How to Measure a Cow Page 3

  She tired herself to the point of numbness, thinking about this letter. All day, standing at the conveyor belt, her hands automatically lifting, pressing down, she shook slightly with all this absurd agitation about its arrival. Repetitive jobs, she’d already learned, needed attentive minds. Such a simple action she was performing, so easy it could be done, surely, in her sleep. But it couldn’t, that was the shock. To think she’d been educated for this. Nobody would believe it. She didn’t believe it herself. Tara couldn’t be doing this, not with her talents, her qualifications. It was Sarah Scott doing it, stupid Sarah Scott, silent Sarah Scott. She talked to no one, except for the obvious pleasantries, the polite good mornings, the comments on the weather. Her silence didn’t seem to bother the women she worked with. One or two of them, in the brief breaks, made an attempt at communicating but nobody asked direct questions. They were all tired, as she was herself. They wanted their shifts over, and then home as quickly as possible.

  There was no spark in this Sarah Scott. Tara was startled by how completely she’d given in to this woman, how that had been part of the plan, for her, Tara, to fade away and be resurrected as another, better person. A plan that was succeeding too well.

  It was why the letter loomed ahead as so significant. A link to a life left behind, but still hers.

  II

  A REUNION: CLAIRE wanted to have a reunion, a celebration, twenty-five years on, but of course Tara should be present or it would have no true meaning. It was Tara, after all, walking on the opposite bank, who had dived into the fast-flowing river and grabbed hold of the child’s foot. Liz quickly followed, and together they hauled the little boy out and Molly began the life-saving procedure she’d only just learned at a first-aid class. Claire was the one who ran back along the river path to the pub, the Bull’s Head, to get them to phone for an ambulance. Oh, how fast she had run, heart thudding, breath coming in such gasps because she wasn’t used to running. Her finest hour … that was what Dan said, sarcastically, every time she reminisced, which she did once a year, remembering the date of this dramatic event all too clearly, a summer’s day, perfect blue, cloudless sky. And the boy’s life was saved.

  They were local heroes for a while, even Claire who had merely run for help which, by the time it came, had not really been needed. Molly had done the necessary. But all four of them were photographed with the boy they’d saved and a piece was written about them in the newspapers. That was how they became friends with Tara Fraser. They were already all in the same sixth form but Claire and Molly and Liz had known each other since nursery school. Their mothers were friends, their fathers commuted to London on the same train. Tara Fraser didn’t have these connections. She was thought of as a bit wild, known to ‘give cheek’ to teachers, known to be defiant in the face of authority. She dyed her auburn hair black, then purple, and had ways of getting round all sorts of rules about uniform that irritated teachers.

  But after the famous rescue, Tara became part of their set. They began to move around as a quartet, Tara influencing the others in all kinds of subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Her language was awful. She used the F-word frequently, quite shocking the other three, but there was no stopping her. Led by Tara, they too began circumnavigating rules and regulations, enjoying the small thrill it gave them. Claire was called into the headmistress’s office and told that she was now proving ‘a disappointment’.

  ‘You are a prefect, Claire,’ the headmistress said. ‘It is up to you to set an example.’

  Claire hung her head and apologised, but the moment she left the room she rushed to the others and mimicked the headmistress, basking in Tara’s approval. Such good times they had, and then school ended, and they all went off to different places but kept in touch, always.

  Claire was the best at keeping in touch, at rounding them all up, two or three times a year, and organising a lunch or supper. She sent handwritten notes, thought quaint by the others. She liked writing them, she still did. It was a habit of hers to drop a short note, expressing concern, when she heard someone was ill, or that a husband/wife/partner had died. Often, the recipients of these notes were neighbours she didn’t know at all well, but still, they deserved some compassion. It didn’t matter if they were never acknowledged. Well, it did, but Claire knew it shouldn’t, not to a truly caring person. She stifled a slight disappointment when, if she later met a person to whom she’d sent a sympathetic note, nothing was said, no mention made of her thoughtfulness. Some people were like that. She was not.

  She had written to Tara, after deep thought, when she read in the newspapers what she was said to have done. She’d spent ages toiling over this missive, trying to convey sympathy without attaching blame, even though it looked as though Tara was very much to blame. There had been no reply. She didn’t write again, and she didn’t go to the trial. Of that she was deeply ashamed, but when she had tentatively floated the idea of going her husband had been adamant that she should not. It would do no good, Dan had said. Far from being a gesture of solidarity, it would be acting like a voyeur. But at least, when one newspaper dug out the old story of the rescue of the boy, and tracked Claire and the others down, she had stood by Tara, emphasising all her good qualities. There had been some pretty close questioning, though, and she knew she hadn’t come out of it well. Did she keep in touch with Tara Fraser? Oh yes, she certainly did. So when had she last seen her? Claire struggled … Six months ago, maybe a little longer. Last talk on the phone? She couldn’t be sure. At this point, Dan had arrived home, furious to find she was letting herself be interviewed, and dragged her inside.

  Then there were the prison years. She’d written straight away, when Tara was sentenced, and posted it without reading it through because she knew if she did read it she’d probably tear it up and this would go on and on. There was no reply. In a way, this was a relief. She’d done her bit. But she knew that was a lie. Guilt about how she, as a friend, should have behaved, troubled her for months, at the strangest moments, and then, over the years, she began to forgive herself and forget. Now the guilt returned, the moment she decided to plan a reunion. Tara would have to be invited. It was time to make up for lost opportunities (Claire liked that phrase, ‘lost opportunities’, so soothingly vague, so meaningless). She had no address to write to but she’d read about Tara being transferred to an open prison a few years ago and she sent her letter to the governor there, with a covering note.

  Molly and Liz thought Claire’s letter a waste of time. They were hard on her about it because she was so self-righteous and pleased with herself.

  ‘She’ll never get it,’ Liz said, ‘and if she does, it will annoy her.’

  ‘You don’t know what I said,’ objected Claire.

  ‘I can guess,’ said Liz, with a smirk.

  Claire flushed, and tried not to react.

  ‘I don’t think she’ll want to see us anyway,’ Molly said. ‘We were proved to be broken reeds.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Liz laughed. ‘Broken reeds? Really, Molly.’

  ‘Well, you know what I mean. She’ll think we let her down, and we did – she won’t want anything to do with us. The very idea of a reunion would probably make her sick.’

  ‘It will be like sticking a message into a bottle and throwing it into the sea,’ said Liz.

  ‘Well,’ said Claire, ‘I’m going to throw it.’

  Slowly, slowly, Tara grew into the house, the street, the job. She began to make small changes which she thought had a significance she couldn’t quite work out. Buying a cup and saucer in a charity shop and bringing it home to put on the shelf she’d emptied of hideous crockery seemed bold and defiant. This was her cup and saucer, Sarah Scott’s. It had nothing to do with Tara Fraser, even if Tara too had preferred cups to mugs. She would never have chosen this one, though. Tara liked colour. She wouldn’t have picked a plain cream cup and saucer, large enough for a very generous amount of coffee. Just looking at it pleased Tara. When she used it for the first time her hand trem
bled slightly with the unexpected pleasure. She bought a cushion (again, in a charity shop) and a cafetière (new). Then she took down both the net half-curtain and the red velour curtains in the bedroom and put up a blind. It thrilled her to be able to manage this herself. Tara would never have tried, but Sarah bought the necessary tools, a screwdriver and a small hammer, and followed the instructions carefully, and there it was, working perfectly, a plain blue blind which went smoothly up and down. She liked it best at half-mast during the day, but fully down at night. If there was a moon, the blue turned paler and gave the room a strange, unearthly atmosphere which she liked, though it made her shiver. Tara would have thought that she, Sarah, was a weird kind of woman. True. She was. But then so had Tara been.

  The street was always quiet. Always. Hardly any traffic, any day of the week. No buses went down it. They just passed it. There were not many cars either. Plenty of room to park. She vaguely thought of taking advantage of this and buying a car, but not yet. She wasn’t established yet. A car would definitely involve paperwork she wanted to avoid and of course draw attention to her. Could Sarah drive? Surely she could, but did she have a licence? If she had, it wasn’t among the documents in Tara’s possession. She must ask about it. Maybe there was a ban on Sarah Scott driving which they had omitted to tell her about?

  It was an elderly street. This became obvious. All the people she saw going in and out of these terraced houses were like those in Lowry paintings, except for a couple of families at the far end, living next to each other with the brightly painted doors. Almost everyone she saw in the street had a stick, and walked excruciatingly slowly, head down. They all wore hats of one sort or another; she’d never seen so many hats. The women mostly carried bulging shopping bags which looked too heavy for them. Nobody spoke to her, though after a few weeks several nodded, registering that she lived in their street. She thought that it might be natural for her to initiate saying ‘Good morning’ or ‘Cold, isn’t it?’ but didn’t. Nodding was enough. They were right.

  She was by now on those sorts of terms at work, though, the ‘Cold, isn’t it?’ sort of pleasantry. Back came a torrent of agreement, tales of individual experiences of cold, of having no heating, no hot water, and at least in the factory it was warm. Nobody, she noticed, ever asked her a direct question. Nobody wondered why she’d come to work here, or where she’d worked before. It was a relief, this lack of curiosity (if that was what it was) but it made her feel even more isolated than she already was. Maybe, she thought, these women were merely biding their time. Maybe this was how they did things here: softly, softly, catchee … But that, she knew, was her paranoia showing. She should just be thankful and treat others as they treated her.

  It was easy enough. She found that Sarah Scott didn’t have much interest in her fellow workers. She didn’t want to know more about them than the scraps of information which they let drop told her. She didn’t, apparently, want friends. She had enough of them. A blatant lie. She had none, and though Tara had had real friends, close friends, they had long since melted away. She was poisonous to them, she’d supposed. Untouchable. They’d shuddered, she expected, at having been associated with her in the past. But there was a letter coming, to Tara, not Sarah, so perhaps this was not quite true. Someone had risked writing to her. Why? After all these years. Why? When no effort had been made, so far as she knew, before, except for that irritating letter years ago from Claire. A week had gone by since she’d been told about a letter on the way. Not a long time, especially to her, a blink of an eye to one who had learned the true meaning of enforced patience, who had experienced the numbing monotony of endless empty days, days ruled by meals, by lights going on and off, by the noise of footsteps, the sound of bells, shouted orders. A week was nothing once, yet now it seemed interminable. Each day she returned from work barely able to breathe as she opened her front door, and then stood and stared at the empty mat. No post. Another twenty-four hours to get through before there was any chance of there being something on the mat. Anger followed the disappointment. What were they playing at? Why were they tormenting her like this? They’d asked if she wanted the letter and she’d said yes. What did they want her to do? Beg for it? She would not beg. Begging, of any kind, reduced her. She had very little left to lose but what she had, that thin sliver of self-respect which had somehow survived, she would not give up.

  She closed the front door carefully.

  The curtains had gone. Nancy could not believe it. A blind! Perfectly good curtains, just discarded, as though of no value. What had been done with them? If Amy’s curtains were not good enough for this Scott woman then she would be happy to have them, very happy. The blind upset her, its blue blankness an offence. Most of the time it was three-quarters of the way down, leaving only a small gap through which nothing at all could be seen. When a light came on, the blue glowed brightly but no shadow appeared behind it. A thick blind, then, thick material. Like blackout stuff. Nancy remembered it well, black and thick, not a chink of light showing from within in case German bombers were guided by it.

  But this Scott woman was much too young. She’d have no memory of blackout blinds, or of the war. Why had she taken down curtains and put up a blind? It meant something, but Nancy couldn’t figure out what. She wondered if other changes were going on in Amy’s house, concealed from view. Maybe the whole place was being revamped, modernised. Maybe next thing she’d see a plumber arriving with a new bath and sink. That kind of thing had just begun in their street, at the far end, things being done to these houses which were unbelievable. There was no knowing where it would end. Nobody was content any more with what they had. It was the television which had started it, all those adverts, giving people ideas, and then there were those card things, bits of plastic with numbers on, and if you had one you didn’t need cash, it just went in a machine and the deal was done. Well, she had a television, course she did, but she would never, never stoop to having a plastic card.

  A woman who took down good-quality curtains and put up a blind would have a plastic card. Nancy was certain about this. She looked at the blind, and was convinced. She badly wanted to discuss this with someone but feared she might be laughed at, thought hopelessly behind the times.

  ‘An old fuddy-duddy,’ she said aloud, not like the new woman across the road. Amy would’ve understood, even though she’d been proud of her nephew keeping her, she said, ‘up with the times’. So far as Nancy had been able to make out this meant getting her a television – for heaven’s sake, everyone had a TV, Amy had simply been thirty years behind everyone else. The way she’d boasted about getting it, about the nephew buying and installing it, had been ridiculous, misplaced gratitude. Why was it misplaced? Nancy fretted over why. The words had sprung into her head unbidden and lay lumpily there, waiting to be explained. She tired herself so with this kind of thing, wondering where words came from, what they meant, and the more she fretted the more inexplicable combinations of ordinary words seemed. She needed to say them to someone else to give them a chance to mean more than their ordinariness suggested.

  ‘Misplaced gratitude,’ she said loudly, and left it at that.

  The house, his now, had been let for six months, the rent paid in advance. The cheque was not signed by the occupant but by a man. It was none of his business who this man was, or how he was connected to Sarah Scott, so he never enquired. He had stipulated in the tenancy agreement, though, that he would have the right to enter the premises to see all was as it should be, with notice of his intended visit given beforehand. He didn’t know why he’d insisted on this. The house was in a shabby state, nothing much to damage there, and one single woman would hardly be likely to wreck it further, but you never knew. She might be a cat lover and the place could become infested with cats or she could take in lodgers, pack them in. Neither of these possibilities was likely, and he knew that he would be quickly informed by that old bitch across the road if either happened. She missed nothing, and would get a kick out of letting him k
now if his tenant did anything odd. She’d wait until she was sure damage was already done, and then delight in telling him, relishing what she saw as the Good Neighbour act.

  He glimpsed her at her window as he walked down the street, watering an ugly dark green plant she had there. She was always using this watering as an excuse to stand at her window, checking out any activity. He deliberately waved, knowing she would ignore him, pretending she hadn’t seen him. When he got to the house, his house now, he stopped and turned towards her window, and waved again. She straightened her lace curtain and disappeared.

  The house was tidy. He’d said what time he would call, so he expected an effort would’ve been made, but the impression was that it was always tidy. No sign of hastily cleared-away clutter. No clutter at all. It was as if no one lived there. Quickly, he looked into the kitchen, after he’d scanned the living room from the doorway, smiling on registering the chrysanthemum plant, and then went upstairs. The curtains had been taken down and a blind put up. This surprised him. Why go to the bother? He looked around and saw the curtains, both sets, neatly folded on a chair. No harm done. When Sarah Scott had gone, the curtains could go back up if she took the blind with her. Coming down the stairs again, ready to leave the house, he detected a faint smell. It wasn’t unpleasant, nothing like the smell from blocked drains or rotting food, but something slightly spicy. Cigarette smoke? Some foreign brand? Or perfume lingering? By the time he got to the bottom of the stairs, it had gone. As he went to open the front door and leave, a letter came through the letter box. He picked it up. For his tenant, of course. He put it back down on the mat, together with a note he’d written before he came, saying he’d called as arranged, and everything was satisfactory.