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.
The portrait showed Hope in a conventional pose, seated like any heiress on a brocaded chair. The eye was drawn to her opal hair lying like a soft harp on her strong shoulders, and to her firm mouth with its slight reflective dip at the corners. What Hope and I had not noticed was the presence of a second figure in the painting. Standing against the skyline on the terrace behind Hope was the image of a man in a white jacket, his head lowered to reveal the bony plates of his forehead. The watery outline of his figure — the hands hanging at his sides were pale smudges gave him the appearance of a man emerging from a drowned sea, strewn with blanched weeds and algae.
Astonished by this spectre materializing in the background of the painting, I waited until the next morning to see if it was some aberration of light and pigment. But the figure was there even more strongly, the bony features emerging through the impasto. The isolated eyes cast their dark gaze across the room. As I read to Hope after lunch I waited for her to comment on this strange intruder. Someone, plainly not her half-brother, was spending at least an hour each day before the canvas in order to imprint his image on its surface.
As Hope stood up to leave, the man’s pensive face with its fixed eyes caught her attention. ‘Robert — you have some kind of wild magic! You’re there again!’
But I knew the man was not myself. The white jacket, the bony forehead and hard mouth were signatures of a separate subject. After Hope left to walk along the beach I went up to her studio and examined the canvases that kept watch for her on the landscape.
Sure enough, in the two paintings that faced the reefs to the south I found the mast of a waiting ship half-concealed among the sand-bars.
Each morning the figure emerged more clearly, its watching eyes seeming to come nearer, One evening, before going to bed, I locked the windows on to the terrace and draped a curtain over the painting. At midnight I heard something move along the terrace, and found the library windows swinging in the cold air, the curtain drawn back from Hope’s portrait. In the painting the man’s strong but melancholy face glared down at me with an almost spectral intensity. I ran on to the terrace. Through the powdery light a man’s muffled figure moved with firm steps along the beach. The white rays revolved in the dim air over his head.
Five minutes later the white-haired figure of Foyle slouched from the darkness. His thick mouth moved in a grimace of morose humour as he shuffled past. On his black silk slippers there were no traces of sand.
Shortly before dawn I stood in the library, staring back at the watching eyes of this phantom visitor who came each night to keep his vigil by Hope’s picture. Taking out my handkerchief, I wiped his face from the canvas, and for two hours stood with my own face close to the painting. Quickly the blurred paint took on my own features, the pigments moving to their places in a convection of tonalities. A travesty appeared before me, a man in a white yachtsman’s jacket with strong shoulders and high forehead, the physique of some intelligent man of action, on which were superimposed my own plump features and brush moustache.
The paint annealed, the first light of the false dawn touching the sand-blown terrace.
‘Charles!’
Hope Cunard stepped through the open window, her white gown shivering around her naked body like a tremulous wraith. She stood beside me, staring at my face on the portrait.
‘So it is you. Robert, Charles Rademaeker came back as you… The sand-sea brings us strange dreams.’
Five minutes later, as we moved arm in arm along the corridor to her bedroom, we entered an empty room. From a cabinet Hope took a white yachting-jacket. The linen was worn and sand-stained. Dried blood marked a bullet-hole in its waist.
I wore it like a target.
The image of Charles Rademaeker hovered in Hope’s eyes as she sat on her bed like a tired’ dream-walker and watched me seal the windows of her bedroom.
During the days that followed, as we sailed the sand-sea together, she told me something of her affair with Charles Rademaeker, this Dutchman, recluse and intellectual who wandered across the desert in his yacht cataloguing the rare fauna of the dunes. Drifting out of the dusk air with a broken yard two years earlier, he had dropped anchor at Lizard Key. Coming ashore for cocktails, his stay had lasted for several weeks, a bizarre love-idyll between himself and this shy and beautiful painter that came to a violent end. What happened Hope never made clear. At times, as I wore the blood-stained jacket with its bullet-hole, I guessed that she had shot him, perhaps while she sat for a portrait. Evidently something strange had occurred to a canvas, as if it had revealed to Rademaeker some of the unstated elements he had begun to suspect in Hope’s character. After their tragic climax, when Rademaeker had either been killed or escaped, Hope searched the sand-sea for him each summer in her white schooner.