Читать книгу RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR - Philip Hoare, Philip Hoare - Страница 11

The runway is spattered with coloured lights, a constellation fallen from the sky. I’m led out into the sharp night air, and take my place beside the pilot. He tells me to slide my seat forward and strap myself in. The dual controls move over my lap, operated by a ghostly co-pilot; incomprehensible dials and LED displays tick and flicker on the console. The plexiglass windows shake with the propellers as we taxi onto the airstrip. We stand ready for takeoff, behind a huge airliner, the kind in which I’ve just spent six hours getting here. But these last few miles seem the most difficult.

The little plane follows the behemoth, drawing courage from its slipstream. The pilot mutters into his microphone, the runway clears and the wings wobble. Suddenly we are rising over the dark city, made darker by the sea at its edge.

I have to catch hold of my breath, like a child on Christmas morning. I want to turn to the pilot and say, Isn’t this amazing? But he just stares ahead, wearing his white pressed shirt, quietly suppressing his ecstasy. Everything falls away, all the houses and streets and offices and institutions, leaving only the black water.

The airstrip lights vanish, replaced by winter stars. Orion lurches over the horizon, lazily rising into position, echoing Cape Cod’s fragile shape in his starry frame. The night is so clear, made clearer by the cold, that I can see through the Hunter’s spaces to the stars he has swallowed, the stars that are being born. We’re astronauts for twenty minutes, inside the sky, flying into another system. I look up and down: there’s no difference above or below. The sea is full of stars; the stars are full of the sea.

Out of the blackness ahead a line of red lights appears, trembling, beckoning us down. It is a tentative landfall: the only thing below us is sand. We return to earth with a bump. For all I know we might have arrived on another planet. Then the pilot turns round in his seat and says, ‘Welcome to Provincetown.’

These past few days the bay has been filled with mergansers. They’re saw-beaked, punk-crested birds, forever roving over the sea in their search for food or sex. Just offshore, three males arch their necks in lusty splendour, fighting over a female. Pat says black-backed gulls sometimes take them. Pat is my landlady, although sealady might be a better term. She’s lived here for seventy years. She knows this place as well as her own body. It is through her eyes that I see it.

Close up, red-breasted mergansers are even more extreme: big, pugilistic, as though they’re cruising for a fight. I see the detached head of one rolling in the tideline. I pick it up, running my index finger along its velociraptor teeth. This winter beach is no place of innocence and play, but a site of carnage and slaughter.

From my deck I hear the forlorn calls of loons drifting across the bay. In the mid-distance is the rocky, guano-spotted breakwater. It was built to protect the harbour, but it was soon colonised by cormorants. They’re despised for their droppings that dribble like fishy porridge, and for their supposed depletion of the fishermen’s catch; so greedy that they dislocate their jaws to swallow fishes whole. Only Pat sees them for what they are: sentinel creatures she has drawn over and over again, kayaking out to the breakwater and tethering to a lobster buoy, Zeiss binoculars in one hand and a black marker pen in the other.

Pat – who resembles a bird herself, with her shock of silver hair, intense brown eyes and high cheekbones – channels these charismatic spirits. Haughty of our disdain, they pose in portrait after portrait, a cormorant lineage, each profile worthy of a Hapsburg prince. Clamped to the rocks by their claws, heads bent to preen or raised to the sky, they hold out their wings – to cool their bodies as much as to dry their feathers – casting shadows of themselves. Some saw the crucifix in the shape they threw, a symbol of sacrifice; others discerned something darker.

In the opening pages of Jane Eyre, published in 1847, Charlotte Brontë’s young heroine takes Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds from a library shelf on a winter’s afternoon, and hiding in a curtained window seat, loses herself in descriptions of ‘the haunts of sea-fowl’ in the Northern Ocean, surrounded by ‘a sea of billow and spray’ and the ‘marine phantoms’ of wrecked ships.

Bewick’s engravings of ‘naked, melancholy isles’ echo Jane’s abandonment as an orphan, ‘an uncongenial alien’. Later, when she meets Mr Rochester, she shows him three strange watercolours she has painted. One portrays a woman’s body from the waist up, seen through a vapour as the incarnation of the Evening Star; another depicts an iceberg under a muster of the northern lights, overloomed by a veiled and hollow-eyed head. In the third allegory, a cormorant perches on the half-submerged mast of a sinking ship. The bird is ‘large and dark, with wings flecked with foam; its beak held a gold bracelet set with gems, that I had touched with as brilliant tints as my palette could yield, and as glittering distinctness as my pencil could impart’. Below it, ‘a drowned corpse glanced through the green water; a fair arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or torn’.

The double-crested cormorant’s binomial, for all its Linnaean rigour, is resonant of such gothic airs. Phalacrocorax auritus conflates the Greek for bald, phalakros, and korax, for crow or raven, with auritus, the Latin for eared, a reference to the bird’s breeding crests. Its common name also reflects the same allusion, if not confusion, as a contraction of corvus marinus, sea raven – until the sixteenth century it was believed that the two species were related. Indeed, like ravens, cormorants have a noble antecedence: James I kept a cormorantry on the Thames, overseen by the Keeper of the Royal Cormorants who hooded his charges and tied their necks to stop them swallowing their prey. Bewick called them corvorants and thought their tribe ‘possessed of energies not of an ordinary kind; they are of a stern sullen character, with a remarkably penetrating eye and a vigorous body, and their whole deportment carries along with it the appearance of the wary circumspect plunderer, the unrelenting tyrant’; he noted that Milton’s Satan perches as a cormorant in Paradise, a banished black angel on the Tree of Life.

The cormorant, whose darkness is implicit in its ability to dive one hundred and fifty feet into the sea, predates any tyrannical monarch; its pterosaur pose evokes the reptilian past of all avians. But to some modern eyes, the cormorant is all too common: a scavenger, a sea crow, or, in the careless calling of the American deep South, the nigger goose. According to Mark Cocker, British anglers call it ‘black death’, and demand its execution. But all name-calling reflects only on ourselves: we name to know and own, not necessarily to comprehend. We don’t even have the right words for ourselves.

Like other animals, cormorants have been forced to share the human stain. Far from eating ‘our’ fish, the prey they take is of little value to us. Rather, they appear to be attracted to objects that we discard. In 1929, E.H.Forbush, the indefatigable state ornithologist of Massachusetts – a man who acted as a defence attorney for such accused avians (even though he himself ate some of the species he studied) – noted that a cormorantry off Labrador was embellished with objects the birds had salvaged from shipwrecks, diving like Jane Eyre’s bracelet thief to retrieve penknives, pipes, hairpins and ladies’ combs. Their finds decorated their nests as if they were making their own artistic comments on our disposable culture.

One autumn morning, after a terrific storm that had swept over the Cape and depressed my spirit with its violence, I woke at dawn to find the sea in front of Pat’s house filled with cormorants, hundreds of them. Driven off the breakwater, they’d gathered in a dense raft, avian refugees in an abstract arrangement, each sharp upturned yellow bill, white throat and sinuous neck creating a repeated rhythm, a crazy cormorant expressionism. A scattering of sea crows, marks on the water.

Some perched on the rotting remains of the old wharf, its stanchions reduced, storm by storm, to forty-five-degree angles sticking up out of the water. I watched as the birds rose and fell as one with the swelling waves. Later, I saw them further out. They’d found a source of food, and as the sun glinted on their bobbing bodies they were overflown by herring gulls, a flickering grey layer to their inky black shapes. It was a frenzied, silent scene, watched only by me.

Most mornings, I walk down the beach to meet Dennis and his dog, Dory. Dennis is handsome and everyone loves him. He’s sturdy, with salt-and-pepper hair and a trim beard; he reminds me of Melville. When we get off the whalewatch boat it takes us three times as long to get home, because he stops so often to talk to friends and acquaintances in town. Dennis was once a teacher; he did his national service in the coastguard, but has loved birds ever since he was a boy growing up in Pennsylvania. He came to Provincetown by chance, and stayed. Everyone’s a washashore here, like the soil itself, brought as ballast to these unstable sands; even the turf came from Ireland, to be laid as lawns for the gracious gardens of the East End.

That morning, as Dennis and I walked towards each other, I saw a bird crouched on the rocky groyne in between us. It had tucked its head into its wings; I presumed it was preening, or sleeping. But as we drew near, Dennis took up his binoculars. Something was wrong. He gestured at me with open hands and then at the cormorant, which slipped off the rocks and into the water.

The bird’s bill was lashed to its back by fishing line, and it was tugging pathetically at the monofilament. We followed as it swam parallel to shore. It wanted to return to the land, confused by what had happened to it, as if it might peck off its trusses. But each time we approached, it went back to the water. Dennis was not optimistic. ‘It’ll just keep swimming out – or it’ll dive,’ he said.

I waded into the sea. Dennis ran further up the beach, staying close to the bulkheads to keep his profile low. I tried to splash the cormorant ashore. It worked: the bird made for the beach and Dennis dashed towards it, unafraid of its flapping bulk.

Suddenly there it was, in our hands. A startling sapphire circle around a green cabouchon eye; a fractured sharpness, staring back unblinking. Up close, every feature took on the definition that Pat had drawn: the yellow-tipped bill and its hooked tip, the matt black wings. Primeval enough from afar, this near the bird looked even more like an archaeopteryx on the beach; evolution in our fingers.

Any bird exists apart from us: unmammalian, and therefore uncanny. Yet I could imagine myself a cormorant mate, entranced by this handsome fellow, building a nest on the rocks, proudly holding our bills in the air in celebration of our cormorantness. We took the bird to the deck of a beach house under construction, where a workman produced a knife. Swiftly, Dennis cut the line and pulled the hook from the cormorant’s mouth. Blood trickled out, bright and fresh against the black feathers. Dennis was promptly pecked on the thumb for his trouble, drawing his own blood in turn. I unwound the bird’s bound wings. In a second it was free, half running, half flying back to the water for its lunch.

After a day of louring greyness, when the town seems bowed down by the low pressure – ‘Everyone I meet says they have to go home and sleep,’ says Pat – I retreat to my studio in the timber house. Its double gables rise over the beach like some Nordic chapel or a barn raised by settlers, held up by a pair of cinderblock chimneys. I sleep in its eaves, in an attic like a chandler’s loft or a ship’s prow. At night I climb up to my platform bed via a wooden ladder, ascending to my dreams, descending in the morning, clambering down backwards the way I would at the stern of a boat.

The house is a fragile and sturdy construction, built to withstand three hundred and sixty degrees and three hundred and sixty-five days of weather. In the winter the wind worries at its windows, with their layers of glass and screens, grooves and latches, a complicated, ultimately ineffectual system of defence. No one wins against the wind, not even these wind’s eyes. Running in front of the house is the deck, a wide wooden stage over which Pat lays a path of threadbare yard-sale rugs to stop its splinters from entering her bare feet. They lend the boards a tattered luxury, like some trampled boudoir. Stirred by the wind and rain, they take on a life of their own, rucking like a ploughed field out of which ever-larger splinters sprout as spiky seedlings.

The whole house is still partly tree. The knots in its walls have fallen out over the years, leaving spy-holes and escape routes for whatever creeps and scratches about inside. There are so many compartments, cupboards, stairs and crawl spaces – so many spaces within spaces – that there could be colonies of creatures living under its eaves. Even as I write this, I discover a narrow staircase which I had never seen before in all the years I’ve been staying here, hidden in a cupboard and leading to the top floor like some secret escape route. And when I open the built-in linen closet on the first floor, a cat hisses at me, leaps up a shaft and disappears into an interior where, for all I know, an entire community of feral felines might reside. I sleep with bare boards next to my head, stamped with the timber merchant’s marks,

MILL 50 MILL 50 MILL

W.C.

L.B. ®

UTIL 3/4 W.R. CEDAR

and occasionally silverfish run up and down the western red cedar, their filigree antennae feeling their way like tiny lobsters, while mice scratch in the eaves. I feel the weather and the sea through the wooden walls and the way the day arrives and the night leaves, and there’s sand instead of biscuit crumbs in my sheets. Sometimes the whole house becomes a woodwind instrument played by a demented child. Doors rattle, urgent spirits seeking admission. Timbers creak as a ship caught in ice; articulated chimney cowls squeak like weather vanes turning in the wind. The house reverberates as though remembering how it was built, an echo chamber resonant with everything happening outside and everything that ever happened within. It may be inanimate, but it makes me more alive, this big beach hut. How could anyone not feel that way, knowing that out there is the sea, and all land is lost to the horizon?

The front hits us, head on. The waves, which yesterday lapped the footings of the house, turn over themselves in their remorseless assault on the bulkhead that acts as a buffer between the house and the sea. Town regulations, designed to allow the shifting sand its sway, mean that even the most luxurious decks and dining rooms are temporary arrangements. Pat’s house, now in its sixth decade, was built to be part of rather than apart from the water; in stormy spring tides the sea actually runs right underneath it, disdaining its foundations. By the end of the century all those exclusive properties and ramshackle shacks alike will yield to the waves. ‘The truth is,’ the philosopher Henry David Thoreau wrote on one of his visits to the Cape, ‘their houses are floating ones, and their home is on the ocean.’

Directly in front of the house is a raft tethered by a chain to the sea bed. It’s another stage, a four-foot-square island of performance. In the winter seals lounge on it, their doggy heads and flappy feet held in the air to keep warm. Summer visitors think the raft is built for human swimmers; they soon realise that it’s covered in deposits from its other tenants, the eider ducks that take up winter leases, and for whom it is a safe perch even when it rocks wildly in high seas.

Pat and I watch a duck and drake circling the float as if sizing it up. The male makes the first move, followed by his partner. They stake out their separate corners, like a couple seeking their own space. Another male appears with his mate; she is allowed on board, he is rebuffed by the first male. It’s a stand-off. There follows a ritual puffing up of chests and fluttering of wings, like a contest on the dance floor. The inevitable compromise is reached, and the newcomers are admitted. Soon, in the niceties of eider choreography, a third couple arrive and the same rite is observed. All their gestures and cooing, which seem quaint to our anthropomorphic eyes – as if they were saying to each newcomer, ‘No room, no room’ – are in fact grim and determined expressions of potential violence and struggle for precedence.

Eiders are another of this shore’s animal spirits. They preside, like the cormorants and the seals, imbued with their own inscrutability. The raft is their portal: I imagine them diving off it and coming up in a willow-pattern world to reassume their imperial presence, shrugging their lordly wings as they do so. They may be the largest of the ducks, but they’re also the fastest bird in level flight, able to fly at seventy miles an hour against fierce nor’easterlies. They are endlessly interesting to me, seen from my deck or through my binoculars. Their heads slope down to wedge-shaped bills, redolent of Roman noses or a grey seal’s snout. Their black eye patches and pistachio-green napes look like exotic make-up, although Gavin Maxwell thought that they wore the full-dress uniform of a Ruritanian admiral. Their table manners are hardly refined: they use their gizzards, lined with stones, to grind and crush the mussels and crabs which they swallow whole. Birds as machines.

They too have suffered. In Britain they were used for target practice during the Second World War; thousands of them, lying in rafts on the sea, were blasted away. On the Cape that winter I find many eider carcases strewn across the sand, ripped open and spatchcocked, as if the violent cold were too much even for them, despite their downy insulation. One victim’s eyes have long since puckered into blindness, but its nape is still tight, like the back of a rabbit’s neck, more fur than plumage. Eiders are still harvested for their air-filled feathers to make quilts and coats, ‘robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare this shelter with a shelter’, as Thoreau wrote. They tolerate our appropriation; they have no choice. But while we may have our uses for them, their features speak of something unknowable.

Perhaps it is those eyes. Yes, it’s those eyes. It always is. They take in the whole of the world, even as they ignore it.

Held out into the Atlantic, Cape Cod is a tensed bow, curled up and back on itself, a sandy curlicue which looks far too fragile to withstand what the ocean has to throw at it. Battered by successive storms, its tip has been shaped and reshaped for centuries. It is only halfway here, and not really there at all. It is porous. The sea seeps into it.

This is where America runs out. Sometimes, if the light is right, as it is this morning, the land across the bay fizzles into a mirage, a Fata Morgana stretching distant beaches into seeming cliffs, floating dreamily on the horizon. The further away you are, the less real everything else becomes. This place takes little account of what happens on the mainland; or rather, puts it all into perspective. It is a seismograph in the American ocean, sensing the rest of the world. Not for nothing did Marconi send out his radio signals from this shore; he also believed that in turn his transmitters might pick up the cries of sailors long since drowned in the Atlantic.

The inner bay arches around from the lower Cape, losing people as it goes. From empty-looking lanes where signs politely protest THICKLY SETTLED, as if there might be as many inhabitants as trees, you pass through Wellfleet’s woods and second homes to North Truro’s desultory holiday cottages on the open highway, as lonely as Edward Hopper’s paintings, and on to Provincetown, where the land widens briefly before dwindling to Long Point, a spit of sand as slender and elegant as the tail on the tiny green spelter monkey that sits above Pat’s woodstove. Long Point Light stands on the tip, a square stubby tower topped with a black crown lantern – it might welcome or warn off visitors, it doesn’t really matter which. Once you’re here, you never leave. This is the end and beginning of things.

I first came to Provincetown in the summer of 2001. Invited here by John Waters, I was in town for just five days; I had no idea then what they would mean to me now. Like some perverse mentor, John initiated me into the secrets of the place. We drank at the A-House, where grown men groomed one another’s bodies like animals eating each other’s fleas; and we drank at the Old Colony, a wooden cave that lurched as if it was drunken itself; and we drank at the Vets bar, where the straight men of the town took their last stand in the dingy light. On hot afternoons we hitched to Longnook, using a battered cardboard sign with our destination scrawled on it with a Sharpie, waiting on Route 6 for a ride. Once a police car stopped for us. We sat on the caged back seat like criminals and when we arrived, John said, ‘We’ve been paroled to the beach.’ He looked out over the ocean and declared it to be so beautiful that it was a joke. When he rode down Commercial Street on his bike with its wicker basket like the Wicked Witch of the West, I heard someone call ‘Your Majesty’ as we passed.

It was only at the end of my stay, about to take the ferry back to Boston, that I decided to go on a whalewatch. I stepped off the land and onto the boat. Forty minutes later, out on Stellwagen Bank, a humpback breached in front of me. It still hangs there.

It is not easy to get here. It never was. For most of its human history, Provincetown was accessible only by boat, or by a narrow strip of sand that connected it to the rest of the peninsula. And even when you did arrive, it was difficult to know what was here and what was there; what was land and what was sea. Maps from the eighteen-thirties show a place marooned by water, its margins partly inundated. There was no road till the twentieth century; the railway once raced visitors to Provincetown, but that was abandoned long ago, as were the steamers that brought trippers from New York. Nowadays ferries run only from May to October, and the little plane can be grounded by lightning striking the airstrip or fog shrouding the Cape. Provincetown is where Route 6 starts, running coast to coast for three and a half thousand miles all the way to Long Beach, California. But it was renumbered in 1964, and now North America’s longest highway seems to peter out in the sand, as if it had given up before it began. It is a long, long drive here from Boston, and the road becomes progressively narrower the further you go, curling back on itself till the sea presses in from all sides, leaving little space for tarmac, houses, or people. No one arrives here accidentally, unless they do. It is not on the way to anywhere else, except to the sea.

The lost people who find their way here discover the comfort of the tides, anchoring endless days which would spin out of control, faced with the wilderness all around. My time is defined by the sea, just as it is at home. But instead of having to cycle to it, I only have to roll off my bed, and stumble down the wooden steps. I sniff the air like a dog, and lower myself off the bulkhead. The eiders coo like camp comedians. The water is the water. I turn on my back, face up to the sky, the monument high on the hill behind me marking the arrival of the Pilgrims who set sail from Southampton for this shore three centuries ago. I swing my body towards it like a compass needle. It’s as though I’d swum all the way here. I count my strokes. The cold soon forces me out. I climb back upstairs to boil water for tea, holding my hands over the glowing electric element to restore the circulation enough to let me write.

On my desk sit the objects that spend my absence stashed away under the eaves like Christmas decorations. A swirly green glass whale I bought from the general store. A nineteen-twenties edition of Moby-Dick, a faded coloured plate stuck on its cover. A slat of driftwood found on the beach, with layers of green and white paint peeling away in waves. A tide table pinned to the wall, although I don’t really need it. My body is tuned to the ebb and flow; I hear it subconsciously in my sleep, and feel it wherever I am in town. Everyone else feels it too, even if they think they don’t. It stirs me from my bed and summons me to the sea, whatever the time of day or night.

I’ve spent many summers here; winters, too. I’ve seen it out of season, when the people fall away with the leaves to reveal its bones: the shingled houses and white lanes lined with crushed clam shells as if they led out of or under the sea. Squeezed on all sides by the sea, houses here are built efficiently, like ships; in a place like this, you don’t waste space or resources. An artist’s studio has drawers built into the risers of the stairs, turning them into one big ascending storage unit. At another cottage, over a glass of gin, I admire a galley kitchen with plates stored on sliding racks. The artist tells me they were designed by the previous owner, Mark Rothko. ‘He made us promise never to change them.’

Provincetown may be a resort to some, but it is at its best at its most austere, when everything is grey and white and hollow, and you can peer over picket fences into other lives; backyards full of buoys or old trucks where a century ago there would have been nets and harpoons. Once this was an industrial site – hunting whales, catching fish. Then it emptied, forgotten by the future which left its people behind, the insular people Melville knew, ‘not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own’.

On warm summer nights, Commercial Street, one of only two thoroughfares that thread through the town, is an open, sensual place; in the winter, when the cold comes inside and won’t leave of its own accord for half the year, the rawness returns it to a dark lane, winding nowhere. In 1943, when the town was further shadowed by the threat of air raids and German landings – as if its held-outness was a kind of sacrifice to the war going on across the ocean – the young Norman Mailer walked down the blacked-out street and back into the eighteenth century, or at least what he felt was ‘a close intimation of what it might have been like to live in New England then’. It’s difficult to imagine an inhabited place so empty. Even during the day in the twenty-first century, a chill sea mist can envelop its springtime streets – all the seasons are delayed here – filling the glowing white lanes with ghosts. There are spirits throughout this creaking old town. You see their shadows on stairs, shapes out of the corner of your eye. In the winter, they walk down the street. They’re there in the summer too; they just look like everybody else.

The sea accelerates and stalls time. This town has altered in many ways, even in the fifteen years I have been coming back to it, for all that it stays the same. I’m never quite sure when I return that I will be accepted by its people, its weather, its animals, or that anyone will remember me, and am always surprised when they do. I’m always arriving and always leaving; as my friend Mary across the street says, the moment you arrive anywhere is the start of your departure. Life here is measured by the waiting for spring, the longing of the fall, the waiting for summer, the longing of winter; everything is restless, like the sea. Sometimes it seems so perfect that I wonder if it even exists, if it isn’t all a vision which rises through the plane’s windscreen as I arrive and disappears off the ferry’s stern as I leave; and sometimes I wonder why I come here at all, when the wind whines and voices bicker, when cabin fever takes over and doors blow back in your face.

This is not a kind place. It leaves its inhabitants biopsied, like the scars in skin too long exposed to the sun. Lungs collapse with too much cold air. Like their forebears, they suffer for presuming to live on this frontier. It is a continual challenge to body and mind. A place of dark and light, day and night, storms and tides and stars; a place where you have to feel alive, because it so clearly shows you the alternative.

Pat’s house is so much of a boat that it might have been floated across from Long Point, as houses were in the nineteenth century, or been trawled out of the bay, like the whaling captains’ mansions down in New Bedford, ‘brave houses and flowery gardens, that came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea’. Inside her studio, Pat’s state-of-the-art kayak is slung from the rafters alongside an older, wooden model, both hanging there like stuffed crocodiles in a cabinet of curiosities. A large plastic sheet is stretched between them to catch the rainwater that drips from the roof. With typical ingenuity, Pat has rigged up an intricate series of lines and pulleys, along with a plastic tube draining the swelling whale belly of the sheeting like a catheter into a hanging bucket which, when full – as it is from last night’s storm – can be lowered to be emptied, just as Pat’s kayaks can be lowered, ready for the days when she would paddle out to the Point and beyond, not really caring about coming back.

The rigging turns her studio into an inside-out yacht. It is a kinetic work of art in itself. Lightbulbs dangle from electric cords like the lures of angler fish, but there are no bright lights inside because all the light is outside. Doors slide to reveal store cupboards capable of stacking huge canvases like theatre scenery. The whole house is slotted together, a serious plaything, a place to work and be and think and drift along with the seasons. It is part of her body, an extension of her self. It is entirely practical, fitted out rather than built. On the studio walls hang Pat’s paintings of the view outside: the same scene painted again and again, like the cormorants; the same proportion of sea and sky, the same dimensions divided between air and water, in mist and fog and snow and moonlight. They are not so much paintings as meditations. They look through the moment of seeing – the falling fog, the drifting snow, the rising moon. They are the sea reduced to its essence. They are not concepts. Pat’s husband Nanno de Groot told her, ‘Analyse your stupidity.’ ‘I don’t think about anything else when I work,’ Pat tells me. That’s because her work is not like anything else.

She uses no brushes, but applies the paint with a knife; removing, rather than adding, to reveal what was there all along. The paint is flattened, smoothed, pushed in; you can feel the power of her hand and arm and shoulder behind it. But at the same time the colour – the medium between what she sees and what she puts down – rises rhythmically like the waves and clouds it re-presents, grey and green and white and blue. Pat paints the memory of the actuality of the thing – the thing that lies out there. It all comes down to the water. When I admire one painting of a dark sky and a silver sea, she says, ‘I waited half my life to be able to paint that.’

Everything is here; everything disappears. Every window is a frame for her work: windows in her dining room, the windows she looks through from her bed, the windows in her bathroom, the windows in her head. They all admit possibilities and impossibilities; work-in-progress. Her mind is laid out here. You can follow the trail of her imagination from her studio and into her house. Half-squeezed tubes of paint lie under Buddhist prayer flags, next to scraps of sun-yellowed paper and rolls of masking tape, tiny palette knives and piles of fading National Geographic magazines. On a work table is a clam shell in which a finch is curled, quietly sleeping, all but breathing, its perfect feathers still blushed pink.

Pat is in her eighties now. She doesn’t paint much any more. She doesn’t have to. When she talks to me in the morning, the sun already turning the deck hot by eight o’clock, she carelessly raises her leg above her head in a yoga pose. She weighs one hundred pounds. She is wired as much as muscled. She still sunbathes naked in the dunes, where national park rangers have threatened to issue her with a ticket for flouting the bylaws. Pat tells them they can do what they like; she’s been doing this for seventy years, and she’s not about to stop now. She walks barefoot all day – ‘Bare feet are older than shoes,’ as Thoreau says – padding along the beach, more animal than human. All the time I’ve known her, she has always kept German Shepherds close to her. They are wolves in disguise, just as she is half dog herself. It’s taken me fifteen years to hear her story; she keeps it in reserve, hidden in her cupboards and drawers. The withholding only makes the past more present.

Pat was born in London in 1930, but in 1940, when she was ten years old, she and her brother were sent to America by their parents. She still finds this extraordinary, as if she can’t quite believe it even now. Her father, Ernald Wilbraham Arthur Richardson, was born into the landed gentry in 1900; his own father, who had served in the South African war, was English-Welsh, and his mother was Irish; the family had a large country estate in Carmarthenshire. Ernald followed the progress of his class, from public school to Oxford, but his passion was skiing, and he was an Alpine skiing pioneer in the nineteen-twenties, photographed on the slopes as part of the British ski team, a dashing young man. In 1929 he had travelled to the US, where he met and married Evelyn Straus Weil, a smart, chic young New Yorker of twenty-three with dark hair and big bright eyes whom her daughter would describe as a flapper. She had a decidedly more cosmopolitan background than her English husband.

Evelyn’s grandfather was Isidor Straus, a German-born Jew who had joined his father, Lazarus, in New York in 1854. There the family forged a remarkable partnership. Lazarus Straus went into business with a Quaker from a celebrated Nantucket whaling family, Rowland Hussey Macy. Their department store boomed. In 1895, Isidor and his brother Nathan took over ownership of the store. They had now become a firm part of American life. Both were philanthropists; Isidor had raised thousands of dollars to aid Jews threatened by pogroms in Russia, and Nathan’s son, also called Nathan, would try to get visas for Anne Frank’s family. Isidor, Pat’s great-grandfather, became a member of Congress and turned down the office of Postmaster General when offered it by President Grover Cleveland. Isidor was devoted to his wife, Ida, and their seven children, among them Minnie, Pat’s grandmother.

On 10 April 1912, after a winter spent in Europe, Isidor and Ida boarded a new luxury liner at Southampton, bound for New York. Five days later, in the early hours of 15 April, as Titanic struck an iceberg and began to sink 375 miles south of Newfoundland, the couple’s devotion to each other became a modern legend. Ida declined to get into a lifeboat without Isidor. And since there were still women and children on board, Isidor refused the offer of a place in a boat alongside his wife.

‘I will not go before the other men,’ he is reported to have said, in formal, polite insistence. ‘I do not wish any distinction in my favour which is not granted others.’

Ida sent her English maid, Ellen Bird, to lifeboat number eight. She gave Ellen her fur coat, saying she would not need it herself: ‘I will not be separated from my husband. As we have lived, so will we die, together.’

The couple went and sat on a pair of deckchairs. It was, according to those who witnessed it, ‘a most remarkable exhibition of love and devotion’. I see that determination in Ida’s face and Pat’s: the same brow, the same eyes.

Isidor and Ida, along with fifteen hundred other souls, perished in a sea described as a white plain of ice. Most died of cardiac arrest after a few minutes in the minus two degrees water. One rescue ship came across more than one hundred bodies in the fog, so close together that their lifebelts, rising and falling with the waves, made them look like a flock of seagulls bobbing there. Isidor’s body was recovered and brought back to New York; his funeral was delayed in the hope that Ida’s body might be found. It never was: fewer than one in five were, and of those, only the corpses of the first-class passengers were worth bringing back, since their relatives could pay. The rest were tipped back into the sea.

Nearly thirty years later, Pat’s mother Evelyn – known as Evie – sent her and her brother across that same ocean – itself a dangerous journey during wartime; in June 1940 the ship they sailed on, SS Washington, had been stopped by a German submarine on an earlier voyage taking back Americans who had been warned to return to the US without delay or stay in Britain at their own risk. (As a Jew, Evie would have been concerned at what might happen if the Germans invaded. Ten years later, the same ship would sail from Southampton to New York, carrying survivors of the Holocaust.) The liner’s deluxe interior – its staterooms, ballroom and library – was filled with families. Archive film shows the deck piled high with trunks and suitcases, and children being led off the ship on arrival in New York with teddy bears in their hands or in prams and pushchairs. Their evacuation was done for their safety, but Pat came to believe that both her mother and her father wanted to conduct their various affairs unencumbered by their offspring. It had not been a happy marriage. Her parents had divorced in 1936, leaving Evie to conduct an affair with Ralph Murnham (later the queen’s surgeon) before marrying her second husband, Sebastian de Meir, son of a Mexican diplomat, in 1939; he enlisted in the RAF and died when his bomber plane was shot down over the Netherlands in 1942. Evie, who had taken up nursing in London during the war, moved back to New York in 1943.

Pat had always felt abandoned. ‘I was a refugee,’ she says. As a girl, growing up in St John’s Wood in London, she had hidden in the park, imagining herself as an animal; one of the first books she remembers reading, in the nineteen-thirties, was about a boy who was shipwrecked and stranded on an island where he was brought up by wolves. She wanted to be that boy. Her parents did not care about animals; nor did her nanny, whom Pat remembered wearing a sealskin coat. Pat’s mother must have been beautiful and chic. She gave Pat a beaver collar, but Pat refused to wear it, and wouldn’t even touch her mother when she wore her fur coats. Pat remembers when Evie showed her a rug made of cat fur. ‘She knew I loved cats. She hated them.’

A faded photograph in Pat’s bedroom shows ‘Captain E.W.A. Richardson, February 1944’, now serving in the Queen’s Regiment, dressed for the Canadian winter in a white wool duffelcoat as thick as snow. His face is broad and handsome and British. He glows.

Evie’s life was as unstable as the times. In 1945 she married Martin Arostegui, a Cuban publisher whose previous wife, Cathleen Vanderbilt, an alcoholic heiress, had died the year before. Within a year they had separated, and Evie married George Backer, an influential Democrat, writer and publisher of the New York Post. Like his friend Nathan Straus, Backer had worked to save his fellow Jews: in 1933 he had travelled to Poland and Germany to help Jewish refugees flee the growing Nazi menace, and he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur by the French government in 1937 for his efforts. ‘It is horrible to think,’ he would later recall, ‘how responsible we were for all that happened. The ships were there and the people were not saved.’

But Evie’s world was Manhattan, a world of money and powerful people. Her husband’s friends included William Paley, the head of CBS, and Pat recalls that another friend, Averell Harriman, US ambassador to Britain and heir to the largest fortune in America, had also attempted to seduce her mother. Described by the New York Times as ‘a small, fast-moving woman … amusing, gay and sharp-tongued’, Evie drew on her sense of style and her impeccable contacts to become an interior decorator; her clients included Kitty Carlisle Hart, Swifty Lazar and Truman Capote. The pictures in her apartment on the Upper East Side, at 32 East 64th Street, were hung low and small-scale furnishings were chosen to reflect Evie’s five-foot-four stature; she moulded her environment to her requirements, just as her daughter would do. Capote named her ‘Tiny Malice’ for her quick wit. She created a lavish, almost visceral apartment for the writer on the UN Plaza, painting the drawing room blood-red and installing a Victorian carved rosewood sofa, a $500 Tiffany lamp, and a zoo of mimetic and dead animals, from a bronze giraffe and china cats to jaguar-skin pillows and a leopardskin rug. I can hear Pat’s horror. Cecil Beaton called it ‘expensive without looking more than ordinary’. But Capote approved, and asked Evie to design his Black and White Ball, the most famous, or notorious, party of the twentieth century, notable for the fact that, despite Evie’s recommendation, Capote declined to send an invitation to the President.

She and Capote were snapped arriving at Manhattan’s fashionable Colony restaurant. Truman wears a bow tie and horn-rimmed spectacles. He greets the paparazzi, his notorious guest list in his hand; how the magazine editors longed to see that roster. Evie is by his side, thin and chic, conspiratorial in dark glasses. They’re both diminutive, yet the centre of all attention. They retreat to one of the coveted back tables – the Cushing sisters on one side, James Stewart on the other – to plot the party. Margaret, Duchess of Argyll is added to the list – Evie says it never hurts to invite a few duchesses. Later, Capote crosses her off too.

The venue was the Grand Ballroom at the Plaza Hotel, celebrated in the twenties by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The event exceeded any of Gatsby’s parties. Evie ordered red tablecloths and gold candelabra entwined with ‘miles of smilax’, a green vine. The guests wore masks, barely disguising their celebrity: Lauren Bacall and Andy Warhol, Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow, Norman Mailer and Cecil Beaton, Henry Fonda and Tallulah Bankhead. There were Guinnesses, Kennedys, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, and it was a marvellous party; its ghosts might still be dancing now.

Evie was never more in her element; her daughter couldn’t have cared less. High society was far from how Pat wanted to live; now she looks at those photographs, those thin society queens, with disdain. She was, and still is, a teenage rebel, a dropout, and had been ever since she first came to Provincetown, at the age of sixteen. In 1946, her mother had rented John Dos Passos’s house in Provincetown’s East End for a year, having been alerted to the Cape’s allure by Dorothy Paley, wife of William Paley and friend of Dos Passos. It was a heady introduction. It changed the course of Pat’s life.

I find it almost impossible – but not quite – to imagine what this place was like then. Its lanes seemed part of the country; many still do. Fishing and whaling had left the remote town open to other influences; a wilderness which allowed the wildness of its inhabitants. Pat worked in the bookshop, but was fired because all she did was read. Then she worked as a waitress in the Flag Ship, where the bar was a boat, and where the owners didn’t feed her. Her mother complained that Pat was losing weight – less attractive to the rich Jewish boys with whom she tried to pair off her daughter. Pat would rather go out on Charlie Mayo’s boat and sit on the fly bridge, watching the whales and birds. Charlie lived across the street. He was a champion fisherman; his family, part Portuguese, had been on the Cape since 1650. His father had hunted whales, as did Charlie; he only stopped when he harpooned a female pilot whale and heard the cries of her calf beneath his boat. Pat saw Charlie as her surrogate father. They talked and fished. Her mother disapproved; she thought Mayo was a communist. Pat didn’t care. She cared about the sea.

Evie had sent her to Austria, in the way that young women of wealthy families were sent to finishing school. Vienna in 1948 wasn’t a good choice for a girl like her; there were no zithers playing, and a former Nazi officer tried to rape her when he discovered she was Jewish. Pat came back to college at Pembroke, outside Boston. She loved riding and skiing. But her mother took her away, and her stepfather arranged for her to go to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, studying English literature and journalism. Pat felt abandoned all over again.

After graduating in 1953, Pat went to spend time in Benson, Arizona, close to the Mexican border, working on a ranch with the horses she loved. ‘I was outside all the time I wasn’t sleeping.’ She planned to go to Taos, where Georgia O’Keeffe had worked; Pat had an artist friend there, and thought that she might learn to paint. But her mother protested about that, too, and Pat was persuaded to go to Paris, where she worked for the Paris Review and George Plimpton, typing up Samuel Beckett’s manuscripts, riding round the city on a bicycle. She lived in a tiny room at the Hôtel Le Louisiane in Saint-Germain, where Sartre stayed and where the sight of her fellow tenant Lucian Freud, a man who had the look of a raptor, scared her. ‘I was not very hip and was hideously shy.’ On an assignment to Dublin, where her father now lived, Brendan Behan hit on her in a bar.

No wonder. She was a fine, fierce, uncaptured muse, waiting for the moment. In New York she worked for Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Roger Straus was her cousin. She lived in a walk-up at 57 Spring Street, north of Little Italy, which was pretty funky and a long way from the UN Plaza; the building still stands, hung with its fire escape, two doors down from a restaurant called Gatsby’s. The rent was twenty-five dollars a month. Pat would fight with Italians for parking space for her black business coupé, and thought the poor Puerto Rican families were happier than her. On Friday nights she’d leave the office and drive all the way to Mount Washington to ski.

When she had to leave her apartment she moved to the Chelsea Hotel, setting up an office in her room. She took a course in book design at New York University with the designer Marshall Lee. ‘He was a good teacher.’ It was the only formal training she had. She excelled at it. Even now she’ll hand me a new book from her packed shelves and flick through it, expertly analysing its qualities. Her designs were simple and smart. For Thom Gunn’s collected verse she created a helical motif, a graphic contrast to the poet’s photograph on the back, showing the bearded Gunn crouching in a field, shirtless, in tight jeans, a leather belt loaded like his name. Bennett Cerf, the celebrated founder of Random House, told her mother how brilliant Pat’s designs were. Evie just asked her daughter, ‘Exactly what is it that you do?’

Pat and Evie. The pearls. The champagne. The lighted cigarette.

Manhattan could never rival Provincetown, and Pat kept coming back. In the summer of 1956 she met Nanno de Groot, a Dutch-born artist, for the second time, having met him briefly when she was eighteen and he was living with his third wife, Elise Asher, in the West End, next to friends of Pat’s. That second meeting was memorable: ‘When I woke up he was sitting on top of a weir pole, on his feet like a bird looking out to sea, waiting for me.’

He was an imposing figure, forty-three, six foot four, often bare-chested, and always bare-footed, as Pat would be. He’d been to nautical school in Amsterdam and had served on submarines, but was now the artist he had always wanted to be, part of the New York circle of de Kooning, Pollock, Franz Kline and Rothko. ‘We spent that week together,’ says Pat. She moved into his farmhouse in Little York, New Jersey. They got married on Long Island two years later; the reception was held at the Backers’ summer house on the sea-surrounded Sands Point – Daisy Buchanan’s East Egg. In the winter they lived in Little York; Nanno painted, Pat went to work in the city. In the summer, they’d return to Provincetown, living in a three-room cabin in a field at the end of town. A photograph shows them there: white light, Nanno naked to the waist, Pat svelte and tanned too, feet up on a table. Nanno painted the trees and the land and the sea – the passing seasons, fishermen’s nets drying in the fields – in between working as a mate on Charlie’s boat.

It must have been mad and idyllic and frustrating and ecstatic, this life together, in the dunes, on the streets, at sea. Pat remembers 1961, the summer with no wind, when they’d go out on the boat in the glassy calm, so clear you might reach down and pluck fish out of the depths. It was ‘a visual onslaught’, Pat says in a later, filmed interview in which her style emerges, a mix of bohemian smartness and concentrated beauty. With her wavy, centre-parted hair she might be one of the Velvet Underground, or a Renaissance model. She looks straight at the camera, but sees something else in the distance. She talks about Nanno, who wrote, ‘In moments of clarity I can sustain the idea that everything on earth is nature, including that which springs forth from a man’s mind, and hand.’ He read Robert Graves’s The White Goddess and painted birds; birds which, as Pat says, ‘he felt he might have become’, just as she might have become a wolf.

From one of her studio shelves, low down where the cats prowl, Pat pulls a brown envelope, and from it a photograph of herself and Charlie.

It’s 1961. There’s no wind. The five-hundred-pound tuna dangles between them, suspended by a rope around its tail, so huge and bug-eyed, so stuck over and spiny it’s hard to believe it’s not cut out and glued on. They each hold a fin, these two anglers, smiling for the camera, proud of their catch.

Pat has a huge rod and reel. As slight and chic as she seems, in her rolled-up jeans, checked shirt and suntan, it was Pat, not Charlie, who did all the work; Pat who struggled to hoick the bluefin out of the sea and onto the deck; Pat who was given the trophy by the state governor for her prize catch, seen in another press photograph, dressed in a dark silk shirt-waister, as shiny as a fish, her glossy hair in curls. She looks like Hepburn or Bacall, gamine and self-assured, with Charlie as her Bogart.

It was Nanno and Charlie and Pat, out fishing, part of the sea. In 1962, Nanno and Pat built this big house, created to enable thin slivers of art. They bought the land for six thousand dollars. Pat drew up the plans and the house grew up from the shore. It didn’t so much look out to the sea as the sea looked into it.

‘It wasn’t conceptual,’ Pat says. ‘It rose up out of the mud.’ Locals thought it was impractical. It seemed built out of belief alone. A factory of the imagination.

That same year came Nanno’s diagnosis, ‘and everything that goes with that’. Photographs show him bundled up to the neck, sitting on the deck, while the house rises pristine behind him, full of light and space. Living with lung cancer, he painted his last painting, of the sea, the large canvas laid flat, supported on stools. It showed the harbour flats drained at low tide. For the first time, he painted no horizon.

‘It was,’ said Pat, ‘his last word on the subject of painting.’ They moved into the house at Thanksgiving, 1962. They were there together barely a year. The following Thanksgiving – just days after President Kennedy was shot – there was a terrible storm which worked its havoc through three high tides. ‘It took the bulkhead, the deck, and almost undermined the house,’ Pat recalls. A month later, that Christmas, Nanno died.

Pat had his coffin constructed from red cedar left over from the building of their house; as if he were being launched out to sea, like Ishmael. Nanno’s tempestuous scenes of the Atlantic shores still hang on these walls: Ballston Beach bursts with energy, as if it were just a window on the wall looking over to the ocean side of the Cape. Every cupboard, every drawer, every eave of this house is filled with art. Art seeps out through the knots in the wood, like the sea under the floorboards.

There were parties here back in the sixties and seventies, recorded in flaring home movies and remembered in the stories of those who attended them and spent a night in gaol for disturbing the peace. There were psychedelic drugs, and when Pat invited jazz musicians, like her lover, Elvin Jones, she’d find rotting fish on her doorstep, left by folk who took offence at her having brought black people to town. Nina Simone visited; I imagine coming downstairs and finding her sipping tea at Pat’s long table, talking in her rich voice. A faded photograph pinned to the wall shows Pat and her friends playing congas out on the deck. The drums still stand in her living room, but they haven’t been played in a while.

Pat had other visitors to attend to. In 1982, a lone orca appeared in the bay. It was a female, apparently habituated to humans; some thought it was an escapee from a military marine mammal programme, a dolphin draft-dodger. It was the biggest animal she would meet. Pat would kayak out to meet it and drew it over and again, this time using her black marker on flat stones. With the fin rising next to her boat, Pat held out a flounder to her friend.

Others were less considerate when the whale came in close to the pier. ‘Someone poured bourbon in her blowhole,’ Pat says. After that, the harbourmaster drove the whale back out to sea.

This house is rebuilt with every season, growing layer upon layer. Giant jade and ficus plants tower in the interior, tended by rainwater collected from the roof. Buddha sits in his lotus position in the garden. The outside comes inside. In the yard, self-seeded trees shade the graves of departed dogs; great strings of blue lights illuminate their branches as night falls. Robins and cardinals take refuge up there from the cats to whom this house really belongs, familiars to their mistress.

It is the very antithesis of the order her mother created in fashionable Manhattan. Books and catalogues rise in piles on every step of the stairs. Dusty drawers are filled with cormorants cawing and clamouring to get out. If Pat no longer paints, perhaps it is because she has said what she needed to say. Now she collects stones from the shore as she walks it in her light leaping stride, pocketing pieces of seaworn granite and quartz to be arranged on her tables outside with no purpose but every intention. Years ago, in 1954, when she was typing out Beckett’s Molloy for the Paris Review, she became fascinated with the ‘sucking stones’ section.

‘I spent some time at the seaside, without incident,’ says Molloy. ‘Personally I feel no worse there than anywhere else … And to feel that there was one direction at least in which I could go no further, without first getting wet, then drowned, was a blessing.’

He then performs a strange, obsessive rite.

‘I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking-stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones. Yes, on this occasion I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about.’

‘For ten pages, in one paragraph,’ says Pat, ‘he moves these stones in and out of his pockets and his mouth, working on a complicated logistic with the order of sucking each stone and where to put it after it is sucked so it won’t get sucked again before all sixteen stones have, in turn, been sucked and put in the proper pocket. It took me a long time because I constantly got lost. I read and read this piece. Those stones stay with me …’

Stones and sea and sand. It’s the nothingness of what she does that drives Pat on. Her energy has become concentrated, as if everything was working to some Zen-like point of absolute and discard; the apparent nothingness of her paintings, the seeming emptiness of the beach; as if she has conjured it all up herself, and is content with what she has done. She needs to do no more. Pat rarely leaves Provincetown now; she is bound to this place. ‘I feel very cut off,’ she said in 1987, more than twenty years after Nanno died. ‘Come April, after a winter alone, I almost feel I don’t exist.’

Living behind her trees, looking out to sea, she might be a forgotten figure in this forgetting town, abandoned all over again. But when we get in a taxi, the young driver tells me, ‘Mrs de Groot rides for free.’

It lies there in the shadow of the wharf, as if it had sought shelter beneath the wooden struts. It has been dead for only twenty-four hours, but its distinctive markings – delicate grey and yellow swirls, merging as a graphic equaliser of its motion through the waves, as if they’d left their traces on its body – are already fading in the wind.

A common dolphin, exquisitely ill-named. Dennis writes the binomial down on his form, losing patience as his pen runs out: Delphinus delphis, a much more princely title, redolent of Cretan friezes and Greek vases. Two thousand years ago in his History of Animals, Aristotle attested to ‘the mildness and gentleness of dolphins and the passion of their love for boys’, and added, ‘It is not known for what reason they run themselves aground on dry land; at all events it is said that they do so at times, and for no obvious reason.’

This is no wild strand on the Cape’s ocean shore. It’s the town beach on the bay, overlooked by the rear porches of shops and restaurants; this stranded cetacean might well have been a late-night throwaway, along with the lobster and clam shells. Yet these tame waters can be dangerous places, too. One morning, out on my deck, I’d seen fins in the distance, between the breakwater and the pier. Through my binoculars I watched a small pod of common dolphins moving restlessly up and down. I cycled down to see them from close quarters. Too close, I realised; they were in danger of grounding. I stood barely ankle-deep, and they were only twenty feet from me, where the blue became sandy brown. It seemed impossible that they could even be swimming there. The potential for disaster turned it into a quiet crisis, a clip from a natural history documentary with the voiceover removed, a scene ignored by the townsfolk going about their business.

For a dolphin to beach itself is a drastic act. Recent studies suggest that the animals ‘will strand themselves when they are very weak because they don’t want to drown’, says Andrew Brownlow, a Scottish scientist. There seems to be ‘something very deep in the terrestrial mammalian core that fires up when they are in extremis’. It is both suicidal and a desperate last attempt at survival. At least, that is how we see it. We sanctify these creatures as salves for our own depredations, and seem always to have done so. Around AD 180, the Greco-Roman poet Oppian declared that hunting ‘the kingly dolphin’ was immoral, on the grounds that they were once humans who had exchanged the land for the sea. ‘But even now the righteous spirit of men in them preserves human thought and human deeds.’

Dennis called me with the news. Minutes later, we were driving down to the harbour. The day before, on the whalewatch boat, we’d watched the pod of dolphins moving through the clear waters in search of food. Among them was this individual. Such small groups of dolphins have close matrilineal relationships and are intensely loyal. Did it die in the night, on the dark and lonely beach, calling for its family as they called back? This beautiful, naked animal, now lying at my bended knees, was as smooth and patterned as a piece of porcelain. There was nothing morbid about it; it still seemed full of life.

I run my hands over its body. The fins are finely shaped, rubbery and tactile, caressed and caressing when alive; the taut flanks taper to the muscular tail. The eyes are disconcertingly open, unseeing, untouched by the gulls, which often fall to feed on stranded cetaceans even before they’ve expired. Clearly displayed on its underbelly is the animal’s genital slit, flanked by two smaller mammary slits, betraying, in this indecent exposure, its sex. I insert my finger, ostensibly to investigate if she, as she had now become, had bred, but in reality out of prurient curiosity.

I say a Hail Mary for my sins.

After we have recorded her dimensions as if measuring her for a new outfit, I stretch out beside her for comparison; not for scientific reasons, but my own: head to tail, toe to beak, sensing how similar we are. I imagine her as a human in a dolphin wetsuit. I think of her bones, lighter than mine since they did not have to bear the full weight of gravity; I might replace my burdensome skeleton with hers, transformed from the inside out. I think about how much of my life is spent vertical or horizontal, upright on land or level with the water – a sensation known as proprioception: the apprehension of one’s body in space; the way we want to be comfortable in the world, yet are never really reconciled to the business of being physical.

I lie there like a lover, her body a mirror for my own. Her blowhole would never again burst open in exultation, in the joy of being a dolphin. She wouldn’t wriggle free of the sand, working her vigorous tail to swim away. The patina of decay had spread along her flanks like the silvery bloom on a plum. Dennis’s knife cuts into the dorsal fin as the instructions on his form dictate, slicing off its tip in a liquorice-allsort sandwich of black skin and white fat. I feel an odd compulsion to bite down on the excised morsel. The teeth come next, each ivory needle arranged regularly along the narrow jaws. Research suggests that they may act as a sonic tool, helping to transmit sound back to a dolphin’s inner ears.

Compared to this complex animal, I am sensorially inept, a dumb being barely able to feel anything. She could hear-see in the depths, heat-seeking sand eels and surfing with humpbacks; she could bond with her pod, using her signature whistle and those of her friends to call them. She could echo-locate her peers, sensing their emotional states, knowing how they felt, almost telepathically. She had a culture and expressed her self in a state of collective individualism and, as we now know, exhibited an emotional maturity possibly in excess of our own. But her life of apparent ease has been brought to an end on this urban shore. Passersby ask, ‘What kind of fish is that?’ Waiters sit on restaurant steps smoking cigarettes before the start of their next shift. In another age, their counterparts might have served it to their customers. In the nineteen-sixties, the town’s Sea View diner had humpback on the menu.

Dennis saws at the jaw, hacking out the four teeth required for analysis by the organisation for whom he is acting. The serrated blade grates against bone, the worst hour in the dentist’s chair you could imagine. The gums part and, two by two, the teeth are extracted. Blood trickles into the sand. The outrage is complete. Our samples bagged and the animal’s flanks duly marked with the organisation’s acronym, we drive off, leaving her alone on the beach, ready to roll in the next tide, as though its comforting waves might wash her back to life.

Dead or alive, we all strike the same pose; the same way my mother sat in a sepia photograph of her as a young woman in the garden of her suburban family home, resting her weight on one hand on the chair as she half turns to the camera like the movie stars she’d seen; the same way she’d sit in the last photograph I took sixty years later of her in our garden barely a mile away, adopting the same position; the same pose that, I realise, I too take up as I sit and turn to a camera which is not there.

Out in the bay, the moored boats act as weather vanes, swivelling and turning with the direction of the wind. I look out from my deck to the horizon. It’s my barometer. If it’s straight, there’ll be whalewatching today; if it’s wavy and irregular, perhaps not. Today it is level. So we go to sea.

There’s nothing so exciting as that rising feeling as the boat readies to leave the harbour, potent with the prospect of the day ahead. Even as it stands tethered to the wharf, Dolphin VIII is a vessel invested with its own momentum, as though it would leave whether or not anybody was on board; a great grinding mass of steel plates and engines whirring deep down below, a powerful industrial connection with the resisting churning water. As I board with its crew – the fisherman turned captain, the taciturn first mate, the poet naturalist, the East European galley staff with professional futures back home – I feel a perennial outsider, for all that I’ve been sailing on these same boats, watching the same whales, for fifteen years. No one is ever sure of their place here, no one quite secure: the crew only work if the weather is good and the punters are paying their wages. Weather, work, people, whales: it is all an uneasy alliance, a nervous contract drawn up on an inconstant sea, agreed by a common pursuit. At least, for those few hours.

After a long bitter winter, the Cape has come to life. As I peer down into the green water, the reason is clear: fields of silvery sand eels, roused in their millions from the sea floor by the sun and now pooling in wriggling tangles, turning this way and that as one mass, just below the surface. These slender fish supply an entire food chain; their arrival could equally herald the crowds that will soon teem through the town’s streets.

Only half an hour out from the land, a frenzy is in progress. Northern gannets are plunging into the bait like white-and-yellow torpedoes. A raft of loons, with stiletto-sharp bills and freckled oil-green wings, are working the same source. Harbour porpoises roll through the waves; grey seals bob like bottles.

Suddenly, something much larger appears in the one-hundred-and-fifty-foot-deep water that runs right up to Race Point: the falcate dorsal of a fin whale. For all its size, its black back too big to belong to a mere animal, it too is feeding on fish barely bigger than my finger. A pair of minkes, more modest rorquals, bearing the same strangely pleated bellies, join in. Then, as the boat pushes out over Stellwagen Bank’s great drowned plateau under the wide Atlantic sky, the ocean begins to erupt anew with the blows of dozens of humpbacks, back from their winter stay in the Caribbean.

Then we are upon them, along with a thousand white-sided dolphin, weaving in and out as the great whales trap the sand eels in their bubble nets, rising through the corralled fish with mouths open wide, throats like rubbery concertinas, pleats clattering with barnacles like castanets. Gulls perch on the whales’ snouts to pick out titbits. And just when it seems the scene can sustain no more predators, a dozen more fin whales arrive, lunging on their sides, displaying the bristly baleen in their jaws.

In this moment of witness, nothing else matters. Passengers delete images to make room for new ones on their cameras. My friend Jessica sees a couple frantically pressing the trash button as one says, ‘Dump the wedding ones.’

Up on the bright white fly bridge, we watch the performance. A pair of adult fin whales aim straight for us. Each of them sixty feet long, at least.

Hands tight to the wheel, our captain, Todd Motta, shouts, ‘Whoa!’ as the nearest whale sheers off our bow, surfing on its side to display its great white belly like some enormous salmon.

‘I thought it was going to hit us,’ says Todd.

As experienced as he is, he’s momentarily shaken. The second largest animal on earth, normally betraying barely a tenth of its mass as it moves through the sea, has flashed its entire physical self at us, using our boat as a fish stop. We are an instrument as much as an engine of observation.

All around us, the humpbacks continue to feed. One of the whales called Springboard rolls over to swim for a while on her back, displaying her genital mound, a region so gathered about with barnacles that it must make life uncomfortable for her suitors.

‘I’ve never seen that before,’ says Dennis.

Or maybe he has; it’s so difficult to tell. Are these the same whales we just saw? The boat rocks and I stagger as I hold on to the clipboard and the rubber-encased GPS, regaining my footing to read off the coordinates for the pink photocopied sheets.

70 degrees north 18 degrees west. Mn: 1/2.

A calf holds its tail out of the waves, its body perpendicular in the water column. It trembles with its own life, the way a young boy’s body trembles in adolescence, quivering with hormones. Then it starts to smash up and down on the water.

‘Are these new animals?’ Dennis asks.

I’ve no idea. The boat has turned round on itself, leaving a green swirling trail in its wake. The animals rise again, mouths as open as birds’ beaks. The passengers look over the railings, ecstatically, loudly excited or overcome with lassitude and boredom, in the way of all ordinary miracles. None of this is of any consequence, because it happens day after day. Only in the actual moment am I transported. Only then does it leave me, this sense that I am not really here at all. We shiver with life, and its alternative. Waiting to come out the other side.

A few days later, we sail out of the harbour on another sunny morning. In the wheelhouse, I lean over the broad counter covered in what looks like wood-effect Formica from a seventies kitchen, peering at the chrome-ringed dials, updated with computer displays of the underwater terrain and a green radar screen silently scanning a black sea. We have left the land and its safety. An adhesive label announces the instructions for Marine Distress Communications to be relayed on the Submersible Plus VHF radio. Stuffed behind the sticky cup-holders is the Weekly Payroll Sheet.

Everyone on the bridge is in a good mood, looking forward to the day. But as the depth gauge draws 206 feet, the outlook changes as abruptly as the ocean floor falls away beneath us. The land to our starboard – such as it is – has been submerged under a sea fret. It’s as if the view had reached the edge of an old projected film, fading into fuzzy nothingness.

The boat sails straight into the mist and everything around us disappears. The land and sky vanish into one vast cloud; all we are left with are the few yards of water immediately around the boat. We’re entirely isolated, wrapped up in damp cotton wool. One minute, holiday sun; the next, murky obscurity.

‘How do you look for whales in conditions like this?’ I ask Lumby – Mark Dalomba, our captain for the day.

His camouflage cap is pulled down over his eyes; he doesn’t turn round as he talks to me.

‘Cut off the engines and listen,’ he says. ‘For the sound of their blows.’

But today Lumby has assistance. Chad Avellar, another young fisherman of Azorean descent who could sail these waters in the dark, is ahead of us, and radios back what he is seeing. Lumby charts a course ahead; or rather, he follows his own instincts. He plays the sea like a pinball machine. Perched on his captain’s seat, eyes always ahead, he stabs at the radar screen.

‘See those blips?’ he says, pointing at the luminous green blobs shaping and reshaping, coming together in one mottled mass, discrete from the sea clutter that the fish-finder produces when reflected by the waves. ‘Those are the whales.’

Conditions deteriorate. The boat rolls with its weight and ours, lurching from side to side.

‘Crappy weather on the way,’ says Lumby.

We seem to be moving ever slower, dragged back by the banks of fog. My heart sinks. It’s my last trip of the season. Even if we come upon whales, will we actually see them? Everything is grey. There’s no horizon, no context. We might as well have drifted into the Arctic, or the Bermuda Triangle, for that matter.

The silence explodes with blows. Of course it does. We are surrounded by whales, as if they’d been there all along, only now choosing to break cover. The water bursts with their exhalations. We can’t tell sea from sky, but these animals are producing their own weather, their spouts merging with the mist.

They are feeding, voraciously. Bellowing, blowing, rising up through their own bubble-clouds, eight whales at a time piercing the surface, cooperating in an orgy of consumption. It is a visceral, indisputable, audible furore. Whales are not tentative. They do not fuss and bother. They do not falter. They act, uproariously, greedily, and utterly in-their-moment.

Lumby climbs up to the fly bridge. As he does so a dozen whales loom up right off the bow, their cavernous mouths open like gigantic frogs, fringed with baleen and roofed with pink strips like engorged tongues. It’s a fearsome sight. We follow Lumby aloft, clambering up after our captain as if trying to get away from the beasts.

From our eyrie, we look down through the mist. Everywhere there are whales, lunging and fluking and kick-feeding, taking advantage of the fog to cover their gluttony. Fifteen humpbacks, maybe more.

Then, as if roused by their mothers’ furious feeding, the calves begin to leap. One after another, spindle-shaped bodies shoot out of the sea like popguns going off. We don’t know where to look. Lumby holds the boat in position; he seems to be conducting the whole scene, even though he has lost control, like the rest of us.

‘Jesus Christ,’ I exclaim, then apologise, hoping the passengers haven’t heard me.

‘No,’ says Liz, the poet naturalist. ‘That’s quite appropriate.’

The calves have begun to breach simultaneously: two, three, four, five, all together.

‘They’re more like dolphins than whales,’ I shout.

No marine park could rival this show. They might as well be Eocene cetaceans leaping out of an ancient ocean, celebrating their leaving of the worrisome land. Two centuries ago, as a young man on his maiden voyage, Melville saw his first whales not far from this shore; his ship, too, was drifting in the mist.

‘The most strange and unheard-of noises came out of the fog at times: a vast sound of sighing and sobbing. What could it be? This would be followed by a spout, and a gush, and a cascading commotion, as if some fountain had suddenly jetted out of the ocean … But presently some one cried out – “There she blows! whales! whales close alongside!”’ To the young sailor, they sounded like a herd of ocean-elephants.

As the sea bursts with the blows and foraging of the adults, it is blown open by their breaching calves, creating abbreviated geyser-spouts of their own. Up on the bridge, we’ve run out of superlatives. John, our hardbitten first mate, is speechless. Later, in the afterglow of what we’ve witnessed, in a kind of apologetic embarrassment of emotion, he volunteers that, out of seven thousand trips, this is one to remember – ‘And it takes a lot to impress me.’ Liz and I assure our passengers – should they assume that this sort of thing happens every day – that it is one of the most extraordinary sights we have seen, out here on the Bank.

Then I look at Lumby. Under the peak of his cap, tugging at the cigarette jammed in his fist, he too is smiling to himself, as if he had summoned it all up. As if the scene, all the more amazing for the inauspiciousness of its prelude, were a vindication of his magical skills, far beyond those of naturalists or scientists or writers. Like his fellow captains, Lumby has never taken a photograph of a whale.

He doesn’t need to. They’re all there, in his head.