He half-filled a can of water and carried it into the cabin. Catherine Austen was strolling up and down, inspecting his books and curios.
‘You're well prepared, doctor. I see you have your own little world here. Everything outside must seem very remote.’ She took the can and turned to leave. ‘I'll give it back to you. I'm sure you'll need it.’
Ransom caught her elbow. The difficulties of coming to terms with the young woman warned him of all the unseen hazards of the changing landscape. ‘Forget the water. Catherine, I'd hate you to think I'm smug, of all things. If I am well prepared it's just that …’ he searched for a phrase ‘… I've always thought of the whole of life as a kind of disaster area.’
She watched him with a critical eye. ‘Perhaps, but I think you've missed my point, doctor.’
She walked up the bank, and without looking back disappeared towards her villa.
Below the bridge, in the shadow of the pylons, the trailer families sat around a huge garbage fire, their faces blazing like voodoo cultists in the serpentine flames. Down on the water the solitary figure of Quilter watched them from his coracle, leaning on his pole among the dead fish like a water-borne shepherd's boy resting with his sleeping flock. As Ransom returned to the houseboat Quilter bent down and scooped a handful of the brackish water to his mouth, drank quickly and then punted himself away below the bridge with an awkward grace.
‘Doctor! Quickly!’ Half an hour later, as Ransom was fastening the galley fan-lights, there was a shout outside. A long wooden skiff, propelled by a tall, sunburnt youth, naked except for his faded cotton shorts, bumped against the houseboat, materializing like a spectre out of the canopy of reflected light that lay over the black mirror of the water.
Ransom went up on deck and found the youth, Philip Jordan, fastening the skiff fore and aft to the rail.
‘What's this, Philip?’ Ransom peered down into the narrow craft, where a large nest of wet mattress flock, covered with oil and cotton waste, lay in a parcel of damp newspaper.
Suddenly a snake-like head lifted from the nest and wavered at Ransom. Startled, he shouted: ‘Tip it back into the water! What is it – an eel?’
‘A swan, doctor!’ Philip Jordan crouched down in the stern of the skiff, smoothing the clotted head and neck feathers. ‘It's suffocating in the oil.’ He looked up at Ransom, a hint of embarrassment in his wild eyes. ‘I caught it out on the dunes and took it down to the river. I was trying to make it swim. Can you save it?’
Ransom stepped over the rail into the skiff. He searched the bird's mouth and eyes. Too exhausted to move, the swan stared up at him with its glazed orbs. The oil had matted the feathers together, and choked its mouth and respiratory passages.
Ransom stood up, shaking his head. ‘Spread its wings out. I'll get some solvent from the cabin.’
‘Right, doctor!’
Philip Jordan, foster-child of the river and its last presiding Ariel, lifted the bird in his arms and unfurled its wings, letting their tips fall into the water. Ransom had known him for several years, and had watched him grow from a child of twelve into a tall, long-boned youth, with the quick eyes and nervous grace of an aboriginal.
Five years earlier, when Ransom had spent his first weekends out on the lake, rebuilding his world from scratch from the materials of water, wind and sunlight, Philip Jordan had been the only person he could incorporate into his new continuum. One night, as he sat reading under a lantern in the well of his craft moored to a derelict quay among the marshes, he heard a splash of water and saw a slim brown-faced boy paddle a home-made dinghy out of the darkness. Leaving a few feet of open water between them, the boy made no reply to Ransom's questions, but watched the doctor with his wide eyes. He wore a faded khaki shirt and trousers, the remnants of an old Scout uniform. To Ransom he was part waif and part water-elf.
Ransom resumed his reading and the boy moved twenty yards away, his blade slipping in the liquid silver of the night-water. Finally he came in again and produced from between his feet a small brown owl. Raising it in his hands, he had shown it to Ransom – or more probably, the doctor guessed, had shown Ransom to the owl, the tutelary deity of his water-world – and then vanished among the reeds.
He appeared again after a lapse of one or two nights, and this time accepted the remains of a cold chicken from Ransom. At last he replied to some of Ransom's questions, answering only those about the owl, the river and his boat. Ransom assumed he came from one of the families living in a colony of beached houseboats farther into the marshes.
He saw the boy on and off over the next year. He would share a meal with Ransom in the well of the boat, and help him sail the craft back to the entrance to the river. Here he always left Ransom, reluctant to leave the open water of the lake. Friend of the water-birds, he was able to tame swans and wild geese. He still referred to himself only by his surname, the first clue that he had escaped from some institution and he was living wild. His strange changes of costume – he would appear in a man's overcoat or pair of old shoes three sizes too big – confirmed this. During the winters he was often close to starvation, going off alone to eat the food Ransom gave him.
All these times Ransom wondered whether to report him to the police, frightened that after a cold week-end he might find the boy's body following the fish downstream. But something dissuaded him: partly his own increasing influence over Philip – he lent him paper and crayons, and helped him to read – and partly his fascination at the spectacle of this starveling of the river-ways creating his own world out of the scraps and refuse of the twentieth century, the scavenger for every nail and fish-hook turning into a wily young Ulysses of the waterfront.
As Ransom collected the turpentine and cotton waste from a locker in the galley, he reminded himself that selfishness in not reporting the youth years earlier might make Philip now pay a terrible price. The river was no more a natural environment than a handful of pebbles and water-weed in an aquarium, and its extinction would leave Philip Jordan with a repertory of skills as useful as those of a stranded fish. Philip was not a thief — but from where had come those mysterious ‘gifts’: clasp knives, a cigarette lighter, even an old gold-plated watch?
‘Come on, doctor!’ Philip Jordan beckoned him over the rail. The swan lay with wings outstretched, its plumage slick with oil.
‘Easy, Philip.’ Ransom began to clean the swan's bill. The bird roused faintly in response to the manual pressure, but it seemed nearly dead, smothered in the great weight of oil.
Philip Jordan shouted: ‘Leave it, doctor! I'll take it down to the galley and soak off the oil.’ He lifted the bird in his arms, struggling with its flopping head, but Ransom held his shoulder. ‘What's the matter?’
‘Philip, I can't spare the water. The bird is almost dead.’
‘That's wrong, doctor!’ Philip steadied himself in the skiff, the bird sliding in a sprawl out of his oil-covered arms. ‘I know swans – they come back.’ He released the bird and let it subside between his feet. ‘Look, all I need is one bucket and some soap.’
Involuntarily, Ransom glanced up at Catherine Austen's villa. In addition to the water tank in the roof of the houseboat, there was a second tank containing two hundred gallons in the pontoon. Some inner caution had prevented him from revealing its existence to Philip Jordan.
Ransom gestured at the sky, knowing that he would have to make allowance for Philip in his plans for departure. Below his feet the dead birds and water-fowl drifted past. ‘The drought may well go on for another two or three months. There's got to be an order of priorities.’
‘There