Vermilion Sands

by James Graham Ballard

  This was my rescue by Hope Cunard. Resting in the cabin below, while one of the crew wrapped the wounds on my feet, I could see her pale-haired figure through the glass roof. Her preoccupied face gazed across the desert as if searching for some far more important quarry than myself.

  She came into the cabin half an hour later. She sat down on the bunk at my feet, touching the white plaster with a curious hand.

  ‘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 realzed 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 forwards 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 nearby, 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. How-ever, 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 half-brother 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.

  By comparison, the two portraits developing in the library were far more interest
ing. 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 hard-edge 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 energed, 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 sand-rays, 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 tires on its wheels. ‘Besides …’

  ‘No! Robert, you’re still reading Maldoror.’ Hope gazed at me with her overlarge 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 i
n her white schooner.

  Now Rademaeker had returned – whether from the desert or the dead – cast up from the fractured sand in my own person. Did Hope really believe that I was her reincarnated lover? Sometimes at night, as she lay beside me in the cabin, the reflected light of the quartz veins moving over her breasts like necklaces, she would talk to me as if completely aware of my separate identity. Then, after we had made love, she would deliberately keep me from sleeping, as if disturbed by even this attempt to leave her, and would call me Rademaeker, her clouded face that of a neurotic and disintegrating woman. At these moments I could understand why Foyle and Barbara Quimby had retreated into their private world.

  As I look back now, I think I merely provided Hope with a respite from her obsession with Rademaeker, a chance to live out her illusion in this strange emotional pantomime. Meanwhile Rademaeker himself waited for us nearby in the secret places of the desert.

  One evening I took Hope sailing across the dark sand-sea. I told the crew to switch on the rigging lights and the decorated bulbs around the deck awning. Driving this ship of light across the black sand, I stood with Hope by the stern rail, my arm around her waist. Asleep as she stood there, her head lay on my shoulder. Her opal hair lifted in the dark wake like the skeleton of some primeval bird.

  An hour later, as we reached Lizard Key, I saw a white schooner slip its anchor somewhere among the sand-reefs and head away into the open sea.

  Only Hope’s half-brother was now left to remind me of my precarious hold on both Hope and the island. Foyle had kept out of my way, playing his private games among the rock spires below the terrace. Now and then, when he saw us walking arm in arm, he would look up from his beach chair with droll but wary eyes.

  One morning, soon after I had suggested to Hope that she send her half-brother and Miss Quimby back to her house in Red Beach, Foyle sauntered into the library. I noticed the marked jauntiness of his manner. One hand pressed to his heavy mouth, he gestured sceptically at the portraits of Hope and myself. ‘First the Ancient Mariner, now the Flying Dutchman – for a bad sailor you’re playing an awful lot of sea roles, Melville. Thirty days in an open divan, eh? What are you playing next – Captain Ahab, Jonah?’