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