helplessly from the front seat of the car was a small moon-faced woman. Behind her, the white faces of three children, one a boy of eight, peered through the side window among the bundles and suitcases.
Johnstone pulled the men apart, the shot-gun raised in the air. His burly figure was a good head taller than the others.
‘That's enough! I'll deal with him now!’ He lifted the driver to his feet with one hand. ‘Who is he? What's he been up to?’
Edward Gunn, owner of the local hardware store, stepped forward, an accusing finger raised in front of his beaked grey face. ‘I caught him in the church, Reverend, with a bucket. He was taking water from the font.’
‘The font?’ Johnstone gazed down magisterially at the little driver. With heavy sarcasm he bellowed: ‘Did you want to be baptized? Is that what you wanted, before all the water in the world was gone?’
The stocky man pushed Gunn aside. ‘No, I wanted water to drink! We've come three hundred miles today – look at my kids, they're so dry they can't even weep!’ He opened his leather wallet and spread out a fan of greasy bills. ‘I'm not asking for charity, I'll pay good money.’
Johnstone brushed aside the money with the barrel of the shot-gun. ‘We take no cash for water here, son. You can't buy off the droughts of this world, you have to fight them. You should have stayed where you were, in your own home.’
‘That's right!’ Edward Gunn cut in. ‘Get back to your own neighbourhood!’
The stocky man spat in disgust. ‘My own neighbourhood is six hundred miles away, it's nothing but dust and dead cattle!’
Ransom stepped over to him. Johnstone's bullying presence seemed merely to aggravate their difficulties. To the owner of the saloon he said: ‘Quieten down. I'll give you some water.’ He tore a sheet from an old prescription pad in his pocket and pointed to the address. ‘Drive around the block and park by the river, then walk down to my house. All right?’
‘Well …’ The man eyed Ransom suspiciously, then relaxed. ‘Thanks a lot, I'm glad to see there's one here, at least.’ He picked his panama hat off the groud, straightened the brim and dusted it off. Nodding pugnaciously to Johnstone, he climbed into the car and drove away.
Gunn and his fellow vigilantes dispersed among the dead trees, sauntering down the lines of cars.
As he settled his large frame behind the wheel Johnstone said: ‘Kind of you, Charles, but begging the question. There are few places in this country where there aren't small supplies of local water, if you work hard enough for them.’
‘I know,’ Ransom said. ‘But see it from his point of view. Thousands of cattle dead in the fields – to these poor farming people it must seem like the end of the world.’
Johnstone drummed a fist on the wheel. ‘That's not for us to decide! There are too many people now living out their own failures, that's the secret appeal of this drought. I was going to give the fellow some water, Charles, but I wanted him to show more courage first.’
‘Of course,’ Ransom said noncommittally. Five minutes earlier he had been glad to see Johnstone, but he realized that the clergyman was imposing his own fantasies on the changing landscape, as he himself had done. He was relieved when Johnstone let him out at the end of the avenue.
On the right, overlooking the mouth of the river as it entered the lake, was the glass-and-concrete mansion owned by Richard Foster Lomax. At one end of the outdoor swimming pool a fountain threw rainbows of light through the air. Taking his ease at the edge of the pool was the strutting figure of Lomax, hands in the pockets of his white silk suit, his ironic voice calling to someone in the water.
Johnstone pointed at Lomax. ‘Much as I detest Lomax, he does prove my point.’ As a parting shot, he leaned out of the window and called after Ransom: ‘Remember, Charles, charity shouldn't be too easy to give!’
Musing on this callous but shrewd criticism of his own motives, Ransom walked home along the deserted avenue. In the drive outside the house his car stood by the garage door, but for some reason he found it difficult to recognize, as if he were returning home after a lapse not merely of a week but of several years. A light coating of dust covered the bodywork and seats, as if the car were already a distant memory of itself, the lapsed time condensing on it like dew. This softening of outlines could be seen in the garden, the fine silt on the swing-seats and metal table blurring their familiar profiles. The sills and gutters of the house were covered with the same ash, blunting the image of it in his mind. Watching the dust accumulate against the walls, Ransom could almost see it several years ahead, reverting to a primitive tumulus, a mastaba of white ash in which a forgotten nomad had once made his home.
He let himself into the house, noticing the small shoe-marks that carried the dust across the carpet, fading as they reached the stairs like the footprint of someone returning from the future. For a moment, as he looked at the furniture in the hall, Ransom was tempted to open the windows and let the wind inundate everything, obliterating the past, but fortunately, during the previous years, both he and Judith had used the house as little more than a pied à terre.
On the hall floor below the letter-box he found a thick envelope of government circulars. Ransom carried them into the lounge. He sat down in an armchair and looked out through the french windows at the bleached dust-bowl that had once been his lawn. Beyond the withered hedges his neighbour's watch-tower rose into the air, but the smoke from the refuse fires veiled the view of the lake and river.
He glanced at the circulars. These described, successively, the end of the drought and the success of the rain-seeding operations, the dangers of drinking sea-water, and, lastly, the correct procedure for reaching the coast.
He stood up and wandered around the house, uncertain how to begin the task of mobilizing its resources. In the refrigerator melted butter dripped on to the tray below. The smells of sour milk and bad meat made him close the door. A stock of canned foods and cereals stood on the pantry shelves, and a small reserve of water lay in the roof tank, but this was due less to foresight than to the fact that, like himself, Judith took most of her meals out.
The house reflected this domestic and personal vacuum. The neutral furniture and decorations were as anonymous and free of associations as those of a motel – indeed, Ransom realized, they had been unconsciously selected for just this reason. In a sense the house was a perfect model of a spatio-temporal vacuum, inserted into the continuum of his life by the private alternate universe in the houseboat on the river. Walking about the house he felt more like a forgotten visitor than its owner, a shadowy and ever more evasive double of himself.
The radiogram sat inertly beside the empty fireplace. Ransom switched it on and off, and then remembered an old transistor radio which Judith had bought. He went upstairs to her bedroom. Most of her cosmetic bric-a-brac had been cleared away from the dressing table, and a single line of empty bottles was reflected in the mirror. In the centre of the bed lay a large blue suitcase, crammed to the brim.
Ransom stared down at it. Although its significance was obvious, he found himself, paradoxically, wondering whether Judith was at last coming to stay with him. Ironic inversions of this type, rather than scenes of bickering frustration, had characterized the slow winding-down of their marriage, like the gradual exhaustion of an enormous clock that at times, relativistically, appeared to be running backwards.
There was a tentative tap on the kitchen door. Ransom went downstairs and found the owner of the green saloon, hat in his hands. With a nod, he stepped into the kitchen. He walked about stiffly, as if unused to being inside a house. ‘Are your family all right?’ Ransom asked.
‘Just about. Who's that crackpot down by the lake?’
‘The concrete house with the swimming pool? – one of the local eccentrics. I shouldn't worry about him.’
‘He's the