The Drought

At his feet, traced in the white dust on the pavement outside the porch, was a small fish-shaped sign.

9 The Phoenix (#ulink_6d8333d7-dcb9-512f-82c4-2271f55e593b)

‘Doctor.’

As Ransom knelt down to examine the sign a hand like a bird's claw clasped his shoulder. He looked up to find the broad, dented face of Quilter gazing at him with moist eyes.

‘Lomax,’ he said by way of introduction. ‘He wants you. Now.’

Ransom ignored him and followed the loop in the dust with his finger. Quilter leaned against the stump of a tree, listening with a bored expression to the faint sounds of the organ from the church. His ragged clothes were stained with tar and wine.

Ransom stood up, brushing his hands. ‘What's the matter with Lomax?’

Quilter looked him up and down. ‘You tell him,’ he said offensively. When Ransom refused to be provoked his broken face relaxed into a smile, first of grudging respect, which became more and more twisted until all humour had gone and only a bitter parody remained. He tapped his head slyly and said, sotto voce: ‘Perhaps … water on the brain?’ With a laugh he made off down the avenue, beckoning Ransom after him and pointing with his forefinger at the observation platforms on the watch-towers.

Ransom followed him at an interval, on the way collecting his valise from his house. Quilter's oblique comment on Lomax, probably a tip of some sort, might well contain more truth than most people would have given him credit for. Lomax was certainly an obsessed character, and the drought and its infinite possibilities had no doubt inflamed his imagination beyond all limits.

At the gates Quilter pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket. He unleashed the two Alsatians fastened to the iron grille. Giving each of them a hard kick in the rump to quieten it down, he led the way up the drive. Lomax's house, a glass-and-concrete folly, stood above them on its circular embankment, the balconies and aerial verandas reflecting the sunlight like the casements of a jewelled glacier. The lines of sprinklers had been switched off and the turf was streaked with yellow, the burnt ochre of the soil showing through at the edge of the coloured tile pathways. Alongside the swimming pool a large green tanker was pumping the remains of the water out through a convoluted metal hose The diesel thumped with a low monotonous thirst From the cabin the driver watched with weary eyes as the ornamental floor appeared

The hallway, however, was pleasantly cool. A set of wet footprints crossed the marble squares.

Lomax was in his suite on the first floor. He sat back against the bolster on the gilt bed, fully dressed in his white silk suit, like a pasha waiting for his court to assemble. Without moving his head, he waved his silver-topped cane at Ransom.

‘Do come in, Charles,’ he called in his clipped, creamy voice. ‘How kind of you, I feel better already.’ He tapped the wicker rocking chair beside the bed. ‘Sit down here where I can see you.’ Still not moving his head, he shook his cane at Quilter, who stood grinning in the doorway. ‘All right, my boy, away with you! There's work to be done. If you find those lackeys of mine, turn the dogs on them!’

When Quilter had gone, the Alsatians pawing frantically at the floor in the hall, Lomax inclined his head at Ransom. His small face wore an expression of puckish charm.

‘My dear Charles, I do apologize for sending Quilter to you, but the servants have left me. Can you believe it, the ingratitude! But the Gadarene rush is on, nothing will stop them …’ He sighed theatrically, then winked at Ransom and confided coarsely: ‘Bloody fools, aren't they? What are they going to do when they get to the sea – swim?’

He sat back with a rictus of affected pain and gazed limply at the decorated ceiling, like a petulant Nero overwhelmed by the absurdity and ingratitude of the world. Ransom watched the performance with a tolerant smile. The pose, he knew, was misleading. Under the cupid-like exterior Lomax's face was hard and rapacious.

‘What's the matter?’ Ransom asked him. ‘You look all right.’

‘Well, I'm not, Charles.’ Lomax raised his cane and gestured towards his right ear. ‘A drop of water from that confounded pool jumped into it; for a day I've been carrying the Atlantic Ocean around in my head. I feel as if I'm turning into an oyster.’

He waited, eyes half-closed with pleasure, as Ransom sat back and laughed at the intended irony of this. Ransom was one of the few people to appreciate his Fabergé style without any kind of moral reservation – everyone else was faintly shocked, for which Lomax despised them (‘mankind's besetting sin, Charles,’ he once complained, ‘is to sit in judgment on its fellows’), or viewed him uneasily from a distance. In part this reaction was based on an instinctive revulsion from Lomax's ambiguous physical make-up, and the sense that his whole personality was based on, and even exploited, precisely these areas

Yet Ransom felt that this was to misjudge him. Just as his own stratified personality reflected his preoccupation with the vacuums and drained years of his memory, so Lomax's had been formed by his intense focus upon the immediate present, his crystallization on the razor's edge of the momentary impulse. In a sense, he was a super-saturation of himself, the elegant cartouches of his nostrils and the waves of his pomaded hair like the decoration on a baroque pavilion, containing a greater ambient time than defined by its own space. Suitably pricked, he would probably begin to deliquesce, fizzing out in a brilliant sparkle of contained light.

Ransom opened his valise. ‘All right, let's have a look. Perhaps I'll find a pearl.’

When Lomax settled himself, he examined the ear and syringed it, then pronounced it sound.

‘I'm so relieved, Charles, it's your neutral touch. Hippocrates would have been proud of you.’ Lomax eyed Ransom for a moment, and then continued, his voice more pointed: ‘While you're here there's another little matter I wanted to raise with you. I've been so busy recently with one thing and another, I haven't had a chance until now.’ Steadying himself with the cane, he lowered his short legs to the floor, accepting Ransom's hand with a flourish of thanks.

Despite Lomax's pose as an elderly invalid, Ransom could feel the hard muscles beneath the smooth silk suiting, and noted the supple ease with which he moved off across the floor. What exactly had kept him busy Ransom could only guess. The dapper white shoes and spotless suit indicated a fairly insulated existence during the previous weeks. Perhaps Lomax saw an opportunity to settle some old scores. Although responsible for a concert hall and part of the university in Mount Royal – examples of his Japanese, pagoda-ridden phase some years earlier – Lomax had long been persona non grata with the local authorities. No doubt he had been brooding over his revenge for the way they had allowed a firm of commercial builders to complete the university project after local conservative opinion, outraged by the glass minarets and tiled domes rising over their heads, had marched on the city hall. But the officials concerned would by now be safely at the coast, well out of Lomax's reach.