RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. Philip Hoare

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ