She had no lake in which they could swim, so they reclined over the long bench in the arbour outside instead, sipping water from champagne flutes.

She felt rather like she was in a Pierre Bonnard painting, languorous, dappled like a leaf by lazy afternoon sun yet cooled by the shade of the almond tree in blossom.  She turned to her companion and smiled.

“Shall we fill the glasses with something stronger?”

All that could be found was lemonade.  But she didn’t mind – she already felt drunk from the heady blossom-scent and the azure-afternoon air, the colour of the ripe cherries in the bowl before them and the sun-speckled leaves of the almond tree, waving in the sea-breeze.

“May I paint you?”

Too lackadaisical at that moment to care what her companion did, she laughed and consented.  She watched half-heartedly as the easel was set up and the oils were mixed on the palette.

“You used to sail boats, didn’t you?” she asked.

“Yachts, yes.  I still do,” her companion answered, grinning.

“I should like to go yachting,” she yawned.

“In a pretty sailboat with pink sails, moored at the marina of some exotic Mediterranean island?”

“Like Sardinia!  Oh, yes… And this island has towering cliffs, you see, covered in thick native greenery, and frigate birds wheel above the cliffs, only pausing to alight on skeletal little trees, jutting out from the greenery.  That’s where they make their nests.  And the waves!  So unimaginably blue!  And they crash against…”

“…the cliffs and you can see those impossibly blue waves from the balcony of your secluded Sardinian villa.  And once a year the ocean is ablaze with the colours of ships in the regatta.”

She realised, with dismay, that her companion was surely mocking her.

“Oh, don’t!  Please don’t laugh at me!”

Her companion flourished the paint-loaded brush in almost exaggerated theatricality and momentarily disappeared behind the canvas.  Did I say something that offended her…?

“The problem is that I know you too well…” began her companion.

Which, of course, was true.  For who else could come up with an imagined scene that so accurately coupled her own?

“Your head is full of Dufy and Matisse and Monet.  Your ideas of boating come from the paintings by Dufy in the art gallery, since you have never seen a real regatta.  Some day I shall take you,” her companion finished.

The subject sighed and remained silent for a moment, wondering how they had begun to converse about Mediterranean islands and annual regattas.  It was the boats, of course…  She tilted her sun-hat, adjusting the silk ribbon around it, and beamed at her painter.

“Better?”

Her companion grinned lopsidedly.

“I care not a fig how you wear your hat.”

It took her a moment to realise that this was a roundabout compliment.

“Do you like my dress?”

“It matters little to me also.”

She was taken aback.

“Then why are you painting me?”

Something seized her companion suddenly.  Perhaps it was the combination of dream-sea and the canopy of sky that was entirely too blue.  Sea and sky.   Flee and fly.  Or perhaps it was that her companion had been waiting too long, or that the afternoon was too long, or that the sea was too far away… Oh, by the gods, she must know how I feel!  I must let her know!

“Because you are divine.  You could be wearing farmers’ breeches and clogs and I should still think you divine.”

She smiled and lay back again.  The sun was so hot…

“You jest.  But that was indeed a pretty thing to say.”

And so she sipped lemonade from her champagne flute, glad that her companion had had the manners to flatter her so delightfully – so delicately! – and her mind began to meander to lines from Lord Byron and sunrises and sunsets in a thousand different places.  And so her companion’s heart snapped jaggedly in two.  

“You jest.”
But I do not, thought her companion desperately.  She does not realise how I feel.  She is too preoccupied to see that I am standing directly before her, offering something like adoration… something like love.  She will forever be lost in her dreams.  She will never love me.

When she woke from her reveries the day had swum to that particular hour when the light-tinged clouds drift across the sky-stage, painting its dull grey undercoat with a thousand shades of orange and pink, too subtly to be perceived by the eye.  The wind crashed against her like diaphanous waves, and a shrike calling above them momentarily became a frigate bird.  She smiled to herself, furtively.

Her companion offered her a cherry from the glass bowl and she took it gladly, for what was life if one did not accept the cherries proffered in front of one by others?

“Dusk,” murmured her companion absent-mindedly, still occupied with the painting.

“May I see it?”

“No, not yet.”

She remained silent for a moment, trying to catch the wind in her hands.

“Have you ever been to Russia?” she asked suddenly.

Her companion laughed.  “What a thing to ask!  I’ve not been to Russia, no… However…”

“Yes?”

“I have been to Mytilene.  Not nearly as exciting, I’m afraid.”

“The birthplace of Sappho.”

“Yes.”

“I should like to meet Sappho.”

“Well, you can’t.  She is dead.”

She sat up and looked directly at her companion, sighing deeply, as though she had just farewelled a lover.

“I know that.  I simply meant that I should have liked to have talked to her about certain things.”

“She would have understood.”

She nodded.

“Yes… You see, most people… don’t.”

She fell back against the Persian rug draped carelessly over the bench.

“I hope you left your mark on Mytilene,” she murmured, as the first star revealed itself shyly, scarcely visible against the now lavender sea.

“Pardon?”

“Lord Byron carved his name on the Parthenon.”

And while her companion painted, she dreamt of pirates and palm trees instead of almond blossoms, and men and women and poets and painters who weren’t her companion.

And she will never care for me, thought her companion.  She will become like her long line of ancestors, all meticulously painted, sleeping in their frames along the palatial hallway of her manor.  She will marry a grand duke with a moustache or an ambassador or an earl and forget her Sappho and her Byron and her sailboats in the Mediterranean.  She will forget the stalk of lupin she twirled carelessly in her hands when I first arrived this afternoon.  She will forget that she grabbed my hand and dragged me into the arbour so that I should see the tiny pinprick of sea, barely visible in the distance, from her favourite position under the almond tree.

She watched a butterfly journey across the moon and the ephemeral nature of their time together suddenly struck her.  Her companion had been so polite and so markedly different from the people who usually visited or dined with her – pompous prospective suitors, eager to relate where they were studying – Oxford, Cambridge, what did it matter? – and where they had travelled, young parliamentarians’ wives, intent upon discussing the intricacies of flower arrangement or how to run a household, endless society men and women just back from Paris or Rome, and flamboyant, arrogant artists who each painted the same picture of her – smiling mysteriously, meaninglessly, da Vinci-style, arrayed in ruffled pink and pearls.

“I left a pin there… I slid it under some loose rocks, in the hope that one day someone would find it and declare it an ancient artefact from 600 BC.”  Her companion’s eyes glittered, making the reclining woman clap her hands together excitedly, almost childishly.

“Look!  The moon has appeared!  Come, oh do come and lie under the almond tree.  The painting will wait.”

They settled in the long grass under the tree’s sweeping branches and stared unwaveringly at the moon.  A blossom fell upon her face.  She left it there.

“Did you know,” she began breathlessly, sending the blossom spiralling onto the grass beside her, “that in Arabic the word luz means almonds?  But in Spanish luz means light.”

“Luz…” breathed her companion, making her smile for no apparent reason.  It sounded perfect.

“The Chinese associate the almond with long-harboured sadness and femininity.  Funny, isn’t it?  That the two should be connected.”

Her companion was not certain how to respond and remained quiet for as long as it took a cloud to pass the moon.  “I do not see how beauty and sadness could ever be related, luz de mi vida.”

Luz de mi vida – light of my life.  Sea and sky.

She had fallen asleep.

Flee and fly.

And that was how her companion left her, sleeping beneath the almond tree, surrounded by fallen petals, like some ancient goddess.

Her companion stole through the grass, which rippled like a green tide in the evening breeze.  Past the abandoned champagne flutes and the Persian rug, only to glance briefly at the painting.  It did not need to be finished.

Incredible that what we most desire can be so close, yet so inescapably far, ‘like the sweet apple… that the pluckers forgot somehow’.  Impossible to reach.  Sappho knew that, centuries ago.

When she awoke, she found her companion gone.  The moon had dipped behind a cloud, temporarily darkening her abode.  She was afraid.  Where has my companion gone…? she wondered, tripping through the long grass, which tickled her ankles.

And here is my picture, she thought, shaking stray petals from her hair.

She had to stare at it.  She knew not how long she stared, for it was the most realistic picture of her that had ever been painted.  The brushstrokes had been so haphazardly applied, with such disregard for perspective, colour schemes, principles of design… and yet it was so much more real than all of the stiff portraits which lined the hallway.  Her companion had painted her asleep, her bushy hair fanned over the Persian rug, naked but for farmers’ breeches.  What daring!  And there in the background was the sea!  And a little pink speck of sailboat.  But her companion had gone.  Like the moon behind the cloud.  Flee and fly.

“Though the night was made for loving,” she whispered, “and the day returns too soon, yet we’ll go no more a-roving by the light of the moon.”

And tomorrow a new suitor would arrive and she would have to marry sooner or later, and she would have missed her one chance at happiness…  The blackberry hedge rustled and she wondered how a simple, childishly Impressionistic painting could have such a profound effect upon her.  And as she looked around, a little lost, she wondered why her companion had been so different… and why had she not realised her companion’s intentions?

“So will it be Sardinia…”

She turned around, let out a cry of delight, and, as the moon sailed out again, she flew to her shadowed companion, beaming.  The wind crashed against them, but they hardly felt it.

“…or Mytilene?”

She took her companion’s hand and felt her squeeze back.  “You stayed.”

A thousand thoughts careered through her companion’s mind…  I won’t let you be another stiff portrait in the hall, and I won’t let some cocky Oxbridge old boy marry you!  I won’t let the world rob you of your eccentricity, nay, your indomitable individuality…

“I… Well, I could hardly let you go to Mytilene alone.”

And so she laughed and they melded their hands together under the almond tree, drowning in the wind, and gazed in unison at the first moon of July.