How to Measure a Cow Page 4

  Out of a desire to be annoying, he went across the street and knocked on Mrs Armstrong’s door. She didn’t have a bell, just a large brass knocker, kept gleaming with Brasso applied every Monday morning at eleven. He fairly hammered with the knocker, knowing perfectly well it was unnecessary to do so. He knew he wouldn’t be asked in, and that the door, when it opened, would only open a crack.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Armstrong,’ he bellowed when it did. ‘Just thought I’d see how you are. Well, I hope?’ There was no proper reply to his harmless enquiry, just a grunt. And now, being really mischievous, he said, ‘Have you got to know your new neighbour yet? Nice lady, isn’t she?’

  The door opened a little bit further.

  ‘I keep myself to myself,’ she said, ‘and so does she.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, enjoying himself, ‘that is a most agreeable state of affairs. Well done. I’ll be on my way, keep myself to myself, too. Good day, Mrs Armstrong,’ and he tipped an imaginary hat.

  Seething, Nancy slammed her door shut. He was so cheeky. Thought she didn’t get the sarcasm, didn’t know he was making fun. Smart alec, that was what he was.

  ‘He just likes a joke,’ Amy had said, failing to recognise the nastiness in him. Trust him to come and snoop around when Sarah Scott was out. She wouldn’t put it beyond him to have gone through drawers trying to find things out about her. She ought to tell her neighbour that he’d been in the house fourteen minutes precisely, and he’d been in her bedroom too. She might not know, and she should be told. You couldn’t be too careful.

  It was a white envelope, oblong, the name Sarah Scott, her name now, and address typed upon it, dead centre. First-class stamp. The thickness, when she picked it up, told her the other letter, the real letter, was inside. Smaller. Different shape.

  She should take her wet coat off, make a cup of coffee, settle herself beside the electric fire, both bars on, before she opened the outer envelope. Of course she should. But she didn’t. She leaned against the wall, just inside the front door, and ripped open the white envelope, taking no care at all, letting it flutter to the floor and then lifting her foot and stamping on it. The sight of her real name, her old name, and the handwriting, both made her head swim. Sarah Scott, she told herself, get a grip. There is no need to upset yourself. Claire is harmless. She always was. The nicest, kindest, most straightforward of the four of them. Whatever she’d written, why ever she’d written (at last) there would be no cause for alarm. She had nothing to fear from Claire. Tara had nothing to fear, Sarah had nothing to fear.

  Then she did take her coat off and hang it on the hook behind the door where it could drip on to the old doormat. She slipped her shoes off too, leaving them there, and padded through to the kitchen to put the kettle on. As usual, she didn’t turn on a light. There was no need. The chrome of the kettle glowed, guiding her to its switch. She was in no hurry, was no longer disturbed. She was not excited or hopeful either. All this time, since the Man had told her about the letter coming, she realised what a state of nerves she’d been in, and now it had gone. It was odd, she thought, how, instead of being relieved that she was calm, she missed the tension of waiting for this letter. It had come. Now nothing else was likely to happen.

  She opened this envelope more carefully, examining the sticker on the back. It had Claire’s name and address on it and a little rose printed in the top left-hand corner. She imagined Claire having them done, several sheets of them, perforated for easy tearing off. She peeled this one away from the flap and held the tiny label between finger and thumb. She was not going to reply, whatever was in the letter, so she didn’t need to keep this scrap, and in any case Claire being Claire would have written her address on the letter itself too. But all the same, she laid it on the wooden arm of the chair she was sitting on. The sheet of paper she then took out of the envelope, blue, pale blue, and sure enough there was Claire’s address and phone number and email all printed at the top of the paper, the lettering a darker blue. All very proper, all very formal, all very Claire. Who else, today, would have printed stationery? It was old-fashioned enough, middle class enough, to be touching. Poor Claire, so correct, clinging to the rules by which she’d been brought up.

  A reunion. The letter was to tell her (to tell Tara – not, of course, Sarah) that there was to be a reunion. A sort of silver wedding thing, twenty-five years, though no wedding had been involved. It was just a thought Claire had had, how lovely it would be to meet up after all this time, twenty-five years to the day, though not precisely to the day because that would be a Monday this year and so it was to be the day before, or rather two days before. The Saturday, and after all the day had been a Saturday, did Tara remember? Her memory, quite unnecessarily, was jogged. It wasn’t the sort of day, or event, anyone involved in could ever forget. Four teenagers had acted in such a way that a child’s life was saved. Tara remembered enjoying the drama of it, though she tried to hide it, tried to be modest and self-effacing, announcing that it was nothing. Anyone would have done the same. But they wouldn’t have. She’d been wandering along the grassy track beside the riverbank bored out of her skull, nowhere to go, nothing to do, and on the opposite bank she’d seen that stuck-up trio approaching and she’d hated them. When the little boy fell in the river her instant reaction was that she would show those three what she was made of. So she dived in and grabbed the child, and all else followed from that. Oh, how she enjoyed the aftermath! The fuss! The acclaim! And new friendships. Especially that: the new friends. She seemed, up to that point, to have gone through life without friends, real friends. Other children mostly bored her, refusing, as they so often did, to play the games she wanted to play. So she made a point of declaring that she was quite happy on her own and didn’t need friends. Teachers, noticing her solitary state in the playground as they were bound to do, questioned her tactfully about this, but got nowhere. Grammar school was better. She was good at all sports, and was soon in teams, and that meant she wasn’t on her own so much, she wasn’t so obviously without friends. But, suddenly, the desire to have a little gang around her grew, which was why she watched Claire and Molly and Liz so enviously. She couldn’t break into that clique, she knew that – they wouldn’t let her – but she could perhaps form her own gang.

  It proved impossible. No sooner had she made overtures to a girl she thought promising than Tara got tired of her, and wanted free of the expectations she’d just raised, hurting the chosen girl in the process. After this had happened a few times, she earned the reputation of being bitchy and arrogant and best steered clear of. She concentrated on scoring goals galore in hockey matches, and outplaying everyone at tennis, and taking part in swimming galas where she won race after race. So she was busy, involved in plenty of action, but still essentially solitary. Then came the day of the child’s rescue, and everything changed. She had friends, bound to them by her own bravery.

  This reunion was to be a lunch at the riverside pub to which Claire had run, shouting for someone to call for an ambulance. It was, wrote Claire, a gastropub now. It had rooms available which were not expensive, and she could book one for Tara if she would be travelling any distance, if, from wherever she was, a day trip would not be possible. A day trip, indeed – enough to make Tara smile at the idea. The smile, weak and a little bitter though it was, helped her see how absurd the whole idea of this ‘reunion’ was. And yet … it was tempting. She could slip back to being Tara again, just for a weekend. How uncomfortable they would all surely be. They wouldn’t know how to treat her. They would want to ask the Big Question, the one they wanted to ask, she was certain, at the time but hadn’t done so: how had it happened? She’d pleaded guilty, but how had it happened, what exactly had brought her to that point? And she had her own question: why had none of them offered a shred of support (she didn’t count Claire’s pathetic letter)? Why had friendship not overridden all else?

  Tara told Sarah that this was nothing to do with her, and that she should tear the letter up. Sarah did not know
this person who had sent the letter. Sarah has a different life, a new life. Sarah is safe here. What happened in the past cannot be allowed to intrude into her existence here. So, Sarah, Tara said, tear this letter up. Old friends do not matter. They are deluded if they think they do.

  Sarah was slow to obey, but eventually, to Tara’s relief, she did. She tore Claire’s letter up. Good girl. But Tara wasn’t fooled.

  Nancy waited and watched. Saturdays and Sundays there was no activity. No coming and going. Sarah Scott stayed inside the whole weekend, unless she went in and out during Nancy’s own brief hour when she went shopping on Saturday morning. This seemed to her unlikely. The blind in the bedroom was still fully down when she left at nine o’clock and when she returned, just before ten, it was still down. It didn’t get half-lifted until about eleven. So, Sarah Scott had a lie-in on Saturday mornings. Perfectly reasonable. Nancy allowed that. But what about the rest of every weekend? Rain or shine, the woman shut herself up in that house. It wasn’t healthy. There was no television there any more – the nephew, typically, had removed it, and there had definitely been no delivery of another – and if there was a radio surely listening to that couldn’t fill the whole weekend.

  There was no sign of her new neighbour making any church attendance on Sunday, but that wasn’t unusual. Nancy didn’t go any more herself, except to funerals sometimes. She thought about resuming her old habit, ingrained since childhood, of going to morning service but then she remembered how it had depressed her for years before she gave up. So few people there, lost in the echoing place, coughing and shuffling, hardly one of them able to sing a hymn. And the vicar was pathetic, his sermons mumbled with head down, barely audible and without meaning. If it had not been for the white surplice, always pristine (she gave him that) he could have been a tramp who’d wandered in. The first Sunday she didn’t go, Nancy felt defiant. If the vicar came to enquire about her, she was ready with her criticisms and he would just have to accept them. But he never came. She could have been lying dead. It was no good saying to herself that maybe he hadn’t noticed her absence. Not noticed? She sat in the front left-hand pew, right in front of his pulpit, the only one who ever did. Not noticed, when he never had more than eight people in his congregation? Not noticed, when she was always the last out, the last to shake his hand? The only one who looked him in the eye and was in no hurry to scurry off?

  But a gap was created. Nancy had felt restless every Sunday morning since. There were lots of shops open on Sundays these days, but it would have seemed wrong to go shopping, even window shopping. Shopping was Saturdays. She tried going for a walk and sometimes still did. It meant getting ready, which was good, and being out, which was good, but she always felt self-conscious going for a walk that had no objective. If it rained, or was exceptionally cold, as it often was, an aimless walk was not an option. She stayed in and played patience. This seemed almost wicked, on a Sunday, but it filled an hour. Very occasionally, she had a visitor, and even less frequently she made a visit herself. Those were satisfactory Sundays. She got bored, though, with the women who visited her and whom she visited. They all knew each other too well, the connection between them of long standing but never running very deep. There was nothing new to discover, and these days all of them repeated themselves. Nancy didn’t, but the others did. Even when she said yes, they’d told her whatever it was before, again and again, they still carried on. It was highly irritating. She missed Amy, with whom she had been totally at ease.

  Sarah Scott would be new. Everything about her would be fresh. However ordinary she might turn out to be there was a whole unknown life there. Nancy craved knowing it. She wouldn’t, given the opportunity, do anything as crass as ask direct questions. She didn’t wish to interrogate Sarah Scott. She would be quite content to let her history unfold, bit by bit, year by year. And she would be perfectly happy to share her own story, if Sarah Scott showed any interest. She had nothing to hide. Maybe she hadn’t had an exciting life, but she’d had her moments, as a child, during the war. Sarah Scott might be interested in those experiences. Possibly.

  What Nancy needed, she realised only too well, was an excuse to invite her new neighbour for a cup of tea. An excuse, a convincing one, was essential, otherwise it would be embarrassing. She couldn’t openly admit that she was intrigued by Sarah Scott and wanted to know about her. That would be terrible bad manners. Giving her the nephew’s plant had been a mistake, a miscalculation. It had seemed, and indeed was, false, and Sarah Scott had sensed this, which was why she’d seemed so shaken. Something natural was needed, some casual, friendly overture which arose without effort, and could not be misinterpreted.

  Nancy went on watching and waiting, afraid that she might miss some significant sign which would direct her to the solution of this puzzle, this desire to find a way to approach Sarah Scott. Her presence in Amy’s old house was becoming unbearably tantalising, especially on a Sunday.

  Claire worried about the fate of her letter, but then she worried, fretted, about so many things. She worried silently, her head so often filled with this internalised anxiety. Those upon whom all this worry was lavished knew nothing about it. Tara, for example, had never known of all the nights Claire stayed wide awake thinking about her. Why had she done what she’d done? It was impossible to understand. Molly thought Tara must have experienced some sort of mental breakdown. She’d done what she’d done in a frenzy. Claire didn’t agree. True, Tara had a temper, and she was often unpredictable, often hyper, but the evidence was that the act she’d committed had been carried out with a cool efficiency. Liz said that they all had to remember that they hadn’t really been close to Tara any more after she married Tom and moved to London.

  They had all been to the wedding, though it was hardly what could be called a proper wedding. Claire’s wedding, a couple of months after Tara’s, had been the real thing, six bridesmaids, a hundred and twenty guests, church service, the lot. Tara refused to be a bridesmaid. Liz and Molly agreed, but Tara said nothing on earth would make her wear a long pink dress. In fact, the dresses were not pink. They were a pinky lavender, quite different. Tara had deliberately appeared in black. Short, very short, tight skirt (and this was by now the nineties when short skirts were rarely seen except on young teenagers) with tights and boots, and an appalling shiny black PVC thing, neither top nor coat, that crackled during the service. At her own register-office affair Tara had been in white. A demure broderie anglaise dress. Tom, apparently, had chosen it, suitable, he said (or so Tara told them) for his ‘adorable child bride’. What Tara saw in this Tom, none of them could fathom. It wasn’t his looks – that was for sure. Or his charm, since he had none. It must, the three of them decided, be the sense of danger he had about him. They struggled to define this, but couldn’t. He more or less ignored them, but they could see how intensely he concentrated on Tara. He had, Liz thought, a magnetism about him, attracting Tara to him in a way none of them could understand. It was disturbing.

  Weeks passed, and gradually Claire began to accept that she was not going to get a reply to her letter, whether or not it had reached Tara now she was free. This ‘freedom’ was much discussed by the friends. What did it amount to? She had paid the penalty for her crime.

  ‘The past is behind her, over,’ Claire said.

  Liz said that sort of thinking was naive. The past would never be over for Tara. It would have to be lived with, accommodated. That was the most that could be done with it.

  ‘She’s had to do it before,’ Molly reminded them. ‘Block out the past.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Liz, ‘but that was a past she couldn’t remember. She was only three when she went to live with the Frasers. She said herself she couldn’t remember anything however hard she tried. She just had to believe what the Frasers told her. It isn’t the same.’

  They were silent for a while after Liz said that. How shocking it had seemed to them that Tara lived with foster parents. They were curious, but too well brought up to ask direct
questions, especially one: why? Nobody else they knew had foster parents. They half wanted Tara to reveal that she hated the Frasers, and longed for her real parents, but she didn’t. She complained about her foster mother in the way they all complained about their mothers, but she didn’t ever say, or hint, that she hated her, any more than they did (except in odd moments of fury). And she loved her foster father, John, always going on about his sporting prowess. He was the one who taught her to swim when she was still tiny, and coached her to become the school champion. They swam in the Thames together and entered races which Tara always won.

  ‘I wonder,’ Molly suddenly said, ‘if she’s thought about us at all. Maybe we just faded from her mind the last ten years.’

  ‘Unlikely,’ Liz said. ‘She might be full of resentment about us not rallying round when she needed us – and even before that, once she’d moved to London, we didn’t make the effort to go to her, just expected her to come to us.’

  ‘But that was natural, surely,’ said Claire. ‘We all live within twenty miles of each other.’

  ‘Still,’ said Liz.

  It was a quiet lunch, that time. They were all a bit depressed. They’d gone over and over the good times they’d had with Tara and then they’d had to face what had happened all over again. They didn’t, now, expect Tara to turn up. But Claire noticed that neither Molly nor Liz was as upset about this as she was.

  Snow at the end of January, snow well into February, and then constant rain the whole of March. The house was freezing the entire time. Coming home each day, Tara kept her coat and scarf and boots on right up to the moment when she went to bed. Only then was she ever warm and that was due to the electric blanket she’d bought. Once in bed, only her nose was still cold, and as the night wore on, and the blanket was switched off, she pulled the duvet over her head.