yards to the basin. Refused entry, they had taken up their mooring outside. Here Mrs Quilter sat all day on the hatchway, her faded red hair blown around her black shawl, muttering at the people going down to the water's edge with their buckets.
Ransom could see her now, beaked nose flashing to left and right like an irritable parrot's as she flicked at her dark face with a Chinese fan, indifferent to the heat and the river's stench. She had been sitting in the same place when he set off in the houseboat, her ribald shouts egging on the week-end mariners laying a line of cement-filled bags across the entrance to the yacht basin. Even at flood barely enough water entered the harbour to irrigate its narrow docks, and this had now leaked back into the river, settling the smartly decked craft into their own mud. Deserted by their owners, the yachts were presided over by Mrs Quilter's witch-like presence.
Despite her grotesque appearance and insane son, Ransom admired this old woman of the barges. Often during the winter he crossed the rotting gangway into the gloomy interior of the barge, where she lay on a feather mattress tied to the chart table, wheezing to herself. The single cabin, filled with dusty lanterns, was a maze of filthy recesses veiled by old lace shawls. After filling her tea-pot from the flask of gin in his valise, Ransom would be rowed back across the river in her son's leaking coracle, Quilter's great eyes below the hydrocephalic forehead staring at him through the rain like wild moons.
Rain! – at the recollection of what the term had once meant, Ransom looked up at the sky. Unmasked by clouds or vapour, the sun hung over his head like an ever-attendant genie. The fields and roads adjoining the river were covered with the same unvarying light, a glazed yellow canopy that embalmed everything in its heat.
Below the jetty Ransom had staked a line of coloured poles into the water, but the rapid fall in the level needed little calculation. In the previous three months the river had dropped some twenty feet, shrinking to less than a quarter of its original volume. As it sank, it seemed to pull everything towards it. The banks were now opposing cliffs, topped by the inverted tents suspended from the chimneys of the riverside houses. Originally designed as rain-traps – though no rain had ever fallen into them – the canvas envelopes had been transformed into a line of aerial garbage scoops, the bowls of dust and leaves raised like offerings to the sun.
Ransom crossed the deck and stepped down into the steering well. He waved to Quilter, who was watching him with a drifting smile. Behind him, along the deserted wharfs, the bodies of the drying fish turned slowly in the air.
‘Tell your mother to move the barge,’ Ransom called across the interval of slack water. ‘The river is still falling.’
Quilter ignored this. He pointed to the blurred forms moving slowly below the surface.
‘Clouds,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Clouds,’ Quilter repeated. ‘Full of water, doctor.’
Ransom stepped through the hatchway into the cabin of the houseboat, smiling to himself at Quilter's bizarre humour. Despite his deformed skull and Caliban-like appearance, there was nothing stupid about Quilter. The dreamy, ironic smile, at times almost affectionate in its lingering glance, as if understanding Ransom's most intimate secrets, the seamed skull with its russet hair and the inverted planes of the face, in which the cheekbones were set back two or three inches, leaving deep hollows below the eyes – all these and a streak of unpredictable naivety made Quilter a daunting figure. Most people wisely left him alone, possibly because his invariable method of dealing with them was to pick unerringly on their weaknesses and work away at these like an inquisitor
It was this instinct for failure, Ransom decided with wry amusement as Quilter watched him from his vantage point above the dead birds, that probably explained Quilter's persistent curiosity in his own case. For some time now Quilter had followed him around, no doubt assuming that Ransom's solitary week-ends among the marshes along the southern shore of the lake marked a reluctance to face up to certain failures in his life – principally, Ransom's estrangement from his wife Judith. However, Quilter's attempts to exploit this situation and provoke Ransom in various minor ways – by stealing the deck equipment from the houseboat, and disconnecting the power lines down the bank – had so far been unsuccessful in upsetting Ransom's tolerant good humour.
Quilter, of course, had been unable to grasp that the failure of Ransom's marriage was less a personal one than that of its urban context, in fact a failure of landscape, and that with his discovery of the river Ransom had at last found an environment in which he felt completely at home, a zone of identity in space and time. Quilter would have had little idea of the extent to which Ransom shared that sense of the community of the river, the unseen links between the people living on the margins of the channel, which for Ransom had begun to take the place of his marriage and his work at the hospital. All this had now been ended by the drought
Throughout the long summer Ransom had watched the river shrinking, its countless associations fading as it narrowed into a shallow creek. Above all, Ransom was aware that the role of the river in time had changed. Once it had played the part of an immense fluid clock, the objects immersed in it taking up their positions like the stations of the sun and planets. The continued lateral movements of the river, its rise and fall and the varying pressures on the hull, were like the activity within a vast system of evolution, whose cumulative forward flow was as irrelevant and without meaning as the apparently linear motion of time itself The real movements were those random and discontinuous relationships between the objects within it those of himself and Mrs Quilter her son and the dead birds and fish
With the death of the river, so would vanish any contact between those stranded on the drained floor. For the present the need to find some other measure of their relationships would be concealed by the problems of their own physical survival. None the less, Ransom was certain that the absence of this great moderator, which cast its bridges between all animate and inanimate objects alike, would prove of crucial importance. Each of them would soon literally be an island in an archipelago drained of time.
Helping himself to what was left of the whisky in the galley cabinet, Ransom sat down on the edge of the sink and began to scrape away the tar stains on his cotton trousers. Within the next hour he would have to go ashore, leaving the houseboat for the last time, but after a week on board he felt uneager to leave the craft and make all the social and mental readjustments necessary, minimal though these would now be. He had let his beard grow, and the rim of fair hair had been bleached almost white by the sunlight. This and his bare, sunburnt chest gave him the appearance of a seafaring Nordic anthropologist, standing with one hand on his mast, the other on his Malinowski. Although he gladly accepted this new persona, Ransom realized that it was still only notional, and that his real Odyssey lay before him, in the journey by land to the coast.
None the less, however much the role of single-handed yachtsman might be a pleasant masquerade, the houseboat seemed to have been his true home for longer than the few months he had owned it. He had seen the craft for sale the previous winter, while visiting a patient in the yacht basin, and bought it almost without thinking, on one of those gratuitous impulses he often used to let a fresh dimension into his life. To the surprise of the other yachtsmen, Ransom towed the craft away and moored it on the exposed bank below the motor-bridge. The mooring was a poor one at a nominal rent, the stench of the fish-quays drifting across the water, but the slip road near by gave him quick access to Hamilton 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.
Looking at the contents of the cabin as he sipped his drink,
