Half an hour later Ransom had partly recovered, stretched out on the beach by the cool water. As he lay half-stunned in the sunlight he was aware of Mrs. Quilter jabbering away on one of the dunes a few yards from him, the silent figure of her son, like an immense cuckoo, squatting beneath his furs in the sand. The old woman, beside herself with delight at having at last found her son, was now inflicting on him a nonstop resume of everything that had happened to her during the previous decade. To Ransom's good luck, she included a glowing account of the magnificent expedition by automobile to the coast, which Ransom had arranged for her. At the mention of his name, Quilter strode down the dune to inspect Ransom, turning him over with a stilted boot. His broad dented face, with its wandering eyes set above the hollowed cheeks, had changed little during the intervening years, although he seemed twice his former height and gazed about with a more self-composed air. As he listened to his mother he cocked one eye at her thoughtfully, almost as if calculating the culinary possibilities of this small bundle of elderly gristle.
Ransom climbed unsteadily to his feet and walked slowly up the dune to them. Quilter seemed barely to notice him, almost as if Ransom had emerged half-drowned from this pool every morning of the past ten years. His huge eyes were mottled like marbled sandstone. The ambiguous watery smile had vanished, and his wide mouth was firm and thinlipped.
"Doctor-?" Mrs. Quilter broke off her monologue, surprised to see Ransom but delighted that he had been able to join them. "I was just telling him about you, doctor. Quilty, the doctor's a rare one with cars."
Ransom murmured noncommittally, weakly brushing the damp sand from his half-dried clothes.
In a gruff voice, Quilter said: "Don't fish into any cars here, there are people buried in them." With a gleam of his old humor he added: "Hole down to the door, slide them in, up with the window, and that's their lot-eh?"
"Sounds a good idea," Ransom agreed cautiously. He decided not to tell him about Philip Jordan or Catherine. As yet Quilter had given them no indication of where or how he lived.
For five minutes Quilter sat silently on the crest of the dune, occasionally patting his furs as his mother chattered away, touching him tentatively with her little hands. At one point he reached up to the swan's neck, dangling in front of his right eye, and pulled off the headdress. Beneath it his scalp was bald, and the thick red hair that fell to his shoulders sprang from the margins of a huge tonsure.
Then, without a word, he jumped to his feet. With a brief gesture to them he strode off on his stilts across the sand, the cheetah furs and dressing gown lifting behind him like tattered wings.
Chapter 13 – The Oasis
Barely keeping up with Quilter, they followed him as he strode in and out of the dunes, his stilted sandshoes carrying him across the banks of rubble. Now and then, as Ransom helped Mrs. Quilter over a ruined wall, he saw the river bank and the white bonehills of the lake, but the pattern of the eroded streets was only the faintest residue of Larchmont. Nothing moved among the ruins. In the hollows they passed the remains of small fires and the picked skeletons of birds and desert voles left years beforehand.
They reached a set of wrought-iron gates rooted into the sand, and Ransom recognized the half-buried perspectives of the avenue in which he had once lived. On the other side of the road the Reverend Johnstone's house had vanished below the dust carried up from the lake.
Skirting the gate, Quilter led them through an interval in the wall, then set off up the drive. The shell of Lomax's mansion was hidden among the dunes, its upper floors burned out. They passed the entrance. The cracked glass doors stood open, and the marble floor inside the hall was strewn with rubbish and old cans.
They rounded the house and reached the swimming pool. Here at last there were some signs of habitation. A line of screens made of tanned hide had been erected around the pool, and the eaves of a large tented structure rose from the deep end. The faint smoke of a wood fire lifted from the center of the pool. The sandy verges were littered with old cooking implements, bird traps, and pieces of refrigerator cabinets, salvaged from the nearby ruins. A short distance away the wheel-less bodies of two cars sat side by side among the dunes.
A wooden stairway led dowh onto the floor of the swimming pool. Protected by the screens, the floor was smooth and clean, the colored tridents and sea horses visible among the worn tiles. Walking down the slope from the shallow end, they approached the inner wall of blankets. Quilter pushed these aside and beckoned them into the central court.
Lying on a low divan beside the fire was a woman whom Ransom recognized with an effort to be Miranda Lomax. Her long white hair now reached to her feet, enclosing her like a threadbare shroud, and her face had th. same puckish eyes and mouth. But what startled Ransom was her size. She was now as fat as a pig, with gross arms and hips, immense shoulders and waist. Swaddled in fat, her small eyes gazed at Ransom from above her huge cheeks. With a pudgy hand she brushed her hair off her forehead. She was wearing, almost modishly, a black nightdress that seemed designed expressly to show off her vast corpulence.
"Quilty…" she began. "Who's this?" She glanced at Quilter, who kicked off his stilts and gestured his mother to a stool by the fire. Leaving Ransom to sit down on the floor, Quilter reclined into a large fanbacked wicker chair, whose bamboo scrollwork rose above his head in an arch of elaborate trellises. He reached up to the swan's neck and pulled off his hat, dumping it onto the floor.
Miranda stirred, unable to roll her girth more than an inch or two across the divan. "Quilty, isn't this our wandering doctor? What was his name…?" She nodded slowly at Mrs. Quilter, and then turned her attention to Ransom. A smile spread across her face, as if Ransom's arrival had quickened some long dormant and amusing memory. "Doctor, you've come all the way from the coast to see us. Quilty, your mother's arrived."
Mrs. Quilter regarded Miranda blankly with her tired eyes, either unable or unwilling to recognize her.
Quilter sat in his wicker throne. He glanced distantly at his mother, and then said to Miranda, with a quirk of humor: "She likes cars."
"Does she?" Miranda tittered at this. "Well, she looks as if she's just in time for you to fix her up." She turned her pleasant beam on Ransom. "What about you, doctor?"
Ransom brushed his beard. "I've had to make do with other forms of transport. I'm glad to see you're still here, Miranda."
"Yes… I suppose you are. Have you brought any water with you?"
"Water?" Ransom repeated. "I'm afraid we used all ours getting here."
Miranda sighed and looked across at Quilter. "A pity. We're rather short of water, you know."
"But the reservoir-" Ransom gestured in the direction of the pond. "You seem to have the stuff lying around all over the place."
Miranda shook her head. Her rapid attention to the topic made Ransom aware that the water might well turn out to be a mirage after all. Miranda eyed him thoughtfully. "That reservoir, as you call it, is all we've got. Isn't it, Quilter?"
Quilter nodded slowly, taking in Ransom in his gaze. Ransom wondered whether Quilter really remembered him, or even, for that matter, his mother. The old woman sat halfasleep on her stool, exhausted now that the long journey had ended.
Miranda smiled at Ransom. "You see, we were rather hoping you'd brought some water with you. But if you haven't, that's just that Tell me, doctor, why on earth have you come here?"
Ransom paused before answering, aware that Quilter's sharp eyes were on him. Obviously they assumed that the little party was the advance guard of some official expedition from the coast, perhaps the harbinger of the end of the drought.