The Blind Accordionist Read online

  When Ellis set up his canvas, Paul was surprised by the fact that he had his back to the sea. He wanted to tell Ellis that he was facing the wrong way, that he should turn around, that all the artists painted the shore, and the sea, and the clouds over the sea, not empty fields. He offered to take him a little farther up, where a cluster of fishing huts and smokehouses huddled in the lee of the last rock before the island ended, a good spot that not many had painted before, said Paul, but no, Ellis wanted none of that, stood where he was, looked inland, and began his day’s work.

  When Paul returned that evening, Ellis didn’t seem to have done much. The canvas was largely empty, a few streaks of green, and yellow, and blue, and greenish-yellow, and greenish-blue only, traversing the white space. Paul assumed Ellis was having trouble, though the painter seemed content with his work as they wrapped it carefully, then loaded it back onto the boat and headed south again.

  “Are you at the Colony?” asked Paul.

  “The where?” replied Ellis.

  “The Colony. Where all the artists stay.”

  “I haven’t heard of that, no.”

  Ellis seemed disinclined to talk further, and they passed the rest of the journey in silence, until they reached the spot where Paul had picked him up that morning. Paul jumped into the shallows and dragged the boat ashore, then helped Ellis carry his bags to his lodgings, and he did the same thing the next day, and the one after that, and the one after that. Each afternoon, Paul would arrive and look at what Ellis had done, and he saw little. The canvases seemed almost empty to him, bare save for a few swashes of colour. The artist always stood with his back to the sea, looking inward across the featureless ground.

  “What do you think?” asked Ellis on the third day.

  “I’m not sure,” said Paul.

  “Look carefully,” said Ellis. “If you look carefully, you should be able to see the sea beyond.” So Paul looked carefully, and he saw.

  That evening as they were returning, Ellis told Paul he had only paid for three days’ lodgings and needed somewhere to stay.

  Paul had inherited the house from his parents, a long flat building with a high sloped roof that stood on the firmer, drier edge of a marsh and had a brook winding around it. It had been a barn, he told Ellis (though in truth he wasn’t sure), adapted by one of the people who came over with the boom, or possibly a farmhouse whose owner had moved back to the mainland after finding the conditions too difficult out here. Paul had tarred the roof, time and again, and replaced the window frames when they began to let in too much wind, but had done little else, and over the next few years Ellis did much more, fixing the pump, the tiled floor, a warped door frame. Ellis was better that way, better with his hands, more practical, dextrous. Paul was a sailor, after all, a man who knew about water and wind; Ellis was a craftsman, a knower of the tangible, the solidity of stone and wood.

  Ellis found bits of work to earn money, his skills useful on an island where most things apart from rain and wind were in short supply. He became known, liked, a quiet man, reliable. Sometimes he would crate up one or more of his pictures, and take them to the postmaster, and have them sent back to the mainland, where, Paul assumed, they would be sold or displayed in galleries, but he never really knew because Ellis talked little of it. “Once the work is done I have little further interest in it,” was all he’d ever say. He painted a picture of the brook and told Paul he’d done it because he was fascinated by the way you could never tell which way it was flowing. He didn’t send that one away, but hung it on the wall next to the window that looked out onto the brook the painting depicted. It was the only one of his pictures they kept.

  They spent days together, silence never falling as they found the island filled with noises, birdcalls, grass in wind, rocks skittering over themselves, the sea. They spent days apart, Ellis on the land, Paul on the sea.

  “The sea’s like time,” said Paul, because now he had someone to listen to him. “Time’s not a river, a river will tell you little, but if you listen to the sea, and observe it, really, really carefully, you’ll find all the currents and eddies and tides, some hardly visible. There are endless depths, piled on one another. There are creatures, I’ve read, who live so deep in the sea no man has ever seen them.”

  “It’s so cold,” said Ellis, “the water here. The land has warmth in it, it holds time. When you learn to read it, it’s like a book.”

  “It can preserve things forever, this cold water,” said Peter. “You could live forever, as long as you didn’t mind being dead.”

  One thing only disturbed them. One day, Ellis, at home alone, searching for a box, or paper, or something, he couldn’t remember what, or later even why he’d been looking, chanced on a pile of notebooks.

  “I didn’t know you wrote,” he told Paul on his return.

  “You didn’t think I could?”

  “No,” replied Ellis, “not that. I didn’t mean that.”

  “Did you read them?” asked Paul.

  “No,” said Ellis. “I didn’t,” and he hadn’t.

  In winter, storm was a constant. Weather kept a dark grip on the island, loosening its hold for a few days here and there, turning bright and glacial before black wind and ice returned. In midsummer, however, storm was a freak that could come from nowhere, and although people were prepared, each time was new.

  Wrecks were rare, but not unknown. Most shores were soft here, and low, and there was no spectacular breaking, but more often a running aground, ships left beleed, tilted, or upended, unable to move for days, weeks sometimes, until tides and currents and winds had changed. Storm could bring a ship ashore, or take it away again.

  One evening, midsummer, around the time of the notebooks, the air was bright but stifling, and a sulphurous dimness settled toward midnight. Paul had seen such nights before, waiting until the worst had passed before taking his own boat out to help, should it be necessary, and called on Ellis to look out with him. Instead of the moment when darkness almost fell, when day and night each lost focus, tonight it was the line between sky and sea that became indistinguishable. The air flashed cold and bitter. Ellis looked aghast at the waves, which seemed of a curious substance, like jellyfish washing up on the shore. A crowd formed around them, lanterns swinging. Paul helped the other boatmen lash down tarpaulins. Some thought they could see a ship, dashed between the waves, vying with the indistinct horizon. Others said there was nothing there, that it was but a trick played by the lightning, or the waves themselves turning on one another. Those still sleeping were woken by a new, swiftly approaching roar, amazed their sea could sing now in this voice. A pillar of salt foam whirled sky high, then fell back into the sea. Then the air flashed again and, as if obeying its signal, the voice died away. The waves calmed. The small crowd assured each other the night was safe again, wished each other good sleep, and dispersed.

  The next morning was clear, though the air was still suffused with salt and ozone, as if scrubbed, and Paul went out early to check on his boat, hoping for little damage and a good catch. Storms brought fish. It was the lightning, Paul claimed, which drew them to the surface.

  Later, if asked, which for a while he frequently was, Paul wouldn’t really remember if Jenny had been lying on the shore, or standing there as if waiting for him, or merely sitting on the upturned boats. The latter seemed most likely, and thus became the story he told.

  A woman, his own age, perhaps a little older, perhaps a little younger, was sitting on his upturned boat. She was cold, so very cold, and pale, and had a small cut on her forehead that had stopped bleeding because it was so cold. Paul would then add the detail of kelp or bladderwrack being tangled in her sodden coat or hair, but soon he wouldn’t be able to remember if that were true or not.

  Paul led her up to the house, where Ellis waited at the doorway.

  “Hello,” she said to Ellis in English, as if she knew him already, a
nd he welcomed her in, and brewed tea, and found her a dry, warm blanket, one which he had hung next to the fire as if he’d been waiting for her, and Jenny had arrived, and it is here that this story might begin.

  She had hair that changed colour with the light: sometimes it was that of sand, sometimes that of rock. Her eyes flashed green into blue into grey—the sea, obviously. She had bits of several languages, German, French, Swedish, but not much of any at first until she grew into remembering, or learning, more. No one knew if she’d come from the ship that night or not, or even if there’d been a ship. She remembered nothing other than arriving on the shore that morning.

  The cut above her eye soon healed, and she soon grew warm. It was the middle of summer, after all. They found her a bed, and she stayed.

  She said her name was Jenny but nothing more. Paul called her Pirate Jenny because she had arrived in a boat and stolen his heart. Ellis called her Jenny Greenteeth because he remembered a story his mother had told him about a woman who lived in the water.

  Jenny told them she had been born in Sweden, or Germany, or Russia, and had lived in France, and Holland, and Denmark, that she had been a governess to two naughty children in Belgium, a lady’s maid in England, and an artist’s model in Vienna, and Ellis and Paul listened and did not believe her, but it mattered little. Her tales were the stuff of fiction and, like the best stories, illuminated their lives in ways they hadn’t imagined.

  The temperature rose when she arrived, the coolness of the summer evenings dispelled in favour of a slow warmth that stayed in the house like a cat. Light softened at the edges, finding new corners to brighten. When winter arrived, such light lengthened the days, and the warmth turned the darkness into a thick blanket. When spring came around, Jenny went out more, and returned bearing bunches of bright blue flax, coarse yellow dandelions, towering lupins, or buttery cow-wheat, and once, a lush purple marsh orchid.

  In the town, some noted how kind Paul was, taking in orphans and waifs like he did. Others thought he had opened a hotel, or a boardinghouse, while others speculated on which man was the woman’s lover, and some said it was both of them, because they were all foreign, and one was an artist. Some said no good would come of a woman from the sea, but both Ellis and Paul knew her no creature; she was too human. While Paul cooked and Ellis cleaned, Jenny threw her coat on the floor and her scarf on the stove, dropped shoes in the fireplace, trampled mud and dirt into the kitchen, left teacups on the floor and strands of her hair in the sink. Paul washed plates, and Jenny broke them. Ellis swabbed the floor, and Jenny left footprints on it.

  Jenny remembered nothing but the names of flowers, and music. Although she had spoken little at first, Paul and Ellis quickly grew used to her constantly tapping out rhythms on tabletops, or moving her feet in time to some unheard melody, or singing snatches of songs that themselves sounded rescued from the deeps. Jenny, Paul wrote and Ellis thought, aspired to the condition of music.

  One fragment repeated itself, a few notes of an air, each time in a different key, sometimes slowly, others more quickly, sometimes repeating, other times fading into nothing after a few bars. One night toward midsummer, a year after she had arrived, when the light had a spectral edge and even the sea seemed to be sleeping, the pieces came together as Jenny sat on the doorstep looking out across the island and began to sing. The song had no words, or none that either Ellis or Paul recognised, and none she would later be able to recall, but a melody that seemed snatched from the wind, as old as the rocks, as deep as the sea and as fragile as the petals of the flowers she gathered.

  “It’s called ‘The Blind Accordionist,’ ” she said, though she did not know why, or where the song had come from, or where she had ever heard it, or who had ever sung or played it to her.

  Were anyone to see one, two, or the three of them in the town or crossing a field or walking the shore, they would notice how Paul was now less talkative but Ellis more so, and while Jenny was strange, certainly, who wasn’t who had landed on these shores? She had found land, people said, and would stay there, anchored.

  Years passed. Years. None of them could remember how many; none of them kept tally. It was like the small river that ran around their house—no one could tell if it flowed to the left, or the right. The sea lay in either direction, after all. The three of them were a piece of music, a trio moving slowly in and out of time, so slowly no mortal ear could perceive the music, only someone able to listen for centuries.

  Were you to peer in at their window of a night, you would see them, Ellis fixing a loose tile or warped floorboard, Paul writing, Jenny being music, and you would think of happiness, but were you to look again, more carefully, perhaps, you would see things that these people themselves did not know, like blemishes on a map that turned out to be real places, like water creeping in under a house, like the salt that slowly eroded everything here, like the tiny signs Paul could see of approaching storm, or the gradation of light and colour only Ellis knew.

  Of Jenny, we knew nothing. She told us nothing. She told so little to anyone else in this story, and men, so often, have such little understanding of women. Man to the hills, woman to the shore, they’d say, but Jenny was clearly of neither, or both. Yet we should not think her without agency. Jenny had a soul, and a big one, though we shall not know it, perhaps, until later, or not at all.

  Paul and Ellis believed Jenny had brought a truce between sea and sky and land. Since she had arrived, they noted, there had been no more storms, not even in winter, nothing more than a few spats between the elements.

  And then, one day, she told them she was leaving.

  They were sitting around the table finishing a dinner of herring and potatoes, of which Jenny had not taken a bite.

  “The wind here has blown through the very flesh and bones of me,” she told them. “My heart and spirit have been dried and salted. I cannot be the oil for your lives. What am I to do here? To end up stinking of fish?”

  A mailboat carrying a group of German tourists was to leave for the mainland the next morning. Jenny packed a bag and left.

  The next night, surely enough, a storm howled. The tide rose so high Paul scooped fish from the back step. Ellis lay in bed and didn’t paint or fix anything. The two men didn’t speak to one another. Of the boat that had left for the mainland, there was no news.

  When the storm eventually lulled, Paul was not convinced: he knew that sulphurous dimness, the strange vibration of air that belied the clear sky. Again toward midnight, a huge bank of cloud rolled in like a vengeful locomotive, its thunder that of iron striking iron. The very sky seemed to crack open, revealing a dazzling white light beyond. The sea rose, and sang bitterly.

  Men swathed in oilcloth and carrying lanterns came to the house.

  “There’s a ship,” they shouted to Paul. “It’s grounded at the spit. We’ll need help.”

  “I can’t take the boat, not tonight.”

  “Then leave it,” they told him. “And bring Ellis. We need hands.”

  But Paul had his boots on already, and knew Ellis wanted nothing of the water, and knew too that they hadn’t spoken for a day. He grabbed his sea coat and headed out with the men following the shore path to the north, and he didn’t call Ellis, and he didn’t look back.

  When they arrived, the sky had retreated into a sullen bruise of clouds, tinged yellow and orange with swells of anger. Early dawn, this time of year.

  “There it is,” they shouted, the light from their stilled lamps now useless against the breaking morning. The rocky promontory was covered in splinters, matchsticks, firewood. It was hard to believe they had once formed a boat, though a chunk of hull remained. Paul recognised the blue and yellow paint on its clinkered beams. He moved closer. Three figures curled into its shelter, pale as fish skins, all drowned.

  Paul collapsed onto a sodden mailsack. The others came to cover the faces of the dead.

  “
The Germans?” asked one.

  “I think so,” said another.

  “Not Jenny?” asked Paul, and they shook their heads, and Paul breathed. They scoured the rocks and found two more bodies skeltered amid the debris. They picked them up, and stinking green water vomited from them. Neither was Jenny.

  “The lifeboat?”

  “No trace.”

  “It must have left before they wrecked.”

  “Hope?”

  No one answered. The men relit their lamps and placed them on the rocks, as they had no candles to leave.

  Back in the town, the men poured brandy into one another until they could feign a semblance of life. It took another day before Paul was ready to return home. He set foot out of the post office where they had retired, and there, on the threshold, as if waiting for him, stood Jenny.

  Later, when he had drunk more brandy, and he had touched her face, and found her not to be a ghost, and realised that he, too, had not died, she told him.

  “I couldn’t leave,” she said. “I was ready for the boat, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know what to do. I thought I was trapped, but then saw I wasn’t. I stayed at the Widow’s House. I was going to come back, I was, I promise. I’ll always come back. This water has seeped into me. This wind has shaped and sculpted me. This place has become me. And you, too. How could I be without you and Ellis?”

  It was a quiet calm morning, finally, clear skies and the buzz of ozone and the scour of salt. Bright blue and yellow flowers lifted their heads again. The island sang. It would be a good morning for fish, Paul told her as they walked back home.

  Jenny sang, too, more loudly than the land itself, but Paul told her not to, as that would convince Ellis he was haunted, so they laughed instead and shouted his name as they approached.