by Wendy Holden
His father, meanwhile, was always trying to get him to do things. He was, Dylan sensed, inches away from giving him an Eve-style lecture on taking responsibility and getting back to work. That, Dylan resolved, he could not and would not stand.
His father’s axiom, that activity improved the mood, only sent Dylan’s spirits plunging further. He did not want his mood improved. His mood was dark and bitter and he intended to keep it that way. He wanted to stay up in his room with the curtains pulled, as he had when he’d been a teenager. Frankly, he felt like a teenager, but not in any good way. Only in the sense that, back with his mother and father, he felt trapped in his own past.
Trapped, too, by a ghastly new twist on fame. There had been wide newspaper coverage of the ‘accident’, meaning he was now a literary tragedy as well as a success. This had been followed by some doorstepping of his parents’ home by journalists eager to learn the latest developments.
They hadn’t quite reached the actual doorstep; the electric gates had seen to that. But they were there at the end of the drive and people in the village had been asked for information. The phone rang at strange hours.
Although they had never complained about the disruption to them and were outraged only on his behalf, it was clearly unfair to expect his parents to put up with this situation. Another reason, Dylan decided, to disappear and let no one know where he was while he indulged his anger and depression. He could even make it look like consideration for others.
But where should he go? He did not, for obvious reasons, want to return to Cornwall. Or to London; he’d had enough of that too. He wanted to go somewhere he had never been before, where he knew no one and no one knew him. Somewhere, unlike the other places he had lived, that was neither attractive nor interesting. Miserable as he was, he wanted to live in a place that was miserable too, and where – unlike home – no one would be trying to cheer him up.
Dylan decided on the Midlands. He’d never been there and knew little about it. But – Birmingham, Coventry, the Potteries, the Black Country. The names suggested a post-industrial landscape, all depressed towns and motorways edged with litter. Perfect. Somewhere he could really revel in his hopelessness.
Presumably the very middle of these Midlands would be the grimmest bit of all. Dylan took a map of the UK and a very sharp pencil and drew a vertical line down the centre. Then he drew a horizontal line. He would move to the point where the two lines met.
They went through the E of somewhere called Edenville.
The name filled Dylan with a mordant satisfaction. He knew enough about industrial history to be aware that villages built in mill and mining areas had names that were at best euphemistic and at worst a mocking subversion of the miserable reality of their appearance. The area around this Edenville looked fairly empty, but that, Dylan reasoned, was because it was abandoned scrubland, littered with the spoil heaps of closed mines.
Edenville! He wanted to laugh out loud. The town centre would be all concrete multi-storey car parks, boarded-up shops and disaffected youth. The bleakness of it all would suit his current outlook exactly.
‘But where are you going?’ his mother kept demanding, right up until the moment he set off. She stood anxiously now in front of his concerned-looking father on the drive of the comfortable family home.
‘I’ll let you know,’ he answered, deliberately vague. He did not want to hurt his parents; but nor did he want them coming to find him. He wanted to be alone.
He started up the little old hatchback he’d bought second-hand as a teenager and which had remained for years in his father’s garage. Its back-to-basics lack of frills suited his purpose and outlook. It had just come back from being checked; it was, the mechanic said, running well, mostly because there was so little to go wrong. With its two doors, four gears, plastic seats and wind-down windows it was scarcely more complex than a bicycle. His bag, small as it was, with only minimal changes of clothes and a sponge bag, filled the entire back seat.
‘You haven’t even given us your mobile number,’ his mother wailed as Dylan prepared to edge down the leafy drive.
He wound down the window with an effort. ‘That’s because I don’t have one,’ he said.
‘But how will you keep in touch?’ his father wanted to know.
‘Old tech,’ Dylan grinned. ‘Phone boxes. Postcards.’
He drove off, waving cheerily to disguise his guilt and misgivings. He loved them, but he couldn’t stay here.
He roared past the journalists waiting at the bottom of the drive. There were only a couple; hopefully interest in his story was fading. He was two-days-from-now’s chip paper, Dylan thought, and that suited him just fine. He was a piece of screwed-up newspaper blowing about in a deserted multi-storey car park in the post-industrial ruins of Edenville.
By the time he turned off the motorway, the Midlands had yet to come up to his expectations. Or down to them. Nothing so far remotely resembled the wrecked wasteland of his fantasies. Wretched towns and broken buildings, vast, smoke-belching power stations and ugly mechanical plants all seemed in depressingly short supply.
Dylan stabbed at the newly installed satnav – the car’s one concession to the twenty-first century. But there was no mistake; he was definitely going in the right direction. He was approaching Edenville just now, in fact.
Perhaps the grim, noir bits would start soon. For the moment, the countryside was mellow, with fat fields of pinkish-brown earth and handsome red-brick Georgian residences with fanlights picked out in white. He had passed several attractive pubs whose shining windows were stickered with Good Food Guide labels while exterior blackboards listing the specials of the day stood invitingly outside.
Dylan hadn’t realised the Midlands could look like this. The fields looked unbelievably green, under a sky of equally powerful blue. Well, hopefully they would stop soon and give way to some rackety, boarded-up suburbs leading to a brutalist concrete centre.
He had just been through a town called Chestlock, which hadn’t been rackety at all. On the contrary: it had been an upright, well-kept sort of place. None of the businesses had been boarded up; the shops all looked prosperous and the town centre had bustled with people. There was a park of Edwardian tidiness that sported both a boating lake and a floral clock.
Aha, thought Dylan. According to his satnav, he was approaching something called the Pemberton Estate. Edenville seemed to be in the middle of it. He pictured a bleak expanse of public housing beset with social problems. At last!
But that he’d got the wrong end of the stick was evident even before he went over the ancient stone bridge and past the large green sign with ‘The Pemberton Estate’ painted on it in neat white letters. Beyond stretched a rolling emerald park through which a wide silver ribbon of river meandered between banks studded with elegant trees.
That Edenville village was going to be horribly attractive was glaringly obvious.
CHAPTER 18
Behind the managerial wooden flap of the Edenville Arms, Jason Twistle was worrying. It was possible that he hadn’t sounded appalled enough about the sacking of Ros Downer.
Angela was clearly furious about it, but only partly because Ros was her friend and collaborator. The root of her indignation was that the Earl had acted over her head, without consultation, and this had made her look powerless. Appearing powerful, for Angela, took precedence over friendship every time.
Was his failure to sympathise a terrible mistake? Jason wondered. And might Angela Highwater make him pay for it, in some ghastly, yet undreamed of way?
He cast a glance into Pumps bar, and from there into the adjoining Kegs restaurant. His vantage point at the base of the stairs gave him a good view of both.
Nothing much was going on in either. The lunch service was drawing to a close and all that could be heard was the clink of cutlery and glassware as sets were put out for din
ner. Outside, a few stragglers were drinking up at the sunny outside tables. It was all very peaceful. Not even Dan Parker had turned up to defy regulations by eating his home-made sandwiches on the pub’s premises. Hopefully he had finally got the message and wouldn’t.
Jason looked at his watch. The honeymooners should be here soon; the jilted bride and her female companion. And the child, of course.
Was Angela right and were they a same-sex couple? Jason found he was hoping so. Their example might help him face up to the tendencies he’d buried for years, but which were, he felt, steadily coming to the surface. There was a young barman he had hired, Ryan. He wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer but there was definitely something about him . . .
Jason shoved the thought away and returned to flicking through the new estate brochure. Now Ros Downer had actually been sacked, Jason could enjoy her moronic descriptions. She had made a particularly impressive hash of the Pemberton Estate’s holiday cottages.
The cottages had been converted from various estate buildings. ‘Cobblers’ was a former shoe mender’s workshop, ‘Sloppings’ was an ex-pigsty and ‘High Cheeses’ an erstwhile dairy. The latest to come on stream was the rather more romantically named ‘Bess’s Tower’.
A one-time hunting lodge, it was named after an Elizabethan countess of Pemberton who had been especially partial to the chase. Once it would have afforded splendid views of the parkland below, but in the five centuries since it was built, woods had sprung up around it. The building now lay buried like Sleeping Beauty’s castle amid a tangle of trees and rhododendron bushes.
Bess’s Tower had been abandoned for many years, used mainly as a place for fag-breaks by the foresters working in the pine plantations at the top of the estate. But Buzzie Omelet, the famous interior designer, had recently taken the place in hand and given it an overhaul. Bess’s Tower was now, Jason learned from the peerless Downer prose, ‘transfoamed into a haven of piece and tranquility not to mention a shoecase for stunning locally sauced design’.
It was like reading a foreign language. Jason eventually translated details of the master bedroom’s headboard made from ginkgo biloba branches and the Japanese toilet. He knew all about the toilet anyway. Thanks to the estate plumbers, who got everywhere, this convenience was famous throughout Pemberton. It apparently played music and sent up warm gusts of air after self-flushing.
Despite such attractions, Bess’s Tower had as yet failed to catch on with the cottage-renting public as comprehensively as Cobblers, Sloppings and High Cheeses had. All were booked solidly throughout every holiday and many weekends besides – except for Bess’s.
No one really knew why. Some thought it might be the remote location, others pointed to the lack of Wi-Fi. Possibly it was a combination of those factors and the exceptionally steep – even for the Pemberton Estate – weekly rental. The powers that be, it was felt, also had more faith in the pulling power of the Japanese toilet than perhaps, strictly, it merited.
Recent e-bulletins to managers in all areas of the estate had urged those in front-of-house positions to sell the new conversion hard. Jason knew this was an opportunity for him, the new kid on the Pemberton hospitality-offer block, as it were, to make an impression.
But it was a tough call. Only someone who really wanted to escape from the world would want to stay in Bess’s Tower. A reclusive Howard Hughes type. And they’d need his money too if they intended to take advantage of the private chef option.
Edenville was a Best Kept Village on steroids. Worse than his worst fears. Dylan had drawn up in the car park of the pub and was sitting looking gloomily out through his windscreen.
The buildings were like nothing he had ever seen; certainly not in one place, all together, like this. While they had evidently all been built at the same time – early Victorian, at a guess – they were all different and all equally fantastical.
There was a house shaped like a tiny castle, complete with octagonal tower, cross-shaped arrow slit and white flagpole. There was a Tudor one with steep gables, barley-sugar chimneys and mullioned windows criss-crossed with diamond panes. Other houses had a Venetian look about them, with balconies and rows of pointed arched windows. Yet others had the big, projecting roofs of Swiss chalets.
It was all incredibly fanciful, ridiculously gorgeous, impossibly picturesque. And the gardens were even worse, exploding with traditional country colour: hollyhocks, roses, wisteria, delphiniums. There was a church with a green stretch of grass in front of it where a mirror-like pond reflected some majestic oaks and elms.
He stared at the pub, the Edenville Arms. It was built of the same golden stone as the rest of the village. There were twinkling windows and fresh white parasols above the terrace tables. Even the gravel in the car park had been raked like a Riviera beach.
Dylan would have liked to have driven off in search of the somewhere infinitely more miserable he had originally had in mind. But he had drawn his pencil line through this appallingly beautiful place. It was here, or hereabouts, that he’d vowed to live. He was stuck with it. And he was tired after his long journey; the least that was required was lunch. And maybe, after, a sleep in the car. He had to admit that the place was suitable for that at least; it was pretty quiet.
Jason was still absorbed in Ros’s brochure. Perhaps he had been over-critical. In its way it was a masterpiece. So bad that it was good.
‘Excuse me.’
Jason looked up. A gaunt young man in jeans and a white T-shirt stood before him. He looked drained, his wild dark hair accentuating his grey pallor and the shadows under his large, dark eyes.
‘Do you have any sandwiches?’
Jason launched himself into full exuberant manager mode. ‘Sandwiches! Indeed, sir. Absolutely. Allow me to get you a bar menu.’
Dylan watched the neat little bottom in its tight black trousers sashay off into Pumps bar. Jason returned waving a large grey sheet of paper. ‘Here we are, sir. Allow me to recommend the crayfish, pea, mint and mango wrap.’
Dylan stared at the sandwich options printed in swirling script. ‘I just wanted ham.’
‘Certainly. Can I recommend the air-dried jamón from the Spanish black-footed mountain pig? It’s fed entirely on acorns at an altitude of no less than three thousand feet and served with vanilla and green fig compote . . .’
Dylan groaned inwardly. He’d imagined he’d left this sort of thing behind him. Soho members’ clubs had entire herds of black-footed mountain pigs air-dried into fashionable ham and washed down with boutique beers.
‘Just normal ham, if that’s OK.’
‘Of course, sir. The black-footed pig isn’t to everyone’s taste. May I recommend one of our boutique ales to go with it? Tinker’s Bottom is a particularly good fit.’
‘Er, OK.’
Jason beamed. ‘Please take a seat on the terrace, sir. Your sandwich will be with you directly and I’ll send someone out with your Bottom.’
Dylan wandered back out to the front of the pub and sat down at one of the wooden tables. They were clean, comfortable and well shaded. The honeycomb-coloured paving stones beneath them were entirely weed-free; free, too, of a single cigarette butt. This place was almost eerily well kept.
His eye caught the gold weathercock revolving cheerily atop the church steeple. It seemed to him that the sharp pencil shape might at any moment start scribbling on the sky.
Imagery, pshaw, Dylan thought, pushing away this glimmering of literary inspiration, his first since the accident. He didn’t want literary inspiration, not any more. Along with everything else in the writer’s bag of tricks – metaphor, allegory, rhythm, synecdoche, you name it – he no longer had any use for it.
He was here to not write. To not write in a place so depressing that he could abandon himself to nihilism and do nothing at all if he felt like it; where merely running away from writing was enough.
But it was hard not to recognise that things weren’t quite working out that way. Instead of leading him to a miserable, post-industrial town, Fate had brought him to a village that looked like a living postcard. Edenville was all light and colour, beauty and tastefulness. It wasn’t the kind of place where you could stare at a concrete wall whilst the people in the upstairs flat screamed and threw things and police sirens wailed all night long. It was the kind of place where you heard nightingales and stared at what were undoubtedly England’s Best Views.
There was also something irrepressibly vital about it. From the singing birds to the blooming gardens to the thrusting trees, the village seemed full of natural get up and go. The few people Dylan had seen were all busily occupied and the neat outsides of the cottages suggested that their inmates were both proud and happy to be there.
It was difficult, tired and dispirited though he was, not to feel stirred by all this life and activity. It occurred to him that just running away from writing might not, after all, be enough. Not for the rest of his days, anyway.
‘Tinker’s Bottom and a ham sandwich, sir?’
A pint of beer in a straight glass was put in front of him, plus a plate full of dazzlingly bright colours. An onion and tomato salad was topped with cress and chopped yellow pepper. Beside it, made of very fresh white bread and stuffed thickly with home-cured ham, the sandwich had been cut into quarters and carefully arranged along a narrow white plate. It was, Dylan had to admit, without doubt the finest ham sandwich he had ever seen.
As he ate, and despite his efforts not to let it, his unwanted mood of optimism gathered strength. He reluctantly accepted that perhaps his father had been right all along and he ought to find something to do.
But definitely not something where he worked with his brain, or used a keyboard. The something, whatever it was, would have to be far removed from the heated, esoteric world of letters.
