The Mended Fence at Holloway’s End
The postman passed Holloway’s End at half past eight every morning, and Edith Brace had timed her walk accordingly for thirty-one years. She liked the lane when it still held its night-coolness, liked the way the cow parsley brushed her coat sleeves and left small wet prints on the wool. She liked, too, the way the village arranged itself quietly before the business of the day began.
It was the fence that stopped her.
The cottage at Holloway’s End had stood empty since March, when old Mr. Parfit had gone into the care home at Ashbury. His garden had thickened with grass and his gutters had begun to weep with moss. Nobody had come to tend it. His niece, a woman called Sandra whom the village had met only once at the harvest supper two years past, had telephoned the vicar to say she would deal with the property “in due course.”
But the lower fence panel, the one that had been split and leaning since February’s wind, was new. Pale, clean wood. The screws still bright. It smelled of fresh timber and linseed oil, and it fitted the frame so snugly that someone had taken real care with it.
Edith crouched and ran her finger along the edge. No weathering. No lichen. Three days old at most.
She straightened her back, looked at the curtained windows, and continued her walk.
She said nothing to anyone that morning. But that afternoon she stopped into Craddock’s hardware shop on the pretence of needing a new pot brush, and found Terry Craddock sorting rawl plugs behind the counter.
“Someone’s put a new panel in at the Parfit place,” she said, without looking up from the brushes.
Terry set down his box. He had the careful stillness of a man deciding whether to answer a question he hadn’t been asked. “Ordered it myself. Bloke came in Tuesday. Said he was sorting the cottage for the family.”
“What sort of bloke?”
“Fortyish. Brown jacket. Drove a grey estate.” He paused. “Paid cash.”
Edith selected a pot brush. “Did he give a name?”
“Didn’t ask.”
She paid for the brush and left.
The vicar, Gerald Prentice, was deadheading his roses when Edith came through his gate. He was a methodical man and she waited while he finished a stem before interrupting.
“Has Sandra Parfit been in contact about the cottage?” Edith asked.
He looked at her over his reading glasses. “Not recently. Why?”
“Someone’s been making repairs.”
Gerald set his secateurs on the wall. “She mentioned in May that she intended to sell. Perhaps she’s appointed an agent.”
“An agent who pays cash for fence panels and doesn’t leave his name?”
The secateurs scraped against the stone. Gerald said nothing for a moment. Then: “Arthur Hicks told me he’d seen a light in the back bedroom. Last Thursday, he thought. But Arthur’s eyes aren’t what they were, and I didn’t like to make anything of it.”
Edith walked home and made a pot of tea she didn’t drink. She sat at her kitchen table with a notepad and wrote three things: fence panel, cash, light in bedroom.
She telephoned Sandra Parfit that evening. The number was in the village directory, Mr. Parfit having listed it in his careful hand the year he moved in.
Sandra answered on the second ring and seemed genuinely puzzled. No, she had appointed no agent. No, she had asked no one to make repairs. She was coming up herself next month. She would be grateful if Edith could keep an eye.
The next morning, Edith was in the lane by seven. She wore her quietest shoes and carried a trug as cover, as though she were after the blackberries that grew along the hedgerow. The cottage sat still. But the side gate, which had always been bolted, was slightly ajar. Behind it, she could hear the sound of a radio turned very low.
She went to the village shop instead. She bought milk and told Pam Hollister, who knew everything, that she had a vague sense someone was sleeping rough in the area and perhaps they ought to mention it to PC Wentworth.
PC Wentworth was twenty-four and took things seriously. By ten o’clock his car was in the lane.
The man in the cottage was not dangerous. He was fifty-three, gaunt, wearing a brown jacket gone thin at the elbows, and he had been sleeping on Mr. Parfit’s old camp bed for eleven days. His name was Robert Parfit. He was the old man’s son, estranged for twenty years, who had driven past on impulse and found the key still in its old place beneath the third flowerpot, where Mr. Parfit had kept it since 1987.
He had fixed the fence because he had not known what else to do with himself.
The village debated this quietly for some weeks. Sandra Parfit, to her credit, telephoned her cousin directly. What passed between them was private. But in October, when the For Sale sign went up at Holloway’s End, there were two names on the listing.
Edith walked past it on a grey Tuesday morning, the cow parsley long since finished, the hedgerows thick with hips. The new fence panel had weathered to almost the same shade as the old boards beside it. Another month and you would hardly know the difference.
She noticed. But she said nothing, and that was quite enough.
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