The road to Wraycombe was flat for eleven miles and then it was flat for eleven more.
Kate Mercer sat in the passenger seat with her feet on the dashboard, which her mother normally hated, and watched the country go past. There were no hills. There were no woods. There were fields the colour of wet cardboard, and long straight ditches full of black water, and every few miles there was a farm building with no roof. Above all of it there was an enormous grey sky that started at one side of the windscreen and finished at the other.
—It’s very big, Kate said.
—What is?
—The sky. There’s too much of it.
Her mother did not answer. She had been driving for three hours and she had not said very much for the last one.
Kate was fifteen. She was tall and thin and she had her grandmother’s dark hair, which everybody in the family mentioned at least once a year, usually at Christmas, usually in a voice that suggested it was a compliment. She was in the middle of the October half term holiday, and instead of spending it at home with her friends, she was in a car in Norfolk, going to a house she had visited exactly twice in her life.
Her grandmother had died in August.
It had happened quickly and quietly, in hospital, on a Tuesday afternoon, and Kate had not been there. Her mother had been there. When she came home that evening she had put her bag down in the hall and said, in a completely normal voice, that Grandma Iris had gone, and then she had made dinner, and they had eaten it, and nobody had cried until much later and separately.
Since then Helen Mercer had organised a funeral, answered forty letters, cancelled a phone line, argued with a bank, and said the phrase “I’m fine, honestly” approximately two hundred times.
Now they were going to Wraycombe to empty the house.
—How long do we have? Kate asked.
—Nine days.
—And then what?
—And then an estate agent comes and takes photographs, and in the spring somebody buys it, and that’s that.
—Somebody will buy it?
