Another short story. Made up, like the last one.

Aske had paid for the hedge to be laid, so Wyn started from his side.

It was a hawthorn hedge a hundred and forty yards long, and nobody had touched it in thirty years. Left alone that long, a hedge stops being a hedge and turns into a line of small trees. The trunks were as thick as her wrist, bare for the bottom four feet, with all the green bunched up at the top where the light was. Sheep could have walked through it. Aske wanted it laid so it would thicken up again from the base, low enough that, he’d said on the phone, he could see the hill from his kitchen again.

She had cut and laid about six yards when the woman from the other side came out.

“You’ll stop that,” the woman said. She was forty or so, in a coat pulled on over pyjamas, standing in wet grass with no socks on. “That’s my hedge.”

Wyn stopped. She had the billhook in one hand and a stem she’d half cut in the other, so it hung at a slant, not yet over. “I was told it was Mr Aske’s.”

“He would say that.”

Aske had seen them from the kitchen and was coming down the field now, in the same hurry, only in boots. By the time he got there the woman had her phone out with a photograph of a deed plan. It showed a red line drawn in a felt pen that was wider, at that scale, than the hedge.

“The line’s the hedge,” she said. “Look. It’s on the hedge.”

“It’s on both sides of the hedge,” Aske said. “It’s on half the field. That pen’s a yard wide.”

“Then it’s half mine.”

“It’s not how it works.”

“How does it work, then?”

They both looked at Wyn. She was the only one there who was paid by the yard and not by the outcome, so she supposed that made her the referee.

“Can I finish this one,” she said, “before it dries out?”

A laid stem is called a pleacher. You cut down into it at a slant, close to the ground, most of the way through, and stop before the end. What’s left is a strip of bark and pale wood about as thick as a thumb, which bends like a hinge. Then you lay the stem over at a low slant along the line of the hedge. It lives, because the hinge still carries water up from the root. In spring it puts out shoots all along its length, and the stump puts up new ones. Five years on you have a hedge thick enough to stop a bullock, where before you had a row of poles.

Cut too shallow and the stem won’t bend; it splits and you lose it. Cut too deep and it bends lovely and dies in May. She had been doing this for nineteen years and still lost one in fifty.

She laid the stem she was holding. It went over with the small creak that meant it was good. She drove in a stake beside it, then trimmed the stump flat and sloping so rain would run off rather than sit and rot it. The woman watched every stroke as though Wyn were cutting off someone’s fingers.

“It’s a presumption,” Wyn said, still working. “Not a law of nature, and a deed can beat it. But the old way was, when you planted a hedge on your boundary, you dug a ditch on the outside of it. The soil you threw up made the bank, and the hedge went on the bank. So the ditch was on the far edge of your land. If you find the ditch, the hedge belongs to whoever hasn’t got it on their side.”

“There’s no ditch,” the woman said.

“There’s always a ditch,” Wyn said. “It’s just full.”

She dug with the spade from the van. It seemed to her quicker than more talking, and nobody told her not to. She went in at right angles to the hedge, a spade’s width across, first on Aske’s side. There was a foot of topsoil, then clay, clean and yellow, the same all the way down.

Then she went round and dug on the woman’s side, and there it was two feet in. The topsoil suddenly went much deeper, black and soft and wet, with a smell of rotten leaves. It was thirty years of leaf fall and silt lying in a trench somebody had dug before any of them were born. She cut the spade down its far wall to show them where it stopped. It was nearly four feet across.

Nobody said anything for a bit.

“So it’s his,” the woman said.

“On that,” said Wyn, “probably. Get a surveyor if it matters.”

Aske didn’t gloat. Wyn had half expected him to, and gave him some credit for not doing it. He looked at the trench, then at the woman’s bare feet in the mud, then at the house behind her. For the first time Wyn looked at it properly too. It was small and pebbledashed and sat right up against the road, and apart from the hedge there was nothing between its front windows and the traffic.

The trunks of the unlaid stretch were bare for the bottom four feet. But the tops met in a tangle about twelve feet up. From the woman’s side it was a wall of green, and from the road you couldn’t see her house at all.

“When you’ve laid it,” the woman said, “how tall is it?”

Wyn didn’t soften it. “About up to here.” She held her hand flat at her chest. “For a few years. Then as tall as you let it get.”

“So from my front room you’ll see straight out onto the road.”

“For a few years.”

“I’ve got two kids,” the woman said. She wasn’t talking to Wyn. “This house was my mum’s. It came empty the year my marriage ended, and we’d nowhere else to go.” She pulled the coat tighter. “Their dad drives that road to work, twice a day. Some days he’s got his new family in the car with him. He hasn’t once stopped to see the kids, and from here at least they can’t watch him go past.”

Aske looked at the hill he’d wanted to see from his kitchen. Then he looked at his feet.

“She can’t stop you,” Wyn told him, because it was true and he had a right to hear it. “It’s your hedge and you’ve paid.”

“I know.”

“But I don’t have to take every stem,” she said. “It’s quite normal to leave a few. You pick good straight ones and let them grow on up out of the laid hedge, and in the end they’re trees. You call them standards. The old hedges were full of them. That’s where half the oaks in this county came from.”

“How many?” Aske said.

“One every ten yards gives you trees. One every three gives you a screen.” She tipped her head at the woman’s front windows. “In front of the house, one every three. Everywhere else, one every ten. You’ll see your hill over most of it.”

“And in front of the house I won’t.”

“No. You’ll see some hawthorn.”

He thought about it. You could see it cost him something, because he’d wanted that view for years and had just found out he was right about the ditch.

“Fine,” he said. “Every three.”

The woman didn’t thank him, but she didn’t argue. She went in to get socks.

It took Wyn four more days. She left eleven standards along the front of the house and ten along the rest of the line. She marked each one with a twist of orange twine so the next person to lay the hedge, twenty or thirty years from now, would know they’d been left on purpose.

The woman came out on the last afternoon with two mugs of tea and a boy of about six, who wanted to know why the trees she’d knocked over weren’t dead.

Wyn showed him. She went down on her heels by one of the first pleachers, the ones laid on the morning of the argument. She scraped her thumbnail across the bark just above the cut, gently, so as not to hurt it. Underneath it was green and wet.

“That’s still going,” she told him. “It’s only hanging on by that much.” She held up her finger and thumb a little apart. “But that’s enough. That’s all it needs.”

The boy scraped one himself, a bit too hard, and checked his thumbnail for green. There was some.

In April the woman sent Aske a photograph, and he sent it to Wyn. There were shoots all along the laid stems, and above them, in front of the house, eleven thin grey trunks with their first leaves out.