The Drought

Removing his cotton jacket, Ransom sat down on the bench by the stern window of the cabin. He decided to go ashore, but after a week on board the houseboat he felt uneager to leave it and make all the social and mental readjustments necessary, minimal though these would now be. He had let his beard grow, but almost everyone had left Larchmont and there was little point in shaving it off. Although the rim of black hair gave his thin face a gaunt and Rimbaudesque look, he accepted this new _persona_ as part of the altered perspectives of the river, and as a mark of his own isolation in the houseboat.

He had seen the craft for sale the previous winter, while visiting a patient in the yacht basin. With its pastel blue hull and raked windows it looked totally un-nautical, but the functional design of the interior, and the absence of all overlay of personality, made it a perfect retreat. To the surprise of the other yachtsmen in the basin, Ransom towed the craft away and moored it on the exposed bank below the motorbridge. The mooring was a poor one with a nominal rent, the smells of the fish-quays drifting across the water, but he was alone and the slip road nearby gave him quick access to Larchmont and the hospital. The only hazards were the cigarette ends thrown down from the cars crossing the bridge. At night he would sit back in the steering well and watch the glowing parabolas extinguish themselves in the water around him.

He had furnished the houseboat with far more care than he had given to the home he shared with Judith, and its cabin was a repository of all the talismans of his life. In the bookshelf were the anatomy texts he had used in the dissecting room as a student, the pages stained with the formaIn that had leaked like a bland washed blood from the mutilated cadavers on the tables-perhaps somewhere among them the unknown face of his surgeon father. On the desk was the limestone paperweight he had cut from a chalk cliff as a child, the fossil shells embedded in its surface carrying a quantum of Jurassic time across the millions of years to him. Behind it, like the ark of his covenant, stood a diptych of photographs in a hinged blackwood frame. On the left was a snapshot of himself at the age of four, before his parents' divorce, sitting on a lawn with them. On the right, exorcising the terrors of this memory, was a reproduction of a small painting by Tanguy, 'Jours de Lenteur.' With its smooth pebble-like objects, drained of all associations, suspended on a washed tidal floor, this painting above all others had helped to isolate him from the tiresome repetitions of everyday life.

All these mementos he had smuggled under Judith's nose from their house during the previous months, setting up a small zone of i

A siren hooted warningly. An old river steamer, white canvas awnings flared trimly over the rows of empty seats, approached the central passage between the main pylons of the bridge. Captain Tulloch, a thin bottle-nosed old buff, sat above the helmsman on the roof of the wheel-house, staring myopically down the narrowing cha

As the steamer passed, Quilter stepped down into the water, and with an agile leap swung himself on to the handrail, feet in one of the scuppers.

"Whoa, there! Full ahead!" The steamer rocked slightly, and Captain Tulloch hopped from his perch with a cry. He seized a boathook and hobbled down the deck toward Quilter, who grimaced at him from his handhold on the stern rail. Bellowing at the youth, who scuttled like a chimpanzee on its bars, Tulloch rattled the boathook up and down between the rails. They passed below the bridge and approached the Quilters' barge. Mrs. Quilter, still fa

The hot sunlight spangled in the steamer's wake as Mrs. Quilter's laughter faded across it. Settling itself, the river stirred slowly, now and then breaking into oily swells. Its white banks were begi

Overhead a car moved along the deserted motorbridge, heading towards the coast. Ransom left the cabin and went out on to the jetty to inspect his raingauge. He had installed it three months earlier, but so far the cylinder had collected nothing except a few inches of dust and fragments of dried leaf.

As he emptied the cylinder, a woman in a white beachrobe made her way down the bank fifty yards from him. She walked with the slow unhurried step of someone who has recovered from a long malady and feels that all the time in the world lies before her. The crumbling surface of the bank rose around her like clouds of bone-meal. She looked down with preoccupied eyes at the thin stream of water. For a moment, as she lifted her head to the sky, her solitary figure seemed to Ransom like the specter of the renascent dust.

Her strong face turned its level gaze upon Ransom, as if unsurprised to find him standing on the bed of the empty river. Although he had not seen her for some weeks, Ransom, conversely, knew that she would be among the last people to remain in the abandoned town. Since the death of her father, the former curator of the zoo at Mount Royal, Catherine Austen had lived alone in the house by the river. Often Ransom saw her walking along the bank in the evening, her long red hair reflected in the liquid colors of the water at sunset. Sometimes he waved to her as he sailed past in the houseboat, but she never bothered to reply.

She knelt down by the water's edge, frowning at the dead fish and birds that drifted past. She stood up and walked across to Ransom's jetty.

She pointed to an old bucket hanging from the wooden housing of the raingauge. "May I borrow that?"

Ransom handed it to her, then watched as she tried to fill it from the edge of the gangway. "Haven't you any water left?"

"A little to drink. It's so hot, I wanted to bathe." She lifted the bucket from the water, then decanted the dark fluid carefully into the river. The inside of the bucket was cloaked by a black oily veil. Without turning her head, she said: "I thought you'd gone, doctor. With everyone else, to the coast."

Ransom shook his head. "I spent the week sailing on the lake." He pointed to the glistening mudflats that stretched away beyond the entrance to the river. "You'll be able to walk across it soon. Are you going to stay on here?"

"Perhaps." She watched a fishing boat enter the river and approach them, its motor beating slowly. Two men stood in the bows, sca

Yet the significance of the mounted fish eluded him. Most of the fishermen from the marshes lived close to nature, and the carp were probably some kind of rudimentary totem, expressing the fishermen's faith in their own existence.

With a smile, Catherine Austen touched his arm. "Did you see their faces, doctor? They think you're to blame."

"For the lake?" Ransom shrugged. "I dare say." He watched the boat disappear below the bridge. "Poor devils, I hope they find better catches at sea."

Catherine shook her head. "They won't leave here, doctor. Can't you see? What do you think the fish mean on the sides of the boat?" She strolled to the end of the jetty, the white robe sweeping from her hips to the dusty boards. "It's an interesting period, don't you agree? Nothing moves, but so much is happening."

"Too much. There's barely enough time to hunt for water."

"Don't be prosaic. Water is the least of our problems." She added: "I take it you'll also be here, doctor?"

"Why do you say that?" Ransom turned to look up at a truck towing a large trailer across the bridge. "As a matter of fact, I intend to leave in a day or two."

"Really?" Catherine gazed out at the exposed lakebed. "It's almost dry," she said reflectively. "Do you feel, doctor, that everything is being drained and washed away, all the memories and the stale sentiments?"

For some reason this question, with its peculiar ironic emphasis, surprised Ransom. He looked down at the hard eyes that watched his own. "Do I take that as a warning? Perhaps I should change my mooring?"

"Not at all, doctor," Catherine said blandly. "I need you here." She handed him the bucket. "Have you got any water to spare?"

Ransom slipped his hands into the pockets of his trousers. The endless obsession with water during the previous months had forged powerful reflexes. "I haven't. Or is that an appeal to sentiment?"