Copyright

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

Copyright © Philip Hoare 2017

Cover design and illustration by Joe Lyward

Philip Hoare asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008133702

Ebook Edition © 2017 ISBN: 9780008133696

Version: 2018-05-24

Dedication

For Pat

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

THERISINGSEA

HEGAZESTOTHESHORE

THESTARLIKESORROWSOFIMMORTALEYES

SOMETHINGAMAZING

THEPEOPLEOFTHESEA

ZEROANDEVERYTHINGTOGETHER

UNDERAGREENSEA

THEHANDSOMESAILOR

STELLAMARIS

THESEATHATRAGEDNOMORE

Also by Philip Hoare

About the Publisher

Chapter initial illustrations by Joe Lyward

Epigraph

‘The sea, everywhere the sea, and no one looking at it’

DANY LAFERRIÈRE

THERISINGSEA

Not long ago but long enough, I looked into the old cupboard in my bedroom and at the back, among the piles of floppy discs and peeling spines of my children’s encyclopaedias, I found a notebook. It was in an old-fashioned imperial format, half-bound with blue cloth and shiny paper, its fore-edge delicately spattered like a blackbird’s egg. It came from the cable factory where my father had worked all his life. Inside, on feint-lined pages intended for notes on amps and electrical resistance, were writings and drawings I’d done when I was about fifteen years old.

On each left-hand page was a picture, in bright poster paint: a futuristic city, art deco designs, lithe figures out of some space opera or Russian ballet; fantastical images I’d collected in my teenage head. Halfway through the book I’d painted something I’d really seen: a leaping killer whale, slick with clear nail varnish to mimic its black-and-white skin, as if it had jumped out of the sea, rather than a concrete pool in a suburban safari park.

On the right-hand pages I’d composed lyrics and prose, the things I couldn’t say out loud. Looking at this parade of longings forty years later, I realised that the fifteen-year-old me had mapped out his life along those pale blue lines. As if I’d already lived in reverse. Everything that came after had been entered in that blue notebook, balanced on my knees while I watched television in our front room, waiting for whatever might come next.

The wind howled at my window like a wild animal, a snarling beast demanding to be fed. The house held fast against horizontal rain that threatened to find every crack in the walls. The air was full of water, driven directly from the shore. Between the falling trees and the pounding waves, it seemed that the sea – for all that it was a mile away or more – was reaching out for me in the darkness. The newspapers and the television and the websites warned us not to walk near it, as if our mere approach might be dangerous, as if its tentacles might reach out and drag us in.

Growling and yowling, ranting and rocking, falling back to catch their breath before their next assault, the storms kept on coming, and there was nothing we could do. The world had become turbulent with its own temper, its air sweeping over oceans in a tropical fury. If we ever felt guilty, we felt it now.

At least the sea is visible in its rage; the wind is an unseen monster. You don’t hear the wind; you hear what it leaves behind. It is defined by what gets in its way – trees, buildings, waves. Perhaps that’s why it preys on our imagination so disturbingly. The spinning of the globe seemed to have become audible – the sound of a world out of kilter. For what sins were we being punished? What had we done wrong? In Caribbean hurricanes during the seventeenth century, Spanish priests would toss crucifixes into the waves or hold the Host up into the wind, for fear that their sinful flocks were responsible for God’s displeasure.

That winter, storm after storm raked southern England. Tearing and snapping, the wind never seemed to stop. As I lay in bed, I could feel its volume whipping and squalling around me, changing direction wilfully, a mad car out of control.

Then, just when it seemed it could not get any worse, a mighty gale, as near as we might get to a hurricane, ripped out of the cover of night and into the naked day. Unable to sleep, disturbed by the charged air, as if its ions were crackling in my brain, I cycled down to the shore and took shelter under the eaves of the yacht club, a wooden building which seemed about to whirl off into the wind. Behind me stood a medieval abbey, and a fort once visited by the Virgin Queen to survey her maritime kingdom, its Tudor ramparts now protected from the waves by a long sea wall.

I’ve known this shore all my life: from its ancient Seaweed Hut – a weird structure which might as well have been put up by Iron Age inhabitants – to the brutal towers of its nineteen-sixties housing estate. It is as familiar to me as it is to the birds that scrabble for their livelihoods in its shingle and mud. I’d taken it for granted, that it would always be there.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The beach was being torn apart before my eyes. The wall, usually only lapped even at the highest spring tide, was entirely overwhelmed. Waves – to call them waves seems pathetically inadequate – had lost their laterality and gone vertical, rising higher than a house.

My world had lost its moorings. This was not some rocky Cornish or Scottish coast, buttressed against such a battering; this was a sedate, suburban shore, complacent and unprepared; a soft place on the southern edge of England, open to the rest of the world, successively invaded and settled for millennia. This estuary even had its own Roman deity, Ancasta. Clearly, she had been offended.

It was as though someone had computer-generated the weather and ramped it up to a ridiculous degree. An invisible alien, formed of roaring air and raging water, had been unleashed. The sea spray reached the tops of the trees on the shore. It was terrifying, and exhilarating. My heart raced to keep up with every rattling rolling rumble; a cacophony created by raked-up shingle and creaking trees, the Foley effects of enraged gods flinging nature around.

I watched it like some viral video; not rerun, but in real time. Behind this frontline, people were driving cars, taking buses, going to work, school, shops, locked in their own personal climate. We shared the same city; but they felt safe, seeing the storm through their screens. I was on the edge of it, physically confronted by the violence, as shocking as if I’d come across a fist fight on the street.

The sea wall had been replaced by a wall of sea. The placid site where I propped up my bike every morning, where I’d leave my clothes and slip into the water, joining rather than entering it, had become a deadly, repulsive place.

It was the only day during those storms that I did not, could not swim; perhaps the only day that year. Even at the height of the past days’ disruption I’d launched myself into the madness, defying the warnings. So what if anything went wrong? I didn’t take my mobile phone in case of emergency because I don’t have one. People say I should be careful; but why be careful, when we are so full of cares? This was the opposite of that. I glorified in my stupidity. Foolhardy, a hardy fool. I had rocked with the waves, holding my head above water like a shipwrecked dog, dodging planks and plastic buckets. A single trainer had floated past, then a motorbike helmet; I wondered if the head might still be in it. I was borne up by the rollercoaster ride, exultant and excited, although I had soon found myself spat back onshore.

Not that day. That day I had to admit defeat, and defer to a greater power.

During the night the wind woke me again, prowling around the house like a midnight demon, ready to suck me out of the window. The sound was beyond sound: one white noise comprised of many others, fit to eviscerate my dreams.

In the morning, not quite believing what had happened during the darkness – was that last night, or the night before; did I even imagine it? – I ventured out on the third day of the storm, expecting to see a newly devastated world.

But the streets looked the same, just as they do when you come back from holiday. Only a few fallen branches from the trees hinted at the mayhem of the small hours. I rode on down to the beach, not knowing what to expect, but expecting it anyway.

There I realised that the storm had taken its final revenge. Defeated by what it could do inland, it had reshaped the coast itself.

The beach had been lifted up and thrown back, creating a shingle tsunami. The path had been replaced by a tangle of branches and rope, a twisted mass of line and grass torn from some other shore, in the way drowned men’s pockets are turned inside out. The flotsam lay still, but contorted with the torque and tension of the wind and water. Tiny balls of coloured plastic, like the roe of some new petrochemical sea creature, were scattered through the wrackline. The calm itself was violent.

Then I saw the sea wall. The waves had fallen back to reveal their guilty secret. The long straight stalwart of my pre-dawn swims, my chilly changing place, my launching point from the land, had been smashed to pieces, kicked over by a petulant child. The wall had stood for seventy years or more, made of the same stone that had built the abbey and fort behind it. Now, like the abbey, it lay in ruins.

I took it personally. A structure I knew as well as my own body had been reduced to rubble. And I knew I was responsible. I had allowed this to happen.

No one would ever rebuild this place, this insignificant corner, bypassed by ships and cars. The aftermath of this assault was the reality of ‘managed retreat’, in the bureaucrats’ parlance; the desertion of an already forgotten site. We had abandoned beauty, abandoned nature. This was the future: the rising sea on a suburban shore. I wanted to cry, but the hardness of the stone stopped me. So I picked my way over the remains, pulled off my clothes, and got in.

The sea was still filled with debris; household doors and tree trunks floated like lumber thrown from a giant’s outhouse. And even as I swam, the waves began to rise again, responding to an invisible moon. Giving up the struggle, I climbed out, fighting to get dressed as the wind whipped my clothes into air-filled versions of me.

I rode off into a new landscape. Time had sped up; geological change happened overnight. New streams had been formed and new islands created in the flood. Reluctant to let me go, the waves lashed me as I passed.

Frail as I am as a human, I had the ability to withstand the storm. But along this coast, thousands of seabirds died in those few days, ten thousand guillemots alone. Birds that mate for life waited for partners who would never return.

That afternoon I found a dead guillemot on the beach. Its slender-sharp bill and black-brown body lay slumped on the shingle like a soft toy lost over the side of a passing ferry. It was so perfect – and so far from the rocky ledges where it breeds so close to its fellows that they preen one another, even though they are not partners – that I wondered if I should take it home with me. I talked to it, commiserating with its fate. The next tide claimed it – only to bring another victim, rolled about in nylon line.

I pulled it out. It was an avocet. A delicate, emblematic bird I’d only ever seen from afar, suddenly brought into near focus, graphically black and white, a piece of netsuke. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so exquisite, there in my hands. I turned it over in my fingers, feeling its long, scaly legs – relics of its reptilian past – and their knobbly joints like threaded veins, or worms that had swallowed soil. It was their colour that amazed me: an indefinable, pearly blue-mauve withheld under a soft misty bloom; electric, verging on iridescent. I could only compare it to the oceanic blue-grey of a gannet’s bill, as if this were a marine colour reserved for a seabird’s exclusive use. The legs, which might have been made out of some alien metal or art nouveau glass, culminated in tiny black claws, embedded like chips of polished jet.

It was an enamelled animal. Vitrified. As much jewellery as a live, or recently dead, thing. It was hard to believe it had stood on such fragile stilts, let alone stalked its prey from them. Then I remembered the living avocets I’d seen, moving with eighteenth-century elegance, as if they might dance a gavotte. Avocets enact their own rituals, gathering in a circle and bowing to one another like dandies.

I opened the bird’s wings, a pair of fans fluttering across a ballroom. They felt taut with what they were expected to do; not yet quite useless, yet no use now, either. They articulated lightness and lift. The black-capped head, which once bobbed in the shallows, sweeping through the water with its upturned bill, ended in the final, defining, typographical tick that is the avocet’s glory. It was almost too beautiful to touch, but I prised open the ebony splint, like the split reed of a musical instrument. Its lower half was precisely ridged to speed its ploughing; a keratin tool engineered to micron perfection, tapering to a paper-thin tip, as sharp as a squid’s beak. I remembered the sound that played through it, a shapely insistent peep, accompanying the nervously graceful movement as the creature swung its bill from side to side in search of invertebrates. Even the bird’s binomial expressed its exotic allure – Recurvirostra avosetta, as if it were a minor Egyptian god.

With a wrench and a twist, I pulled off the head. The muscles and oesophagus came away, dangling raw and red. Then I spread the body on a long piece of flotsam, laying out the bird on the knotted wood, under the grey sky.

Beautiful, but broken.

As the year slows to its midnight, the solstice blows in fierce and wild, the last of December putting up a fight. Day and night blur; it’s difficult to say when one becomes the other. In the glittering darkness long before dawn, a silver ring of ice is slung around the moon, catching stars and planets in its circle. Their heavenly bodies hang in the O: orbits within orbits, eyes within eyes. I swim through the inky sea, my white body breaking the black surface, moving through the moon.

The tide is high again. It often is here, more than most places, since Southampton Water experiences an unusual double tide, standing twice as high and twice as low every day, swelled and drained by the Atlantic Pulse that drives up and down the Channel. In David Copperfield, Dickens’s watery, autobiographical book, Mr Peggotty, mindful of his ‘drowndead’ relations, says of Mr Barkis, ‘People can’t die, along the coast … except when the tide’s pretty nigh out. They can’t be born, unless it’s pretty nigh in – not properly born, till flood. He’s a going out with the tide.’ The rise and fall brings life and death beyond our control. When the moon is full, the tide is high at noon and midnight, like a clock. The tide is time; the two words share the same root, as does tidy. We are all tidied up by time.

I stand on what is left of the sea wall in the moonlight, charged by its brightness. Apparently Siberian shamans would strip naked during the full moon to absorb its energy; maybe it’ll warm me with its secondhand daylight. The satellite silences our world; it has mysterious powers, as Bernd Brunner notes, still not quite explained, like black holes or gravity itself: some scientists believe the lunar effect extends to the land too, triggering earthquakes as though the planet’s tectonic slides were tides of their own.

And if our home is a living thing, then the sea is its pumping heart, swelling as the moon swings around the earth, tugging at our blood, at the tide inside of me. After all, the entire planet consists mostly of water, like us, and we are governed by its cycles more powerfully than by any elected body. Its tides are our future. They are always racing ahead, every day an hour further on, a reminder that we will never catch up with ourselves, no matter how fast we may swim.

But then, for me every day is an anxiety in my ways of getting to the water. I worry that something will stop me from reaching it, or that one day it won’t be there – as it is, and it isn’t, twice a day. I’ve become so attuned to it, so scared of it, so in love with it that sometimes I think I can only think by the sea. It is the only place I feel at home, because it is so far away from home. It is the only place where I feel free and alive, yet I am shackled to it and it could easily take my life one day, should it choose to do so. It is liberating and transforming, physical and metaphysical. Without its energy, we would not exist. There is nothing so vast in our lives, so beyond our temporal power. If there were no oceans, would we have our souls? ‘The sea has many voices | Many gods and many voices,’ T.S. Eliot wrote. ‘We cannot think of a time that is oceanless.’ ‘In civilisations without boats,’ said Michel Foucault, ‘dreams dry up.’ Even if we could live without the oceans, a world of arid plains and dry valleys would lack mystery; everything would seem knowable, exposed.

In the womb we swim in salty water, sprouting residual fins and tails and rudimentary gills as we twist and turn in our little oceans. It was a tradition in maritime communities that if a child was born with the amniotic sac, the caul, over its head, she or he would never drown, having survived this near-suffocation. To be born thus was to be ‘born behind the veil’, and a preserved caul – itself a veil between life and death – would extend protection to anyone who carried it: David Copperfield is born with a caul which is auctioned when he is ten years old, leaving him uncomfortable and confused at having part of himself sold off. We first sense the world through that fluid filling our mother’s belly; we hear through the sea inside her. The sea is an extension of ourselves. We speak of bodies of water, and Herman Melville wrote of ‘the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin’. Compared to the thin epidermis of land we occupy, the great volume of the sea exceeds our sway; it lends our planet its depth, and ourselves a sense of depth.

And if we are mostly water, hardly here at all, then other celestial bodies might be entirely aquatic. An astrophysicist once told me about newly discovered exoplanets that may be composed of water hundreds of kilometres deep, with only a few rocks at their hard core. Disdaining our need for land, these globular oceans, spinning translucently in some distant galaxy, may be inhabited, as astrobiologists hypothesise – it being their business to study that which may or may not exist – by giant whale-like creatures, half-swimming, half-flying through their atmospheres.

The ubiquity of the sea – from this grey estuary in which I swim, to the great open oceans – is itself interplanetary, connecting us to the stars, not really part of our world at all. It doesn’t begin until it begins, and then it never seems to end. It writes itself in the clouds and the currents, a permanently changing script, inscribing and erasing its own history, held down by air and gravity in a tacit agreement between land and sky, filling the space in between. It’s a nothingness full of life, home to ninety per cent of the earth’s biomass, providing sixty per cent of the oxygen we breathe. It is our life-support system, our greater womb. It is forever breaking its own boundaries, always giving and always taking. It is the embodiment of all our paradoxes. Without it we couldn’t live, within it we would die. The sea doesn’t care.

Down there lies another history, the unseen record of what is going on up above. Preserved in the freezing vaults of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton are sample cores from the sea bed, long columns of mud and sediment whose layers tell out deep time like the rings in a tree or the waxy plugs in a whale’s ear. Composed of falls of marine snow – minute animals and plants and minerals, the makings of limestone- and chalk-to-be – along with dark strata deposited by ancient tsunamis, their past is our future foretold. The water itself has an age, up to four thousand years old, a story of its own. And even if the sea has become a carbon sink, absorbing the energy we have released from the sun, this cistern of our sins is still the repository of our dreams.

But as I just told you, the sea doesn’t care. It deals life and death for innocent and guilty alike.

The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last and most watery play, was first performed at court for James I on All Saints’ Day, 1611. It opens uproariously, slapping the audience in the face with a life-threatening storm and ‘fraughting souls’ on a ship about to split. In the dramatic tumult, panic spreads blame. Antonio, the usurping Duke of Milan, curses the boatswain – who is trying to save the ship – as a ‘wide-chopped rascal – would thou mightst lie drowning | The washing of ten tides!’ He is arrogantly invoking the practice of hanging pirates on the shore, leaving their corpses to swing in successive tides: ‘He that’s born to be hanged need fear no drowning.’

Yet, as the audience slowly becomes aware, these scenes of rip, wreck and panic – overturning all order as the crew fight for their lives and the aristocrats’ status counts for nothing in the face of the waves: ‘What cares these roarers for the name of king?’ – turn out to be nothing more than a magic trick, a theatrical effect within a theatrical effect, a storm raised by a sorcerer’s art and his impish familiar. As Ferdinand, the king’s son, his hair up-staring, leaps from the sinking vessel set aflame by Ariel’s divided fire, he cries, ‘Hell is empty | And all the devils are here.’ (It is an image which may have been inspired by James I himself, author of Demonologie and personal supervisor of the torture of witches, who believed that during a voyage back from Oslo in 1590 his ship had been beset by storms summoned by witchcraft, and demons had been sent to climb its keel.)

Suddenly, and as if in a dream, the castaways find themselves in an eerie calm, on an island full of strange noises, peopled by beings they cannot quite discern; an alien place, although the survivors themselves are aliens too. Some of its spirits are only rumoured, like Sycorax the witch, named after sys for sow, and korax for raven, a fated bird from an ‘unwholesome fen’. Others are all too present, like her son Caliban, a bastard creation, ‘a savage and deformed slave’, amphibious, half-man, half-fish, ‘Legged like a man! And his fins like arms!’ He is a chimeric creature, as if slithering out of an evolutionary sea; his counterpart is Ariel, an ambivalent, fluid spirit of the air who eludes definition and can be anywhere in an instant. Both are ruled over by the all-powerful magician Prospero in his water-bound exile.

Recently, on a shelf of stranded books being sold to benefit a bird sanctuary overlooking the Solent, I discovered a 1968 Penguin edition of the play. It was an oddly apt place to find it: this silted-up seventeenth-century harbour, overflown by marsh harriers and stalked by godwits and avocets, was the domain of the Earl of Southampton – Harry Southampton, Shakespeare’s Fair Youth and possibly his lover, who lived at nearby Titchfield Abbey, where the playwright’s works were performed.

I paid fifty pence for the book, attracted by its cover, designed by David Gentleman. Splashed with broad swathes of solid colour, the wood engraving, inspired by the work of Thomas Bewick, seemed to span the turbulent year of its nineteen-sixties publication – when protestors lifted up pavement stones, to find the beach below – and the uncertainties of its seventeenth-century contents.

A three-masted ship tilts in a stylised sea, rolling on waves below stormy clouds towards a tree-blown island and a rocky cave, all rendered in sludgy, overlapping shades of subdued blue and green, grey and teal, like the birds and land and sea around the building where I’d bought the book. The design was almost cartoon-like, folkloric, and layered. It caught the dark mystery and music of the words within.

The Tempest is a ceremony, a ritual in itself, publicly performed in a sky-open theatre on the site of the Blackfriars monastery on the Thames, a river into which sacrifices were once thrown to propitiate the gods. It is a pared-back, mysterious work, ‘deliberately enigmatic’, as Anne Righter says in her introduction to the Penguin edition, ‘an extraordinarily secretive work of art’, so emblematic that it might be acted out in mime, without any words at all.

Its origins lay in the fate of Sea Venture, which sank off Bermuda in 1609 while carrying colonists from Plymouth to Jamestown; Harry Southampton himself was an investor in the Virginian settlement. Shakespeare drew on William Strachey’s account of the wreck, a natural history of disaster, with its tales of St Elmo’s fire at the height of the storm – ‘an apparition of a little round light, like a faint Starre, trembling, and streaming along with a sparkling blaze’ – and the eerie calls of petrels coming in to roost, ‘a strange hollow and harsh howling’. Their cries earned Bermuda its reputation as an island of devils, one which Strachey rationally dismissed, although he did acknowledge the presence of other monsters: ‘I forbear to speak what a sort of whales we have seen hard aboard the shore.’

The Tempest is the closest Shakespeare comes to the New World. It is almost an American play, although two centuries later its castaways might have been washed up on another colony: Van Diemen’s Land, on whose remote south-western shores one can still imagine a seventeenth-century shipwreck and its stranded sailors stumbling about on the alien sand. Some saw Caliban and Ariel as symbolic representations of newly-discovered native peoples, whose countries were already being plundered by the West; others have seen a reflection of an island nearer to home: Ireland, a troublesome place filled with its own wild people, and regarded as a plantation to be conquered. But equally, Prospero’s isle might be utopia, a nowhere place over which his magic rises as a mist veiling time and space – just as a century earlier, Columbus, researching his expedition, had written notes and marginalia about strange people cast up on the shores of the Azores and the west of Ireland: ‘We have seen many notable things and especially in Galway, in Ireland, a man and a woman with miraculous form, pushed along by the storm on two logs.’

Shakespeare, nearing the end of his life, appeared to have recreated himself in the omniscient magician; others have seen Prospero as a reflection of Elizabeth I’s astrologer, John Dee, who communed with angels using a golden disc, and peered into his black obsidian mirror – stolen from the New World – in order to see the future and the past. The whole play seems to be happening before it was written. It is fraught in the original sense of the word, as a ship filled with freight, as well as with meaning. Shakespeare was familiar with the ocean: he refers to it more than two hundred times in his works, and some critics believe that he was once a sailor. Certainly he knew its meaning, and set The Tempest on a ‘never-surfeited sea’, a transformative place. After the storm, Ariel tells Ferdinand that his father, the king, lies ‘full fathom five’; he has been made immortal by the water, becoming a baroque jewel in the process:

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

For the artists and poets who came after, The Tempest lingered in its magical power and deceptive simplicity. Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought that Prospero’s art ‘could not only call up the spirits of the deep, but the characters as they were and are and will be’, and that Ariel was ‘neither born of heaven, nor of earth; but, as it were, between both’. For Percy Shelley, who would be nicknamed Ariel, the play evoked ‘The murmuring of summer seas’ and his own in-between state. And for John Keats, in whose volumes of Shakespeare’s works the play was the most heavily scored, it became a pattern for his imaginative life, like a map to be followed. Indeed, he sailed down Southampton Water with The Tempest in his pocket.

In April 1817, Keats, then a medical student in London, took the coach to Southampton in search of distraction. He had loved the sea ever since he’d read of ‘sea-shouldering whales’ in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene – ‘What an image that is!’; his poetry habit had made him ‘a Leviathan … all in a Tremble’, and in a letter to his friend Leigh Hunt, he evoked ‘a Whale’s back in the Sea of Prose’. But as he walked along the port’s medieval walls and looked down the grey waterway, the young poet did not see what Horace Walpole had seen a generation before, ‘the Southampton sea, deep blue, glistening with vessels’, nor even any of the dolphins which sometimes swam up it. Instead he found muddy shores laid bare at low tide; the sea had run out. ‘The Southampton water when I saw it just now was no better than a low water Water which did no more than answer my expectations,’ he told his brothers, ‘– it will have mended its Manners by 3.’ Keats’s nerves were raw, so he took out his Shakespeare and quoted from The Tempest for solace: ‘There’s my comfort.’ That afternoon he left on the rising tide, sailing to the Isle of Wight where, troubled by the island’s strange noises and unable to sleep, he began his long poem, Endymion, filled with moonbeams and snorting whales and leaping dolphins and the tale of Glaucus, the fisherman-turned-god with fins for limbs, whom Endymion frees from Circe the witch.

Keats’s contemporary J.M.W.Turner was also stirred by the restless sea. His imagination stained southern skies: he sketched this shore and painted storms off the Isle of Wight, and when he claimed to have had himself lashed to a ship’s mast in a blizzard so that he could create a great swirling vortex of waves and cloud – as if he were seeing into the future – he gave the vessel’s name as Ariel. And in this stormy story, Shakespeare and Turner would in turn influence another writer. Herman Melville’s eyes had been damaged by scarlet fever in his childhood and rendered as ‘tender as young sparrows’; he was thirty years old, with a career at sea behind him, when he read Shakespeare, discovering a large-print edition of the playwright’s works in 1849. As he began to write about his great white whale – his head full of Turner’s spumey paintings he’d seen in London that year – Melville read The Tempest and drew a box around Prospero’s ‘quiet words’, the magician’s wry response to his daughter’s naïve exclamation on seeing the aliens:

Miranda. O! wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! Oh brave new world,

That has such people in’t!

Prospero. ’Tis new to thee

Melville, himself the scion of a colony, saw the prophecy in Shakespeare’s drama and in Turner’s art: both helped him create the strange, ominous world of Moby-Dick. In it, Captain Ahab is a monomaniacal Prospero, and as the opening of The Tempest is lit by St Elmo’s fire, so the same eerie light garlands his ship, the Pequod, in a ghostly glow; animals acquire symbolic meaning – whales and birds accompany the narrative as familiars, swimming and flying alongside the story – and the sea rises up as if with a mind of its own, as it does in Turner’s paintings. Meanwhile mortal men pursue their deadly trade: a restive crew sails into the unknown – among them a tattooed cannibal, Queequeg, a kind of Caliban – and Ahab blasphemously baptises his harpooneers in the name of the devil. Nor would the American’s fascination with Shakespeare’s play end there. At the end of his own last work, Billy Budd, Melville imagines the hanged body of his Handsome Sailor consigned to the deep, entangled in oozy weeds; it is an echo of Jonah’s fate in a biblical sea – ‘where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and the weeds were wrapped about his head’ – but also of Alonso in The Tempest, who, believing his son to be drowned, wishes he too was ‘mudded in that oozy bed’.

Constantly recreated, constantly re-enacted, The Tempest lived on beyond its creator, passed on from hand to hand. It became a secret cipher, a futuristic shipping forecast, an extended magical spell. It conjured a queer sea out of its strange beasts and its masquerades, and stood against time and tide even as it rose with them in a storm stirred up by a dramatist whose own identity still seems fluid and uncertain.

As a new century loomed, the play gained momentum, gathering clouds rather than diminishing with distance and time. A few years after Melville left Billy Budd on his desk unpublished, another former sailor, Joseph Conrad, drew on The Tempest for his Heart of Darkness, with Kurtz as a terrible Prospero. Two decades later, Eliot embedded fragments of the play in The Waste Land, as if Shakespeare had foreseen the undone. Eliot’s work was rivered with the brown god of the Thames and the ship-wrecked, sea-monstered coast of New England he’d sailed as a boy; and as his Madame Sosotris lays out the Tarot card of the drowned Phoenician Sailor – ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes’ – she warns ‘Fear death by water.’ Meanwhile, the bones of another sailor, ‘a fortnight dead’, are picked clean by the creatures of the sea, the slimy things the Ancient Mariner saw down there.

Haunted and haunting, The Tempest accompanied the twentieth century as a parallel rite; few other works of art have been so replicated, remodelled, and re-presented. W.H. Auden reimagined its characters’ fates in his verse drama The Sea and the Mirror; Aldous Huxley drew on it ironically for his brave new world; and the science-fiction film Forbidden Planet turned Ariel into Robbie the robot for an era fearful of its own aliens. And at the end of the darkened nineteen-seventies – as a British satellite named Prospero spun into outer space, following its fellow transmitter, Ariel, launched a decade earlier – Derek Jarman, living in a London warehouse on the Thames and fascinated by John Dee, filmed his alchemical version as ‘a chronology of three hundred and fifty years of the play’s existence’, with Prospero played by the future author of Whale Nation, a sibilant blind actor nicknamed Orlando as Caliban, an androgynous man-boy as Ariel, and Elisabeth Welch singing ‘Stormy Weather’ surrounded by dancing sailors. In this lineage of otherness, filled with hermaphrodites and shape-shifters, it does not seem a coincidence that the director wanted Ariel’s songs to be sung by the starman who obsessed me, and who presided over my blue notebook.

The word ‘tempest’ itself derives from the Latin tempus, for time. Everything is new and old on Prospero’s island. Like the sea itself. Always changing, always the same.

Out of the blackness obscure noises drift from the docks, booming over the water. The red lights of the power-station chimney blink like an industrial lighthouse, summoning and warning. You can be what you want to be in the dark. For me, it used to be nightclubs under London streets. Now it’s another nocturnal performance.

An hour before dawn, before the light starts to stain the summer sky violet, I ride back to the beach. Foxes sidle out of the woods and rabbits flash their white scuts at the approach of my bike light. High in the trees over the shore, a pair of tawny owls converse in screeches. Crows hang in the branches, all angular tails and beaks, as if they’d been born out of the boles. All these creatures own this place in the interregnum of the dark; they should not be anywhere else. No one could have told you when you were young what would happen. They didn’t dare. It’s enough to realise that what we have lost is still ahead of us. I see things that are not there.

One magical moment; I feel like a penitent. The sea is so still it seems like a sin to break its surface. But I do. Swimming at night, with diminished sense of sight, only makes the act all the more sensual. You feel the water around you; you lose yourself in its sway. Fish bite me, leaving loving grazes.

I turn on my back, watching the stars fall.

I first saw it slumped on the weedy slipway one afternoon. A deer, sprawled at the high water mark. It looked perfect, lying there, thrown up by the tide, staring glassy-eyed to the sky. Had it died trying to swim across from the forest? Or had it slipped and fallen, cloven hoofs clattering on the concrete with panic in its eyes? Perhaps it had been shot, although there was no wound in its russet pelt.

The next day someone had hauled out this sea-deer, this antlered seal, and impaled it on the spikes of the metal railings. It hung there by its neck, dangling as a warning, the way farmers nail dead owls, wings outstretched, to barn doors. I wanted to relieve it of this indignity, to take it down from its cross, but I hadn’t the strength.

So I waited to see what happened next.

The following day it reappeared on the shore, as if it had climbed down overnight. It was accompanied by a carrion crow, tentatively but intimately pecking away at the flesh, performing the last rites. I wished the bird well, and a good breakfast.

I’d forgotten about the carcase when, a week later, I came across its remains in the surf. By now the body had been reduced to a single strand of vertebrae, picked clean by crabs and gulls. It was down to its essential scaffolding, its skeletal beauty twisted like the ghost of a horned sea serpent lolling in the water. The stubby antlers sprouted from the bulbous, rough-edged rings on the forehead; caught between them was a scrap of fetlock-like fur. Skeins of grey flesh still hung about the skull, scrappily attached to the thin white bone. I had to have it, this grotesque piece of flotsam, something to add to the pile back home, the fragments of blue-and-white china, the clay pipes with the bloom still on them, the shards of misty sea-glass, the chunks of green-glazed medieval pots, the stones pierced with holes.

Using a bit of driftwood to hold down the spine, I pulled at the antlers, twisting and wrestling with them as with a bull. It occurred to me, as I did so, how easy it might be to detach a human head. With a stagger, I succeeded in wrenching off my trophy, my prize for having watched so patiently. I had to gouge out a gelatinous eye before stuffing the skull into a plastic bag and tying it to the back of my bike.

I rode away from the beach, passing walkers who wouldn’t guess at my cargo. Back home I opened a hole in the warm brown earth and buried the head up to its antlers. They stood proud of the soil like a pruned rose bush. I piled rocks on top to guard against predators and went back indoors to wait till the antlers sprouted and grew like branches, and as below the surface the skull grew roots which became bones, its lost vertebrae, femurs and ribs all restored, ready to rear up out of the earth, a resurrected, a newly-grown deer of my own.

HEGAZESTOTHESHORE

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.

THESTARLIKESORROWSOFIMMORTALEYES

I return to the Cape on the eve of the new year. The summer is long gone. The sun looks as strong as ever, but it is made milky by the cold, its span over the horizon shortened. The days open late, become public, flicker, then close early, reclaiming their privacy.

As Dennis and Dory and I walk the beach at Herring Cove, the Arctic wind hits us full on. It bites at my face, tearing off the sun’s facile heat. I pull my scarf over my nose and stumble through the sand. Dennis kneels to the ground; we observe the rituals of the dead. A herring gull lies eviscerated, its guts pecked out by a glaucous gull which we saw at a distance, crouching over its cousin, ready and welcome protein. Dennis records the carcase on an index card. The blood, on pure white feathers, is strangely orange. The hole in its belly is big enough for me to wear the dead bird as a hat, should I so wish.

I throw Dory’s ball. She is naked, save for her collar. I worry that she might be shivering too. Her brow furrows and she cocks her head to one side as she asks me to throw the ball again. When we are with dogs, physicality is uncomplicated. They walk beside us as our outliers. Part of the human party, they are also our bridge with the natural world. They are our other. They are not cleverer than us, so we love them.

Like all animals, Dory has extraordinary eyes. Hers are fringed with pale lashes. No human could look so exquisite, or so feral, so unadorned. I can see why people once worshipped dogs. As we drive to the beach Dory perches on the armrest between Dennis and me, peering intently ahead, seeing and hearing things we do not see or hear. We only know because her ears rise or her eyes twitch. She knows where we are going. Perpetually expectant, as if every experience were a surprise, her body quivers with the excitement of just being alive. It is Funktionslust; an animal’s pleasure in doing what it does well, in being itself.

Dory is an import, like everyone else here, rescued from the backstreets of Miami. Now she scents foxes and chases balls, sometimes letting them roll into the surf, then staring at them as if daring me to go in after them. Her breeding, such as it is, may be Caribbean – a wild dog, the sort you see roaming Haitian beaches in packs and howling in the heat of the night – but her compact body seems suited to this winter landscape. Her neat flat coat is the colour of the dunes and the parched grass, although now she is growing fine silver hairs through her desert pelt. She never stops being, never stops running for her ball; I think her heart would burst before she let up the chase. Her life runs ahead of ours, speeding up as she races alongside us in another time zone. I’d like to talk to her in her voice, but like Wittgenstein and his lion, I wouldn’t understand what I might hear. Debbie, Dennis’s wife, says that sometimes Dory comes back from the woods shaking as if in fear, as if she’d seen something out there.

‘I am secretly afraid of animals,’ Edith Wharton, an erstwhile New Englander for all that she spent almost all her life in Paris, wrote in 1924, ‘– of all animals except dogs, and even of some dogs. I think it is because of the Usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which belies it, and is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them; left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? their eyes seem to ask us.’

The wonder is that all animals are not afraid of us. J.A. Baker, who spent the nineteen-sixties observing the wildlife of Essex, wrote of finding a heron on the winter marshes, trapped by its wings frozen to the ground. Baker dispatched the bird, humanely, watching the light leave its frightened gaze and ‘the agonised sunlight of its eyes slowly heal with cloud’.

‘No pain, no death, is more terrible to a wild creature than its fear of man,’ Baker concludes, in a deeply affecting passage, cited by Robert Macfarlane: ‘A poisoned crow, gaping and helplessly floundering in the grass, bright yellow foam bubbling from its throat, will dash itself up again and again on the descending wall of air, if you try and catch it. A rabbit, inflated and foul with myxomatosis … will feel the vibration of your footstep and will look for you with bulging, sightless eyes. We are the killers. We stink of death.’ Nature writing becomes war reporting. I remember the countryside of my childhood infected with that disease. In his ‘Myxomatosis’, written in 1955, Philip Larkin sees a rabbit ‘caught in the centre of a soundless field’, and uses his stick in an act of mercy. ‘You may have thought things would come right again | If you could only keep quite still and wait.’ My sister remembers our father having to do the same thing: the same terrifying eyes, the same dispatch.

We only play our roles; animals’ fates are our own. The fifteenth-century orator Pico della Mirandola, in his essay ‘On the Dignity of Man’, declared that to be human is to be caught between God and animal: ‘We have set thee at the world’s centre that thou mayest more easily observe what is in the world.’ Five hundred years later, the Caribbean writer Monique Roffey saw that ‘Animals fill the gap between man and God.’ That gap has widened. As John Berger observed, animals furnished our first myths; we saw them in the stars and in ourselves. ‘Animals came from over the horizon. They belonged there and here. Likewise they were mortal and immortal.’ But in the past two hundred years, they have gradually disappeared from our world, both physically and metaphysically: ‘Today we live without them. And in this new solitude, anthropomorphism makes us doubly uneasy.’

We expect animals to be human, like us, forgetting that we are animals, like them. They ‘are not brethren, they are not underlings’, the naturalist Henry Beston wrote from his Cape Cod shack in the nineteen-twenties; to him, animals were ‘gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear … other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth’. That fear we see in their eyes is fear in alien eyes, eyes created for other realms.

Dennis, Dory and I walk on, around the cove. The tide peels back time, revealing frozen expanses of sand and waves of wrack. Skeins of briar and line have twined together like an elongated net constructed to catch primeval fish. I half expect to see a Neolithic family foraging on the beach. The landscape is moonlike, bone-scattered. Sere, stripped back by the winter, pallid and raw. Yet despite the intense cold – so barbarous it becomes a kind of warmth – the shore is full of life.

Everything is residual and tentative in the intertidal zone; a place belonging to no one, ‘a sort of chaos’, as Thoreau saw it, ‘which only anomalous creatures can inhabit’. Ribbed mussels, elegantly slipper-shaped in metallic blue and mauve, lie next to tiny flat stones, beige and green and purple and ringed with white. Through this tesserated pavement, samphire pushes up its stiff fingers; it’s called pickle grass here, a name that sums up its salty gherkin crunch. Stattice stands upright; even its everlasting purple flowers have been leached to a lifeless brown. Wind-burnt stalks of wild rose have long since lost their scent, but can still tear bare flesh. Pale-green lichens, barely alive at all, grow infinitesimally, stone flowers in this tundra-by-the-sea.

Dennis shows me his favourite tree: a stunted cedar like a large bonsai, spreading its skirt over a sandy hillock, as though claiming the site of an ancient tumulus. Impaled in a bayberry bush is the empty shell of a crab, probably dropped by a passing gull, still snapping its upraised claws at the sea across the dunes.

The estuary ahead widens with the falling tide. In the distance is Race Point Light. In between is Hatches Harbor, site of another lost settlement, like Long Point. Dennis thinks this was the place known as Helltown – an outpost for the outcasts of an already remote place, the human reverse of this heaven. Perhaps it resembled Billingsgate Island down at Wellfleet, which was reserved for young men, with its own whale-lookout, tavern and brothel.

Today there’s not a soul to be seen on this beach. But one winter morning I arrived here to see what looked like black sails a mile down the shore. As they dipped and swayed, I thought they belonged to particularly intrepid windsurfers. Only when I raised my binoculars did I see that the dark triangles were rising and falling, flexingly powered by something far bigger and stronger than a wetsuited human. I realised, with a sharp intake of cold breath, that they were the flukes of right whales, rolling in the waves.

Trying to remember the intricate geography of this outermost edge of the Cape, I cycled round to the fire road and as far as I could to the distant beach, abandoning my bike in the dunes. I would have run if the sand had allowed me. Cresting a low hill and stumbling through the marran grass, I suddenly regained the shore.

Below me lay a great crescent-shaped arena, occupied by hundreds of herring gulls. As I approached, they rose as one like a theatre curtain to reveal, barely twenty yards beyond the surf, half a dozen right whales engaged in what scientists call a surface active group, and what you and I might call foreplay.

I crouched there, doing my best not to disturb them. For an hour or more I watched their sleek blubbery bodies tumble and turn over one another in an intimate display, all the stranger and more physical for their nearness to the shore, as if they might be beached in the throes of their passion. But nothing could have curtailed those caresses. A harbour seal sat at the waterline watching too, hesitating to share the waves with these loved-up leviathans. It was a spectacle made more extreme by the cold, the sun, the wind and the silence as these gigantic animals, whose glossiness seemed to absorb all the light and the energy of the day, danced around one another in an amorous ballet whose choreography was determined only by their own sensuality.

There are no whales today, amorous or otherwise. Perhaps it is too cold even for their courtship. Dennis and I take shelter in the lee of a dune. For a few moments we’re out of the wind and can draw warm breath again. With the sun on our backs, our muscles relax. Hunched shoulders and curled hands loosen a little. As I look around, I realise that we are surrounded by bones – femurs and sternums, ribs and skulls – all tangled up in the salt hay.

We’re standing in a graveyard, an animal ossuary.

Poking about in the wrack we find a fox splayed in the tousled seaweed as if caught in the act of running, or of agony. Its flesh has been stripped away like an anatomical drawing. Clenched jaws display fine canines; ribs are picked clean. But its brush, the length of its body again, streams behind it, resplendent, rotting.

Nearby is a gannet. Or rather, its wings, six feet wide, great white-and-black contraptions discarded by some modern Icarus who’d fallen face-first into the grainy wet sand, leaving a pair of feet sticking out of the ground. A single gannet would fill my box bedroom back home; a bird on a giant scale. I hold the feathers up behind my back, as if the fledgling buds had burst through my skin, sprouting from my shoulderblades and unfolding to lift me into the air. I remember reading in my children’s encyclopaedia that my dreams of growing functional wings were impossible, because I’d have to grow a breastbone longer than my body. The accompanying illustration showed a man with his sternum hanging down between his legs, like some grotesque man-bird chimera drawn by Leonardo.

We turn back into the wind. The strand sweeps open and wide, connecting the inner bay with the outer sea. A beach that in summer is filled with sunbathers and anglers remains resolutely empty. I take off my clothes – no easy matter with frozen fingers and gloves, hat, scarf, jacket, fleece, two jumpers, boots and socks and jeans and long johns to contend with – and run into the navy-blue sea. It rolls on, and on. It looks like it did six months ago and five thousand years ago. It even feels the same. I treat it accordingly, borne up, singing, as though nothing has changed. As though everything will always be like this, and always was.

It is New Year’s Day.

Dennis and Dory walk on ahead. Glowing pink and shivering like a dog, my extremities as navy blue as the sea, I struggle back into my clothes, unable to do my jacket up with my numb fingers, and run after them. Dory looks back, apparently relieved. Did she think I’d been lost for good? In the car park Dennis has to rub my hands in his, making jokes about hoping that none of his friends will be driving by. My teeth chatter and my muscles shiver, shaking me back to life. Skin and bone burn like a hard cold flame. And they continue to burn and shake for an hour afterwards, till my body is convinced that the threat is over. Every swim is a little death. But it is also a reminder that you are alive.

Out at sea, hundreds of eiders and mergansers bob in the waves. They must be among the most hardy of all animals, these sea ducks, forever riding on the freezing water, resilient and resigned. At the north end of Herring Cove – in the lee of the rip of the Race where the sea turns dark as it becomes the ocean – is a sandbar which traps a temporary lagoon at high tide. In the heat of summer it’s a wonderfully warm place to swim, as languorous as a Mediterranean pool, although once I was horrified to see half a humpback beneath me, its great white knobbly flipper all but waving to me from the sandy bottom, as if its part-carcase were preserved by the salt water. Today the tide is running fast, and would quickly carry me out to sea.

This entire rounded tip of the Cape is a curling catchment, a beneficiary of long shore drift, perpetually shifting to reveal shipwrecks sticking out of the dunes. After winter storms have destroyed most of the car park – leaving its tarmac hanging in slabs like cooled lava over the sand – a chunk of ship, stirred out of retirement, emerges up the beach. Was it washed up or merely uncovered by the storms, lying there all along as I walked there, its knees and ribs beneath me, rubbed and eroded by the decades in which they have rolled around on the sea bed, waiting to be revealed like some vast wooden whale? It might be the remains of a twentieth-century vessel or a Viking longboat. The splintered timbers and curled ribs of oak lie cloaked in emerald-green weed, bolted pieces of something whose shape can only be guessed at.

‘The annals of this voracious beach! who could write them, unless it were a shipwrecked sailor?’ Thoreau wrote as he wandered from one end of the Cape to the other from 1849 to 1857, continually drawn back to this inbetween place. ‘How many who have seen it have seen it only in the midst of danger and distress, the last strip of earth which their mortal eyes beheld! Think of the amount of suffering which a single strand has witnessed! The ancients would have represented it as a sea-monster with open jaws, more terrible than Scylla and Charybdis.’

Walking towards Provincetown, Thoreau saw an arrangement of bleached bones on the beach ahead, a mile before he reached them; only then did he realise they were human, with scraps of dried flesh still on them. It was a sign Shelley had already foreseen, ‘On the beach of a northern sea’, as if in a premonition of his own demise, ‘a solitary heap, | One white skull and seven dry bones, | On the margin of the stones’.

On another walk Thoreau was told of two bodies found on the strand: a man, and a corpulent woman. ‘The man had thick boots on, though his head was off, but “it was along-side”. It took the finder some weeks to get over the sight. Perhaps they were man and wife, and whom God had joined the ocean-currents had not put asunder.’ Like the victims of Titanic, some bodies were ‘boxed up and sunk’ at sea; others were buried in the sand. ‘There are more consequences to a shipwreck than the underwriters notice,’ said Thoreau. ‘The Gulf Stream may return some to their native shores, or drop them in some out-of-the-way cave of ocean, where time and the elements will write new riddles with their bones.’ I see that same sea in his eyes, eyes that seem to see the sea forever; what it had found, and what it had lost.

Nearly four thousand ships have been wrecked along the Cape’s outer shore, from Sparrowhawk, which ran aground down at Orleans in 1626 and whose survivors were given refuge by the Pilgrims at Plymouth, to the British ship Somerset, which came to grief off Race Point in 1778 during the Revolutionary War, having fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill, foundering on the sandy bar off the Race. Twenty-one of its sailors and marines drowned, but more than four hundred were taken prisoner and sent to Boston. The Cape Codders escorting them gave up halfway, possibly worn down by their charges asking, ‘Are we there yet?’ Somerset has appeared every century since, in 1886, 1973 and 2010; a spirit ship, a beached Flying Dutchman. One writer in the nineteen-forties claimed that scores of people had seen ‘ghosts in the vicinity, ghosts of the British sailors’. The ship remains a sovereign vessel; perhaps I ought to reclaim it for my queen.

Meanwhile, many other wrecks lie out there like time machines. Thoreau saw the bottom of the sea as ‘strewn with anchors, some deeper and some shallower, and alternately covered and uncovered by the sand, perchance with a small length of iron cable still attached, – of which where is the other end?’

‘So many unconcluded tales to be continued another time,’ he wrote. ‘So, if we had diving-bells adapted to the spiritual deeps, we should see anchors with their cables attached, as thick as eels in vinegar, all wriggling vainly toward their holding-ground. But that is not treasure for us which another man has lost; rather it is for us to seek what no other man has found or can find.’

Wreckage and the wrecked: they merge into one, a mangling of man and land, of vessel and sea. I think of Crusoe cast up on the shore waiting for Friday’s footsteps, as the waves washed over a plaintive nineteen-sixties soundtrack; of Ishmael, another orphan, clinging to a coffin carved for Queequeg which provided his lifebuoy; of beached whales and beached humans. And I hear my father singing, ‘My bonny lies over the ocean, my bonny lies over the sea, my bonny lies over the ocean, O, bring back my bonny to me.’ I used to hear ‘body’ for ‘bonny’.

When Thoreau was visiting the Cape, an average of two ships every month would be lost in winter storms, especially on the deceptive bars off the Race at Peaked Hill, where shoulders of sand shadow the ocean’s edge. The roaring breakers catch white on the shifting shelf, luminous at night with the memory of the lives they’ve taken. And all this happened within sight of land.

‘Ship ashore! All hands perishing!’

These tempests were not conjured up by a magician, nor were there any sprites on hand to guide the survivors to safety. Commonly, sailors did not learn to swim – partly through superstition – ‘What the sea wants, the sea will have’ – and partly through practicality, knowing that adrift on the open ocean, their flailing would only prolong their fate. Any attempts to save the shipwrecked were often defeated by the elements. Would-be rescuers could only look on and wait until the storms subsided, by which time it was too late. All that was left to do was to salvage the wreck. In the eccentric museum at the Highland Light, housed in a 1906 hotel standing in the shadow of the lighthouse on the windblown headland, one of the most haunted places I have ever visited, a row of assorted chairs from many different disasters stands as a testimony to lost souls and salvaged domesticity: a sad line of mismatched seating, ranged along a wall at a students’ party. Upstairs, rooms with stable doors lined along a long, narrow and dimly-lit corridor; they still seemed filled with fitful guests, and something in the darkness down the end told me to get out.

Those who did make it ashore could die of exposure in this no-man’s-land, with no hope of reaching dwellings set deep inland, far from the raging sea. In 1797 the Massachusetts Humane Society set up ‘Humane-houses’, a series of huts equipped with straw and matches to provide survivors with warmth and shelter. Their echoes remain in the shacks still scattered through the dunes: rough constructions put together from grey beach-wood and timbers as though assembled by those lost sailors. Even in the town, salvaged ships’ knees propped up houses against the storms that brought the flotsam here, while Thoreau recorded fences woven with whale ribs.

Other dangers lurk in these countervailing waters, seen and unseen. Locals told Thoreau there was ‘no bathing on the Atlantic side, on account of the undertow and the rumour of sharks’, and he was warned by the lighthouse keepers at Truro and Eastham not to swim in the surf. They would not do so for any sum, ‘for they sometimes saw the sharks tossed up and quiver for a moment on the sand’. Thoreau doubted this, although he did see a six-foot fish prowling within thirty feet of the shore. ‘It was of a pale brown color, singularly film-like and indistinct in the water, as if all nature abetted this child of ocean.’ He watched it come into a cove ‘or bathing-tub’, in which he had been swimming, where the water was just four or five feet deep, ‘and after exploring it go slowly out again’. Undeterred, Thoreau continued to swim there, ‘only observing first from the bank if the cove was preoccupied’.

To the philosopher, this back shore seemed ‘fuller of life, more aërated perhaps than that of the Bay, like soda water’, its wildness lent an extra charge by that sense of life and death. Down at Ballston Beach, where Mary and I often swim out of season while seals and whales feed just off the sandbar, the powerful undertow seeks to pull us out. Not long ago a man swimming here with his son was bitten by a great white shark. Public notices instruct swimmers to avoid seals, the sharks’ true targets. Recently a fisherman showed me a photograph on his phone, taken at Race Point. A great white breaks the surfline, barely in the water, with its teeth around a fat grey seal. I place my quivering body in that tender bite, the ‘white gliding ghostliness of repose’ which Ishmael discerned, ‘the white stillness of death in this shark’. I still swim there, despite Todd Motta’s warning, ‘You don’t wanna go like that.’ The water is as hard and cold as ever. But one day, I think, I will not come out of it.

In his book The Perfect Storm, the story of a great gale which hit New England in 1991, Sebastian Junger details the way a human drowns. ‘The instinct not to breathe underwater is so strong that it overcomes the agony of running out of air.’ The brain, desperate to maintain itself to the last breath, will not give the order to inhale until it is nearly losing consciousness. This is the break point. In adults, it comes after about eighty seconds. It is a drastic decision, a final, fatal choice – like an ailing dolphin deciding to strand rather than drown because of something deep in its mammalian core; ‘a sort of neurological optimism’, as Junger puts it, ‘as if the body were saying, Holding our breath is killing us, and breathing in might not kill us, so we might as well breathe in.’

Drawing in water rather than air, human lungs quickly flood. But lack of oxygen will have already, in those last seconds, created a sensation of darkness closing in, like a camera aperture stopping down. I imagine that receding light, being drawn deep, caught between the life I am leaving and the eternity I am entering. We know, from those who have come back from death, that ‘the panic of a drowning person is mixed with an odd incredulity that this is actually happening’. Their last thoughts may be, ‘So this is drowning,’ says Junger, ‘So this is how my life finally ends.’

And at that final moment, what? Who will take care of my dog? What will happen to my work? Did I turn the gas off? ‘The drowning person may feel as if it’s the last, greatest act of stupidity in his life.’ One man who nearly drowned, a Scottish doctor sailing by steamship to Ceylon in 1892, reported the struggle of his body as it fought for the last gasps of oxygen, his bones contorting with the effort, only to give way to a strangely pleasant feeling as the pain disappeared and he began to lose consciousness. He remembered, in that instant, that his old teacher had told him that drowning was the least painful way to die, ‘like falling about in a green field in early summer’.

It is that euphoria which offers an aesthetic end, leaving the body whole and inviolate, a beautiful corpse, as if the sea might preserve you for eternity. There is an inviting compulsion about falling into the sea, because it seems such an unmessy, arbitrary way to go. You’re there one minute, in another world the next; a transition, rather than a destruction.

On his journey from New York to England in 1849 on the ship Southampton, Melville saw a man in the sea. ‘For an instant, I thought I was dreaming; for no one else seemed to see what I did. Next moment, I shouted “Man overboard!”’ He was amazed that none of the passengers or sailors seemed very anxious to save the man. He threw the tackle of the quarter boat into the water, but the victim could not, or would not, catch hold of it.

The whole incident played out in a strange, muted manner, as if no one really noticed or cared, not even the man himself.

‘His conduct was unaccountable; he could have saved himself, had he been so minded. I was struck by the expression of his face in the water. It was merry. At last he drifted off under the ship’s counter, & all hands cried, “He’s gone!”’

Running to the taffrail, Melville watched the man floating off, ‘saw a few bubbles, & never saw him again. No boat was lowered, no sail was shortened, hardly any noise was made. The man drowned like a bullock.’

Melville learned afterwards that the man had declared several times that he would jump overboard; just before his final act, he’d tried to take his child with him, in his arms. The captain said he’d witnessed at least five other such incidents. Even as efforts were made to save her husband, one woman had said it was no good, ‘& when he was drowned, she said “there were plenty more men to be had.”’

Half a century later, in 1909, Jack London – who was a deep admirer of Melville – published Martin Eden, his semi-autobiographical account of a rough young sailor who becomes a writer. London, the son of an astrologist and a spiritualist, was born in San Francisco in 1876. He had led an itinerant life as seaman, tramp and gold prospector. He was a self-described ‘blond-beast’, a man of action, the first person to introduce surfing from Hawaii to California; he also became the highest-paid author in the world with books such as The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf and White Fang. But the proudest achievement of his life, he said, was an hour spent steering a sealing ship through a typhoon. ‘With my own hands I had done my trick at the wheel and guided a hundred tons of wood and iron through a few million tons of wind and waves.’

London wrote Martin Eden while sailing the South Pacific, trying to escape his own fame; the New York Times had reported FEAR JACK LONDON IS LOST IN PACIFIC when he didn’t arrive as expected at the Marquesas, the remote islands where Melville himself had jumped ship in 1840. In London’s book, Eden, the first man to himself, cynical about his new-found celebrity, contemplates suicide in the early hours of the morning. He thinks of Longfellow’s lines – ‘The sea is still and deep; | All things within its bosom sleep; | A single step and all is o’er, | A plunge, a bubble, and no more’ – and decides to take that step. Midway to the Marquesas, he opens the porthole in his cabin and lowers himself out.

Hanging by his fingertips, Eden can feel his feet dangling in the waves below. The surf surges up to pull him in. He lets go.

Everything in his strong constitution fights against this act of self-destruction. As he hits the water, he begins to swim; his arms and legs move independently of his will, ‘as though it were his intention to make for the nearest land a thousand miles or so away’. A tuna takes a bite out of his white body. He laughs out loud. He tries to breathe the water in, ‘deeply, deliberately, after the manner of a man taking an anaesthetic’. But even as he pushes his body down vertically, sinking like ‘a white statue into the sea’, he is pushed back to the surface, ‘into the clear sight of the stars’.

Finally, Eden fills his lungs with air and dives head-first, past luminous tuna, plunging as deep as he can. His body bursts with bubbles. He is aware of a flashing bright light, like a lighthouse in his brain. He feels he is tumbling down an interminable stairway. ‘And somewhere at the bottom he fell into darkness. That much he knew. He had fallen into darkness. And at the instant he knew, he ceased to know.’ Eden, this handsome sailor whose body is described as solid, hewn and tanned, is compressed by the weight and darkness of the sea, falling asleep on its bed, so still that a shake of the shoulder could not wake him. He has been sacrificed to his own ideals, his own masculinity. London said his novel was about a man who had to die, ‘not because of his lack of faith in God, but because of his lack of faith in men’. His writing is vivid enough to recall his own youthful attempt to drown himself in San Francisco Bay, when ‘some maundering fancy of going out with the tide suddenly obsessed me’. ‘The water was delicious,’ he wrote. ‘It was a man’s way to die.’

There have been moments in the water when I felt they might be my last. One dark November afternoon I swam off Brighton, under the shadow of its burnt-out West Pier, while a murmuration of starlings eddied about the rusting ribs above me. I hadn’t realised, until I entered the water, how strong the undertow was; or, as I swam out, how it would take me up, take control and tip me head over heels before dragging me back out.

I’d lost my grip on the world. The heavy pebbles of the beach rolled beneath me, and in the falling darkness, as the lights came on along the esplanade, I thought how banal it would be to die within sight of a dual carriageway and a row of fish-and-chip shops and burger bars. And I wonder, when I am dead, what thoughts will be left in my head, like the black box recorder of a downed plane.

Another time, on Dorset’s West Bay, under its towering cliffs, the tow played a similar trick. I quickly realised what I had done, and tried to climb out. Again I was turned over for my impudence and thrown face-down on the shingle, my features squashed like a peat bog man. Mark told me this was the way surfers smashed their faces, and that evening in town, someone warned me that the beach was notorious, and that only a few months before a young man had drowned there.

And I thought about Virginia Woolf’s body being taken out, as if her death were a culmination of all her words, moving inexorably towards the sea.

It’s odd to return to the books I was required to read at college, their unbroken backs covered in clear plastic to protect them against some future event, preserving them for a time when I would actually understand them, although their pages are now vignetted in brown, as if the sun had penetrated their closed edges. They wait for me to open them, to bring them back to life, familiar and strange and dangerous, as though I were reading them for the first time.

To the Lighthouse is set in the Hebrides, but it draws on Woolf’s childhood holidays in Cornwall, and memories of her Victorian mother. Mrs Ramsay hears and feels the waves as they ‘remorselessly beat the message of life’; they make her think of ‘the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea’. At night, as her guests sit around the candlelit table, she looks out of the uncurtained windows through the dark rippling glass – ‘a reflection in which things waved and vanished, waterily’, as if all the world was at sea – and she thinks of herself as a sailor who, if the ship had sunk, ‘would have whirled round and round and found rest on the floor of the sea’. In the distance, the lighthouse stands tall and white on a rock.

The water possessed an ambivalent power for Woolf. One moonlit night, when she was a young woman, she and Rupert Brooke swam naked in the river Cam at Byron’s Pool, named after the poet, who had swum there when he was at Cambridge. Brooke was proud of his improbable and Byronic ability to emerge from the water with an erection. Later, Woolf joined Brooke and his Neo-Pagans, as she called them, when they camped on Dartmoor and swam in the moorland river. Virginia, both prim and liberated, did not quite feel at ease with their attempts to commune with nature; her future biographer Hermione Lee would lament the fact that the nude photographs taken on that occasion did not survive.

Woolf – only an extra O away from being an animal herself, a virgin wolf – had a relationship with the natural world that was both paradoxical and predatory. Nature was unfeeling, going about its business. The beach was no consolation. In To the Lighthouse, after a scene in which ‘the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand … to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer’ – we discover, almost in passing, that Mrs Ramsay has died. In the aftermath, the sea seems to take over the house, as death has overtaken the Ramsays. Of their eight children, Andrew is killed in the war and Pru dies in childbirth. Virginia’s own mother, Julia, died aged forty-nine, and her brother Thoby died of typhoid fever when he was twenty-six years old. For Woolf, the water meant death as well as life.

What remains of the Ramsay family and their friends return ten years later. The house, once so full, has stood empty; the elements threaten to overtake it. We expect the deluge of war to have washed it away. But it is rescued by the housekeeper, to whom Mrs Ramsay appears as a ‘faint and flickering’ image, a kind of ghost, ‘like a yellow beam or the circle at the end of a telescope, a lady in a grey cloak, stooping over her flowers’. The memory is electric, almost cinematic: Virginia’s mother Julia was photographed by her aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron, more than fifty times, her profile turned this way or that, her smooth hair, glaucous eyes and strangely vacant face the same as her daughter’s, wearing a black gown, white cuffs and collar, caught on the path at Freshwater, moving in her dark clothes; then not moving, stilled in the instant, then moving on, ‘the Star like sorrows of Immortal Eyes’.

So too Virginia would pose for Vogue in her mother’s dress in 1924, ravished by a Pre-Raphaelite sea, acting as her own sepia ghost, rehearsing her last scene, floating down the Ouse as Ophelia, ‘her clothes spread wide, | And mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up’. After her father died, and Virginia and her orphaned siblings moved to Bloomsbury, she hung Cameron’s fantastical portraits of famous men and fair women in the hallway as an ironic gesture. For all her modernism, Virginia was anchored in a Victorian past, shaped and damaged by its history, and her own.

Those remote summers by the sea would remain with her. In her book, the ferocious Atlantic becomes a character itself, like the moor in Wuthering Heights or the whale in Moby-Dick (of which she owned two copies, and which she read at least three times). ‘In both books,’ she wrote in an essay on Brontë and Melville in 1919, ‘we get a vision of presence outside the human beings, of a meaning that they stand for, without ceasing to be themselves.’ Woolf’s white lighthouse is Melville’s white whale; an impossible mission over unfathomable waters.

Cam, the riverishly-named youngest Ramsay daughter, dangles her hand in the waves as she and her brother reluctantly accompany their father on the long-postponed trip to the lighthouse. Out at sea they become becalmed, and in her dreamy, deceptive state, Cam’s mind wanders through the green swirls into an ‘underworld of waters where the pearls stuck in clusters to white sprays, where in the green light a change came over one’s entire mind and one’s body shone half transparent enveloped in a green cloak’. As blank and ever-changing as it is, as calm or crazed, the sea could embody ecstasy or despair; it was a mirror for Woolf’s descent into madness, a process made profound by knowing what was about to happen. She might have been enchanted by Ariel. ‘I felt unreason slowly tingling in my veins,’ she would say, as if her body were being flooded by insanity or filled with strange noises: birds singing in Greek; an ‘odd whirring of wings in the head’.

Cam seems besieged by the sea, by a numb terror and ‘a purple stain upon the bland surface as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath’. Meanwhile ‘winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason’. Eventually the Ramsays reach the lighthouse, but even that epiphany is darkened by the fact that they pass over the place – if water could be said to have a place – where their fisherman had once seen three men drown, clinging to the mast of their boat. All the while their father, as gloomy and tyrannical as Ahab, dwells on William Cowper’s doomy poem, ‘The Castaway’: ‘We perish’d, each alone: | But I beneath a rougher sea, | And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he.’ When, as a young woman, Virginia had heard of the fate of Titanic, she imagined the ship far below, ‘poised half way down, and become perfectly flat’, and its wealthy passengers ‘like a pancake’, their eyes ‘like copper coins’. Later, to another friend, she said, ‘You’ll tell me I’m a failure as a writer, as well as a failure as a woman. Then I shall take a dive into the Serpentine, which, I see, is 6 feet deep in malodorous mud.’ To her even the bridge over the monstrously-named inland sea in a London park was a white arch representing a thousand deaths, a thousand sighs.

While writing To the Lighthouse, Woolf read of another disaster. On the first ever attempt to fly westbound across the Atlantic, the wealthy Princess Löwenstein-Wertheim had perished, along with her pilot and co-pilot. ‘The Flying Princess, I forget her name, has been drowned in her purple leather breeches.’ In her mind’s eye Virginia saw the plane running out of petrol, falling upon ‘the long slow Atlantic waves’ as the pilots looked back at the ‘broad cheeked desperate eyed vulgar princess’ and ‘made some desperate dry statement’ before a wave broke over the wing and washed them all into the sea. It was an arch nineteen-twenties scene; Noël Coward out of The Tempest. ‘And she said something theatrical I daresay; nobody was sincere; all acted a part; nobody shrieked.’ The last man looked at the moon and the waves and, ‘with a dry snorting sound’, he too was sucked below, ‘& the aeroplane rocked & rolled – miles from anywhere, off Newfoundland, while I slept in Rodmell’. Ten years later Virginia drove past a crashed aeroplane near Gatwick and learned afterwards that three men on board had died. ‘But we went on, reminding me of that epitaph in Greek anthology: when I sank, the other ships sailed on.’

The sea echoes over and over again in Woolf’s work, with the rhythm of moon-dragged tides. Having finished To the Lighthouse, she entered a dark period, exhausted, fighting for breath; yet out of it she sensed the same vision of presence beyond being that she had seen in Brontë and Melville; something ‘frightening & excited in the midst of my profound gloom, depression, boredom, whatever it is: One sees a fin passing far out.’ It was a deep, cryptic image, hard to diagnose or discern, as she confessed to her diary a year later, summoning ‘my vision of a fin rising on a wide blank sea. No biographer could possibly guess this important fact about my life in the late summer of 1926: yet biographers pretend they know people.’

As a boy on holiday in Dorset, I saw a distant glimpse of dolphins, arcing through the water off Durleston Head, a rocky promontory held out in the grey English Channel. As a girl holidaying in Cornwall, Woolf had seen cetaceans too: one family sailing trip in the summer of 1892 ‘ended hapily [sic] by seeing the sea pig or porpoise’; her nickname for her sister Vanessa, with whom she was extraordinarily close, was Dolphin. And in The Waves, the book that followed To the Lighthouse, and which became her most elegiac, internalised work, her vision returned as one character watches a fin turn, ‘as one might see the fin of a porpoise on the horizon’.

The sickle-sharp shape seen against the featureless sea – something there and not there – is the emblem of knowing and unknowingness. It is not the real dolphin leaping through the waves, or the curly-tailed, boy-bearing classical beast, or the mortal animal sacrificed and stranded on the sand, but something subtly different: the visible symbol of what lies below, swimming through the writer’s mind as a representation of her own otherness. In Woolf’s play Freshwater, a satire on the bohemian lives of Julia Margaret Cameron and Tennyson on the Isle of Wight, a porpoise appears off the Needles and swallows one of the characters’ engagement ring; in The Years, ‘slow porpoises’ appear ‘in a sea of oil’; and in a vivid episode in Orlando, a porpoise is seen embedded in the frozen Thames alongside shoals of eels and an entire boat and its cargo of apples resting on the river bed with an old woman fruit-seller on its deck as if still alive, ‘though a certain blueness hinted the truth’.

Woolf made a sensual connection between the porpoise and her lover. Vita Sackville-West, tall and man-womanish – a kind of Elizabethan buccaneer clad in her brown velvet coat and breeches and strings of pearls and wreathed in the ancestral glamour of her vast house, Knole, where the stags greeted her at the door and even wandered into the great hall – morphed from she-pirate into a gambolling cetacean for Virginia. It was a dramatic appropriation, dragging the strange into the familiar. Perhaps it was no coincidence that Shakespeare – for whom gender and species were fluid states – often linked whales, living or stranded, with royal princes; or that Woolf’s name evoked both the queen and her colony.

At Christmas 1925 the two women, who’d just spent their first night together, went shopping in Sevenoaks, where they saw a porpoise lit up on a fishmonger’s slab. Virginia elided that scene with her elusive paramour out of the sixteenth century into the twentieth, Vita standing there in her pink jersey and pearls, next to the marine mammal, both curiosities. ‘I like her & being with her, & the splendour,’ Woolf admitted to her diary like a schoolgirl, ‘she shines … with a candlelit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung … so much in full sail on the high tides, where I am coasting down backwaters.’ ‘Aint it odd how the vision at the Sevenoaks fishmongers has worked itself into my idea of you?’ she wrote to Vita two years later, and proceeded to replay the image at the end of Orlando, when her gender- and time-defying hero/ine returns home in 1928 – ‘A porpoise in a fishmonger’s shop attracted far more attention.’ Meanwhile Vita made her own boast, of ‘having caught such a big silver fish’ in Virginia.

Orlando is an updated fairy tale which collapses four centuries of English history into a whimsical modernist fantasy. History rushes by, briefly arrested in close-up, acid-trip details: the grains of the earth, the swelling river, the long still corridor in Orlando’s sprawling palace which runs as a conduit into time, as if a production of The Tempest were being acted out silently at the end of its wood-panelled tunnel. Orlando is both player and prince, like Elizabeth, or Shakespeare’s Fair Youth, Harry Southampton, animal and human, a chimera out of a Jacobean frieze, ‘stark naked, brown as a satyr and very beautiful’, as Virginia saw Vita. As the deer walked into Knole’s great hall, so Orlando moves through species, sex and time; she too might become a porpoise strung with baroque pearls, animating the unknown sea.

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