Romantic or fearsome? It very much depended on who you were and how you felt about such things. It was a spectacular landscape, and for some would be deeply romantic and savage; for others, including myself, it had a strangely sinister air, not really fearsome, simply a gash in a great mountain reminding one that nature was a far greater force to reckon with than even mankind. This was all clearly the result, many, many years ago, of some cataclysmic upheaval in the earth’s centre. But I knew that in the dark of winter, with the roaring of a storm, or in the early days of spring when the first snows began to melt higher up and turned the gentle stream into a bullying, crashing, shouldering torrent, storming round the boulders, snapping at the dead branches which it had torn away in its violent journey, it could be indeed fearsome.

I could see what had attracted James to the place: the deceptively ‘pretty’ façade plus the angry background, the tremendous gash in the mountain, the wilderness of scrub and shale, the desolation of the dark gorge deep in the shadow at all times of the year, even high summer save for an hour or two, and the little house cowering beneath the great crags where only the raven, hawk and crow lazily wheeled high. Silent in the up-draught.

A painter’s countryside, to be sure; probably a writer’s one also. But not the sort of writer I was. I had no vestige of Edgar Allan Poe about me. Nor did I wish to have.

Turning to retrace my steps back to the front, and more congenial, part of the place (after all I had, it would appear, a three-year lease on the house, so I had to take it a little more seriously than a mere visit to my lost brother’s paradise), I could see, shimmering through the trees on my right, the roofless tower, the ragged windowless line of wall on the ruined château, and the motionless, feather tips of the cedar tree. Still, silent, lost.

Romantic, all right. Gothic. Very Jane Eyre, very Rex Whistler.

Maurice was due at any moment, my hour was about up; but I had an urge to return to the house and make certain that James had left no other signs of his life in this place, other than his canvases in the studio. Surely there would be a dressing-gown? A pair of forgotten slippers? A jacket, some personal thing, even a toothbrush? But, just as I thought that, I remembered the Spartan barrenness of the little bathroom with its newspapers in the bath.

Back in the bedroom I opened the big wardrobe doors. Empty save for two or three coat-hangers swinging in the draught. Nothing in the cupboards at the bottom except an empty plastic moth-repellent packet and one horn button. Nothing either in any of the drawers of the little dressing-table with its cheap modern mirror.