Birds of passage [antikvár]

A certain lack of synchronisity Neighbours. That's what they were, Ellen Walsh and Alice Pickering, with a thin wall between their sitting-rooms and an even thinner one between their bedrooms on the first floor. An eavesdropping house of which both the Walshes and the Pickerings took full advantage. And had been so doing for nigh on forty years. It could fairly be said that they knew each other pretty well, in the private as well as the public domain. Sometimes they confused those facts that were officially known with the information they had gleaned from bricks-and-mortar echo. But, since the pursuit of eavesdropping was common to both sides, each overlooked the others' indiscrétion. In ail respects, they were good neighbours, and what sealed their togetherness was the hedge that joined their two terraced estâtes. It stretched from the Walsh's front gate to the Pickering's with no outward sign of hésitation at its centre as to a change of ownership. It was straight as a die from one holding to the other. Every Saturday morning, Mr Walsh would stand at his gate, shears at the ready. And Mr Pickering likewise. The two men would nod to each other, and silently shear their way to a central encounter. They worked at the same efficient pace, arriving simultaneously at the half-way point, where they would pause and exchange morning greetings. And when one day, late in the spring, their other neighbours noted that the Walsh hedge was growing untamed, towering over the Pickering holding with a certain helpless impudence, they took it as a sure sign that Mr Walsh was indisposed. But it was more than that, as further enquiries and certain visible evidence proved. Mr Walsh had gone to his Maker, and his holding in the hedge was orphaned. Now, Mr Pickering had never coveted his neighbour's wife,