This is the main workroom. It occupies the entire top storey of the Ivory Tower, with windows on every side and a black iron railing around the central well of the staircase. The room is light and airy, with wide window-seats set into the thickness of the walls. The plasterwork of the ceiling rises in a distinct curve towards the centre of the room where there is 9 foot clear of headroom, moulding around the weathered grey beams that support the framework of the roof above. Here and there, various ornaments, drawings and postcards are dangling amongst the beams, suspended by thumb-tacked twists of coloured wool or hanging from nails hammered in somewhat askew. To one side of the room, opposite the staircase, a series of rungs set into the stone lead up to a trapdoor that opens out onto the roof.

There are various different desks and work-tables arranged here, but only one chair — a slender high-backed article with a seat of worn green velvet, marked here and there with faint stains of ink and what looks like some kind of glue. At the moment it is standing rather crookedly against the wall next to an open escritoire, as if thrust back in a hurry.

The writing-desk in question is swept clear save for a battered journal-book lying open and some printed papers (some of which appear to have unspooled from an extremely elderly printer indeed), but a somewhat battered cardboard box is standing on the floor beside it, containing a pile of manuscript approximately eight inches high. The pages all bear a circled number in the top right-hand corner, and, since the box has split open down one side as if someone had stumbled over it in the dark, sufficient protruding edges are visible down the pile to make it clear that the numbers run consecutively from the bottom upwards. The ink on on the visible edges of several of the pages has faded to a pale brown, or to a barely-readable gold-tinged shadow that suggests that nothing had been added to the work in progress at that point for many months... Some dozen-odd pages towards the top are in red ink and written with a different nib: testimony to the unforgiving nature of a stone floor when a fountain-pen is carelessly dropped from a height of several feet.

The topmost leaf of all, its scribbled black ink still unfaded by the sunlight that falls across desk and box from the window to the left, bears a number in the high eight hundreds. There are only a few lines of text at the top. It appears to be the end of a dialogue.But halfway down the empty page, in staggering capitals some two inches high, followed by enough exclamation marks to suggest a seriously unhinged mind, six bold letters stand on their own: "T H E   E N D". Judging by the state of the box, while the magnum opus may be finished, the author clearly hasn't yet got out of the habit of going back to admire the proof of this fact!

The upper half of the escritoire is mainly crammed with letters, the dog-eared corners of larger brown envelopes just visible amongst the general mass, but a couple of compartments towards the right are relatively clear by comparison. One holds a sheaf of scrap paper, a blue airmail pad, some blank envelopes and a folded sheet of stamps, while its neighbour seems to contain only a fat gold-tipped fountain pen, chipped but mended, its somewhat scratchy brushed-steel companion, and two oval ink bottles arranged in a neat row. One, filled with black ink, is almost full; while the other, half-full but dusty, holds red. In the darkness further back, smaller, angular bottles can be glimpsed, showing metallic and jewel-colours even in the shadow, and a couple of slender paint-brushes and spare nibs lie close beside.

On the floor under the desk is a tumbled stack of old hard-backed journals and desk-diaries, their covers bearing a selection of embossed dates ranging from 1977 to 1992. The discolouration along the edges of the white pages indicates clearly that those at the bottom of the pile remain pristine, while the top one is half-used, and three appear to have been completely filled with rapidly-scribbled fiction.

Other parts of the room hold other equipment. One broad table to the north side of the workroom bears a large drawing-pad and some soft pencils on its angled surface, a third table appears to hold pieces of a half-assembled model, while a fourth, a small metal-topped desk with a drawer in the front and a black rim, carries a jam-jar of clean water and two blue tin boxes of water-colours, with a large (and currently empty) ewer on the floor to its right. On the far side of the stairwell, the low-slung bulk of a bookbinder's press is visible, with a sheaf of sewn pages lying across one corner.

A heap of coloured wool at the foot of one window-seat, spilling out of the inadequate confines of a black plastic sack, is half-covered by what looks like a rather small crochet blanket. The latter appears to have been designed on the principles of using as many different colours as possible while keeping a reasonably coherent pattern, although a glance at the odds and ends of wool alongside suggests that the motivation may simply have been that of using up a large number of scraps in different colours... The current outermost border of the crochet consists of squares shading from dark blue to baby blue to white, with an assortment of different coloured dots in the centres of adjoining squares; a further handful of white-bordered squares on the floor beside it, with a crochet hook jammed through them to hold them together, suggest that the project, whatever it is, remains unfinished, although there doesn't appear to be a great deal of wool left.