoring Foyle’s bored eyes as he lounged on his heavy elbows. Hope had listened closely, as if unsure of my real identity.

As I looked at the empty surface of the fresh canvas she ordered to be brought down from her studio, I wondered what image of me would emerge from its blank pigments. Like all paintings produced at Vermilion Sands at that time, it would not actually need the exercise of the painter’s hand. Once the pigments had been selected, the photosensitive paint would produce an image of whatever still life or landscape it was exposed to. Although a lengthy process, requiring an exposure of at least four or five days, it had the immense advantage that there was no need for the subject’s continuous presence. Given a few hours each day, the photosensitive pigments would anneal themselves into the contours of a likeness.

This discontinuity was responsible for the entire charm and magic of these paintings. Instead of a mere photographic replica, the movements of the sitter produced a series of multiple projections, perhaps with the analytic forms of cubism, or, less severely, a pleasant impressionistic blurring. However, these unpredictable variations on the face and form of the sitter were often disconcerting in their perception of character. The running of outlines, or separation of tonalities, could reveal tell-tale lines in the texture of skin and features, or generate strange swirls in the sitter’s eyes like the epileptic spirals in the last demented landscapes of Van Gogh. These unfortunate effects were all too easily reinforced by any nervous or anticipatory movements of the sitter.

The likelihood that my own portrait would reveal more of my feelings for Hope than I cared to admit occurred to me as the canvas was set up in the library. I lay back stiffly on the sofa, waiting for the painting to be exposed, when Hope’s halfbrother appeared, a second canvas between his outstretched hands.

‘My dear sister, you’ve always refused to sit for me.’ When Hope started to protest Foyle brushed her aside. ‘Melville, do you realize that she’s never sat for a portrait in her life! Why, Hope? Don’t tell me you’re frightened of the canvas? Let’s see you at last in your true guise.’

‘Guise?’ Hope looked up at him with wary eyes. ‘What are you playing at, Foyle? That canvas isn’t a witch’s mirror.’

‘Of course not, Hope.’ Foyle smiled at her. ‘All it can tell is the truth. Don’t you agree, Barbara?’

Her eyes hidden behind her dark glasses, Miss Quimby nodded promptly. ‘Absolutely. Miss Cunard, it will be fascinating to see what comes out. I’m sure you’ll be very beautiful.’

‘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.