Six Cars in the Drive

By four o'clock there were six cars in the drive and not one of the people who arrived in them had spoken to another in a decade. Great-Aunt Constance had planned it that way, you could feel it, the way you can feel a chess move three turns after it is made. The estate sat at the end of a road that had no other houses on it. The nearest town was forty minutes back and the phone signal had quietly died somewhere around the second cattle grid. Marianne arrived last. She stood in the gravel and counted the cars and felt her stomach drop, because she had assumed she would be the only one summoned, and clearly so had everyone else, and Constance had known they would all assume that. The front door opened before anyone knocked. A lawyer in a grey suit said the will would be read at five, and dinner served at seven, and that nobody, for legal reasons, would be leaving tonight.