Authors: Julian Lawrence Brooks
‘Great. What are your immediate plans? You’re welcome to stay here till you get yourself sorted.’
‘I’ll take you up on that. I need to go and see the Lodge. And I’ve got an appointment to see Dylan tomorrow.’
E-J heard this and gazed expectantly at her mother.
‘I’m sorry, love. You can come to the Lodge if you want. But I need to see Dylan alone. Perhaps you can come next time.’
E-J looked saddened. She bit her lower lip, but said nothing.
Janis and E-J journeyed up to Grimshaw Lodge, after lunch with Rupert and some of the staff. The Citroën felt very smooth as she drove it through the forests. But this couldn’t offset her mounting apprehension as they made their approach.
Their upset started when they parked at the front gates. A large security hoarding of wood and barbed wire blocked out the arch of the outer gatehouse. The tree branches had begun to undermine the top of the battlements. A few pieces of masonry had fallen down onto the drive and the grass verge nearby.
They both climbed out for a closer inspection. Janis undid the padlock with the key Rupert had given her. This secured a little door in the hoarding. They passed through this to be met by the portcullis. This had jammed near the bottom, giving only a couple of feet of clearance from the ground. They had to get onto their backs and wriggle underneath the metalwork, careful not to gash themselves on the spikes.
E-J still had a spirit of adventure about her as they brushed the dirt from their clothing. But Janis was overwhelmed by a deep sense of sadness, beginning to get an idea of what to expect.
They walked through the archway and onto the drive, E-J taking the lead. The rooks cawed overhead and their sounds echoed eerily over the deserted grounds. The branches hung down low and the rhododendron bushes encroached onto the sides of the driveway. This left only a narrow passageway for them to walk through. It was evident no vehicles had passed this way in a long time. As the passageway opened out, the outer lawns came into view and they both shuddered. All was a jungle of long grass, with an infiltration of nettles and brambles.
Janis leant against the bridge, thinking back to the abseiling here, so long ago now. And of the plans which had never materialized. She glanced over the parapet. The ghyll still raged on, but its banks were as overgrown as elsewhere.
Both of them succumbed to tears when they approached the inner gatehouse. Scorch marks around the windows and arrow slits foretold of what they might find. As they walked under the archway, they could look up directly to the sky. Only a few charred beams remained of Yasuko’s old quarters. The fire had gutted the whole interior.
Rupert had warned them of the vandalism. But nothing he said could have prepared them for what they were now viewing. They had to hug each other for several minutes, each detecting the other’s hesitation about whether to go on or turn back.
Eventually, they crept into the inner courtyard. Weeds were growing out from around the cobblestones. The wisteria on the facade of the main building now covered most of the wall and hid many of the closed upstairs shutters. Extra wooden boarding had been nailed over the ground-floor windows.
E-J ran over to the little door in the side wall. It opened easily into the walled garden. This had been E-J’s favourite space. Now she was met by more stinging nettles, blocking out most of the entrance. Some of the rose bushes still clung wildly to the walls. But the flower and vegetable beds had been completely consumed by the overgrowth.
Janis pulled E-J back and they walked around the side of the building to the main ramparted lawns. They fought their way down the old gravel path towards the terrace by the dining hall. They had no sight of the old sloping vista down towards the woods and the yew-tree tunnel.
Bramble thorns bit into the flesh on E-J’s legs. This prompted them to retreat. They headed for the front door. Janis undid further padlocks and then placed the heavy door key in the lock. The door creaked open.
Several rats squeaked and shot past them, scuttling away across the courtyard.
Both mother and daughter leapt back in fright. Once recovered, Janis had to coax E-J inside.
The hallway floor was damp. The parquet tiles were beginning to warp and rise. The grand stairway led off into the darkness. Janis looked up and saw the glass dome had several broken panels. Water was pouring in every time it rained.
Janis noticed the portrait of Dylan on the stairwell had been damaged by the water. The paint had run, giving his face a warped appearance, and several droplets gave the impression he was crying.
An air of mustiness filled their nostrils as they went into each room in turn. White sheets shrouded the furniture in the lounge. The door had remained locked here and nothing appeared to have been disturbed. Many of the books had been taken off the shelves in the library. The dining hall was an empty shell. Their shoes clicked on the stone floor and reverberated around the walls and up into the ceiling. Only the head of the white hart remained, skewed on its mounting; casting its eyes mournfully over the desolate scene.
The drawing room had taken a lot of damage. Much of the furniture was missing. Dylan’s two Regency globes lay shattered and the grand piano had been upended on the floor. Janis sifted around in the ashes in the marbled fireplace with a poker. There were a couple of charred cabriole legs and pieces of leather bookbinding. Graffiti had been scrawled over the expensive wallpaper and beards and glasses applied to several of the portraits.
Rupert had said they’d had problems with squatters that had taken five months to resolve.
Entering the old conservatory was perhaps the most haunting of all. The pool had been completely drained. Shards of glass from the many panels lay scattered all over the floor. Boarding had been secured over some of the metal latticework of the walls and ceiling. But a lot had been ripped off, either by high winds or by human hand. The elements had begun to destroy the interior fabric here as well.
Janis was plagued by recollections from her childhood. Despite Dylan’s best efforts, the Lodge was beginning to slide back into its former ruinous state, because of her absenteeism. A potent symbol of Janis’s neglect of Dylan and his legacy.
Upstairs, iron grates had been constructed over all the doors to the bedrooms, without a care for the plasterwork and architraves. Janis opened the padlocks and crept into each bedroom in turn. Two of them had been trashed, almost to the point of non-recognition. The others hadn’t been touched. The dustsheets remained intact on the furniture. This strangely gave these rooms added poignancy. Memories came flooding back to Janis, of the many happy nights she’d spent under the covers with the one great love of her life. She’d remained celibate ever since her last time with Dylan, here in this very room.
E-J comforted her as she broke down again.
The door to the tower could be unlocked and opened. But the way ahead had been crudely bricked up. They returned to the library and found their way through the secret door. On the upper levels, nothing had been disturbed. The vandals and squatters hadn’t been able to invade this space. The rooms were empty. The contents had been carefully crated up. The wooden containers remained stacked up in the corner of each room.
Up in Dylan’s old workroom, the desk remained in place. Janis tried to imagine his last moments up here and shuddered at the thought.
‘Don’t sit in that!’ Janis cried.
E-J was about to sit down in the old carved-oak chair in the corner. She froze, puzzled. Janis came over and put her foot on the seat. The iron prongs shot out around the arms and the legs of the chair.
‘Cool!’ E-J said, eyes wide in amazement.
Janis started to cry again.
‘What’s wrong, Mum?’
‘Never mind, love. Maybe I’ll tell you some day. When you’re a little older.’
E-J looked more concerned than intrigued. As if the weight of preceding generations was beginning to fall on her shoulders.
Janis could sense this. She knew she had to increase her resolve to ensure her daughter’s future.
Janis pulled open the door and they went up onto the battlements. Now they could really survey the deterioration of the estate from this coign of vantage.
E-J had never been up in the tower. So she was too busy marvelling at her surroundings to detect her mother was in floods of tears again. Until her mother hugged her in a grip too tight for comfort.
‘Are you OK, Mum?’
Janis remained silent, thinking. She was about to speak, then paused for further thought. ‘I’m upset by what’s happened to this place. If only I’d found a buyer.’
‘What? Sell this place? Never! Daddy’ll be coming back some day….’ she looked anxious. ‘….Won’t he?’
‘No. I don’t think he will, honey.’
Janis gripped her tighter. But E-J did not require consoling. Perhaps she was still too young to understand.
‘Selling this place would’ve secured your future, independent of me. As it is, you’ll inherit this place when you turn eighteen.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. Let’s hope there’ll be something left of it when the time comes….What would you like me to do?’
‘Come home, Mum. Live here.’
Janis relaxed her grip. ‘I’m not sure I could ever do that. There are too many demons here.’
‘Well, fight them away!’ she said vehemently. ‘I can see it now. You could set up a new outdoor centre here. Only bigger and better than Branth’et Farm.’
Janis was beginning to grasp her daughter’s vision. Ideas flashed through her mind as she viewed the grounds. Abseiling off the bridge….Ghyll-walking underneath….A ropes course in the beech trees. A rifle range in the old chapel….Maybe quad bikes on the outer lawns….Overnight camps in the woods. Orienteering around the whole grounds. Caving in the cavern….It would be easy to add a climbing wall, archery….water sports down on the lake….
‘What do you think, Mum? I could join you in the business once I’ve grown up.’
Janis kissed her on the forehead. ‘You know, you may have something there, darling.’
The last vestiges of summer had gone. The leaves had changed colour and were beginning to fall onto the driveway. Janis drove her Citroën into the car park. She stared at the bleak grey walls of the Victorian hospital building.
The doctor was there to greet her. She was a small, slender woman in her early fifties, with short, greying-black hair.
Janis climbed out of the car. She looked reserved, not knowing what the doctor’s reaction to her neglect of Dylan would be. She needn’t have worried.
‘Doctor, it’s good to see you at last.’
They shook hands.
‘What finally brings you here, Mrs Norton?’
‘What you sent me couldn’t be ignored.’ She pulled off her shoulder bag and opened it enough to show the doctor the dog-eared manuscript inside.
‘I see. We’re certain it was the last novel he’d been working on. Hadn’t even printed it off the machine when they found him.’
‘It’s very powerful. And so voyeuristic.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘It disturbed me so much.’ Janis looked unsteady.
‘You sure you’re up to this?’ From their lengthy telephone conversations over the last few years, the doctor was well aware of the amount of therapy Janis had endured in an effort to repair years of ritualistic abuse, never mind the added burden of what had happened to Dylan.
‘Yes. I need to see him. That novel is unlike anything he’s written as Dylan Quest. Reminds me of the style he had in his early unpublished days, when everyone knew him as John Jones.’
The way the doctor was scribbling down notes made Janis think she must have hit upon something important.
‘And the major events are pure autobiography. But sometimes he’s taken them out of sequence and he’s certainly condensed the time between each event. In reality, they took place over a year, maybe eighteen months.’
‘And the other episodes depicted?’
‘They seem to have been constructed, with real people being made to act according to their usual character traits. For example, I’ve never been back to Castle Crag since Sera’s death, but the route described was her favourite fell-walk.’
‘Right, I see.’
‘And Dylan’s showering of gifts onto Freya, and his use of outdoor pursuits to woo her, followed a course he often took to seduce his women.’
‘Umm. A weaving of fact and fiction. Now that’s interesting.’ She took down some more notes.
‘Emily told me Yasuko had discovered her at the chapel. They’d exchanged their stories, revealing their secrets. I can only assume Yasuko must’ve used this as ammunition against Dylan when she left. I’m sure Emily wouldn’t’ve said anything to Dylan. His anger would’ve been too great!’
The doctor nodded and made another note. ‘And what of Emily now?’
‘Still with the bikers, as far as I know. I get the odd re-directed postcard now and then. And I sent her a sizable sum for drug treatment, but she could’ve used this to buy more drugs, I really couldn’t tell.’
‘At least you tried to help her. And Yasuko?’
‘Last I heard she was a high-class dominatrix in Soho. Getting her own back, she said, and getting paid for the privilege.’
‘Oh.’ The doctor seemed taken aback, but recovered quickly. ‘And the other events portrayed?’
‘Well….let me see….Yasuko had been in the Land Rover crash with Dylan. That’s what finally drove Yasuko to leave. E-J found her own way into the cavern, which sent me berserk. Dylan witnessed my punishment of E-J. He was so furious. It led me to disclose my abuse, up in the tree house, as a way of placating him. I burnt the picture of my father. And I discovered the tower and the secret room and got caught in that blasted chair!’
The doctor scribbled away some more. ‘And what about the events concerning your mother?’
‘Well, the earlier events I knew about. The major dénouement in his text confused me deeply. I had no idea my father was also Dylan’s until I read this. I was shocked. It’s going to set me back months in my therapy.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Maybe I should’ve heeded my misgivings about sending it out to you. But you were persistent!’