The Long Way to the Steps

For perhaps a minute, our boat left a blue seam in the harbour. Then we passed into darker water and it was gone. I kept looking over my shoulder, which is not a useful habit when someone has entrusted you with the oars.

“It comes in patches,” Ivo said. “Mind the mooring.”

I pulled too hard on the right. We turned, narrowly missed a buoy, and described an elegant circle around absolutely nothing.

Ivo waited until we were facing the right way again.

“Are you paid by distance?”

“Only when going backwards.”

“You should do well.”

He sat in the stern with an accordion case between his boots. The case had a leather handle polished almost black and one catch held shut with string. His shirt was clean, his trousers carefully pressed. The boat smelled of old rope and something oily that had become part of the wood.

I had met him on the harbour steps, struggling to hold the boat steady while lowering the instrument. I offered a hand. He offered a lift. The blue box was on the far quay, so for once accepting transport had seemed an efficient choice.

Then I volunteered to row.

The trouble was not that I couldn't. It was that I had started watching the water before finding the rhythm. Ivo's boat wanted shorter strokes than I was giving it. Once I stopped trying to pull the harbour towards us, we began making reasonable progress.

Behind his shoulder, houses climbed the slope in irregular tiers. Most windows were dark. In one, a woman shook a sheet from an upstairs sill; it hung briefly like a pale sail before she gathered it inside. Somewhere beyond the breakwater, an engine laboured without seeming to get nearer.

“Do you play?” I asked.

Ivo looked down at the case.

“No. I take it out for the air.”

I laughed, and he allowed himself a small, satisfied nod.

He was going to his sister's house. People would be there. There would be music, if the people remembered to stop discussing the music long enough to begin. His sister played the fiddle; her husband sang when encouraged and sometimes when specifically asked not to.

“What do you play?”

“Tonight? Whatever she tells me.”

A blade caught the water and opened a fan of light.

There it was again. Blue points, extraordinarily brief, brightening along the disturbed edge and disappearing behind us. I eased the next stroke so I could watch without turning. For a few seconds, the oar seemed to be drawing its own reflection from a sky that had no such stars.

Ivo leaned over to look.

“Better here.”

“Dinoflagellates, probably.”

He turned the word over silently, moving his lips.

“That's a lot of name for something you can't see.”

“Individually, no. Tiny plankton. Some kinds flash when the water disturbs them. We'd need a closer look to say which.”

“So the boat is doing it?”

“The boat gives them a nudge. They make the light themselves, with a chemical reaction.”

He watched the next stroke go in.

“My father said it was moonlight caught in the water.”

“Was he teasing you?”

“Usually. Hard to distinguish the occasions.”

We crossed another dark patch. I could still hear the water peeling off the blades, but there was nothing luminous about it. The harbour had resumed looking like a perfectly ordinary place in which to lose a boot.

I wanted to turn back. There was a question about the boundary between those patches forming in my head, followed by three more questions and an inconvenient desire for a sampling bottle.

“What time are you expected?” I asked.

“Before my brother-in-law starts.”

I put some weight into the oars.

At the next mooring, a loose line lay across our way. I saw it late and lifted the blades. Ivo reached for the boat hook, caught the line and guided us past. The hull brushed a hanging fender with a soft rubber groan.

“Sorry,” I said. “Watching the wrong thing.”

“Watch both. It's a small harbour.”

He laid the hook back along the seat. I let the boat settle before rowing again. There was no need to make up the lost time by acquiring another problem.

The steps we wanted were beneath a balcony strung with washing. A lamp burned beside the door above them. Ivo told me where the submerged bottom step began, then took the painter while I brought us in. With him holding us steady, I carried the accordion ashore in both hands.

It was heavier than his conversation had suggested.

“You can leave it there,” he said, pointing to the landing.

I set it down, then waited while he secured the boat. My palms retained the curve of the handle. The blue box stood further along the quay, dark and square between a locked chandlery and a stack of wooden crates. I could have been inside it in two minutes.

Ivo picked up his instrument.

“Coming?”

“I haven't been invited.”

“I'm inviting you.”

From the house came a scraping attempt at a scale, followed by laughter. I found myself smiling before I had decided what to say.

“I don't know the tunes.”

“Neither does my brother-in-law.”

His sister opened the door holding a bow. She asked my name, moved a chair with her foot and told me to sit where I wouldn't knock anyone's elbow. Nobody asked where I had come from. A man by the window was trying to persuade a button back through a cuff. I helped him while the instruments found one another's pitch.

The first tune was brisk enough to discourage conversation. Ivo's hands moved with a lightness I hadn't seen in the boat. His sister watched him over the fiddle, and when he delayed a phrase she waited, grinning, until he brought it home.

I stayed for that one, and the next, and several whose beginnings I failed to notice because they had grown out of the tune before.

Through the open window I could see a little of the harbour. Once, a passing dinghy left two blue strokes in the gap between the houses.

I missed my entrance with the clapping.