Klimt's The Kiss painting on a forearm

You will think I have finally lost my wits, but Mrs Pascoe has let me have the back parlour for my sketching, on the understanding that I pay for the gas and keep the dog off the drop cloths. The print above her piano is the thing I want to tell you about. It is a copy of a painting by Klimt, a man in a cloak stitched all over with squares and spirals, bending so far over a girl that his face disappears into her hair, while she lifts her hands to hold his cheeks as if she means to keep the moment from sliding off the edge of the world. Mrs Pascoe says a cousin sent it from Vienna when she married, and she dusts the glass every Sunday before chapel.

I have been copying the cloak onto old oilcloth, square by square, because the gold in the print is the only colour in this town that doesn't fade in the salt. Tobias from the chandler's keeps coming to watch. He says the black rectangles look like the shutters on the harbour houses at low tide, and he is not wrong, though I have not told him so. Yesterday he brought me a lump of brass polish in a jam jar as payment for a lesson, which I suppose is the most romantic thing anyone has done for me since I arrived.

This morning Mrs Pascoe came in with her duster and stood a long time before the picture. Then she told me the woman's hands were modelled on her own, that her husband had asked her to hold still for a sketch the summer before he went to sea and never came back to finish it. The print was the only thing he left in the house that wasn't a debt. I didn't know what to say, so I passed her a brush and she painted one small gold square in the corner of my oilcloth, and then she went back to her dusting as if nothing had happened.

Come in August if you can. I want you to see the finished piece before the tide takes the pier, and I want you to tell me whether the man's face is kissing her or only listening.

Your loving sister, Edie