The Quarry

Chapter 1: The Will

The solicitor's letter arrived on a Tuesday, which Stephen Kirby would later think was fitting. Tuesdays had always struck him as the most forgettable day of the week — the day when nothing of consequence was supposed to happen. He was standing in his Edinburgh kitchen, still in the suit trousers and white shirt he'd worn to the office, his tie loosened but not removed, pouring a glass of Sancerre he didn't particularly want. The post sat on the granite island where his housekeeper had left it: two bills, a dental reminder, and a cream envelope with a Norfolk postmark.

He set the wine down and picked up the envelope. The handwriting wasn't his father's. Arthur Kirby's hand had been shaky for the last decade, a palsy that had crept in alongside the emphysema, and by the end he'd stopped writing letters altogether. This was neat, professional — a secretary's hand. Stephen turned it over. The return address belonged to a firm in Fakenham. Greaves & Lott, Solicitors.

He opened it standing up, which was how he opened everything. Margaret, his ex-wife, had once told him he approached his personal correspondence as though preparing cross-examination. He'd taken it as a compliment. She hadn't meant it as one.

The letter was brief. Arthur Kirby had died on the fourteenth of September, peacefully, at his cottage in Thornham. Funeral arrangements were being handled by a local firm. The will stipulated that all three of Arthur's children — Stephen, Laura, and Paul — were to gather at the cottage within thirty days of his death to sort the estate together. No individual bequests would be distributed until this condition was met.

Stephen read it twice, then set it on the counter and picked up his wine. He drank half the glass before he registered the taste. Through the kitchen window, the Firth of Forth was a grey smear in the September dusk, and two joggers were passing on the path below his flat, their footfalls soft and rhythmic.

His father was dead. He waited for something to arrive — grief, relief, some seismic internal shift — but what came instead was a dull administrative awareness, the same instinct that governed his working life. There were things to be done. Calls to make. He would need to contact Laura. He would need to find Paul.

The last part would be the difficult one.

He hadn't spoken to Paul in — he calculated — three years. A phone call on Christmas Day that had lasted four minutes, during which Paul had sounded either drunk or recently woken, and Stephen had sounded, he supposed, like himself. Efficient. Clipped. They'd exchanged the necessary pleasantries and hung up with mutual relief.

Laura he spoke to more often, perhaps every two or three months. She was easier. She'd always been easier — the middle child who'd made smoothness her vocation. She taught Year Six at a primary school in Didsbury and lived alone in a terraced house she'd bought after her divorce. She kept African violets on every windowsill, which Stephen knew because she'd told him, more than once, in the gentle, persistent way she had of offering personal details as though they were gifts he might eventually learn to accept.

He finished his wine and called her.

She answered on the third ring. "Stephen."

"You've heard," he said.

"The solicitor rang me this afternoon. I was at school. I had to take the call in the corridor outside the staff toilets." A pause. "He's gone, then."

"Yes."

"Were you — did you know he was close?"

"I knew the emphysema was advanced. I spoke to his GP in July. She said months, not years."

"You spoke to his GP in July and didn't tell us."

Stephen closed his eyes. Already. Not five minutes in. "I'm telling you now. I didn't want to alarm anyone prematurely."

"Paul," Laura said. "Does Paul know?"

"I haven't called him yet. I'm not sure I have a current number."

"I do. He texted me in August. He's in Bristol, I think. Or he was in August."

Bristol. Before that it had been Leeds, and before Leeds, Brighton, and before Brighton, a stint in Dublin that had ended badly. Paul moved the way water moves — always finding the lowest point.

"Will you call him, or shall I?" Stephen asked.

"I'll do it," Laura said quickly. "I'll do it tonight."

There was a silence between them that held the shape of everything they weren't saying. Stephen could hear her breathing, and behind her breathing, the faint sound of a television.

"The will says we have to go to the cottage," Stephen said. "All three of us. Together."

"I know. I read the letter."

"Can you manage the time off?"

"It's half-term in two weeks. I could come then."

"Fine. I'll arrange it."

Another pause. Then Laura said, very quietly, "Stephen. Are you all right?"

"Of course I'm all right. He was eighty-seven. It was expected."

"That's not what I asked."

"Goodnight, Laura."

He hung up and poured the rest of the Sancerre down the sink, watching it spiral away. Then he stood at the window and looked out at the darkening water and thought about his father's cottage, and Norfolk, and the things that waited there, and he thought: I am sixty-four years old, and I have built an entire life on top of something, and now someone is asking me to go back and stand on it again.

He turned off the kitchen light and went to bed.

---

Laura called Paul that evening, sitting on her sofa with a cup of tea she kept forgetting to drink. The African violets on the windowsill behind her were in bloom — purple and white, absurdly cheerful, like small crowds of well-wishers.

Paul's phone rang six times before he picked up. "Laura?"

"Hello, love. Are you all right? Are you sitting down?"

"I'm lying down, actually. What's happened?"

She told him. There was a long silence on the other end.

"Paul?"

"I'm here. I'm just — yeah. Okay." Another silence. "When?"

"The fourteenth. Five days ago."

"Five days. And nobody thought to —"

"The solicitor only contacted us today. Dad arranged everything himself, apparently. He didn't want a fuss."

Paul laughed, a short, hard sound. "No. He never did, did he. Fuss was for other people."

Laura let that pass. "There's a condition in the will. We all have to go to the cottage. The three of us, together. To sort the estate."

"You're joking."

"I'm not."

"He's managing us from beyond the grave. That's — that's actually impressive."

"Paul."

"What? It is. The old man spent his whole life not talking about anything, and his final act is to lock his three children in a house together. It's a masterstroke."

Laura pressed her fingers to her temple. "Can you come? Half-term is in two weeks. I can be there from Saturday the nineteenth."

"Bristol to Norfolk. That's a long drive."

"You could take the train."

"Trains cost money, Laura."

She heard what he wasn't saying. "I'll send you the fare."

"I didn't ask you to —"

"I know you didn't. I'm offering. Will you come?"

A long breath on the other end of the line. She could picture him in whatever bedsit or flatshare he was occupying now — thin, restless, probably lying on an unmade bed with his guitar within arm's reach. Paul at forty-nine. The thought made something ache in her chest.

"Yeah," he said finally. "Yeah, I'll come."

"Good. That's good."

"Laura."

"Yes?"

"Is Stephen going to be — I mean, is he going to be Stephen about the whole thing?"

"He's going to be himself, Paul. That's all any of us can be."

"That's what I'm afraid of."

After she hung up, Laura sat for a long time in her quiet sitting room, the tea gone cold, the violets glowing softly in the lamplight. She was fifty-two. She had been fourteen the last time all three of them had been together in that village, in that house, breathing that particular coastal air that smelled of salt and turned earth and something mineral, something ancient — the chalk and flint of the quarry.

She hadn't been back since. None of them had. Arthur had moved there alone after their mother died in 2003, retreating to the village of his youth like a wounded animal returning to its den. He'd lived there for twenty-one years. They'd visited him separately, when they visited at all — Laura most often, Stephen occasionally, Paul almost never.

Now they would go back together.

She picked up her tea, grimaced at its coldness, and carried it to the kitchen. As she poured it down the drain, she caught her reflection in the dark window above the sink — a woman with greying hair and her mother's eyes, looking tired and uncertain and, beneath it all, afraid.

The quarry. She hadn't let herself think about the quarry in years. She'd become very good at that — at the controlled amnesia that passed for coping, at the way you could build a life on top of silence and, if you were diligent enough, almost forget what was underneath.

Almost.

She washed the cup, dried it, put it away. Then she went upstairs and lay in the dark and did not sleep for a long time.