How to Measure a Cow Read online

  Nobody said anything for a while, then Tara began to speak.

  ‘This is what happened,’ she began. ‘I’ll tell you that first, then I’ll tell you how it was for me and how I am now.’

  It was almost dark when she drove back to where she was staying. Claire had urged her to remain, saying she was in no fit state to drive – they’d had room service later on and two bottles of wine – but Tara said she was fine and she wanted to go. There were kisses and hugs all round. Tara enjoyed them. It was a long time since she’d had that sort of physical contact with anyone and it felt comforting. They used to kiss and hug a lot when they were young. It was the time when everyone their age started behaving in this un-English way, to the embarrassment of the older generation. They were always flinging their arms round each other and saying ‘Love you’, only half mocking. But now, leaving them, she saw the difference twenty-five years had made. None of them could trill ‘Love you’ in the same way. Hugs were serious. There was no exaggerated embracing, only an uncertain, diffident pressure from body to body, a slight squeezing of the arms and then a quick release. Still, it meant something, though quite what she hadn’t yet worked out.

  Alone in her hotel room, Tara found herself thinking about Nancy Armstrong. Claire, Molly, Liz … then Nancy Armstrong, oh God. Sarah Scott’s only friend, and the friendship so pallid, so timid, so unlikely ever to flourish. It had no history, no depth to it, and never could have. Their ages were wrong, their backgrounds unfathomable to each other. Their tentative friendship rested on proximity – that was all.

  Claire was on the phone as soon as she got home next morning, to first Molly, then Liz, ostensibly to check that they had got home safely, and then to plunge into the credibility of the tale Tara told them. ‘Do you believe it?’ she asked each of them. ‘All of it, I mean?’ Molly said she saw no reason not to, incredible as it seemed. She just found it sad. But Liz had some hesitation about accepting certain parts of Tara’s story.

  ‘There’s a gap,’ Liz said, ‘something still missing, something she hasn’t told us. I don’t quite trust it. It’s too hard to believe that she went from adoring Tom to this vicious hatred all in a flash.’

  ‘It wasn’t in a flash,’ Claire protested.

  ‘Comparatively speaking,’ Liz said wearily.

  ‘Personally,’ Claire went on, ‘I think she was always afraid of him but she would never admit it, she would never admit she was afraid of anything or anyone.’

  ‘No,’ said Liz, ‘it wasn’t just fear. There must have been something else. And in any case, why didn’t she just leave him? Why didn’t she get the hell out?’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Liz, ‘I’m depressed by it all. But it’s her life now that worries me. The waste,’ she said, ‘when she’s so clever. I mean, whatever was she thinking of, exiling herself like this.’

  ‘It’s a sort of penance,’ said Claire, ‘a sackcloth-and-ashes thing.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so ridiculous,’ said Liz. ‘She’s done the penance bit. Ten years in prison – that’s penance enough.’

  ‘I thought she seemed quite, well, quite lively.’

  ‘That’s because she was angry,’ Liz said. ‘Anyway, Claire, I’ve got to go, we’ll discuss it later.’

  Tara had given them her mobile number, but not her address. This seemed highly significant to Claire. Clearly, it meant that she didn’t want to be visited. She wanted her new life to remain secret. And yet, at the same time, she’d agreed that she’d like to stay in contact and perhaps meet again soon. But how soon? When was she going back to this town she wouldn’t disclose to them? She hadn’t said.

  Always, with Tara, the need to be mysterious.

  VI

  IT WAS DANGEROUS. Tara knew it was dangerous, but the necessity of doing it overrode any danger. She needed to be there again, in the area, in the road. Not in the house though. She understood that would be impossible.

  There was a Pizza Express next to the Belsize Park tube station, still there. This pleased her. She went in and sat at a table for two, near the front window, and ordered a pizza. It was a good place to eat alone. Nobody was the least bit interested in her. She enjoyed looking across to the cinema, where they used to go so often, and the bookshop. The pavements here were wide, with benches now and again. She tried to analyse the difference between this scene and any street scene in Workington, but she couldn’t. Was it the buildings? Was it the people? Was it the general air of prosperity compared to one of austerity? Whatever it was, this difference was marked. This, a long time ago, had been her place, her slot, and she’d lost it, and couldn’t get it back. Not the way it had been, anyway.

  She crossed the road and walked down Belsize Lane to what was called the village, a small open space where all the Belsize roads met. It was, in fact, quite like a village in feel, though nothing like the Cumbrian villages she now was acquainted with. Slowly, she crossed it and began walking down Belsize Park Gardens. The houses were huge, proper mansions, most long since divided into flats. But they were all in good condition, plenty of fresh paint around. Her heart was thudding as she neared their old home, their first home. She walked past the house, then crossed the road and walked back past it again, looking up at the two top windows which had been theirs. They’d had such a view over the gardens at the back. Tom had said one day he would buy the whole house, which had made her laugh. What on earth would they do with such a huge house? He said they’d rent it out, make a fortune. She didn’t take him seriously. She told him the thought of a fortune didn’t attract her. It was his turn to laugh. Everyone wants a fortune, he told her, and he didn’t believe anyone who said they didn’t. That was their first row, the first time she glimpsed another Tom.

  It irritated her how much store Tom set by the visible signs of wealth. With the exception of clothes, which didn’t interest him, though he wore good suits for work, Tom valued ‘the best’ in everything else. He bought things Tara thought ridiculously flash, like a Rolex watch worth £20,000, and of course there was his veneration for top-of-the-range cars. It appalled Tara. She struggled to decide what all this meant about Tom, why flaunting the evidence of materialistic success was so important to him. Was he, she wondered, reacting to some impoverished background she knew nothing about? They never talked about their respective upbringings. They’d agreed on that when they first met: their lives began then, and what had taken place before was irrelevant. Except, more and more, she was coming to believe, it wasn’t.

  He never bought the rest of the house, of course. They were in that apartment only two years, the two happiest years of her life. Then Tom came home one day announcing that he’d bought a new place, without consulting her, in Chelsea. He said she’d love it, and in a way she did. It was in a terrace, quite a small house like a cottage, painted pink, but she missed their old flat, missed the size of the rooms there, and the views. She felt she was playing at something, though she didn’t know what. She tried to talk to Tom about this odd feeling but he just said good, playing is good, everyone is playing at something. So she asked him what he was playing at and he said winning the game of life, which annoyed her. She wanted him to be serious, and to take her seriously, but he didn’t seem to want to. He got cross when she got serious. He said he thought he’d married a wild, fun girl, and where was she now?

  Her mind full of these disturbing flashes of memory, she sat on a bench opposite their first home, looking up at its windows, struggling to reclaim her time there. Young, happy, busy, with so much to look forward to, or so she’d believed. She couldn’t do it. It was better to let those two years fade. She was being morbid coming back to this road. Abruptly, she got up, and began to walk briskly to where she’d left her car. She would drive back to her hotel, and tomorrow go north again, take up Sarah Scott’s dull life. It was no good hankering after the time before anything bad happened, before she began to realise what Tom’s ‘game’ was. She had to get on with the new life she’d chosen and this time not mess it up. Before she
left, though, she was going to meet Liz, on her own. Claire and Molly had both urged her to come and visit them but she’d accepted only Liz’s suggestion that they should meet in a café they used to frequent years ago.

  Why Liz? She didn’t exactly know, but it had something to do with Liz having no patience with either sentiment or hypocrisy.

  Nancy Armstrong watched Sarah Scott’s house all the time. There was nothing to watch but she did it all the same, checking that the bedroom blind was still half drawn, checking that the curtains in the front window were not quite closed. There was a gap of approximately six inches between them. Nancy approved of that. Leave curtains wide open and, come night time, it looks suspicious; close them completely and during the day it looks equally suspicious. She kept an eye on the letter box, too. The postman, that young Mark, was careless. He didn’t always bother to shove larger envelopes through the flap and left them sticking out. But Sarah Scott got no mail while she was away.

  It would be nice to get a postcard from wherever Sarah had gone. A view of the sea, perhaps, though there was no knowing if she’d gone to the sea. A few words would do, ‘Having a nice time, weather good’, that sort of thing. Most of the postcards Nancy received over the years had that sort of message. Nothing else was expected. Her mother sent her a postcard once from Blackpool which said, ‘Lodgings fair to middling, h. & c. in room.’ Nancy was staying with her aunt at the time and her mother was in Blackpool for a holiday on her own after she’d been ill. Nancy couldn’t understand what h. & c. meant. Her aunt said it meant there was hot and cold running water in the bedroom where her mother was staying. Nancy kept that postcard. She kept every postcard, and had a stock of them in a drawer. Someone at the club told her old postcards could fetch a fortune, but she doubted it.

  Anyway, no postcard from Sarah Scott. Nancy tried not to mind. But she missed the young woman. Well, she wasn’t young exactly, but compared to Nancy she was. Youngish and unhappy, Nancy thought. But she could get nothing out of her. Close as a clam. It would take time, that was all. Sarah Scott would need to be summered and wintered and summered again before anything might be revealed. Nancy understood that. She approved. You had to really get to know people before personal things could be confided. That was what friendship was for, to provide a safe place for perhaps painful information. When she was young herself, after they had to leave the farm, she had friends like that, two of them. They lived in the same street, went to the same school, started work together at the factory. Then boyfriends happened, to the other two but not to Nancy. She could no longer share their secrets. They whispered together, excluding her, because they said she wouldn’t know what they were talking about. She made other friends, in time, but it was not the same. No confiding went on. And then, when she met Martin and got married, she had different sorts of ‘friends’, some of whom she didn’t really like. Martin was her only true friend, and though she could tell him anything, and did, even if she knew he didn’t really listen and he didn’t reciprocate. When he died after only three years of marriage, she decided she was done with friendship. Having some company, at places like the club, would do.

  Yet she found she was missing Sarah Scott. She couldn’t claim that Sarah was a real friend but by now she was more than just a neighbour, surely. She warned herself not to get carried away, though.

  Liz came straight to the point.

  ‘This new life,’ she said. ‘Tell me about it. You didn’t tell us a thing.’

  Tara said there was very little to tell. She lived in a quiet street in a Cumbrian town – no, she was not going to say which one – and she worked in a factory, doing a simple job making boxes.

  ‘Oh, Tara!’ said Liz. ‘This is ridiculous. What on earth are you thinking of?’

  Tara smiled.

  ‘I’m thinking of being a blank,’ she said. ‘I want to be just a blank. It’s such a relief, doing what I’m asked to do, doing it automatically. It’s easy, once you’ve got the knack.’

  ‘But the boredom,’ said Liz, ‘for someone with your brain.’

  ‘Boredom is lovely,’ said Tara. ‘Really, it is.’

  Liz stared at her, silent for a minute.

  ‘And outside working hours? Is that boring too?’

  Tara hesitated.

  ‘Not exactly. I drive along the coast and around the countryside. I walk along beaches. I like getting to know the area.’

  ‘On your own?’

  ‘Usually. Well, always, except for Mrs Armstrong, my neighbour. An elderly woman, about seventy – maybe eighty – something. I sometimes take her. She’s told me how to measure a cow. It’s fascinating. I mean, not just the idea of it – I kept seeing her, in my mind’s eye, standing with a tape measure, asking someone to hold the cow’s tail straight – but the need for it. Why measure a cow? And I asked her, and she got cross, started talking about working out the weight and how important that was. “You know nothing,” she said, when she’d finished. I sat there nodding foolishly and thinking she’s right, I knew nothing, and now at least I know how to measure a cow.’

  It was easy to tell how disturbed Liz was after hearing all this. She laughed at the cow story, but then she frowned ferociously over her coffee, drinking it in two noisy gulps before banging the cup down on its saucer. She seemed, to Tara, to be trying to control her anger which, with an obvious struggle, she did.

  ‘But,’ she suddenly said, ‘you left your blissfully boring life to come to the reunion. Now, what does that tell me?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Tara. ‘What does it tell you?’

  ‘That you might be bored with boredom. That you aren’t altogether satisfied with pretending to be this Sarah Scott.’

  ‘Wrong,’ said Tara. ‘I came because I wanted to embarrass you all. I couldn’t resist it.’

  ‘Liar,’ said Liz, and smiled. ‘You came because this Mrs Armstrong isn’t enough. You need us.’

  Tara paused.

  ‘Well, then,’ she said, ‘if that’s true it’s sad, isn’t it? Because none of you need me.’

  Liz played with a teaspoon, tapping it gently on the table.

  ‘I’ve something to tell you,’ she said, ‘something Claire and Molly don’t know. Don’t ask me why I never told them, because I don’t know the answer myself. I came to your trial, the first day. I didn’t know if you would be able to see me or not, so I sat at the very back and I wore a hat with a big brim so that even if you could see everyone watching you wouldn’t be able to identify me. I was behind a tall man, two tall men actually, so I was more or less screened from view. But I could see you, in the dock.’

  Tara began to say something, but Liz leaned over and pressed her hand.

  ‘No, let me finish. I only went that one day because I couldn’t bear to go again after I’d seen you there. “Guilty,” you said, loud and clear, absolutely definite and without shame. You didn’t smile, but my God, you looked near to doing so. Your head was held so high, you looked so strong and sure. And it made me want to cry. I knew, I just knew, this was all wrong, but there you were, with your “guilty”. I wanted to shout out that what you were guilty of was delusion – why hadn’t the psychiatrists seen it? You must have been seen by a psychiatrist, I knew that, so maybe it was going to emerge that it was a nonsense for you to claim to be guilty. But I couldn’t go again. I was afraid I’d shout something out. And I didn’t know by then what to think, I mean, when all the details came out in the papers about what Tom had been involved in and how he’d treated you. I was so shocked, I couldn’t think straight.’

  Neither of them spoke for a long time. Liz scrutinised Tara’s expression, unable to interpret it. Was there defiance there? But if so, what might she be defiant about? Or did her face reveal a different truth – regret? There was a certain worried look in her eyes, almost pleading, even if otherwise she looked so controlled, her mouth set, lips clamped tightly shut.

  Liz risked putting her hand across the table to touch Tara’s. She patted it experimental
ly, waiting to have it snatched away. But it wasn’t. Tara opened her fingers and grasped Liz’s. They squeezed each other’s hand, and then both withdrew at the same time. There was now a light air of embarrassment.

  ‘He deserved it,’ Tara said, ‘he really did.’ Then she shook her head. ‘Enough,’ she said. ‘I never want to talk about Tom, never.’

  ‘Tara,’ said Liz, ‘it isn’t enough, it doesn’t even begin to be enough.’

  ‘Liz, you read the newspapers, you said, so you know it all. That’s enough. It’s irrelevant, all that. I have a new life, and I don’t have to think about what happened any more. So. Enough. You tell me about yourself, your life. Go on.’

  Twenty minutes later, after Liz had described the dire state of her marriage, they left the café.

  ‘Why don’t you leave him, if it’s as bad as you say?’ Tara asked.

  Liz shrugged.

  ‘I didn’t say it was bad. I just said he bores me more and more. Boredom isn’t grounds for leaving the children. There’s only two or three years to go and then they’ll be off and I can leave then. Maybe.’

  Tara shrugged.

  ‘I’d leave him,’ she said.

  They were almost at their cars, parked one in front of the other across the road.

  ‘But Tara,’ said Liz, ‘that’s the point. You didn’t leave Tom. You should know how hard it is to walk out of a marriage, and you didn’t even have children to complicate things.’

  ‘It was different,’ Tara said.

  ‘Oh,’ said Liz, ‘it’s always different, every case is different, we all think we’re different. Will I see you again, or is this it?’

  ‘I’m going back north today,’ said Tara, ‘but you’ve got my mobile number, for chats, if you like.’

  Liz laughed.

  ‘Chats?’ she said. ‘Is it likely, Tara? What would we chat about when you’re in hiding?’

  ‘I am not in hiding,’ protested Tara. ‘I just have a new life.’