Tell Whoever Buys It That the Posts Are Under the Rockery

Tony answered.

Colin held out the report and said: “It’s five centimetres. Across the whole thing. That’s what it was.”

Tony did not take it.

“Five,” he said.

“Five. In my favour. Over the whole nine years and the eleven before it.”

“Five centimetres.”

“Yes.”

Tony looked at the pages in Colin’s hand for a while without touching them.

“We’ve had four solicitors,” he said.

“We have.”

“Four solicitors, and a hedge, and — ” He stopped.

“Yes,” said Colin.

---

There was a long pause on the doorstep. Somewhere down the road somebody was using a strimmer.

“You’d better come in,” said Tony.

---

They sat in Tony’s kitchen for about an hour and a half.

Colin has never given a full account of what was said and has been quite firm about that, which is unusual for a man who kept two hundred and twelve photographs of a van.

What he will say is that they did not apologise. Neither of them. Not once, not in any form, and that this did not seem at the time like an omission.

What they did was go through the report, page by page, with Tony asking questions and Colin answering them, and then Tony went and got a torch and they went out and looked at the post base under the patio corner together in the dark.

Shona and Deb, who were both in their own kitchens on either side, both saw the torch, and neither of them mentioned it that evening.

They mentioned it on the Wednesday, at length.

---

They did not become friends.

It is important to be honest about that, because the version where two men shake hands and become friends is not what happened and is not, Colin thinks, what usually happens.

They did not start having each other round. They did not go for a pint. In the eighteen months between that evening and the sale, they had perhaps nine conversations, all of them outdoors and all of them brief.

---

What happened was smaller.

In the spring, Tony moved the shed. Nineteen centimetres, unasked, over a weekend, with his son-in-law and a trolley jack. He did not mention it and Colin did not mention it and neither of them has ever mentioned it since.

Colin took the hedge down to waist height in the same month, which took him three days and which he also did not mention.

The van was parked straight from that week until Colin left, and Colin deleted the folder, and says that deleting it took about four seconds and that he thought it would feel like something and it did not feel like anything at all.

---

The house sold in the autumn.

The buyers were a couple in their thirties with a baby and a dog, and they asked, as buyers do, whether the neighbours were all right, and Colin said, “They’re fine. He’s fine.”

He has thought about that answer since and stands by it.

---

On the last day, loading the car, Tony came out.

He helped with the mower, which is heavy and awkward and which Colin had been quietly dreading, and between them they got it into the back of the van in about a minute and a half.

Then they stood there for a second, the way men do when a thing has been done and there is no longer a reason to be standing together.

They shook hands.

“Tell whoever buys it,” said Tony, “that the posts are under the rockery.”

“I’ve put it in the pack,” said Colin. “Anya’s report, all fourteen pages. It’s in with the deeds. And there’s a boundary agreement drawn up, signed, both of us, lodged with the title.”

Tony nodded slowly.

“Good,” he said. “Save them nine years.”

---

Colin and Shona are in the bungalow near Shrewsbury.

The garden is forty feet long and has a fence on one side and a beech hedge on the other, and the neighbours are called Pat and Ivor, and within a fortnight of moving in Colin went round with a bottle and a copy of the title plan and said, cheerfully, “Shall we just agree where it is now, while we still like each other?”

Pat thought this was the funniest thing she had ever heard.

They did it anyway. It took twenty minutes at a kitchen table and cost nothing, and it is signed and it is in both files.

Deb and Shona still speak, every Wednesday, on the phone now, ten till about eleven.

Neither of them mentions the fence.