The Reverend Johnstone stopped to let them go, quieting the front pews with a raised hand. He eyed the retreating figures with his head to one side, as if trying to sum up their motives for coming to the church. Then, in a lower voice, he called his depleted congregation to prayer, glancing through his raised hands at the open doors.
Ransom waited, and then slipped away down the aisle and stepped out into the sunlight. In the distance he caught a last glimpse of the black-clad figures moving quickly between the cars, the smoke clouds crossing the avenue over their heads.
At his feet, traced in the white dust on the sidewalk outside the porch, was a small fish-shaped sign.
"Doctor."
As he knelt down to examine the sign a hand like a bird's claw sat on his shoulder. He looked up to find the broad, dented face of Quilter gazing at him with his 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 filthy, stained with tar and wine.
Ransom stood up, slowly 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 big broken face relaxed into a smile, first of grudging respect, which became more and more twisted until all humor had gone and only a bitter parody remained. He tapped his head slyly and said, sotto voce: "Perhaps… water on the brain?" With a cryptic laugh he made off down the avenue, beckoning Ransom after him and potting with his forefinger at the observation platforms on the watchtowers.
Ransom followed him at a discreet 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 had no doubt inflamed his imagination beyond all limits.
At the guardhouse Quilter pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket and opened the gates. He unleashed the two Alsatians fastened to the iron grille. Giving each of them a hard kick in the rump to quiet them down, he led the way up the long drive. Lomax's house, a glass and concrete folly, stood above them on its circular embankment, its jutting 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 edges of the colored tile pathways. The swimming pool was silent, and alongside it 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, and the driver watched the ornamental floor appear with weary eyes.
The hallway, however, was still pleasantly cool, the marble floor crossed by a set of wet footprints.
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 silvertopped 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 drawn up beside the bed. "Sit down here where I can see you." Still not moving his head or shoulders, 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 any of 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 and peered down at Ransom. His small face with its arrogant features 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 an affected rictus of pain and gazed limply at the decoated 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 soft, cupidlike exterior, Lomax's face was hard and rapacious, there was something almost reptilian about the gray hooded eyes.
"What's the matter?" Ransom asked him. "You look all right."
"Well, I'm not, Charles." Lomax raised his cane and gestured toward 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 patiently as Ransom sat back and laughed at the intended irony of this, eyes half-closed with pleasure. 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 safe distance. In part this reaction was based on an instinctive revulsion from Lomax's ambiguous physical makeup, 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 rather 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 kind of supersaturation of himself, the elegant cartouches of his nostrils and the pomaded waves of his blond hair like the decoration on a baroque pavilion, which seems to contain 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." He 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 tightening under the smooth silk suiting, the supple ease with which he moved off on his dapper feet across the floor. What exactly had kept him busy Ransom could only guess. The 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 second of these projects 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.
"What's on your mind?" Ransom asked, as Lomax sprayed the air with a few puffs of scent from a gilt plunger on his dressing table.
"Well, Charles…" Lomax gazed out at the obscured skyline of the city, from which the smoke rose more and more thickly. To his right the bleached white bed of the river, the channel down its center little wider than a canal, wound its way between the riverside villas. "What's going on out there? You know more about these things than I do."
Ransom gestured at the windows. "It's plain enough. You really must have been busy if you haven't noticed. The entire balance of nature has-"
Lomax snapped his fingers irritably. "Charles, don't talk to me about the balance of nature! If it wasn't for people like myself we'd all be living in mud huts." He peered darkly at the city. "A good thing, too, judging by that monstrous heap. I meant what's happening over there, in Mount Royal? I take it most people have left by now?"
"Nine out of ten. Probably more. There can't be much future for them there."
"That's where you're wrong. There's a great deal of future there, believe me." He walked toward Ransom, surveying him with his head on one side, like a couturier inspecting a suspect mannequin, about to remove a single pin and expose the whole shabby pretense. "And what about you, Charles? Why are you still hanging around? I can't understand why you haven't set off for the coast with everyone else."
"Can't you, Richard? I think you probably can. Perhaps we both have some unfinished business to clear up."
Lomax nodded sagely. "Well put, with your usual tact and discretion. Of course I understand. I hate to pry, but I care for you in a strange sort of way. You began with so many advantages in life-advantages of character, I mean- and you've deliberately ignored them. There's true nobility, the Roman virtue. Unlike myself; _I_ haven't a moral notion in my head." Thoughtfully, he added: "Until now, that is. I feel I may at last be coming into my own. Still, what are you actually going to do? You can't just sit on the mud in your little houseboat."