How to Measure a Cow Page 6

  Revenge, that was the ugly truth. But revenge for what exactly? There had been no dastardly deed, the sort of thing for which an act of revenge would be appropriate. All that had happened was that friendship, at a crucial time, had been found wanting. It hadn’t lived up to expectations. It hadn’t survived a true test. But Tara knew she’d got everything out of proportion. There had been a fading away of support, that was all, and she herself was perhaps to blame. She’d pleaded guilty. Did that not cancel the obligations of friendship? Who would want to go on being friends with a woman who pleaded guilty to that deed? And now that this friendship was on offer again, wasn’t it understandable? She’d served her time, the slate was clear. She could be a friend again. Wasn’t it, after all, impressive to be given another chance? Shouldn’t she be grateful, and accept it?

  Tara struggled hard to believe this.

  She passed the driving test without difficulty, and then began the search for a second-hand car she could afford. Getting the money freed and transferred to Sarah’s name and bank account was laborious, involving several meetings with the Woman and then, less pleasantly, the Man again. But finally it was done, and she had £3,000 to spend.

  She’d always thought that her money would be forfeited, part of the punishment, but no, it wasn’t. She hadn’t been convicted of fraud or any financial irregularities, and the money in the bank came from impeccable sources, so there was no problem about it. It had sat there, in a deposit account, all these years, hers to do what she liked with. Knowing this made her feel rich, but until now she’d felt she had no right to spend it. She’d bought an electric blanket, a duvet, a blind and a few other odds and ends, but that was all. What she now earned, the small wage, covered her bills and rent and food and fares, leaving very little over. But this money was there and now was the time to spend half of it. What she bought, from a garage near where she worked, was a little Fiat. Unfortunately it was green, which worried her a little. Green was relatively unusual. It made the car highly distinctive.

  She knew Mrs Armstrong would see the car – how could she not? She parked right outside her house, thankful that there was no need, as yet, for a parking permit in the street. There was plenty of room. No one to the right or left of her house appeared to have a car, and on the opposite side neither did Mrs Armstrong or her immediate neighbours. The green car stood out. Coming home from work, she could see it from the end of the street where the bus dropped her off. The sight of it was like a welcome home. Her car. Hers. When for so long she’d had nothing. The significance threatened to overwhelm her. Her first car, hers, after she met Tom (his gift), had had the same effect, a sort of boost to her morale, a lifting of her spirits. The car then had meant all the obvious things: independence, freedom, even the promise of adventure. She’d crashed it. Sarah would never do such a thing.

  Sarah was much too cautious and careful. She would treat her car with respect. She wouldn’t, as Tara had done, regularly exceed the speed limit and take risks on roundabouts. She would never, never, get points on her licence. She had learned her lesson (several lessons, in fact) long ago.

  ‘So,’ the Woman said, at their next appointment, ‘how does it feel to have wheels?’

  For a moment, Tara saw herself literally with wheels attached to the soles of her boots, a pleasing cartoon image which made her smile.

  ‘Good,’ she said.

  ‘And are you doing much driving? Getting out and about more? Seeing the countryside?’

  Tara nodded, but it was a lie. She hadn’t yet driven further than the supermarket.

  ‘I’m going to go along the coast this weekend,’ she said.

  ‘And will you take a friend?’ the Woman asked, watching her keenly. ‘Have you a friend yet?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tara, ‘I have. My neighbour, Mrs Armstrong.’

  ‘Mrs?’ queried the Woman.

  ‘She’s very formal,’ Tara said hurriedly. ‘She prefers to be called Mrs at the moment.’

  ‘Well,’ said the Woman, ‘that’s good. I hope this friendship develops. You need friends, Sarah. It isn’t good to go on being so isolated now. Friendship is important, it will do wonders for you.’

  A lecture on friendship … It was too much. Tara said nothing more after that. Next, the Woman would be asking about her love life and telling her love was important and would do wonders for her. It was so insulting. Rage built up in her, a Tara-like rage, the sort that at one time threatened to rule her life. The trouble was, she’d rarely let it all out. Her habit had been to contain it so that it burned inside her stomach and filled her head with a booming noise. Little whimpers of this rage would escape her clenched lips, but that was all. Her face she knew, because people pointed it out, would flush a deep, dark red. They would ask her if she was all right, whether she suffered from high blood pressure, and she would struggle to smile and say that must be it and she must make an appointment with her GP.

  She invited Mrs Armstrong to go with her for a car ride on Sunday.

  Once, she and Claire and Liz and Molly had gone for car rides. They couldn’t be called anything else except ‘car rides’. There was no planned destination, no pretence that they knew where they were going. It was just the fun, the excitement of having the use of a parents’ car to drive around in. All of them eighteen and desperate to leave home. Movement was the thing – up, off, away, and who cares where.

  It was rescuing that child which brought them together, then bound them, but Tara liked to think that if this incident hadn’t happened something else would have drawn them close. It seemed, once they’d become a quartet, that there was a natural affinity between them for all their various differences. What was it? A restlessness? A sense of ambition? What was this friendship based on, what glued it together? Why did they seek each other out years later when they’d all gone their separate ways and it was difficult to meet? Why, when they had all made other friends, and had partners or husbands, why was this particular friendship so deep and special?

  History. That must be it. They concluded that what gave their friendship such strength was knowing each other so thoroughly. It was the legacy of lolling around when they were young, talking and drinking the night away, that was what did it. All that time, all those hours and hours of droning on to each other, letting slip likes and dislikes, worries, fears, hopes. No friendship afterwards could come near this kind of intimacy. They each had a dossier of emotional confessions on each other, many of them made by mistake and regretted. These were never mentioned in subsequent years, but they were there, in the collective memory of the quartet. And so, when their meetings became much less frequent, they never worried about the time gap, there was never the feeling that they had to get to know each other again. They expected to slip effortlessly, within ten minutes, into the old familiarity.

  But Tara remembered how, the last time they’d all met, something like eleven years ago, she’d felt a slight sense of distance from the other three. Maybe, she thought, it was just a matter of how she was ageing differently from them. They were all only in their early thirties but the other three looked older, already on the cusp of middle age in her opinion. Claire’s cheekbones had all but disappeared and her hair, now in a stiff bob, made her face look even heavier. She’d taken to dressing in trouser suits which didn’t help. And Liz’s face was terribly lined for such a young woman, all doubtless due to her disastrous first marriage and the two miscarriages. Molly had put on weight in all the wrong places, but her face was still the same: chubby, cheerful, pink-cheeked. Only her clothes, apart from the new weight she carried, aged her. Fussy blouse, dreary grey skirt, and hideous brown lace-up shoes. She’d studied the three of them saying nothing, but aware that they, too, were aware of the outward difference between them. They might, she recalled thinking, even have envied her. She quite liked that feeling, that they were looking at her and listening to her and being impressed.

  She came away from that meeting sensing that there was a new distance between her and Clair
e, Molly and Liz. She told herself that since their lives were now so radically different they couldn’t expect to feel the same connection. But she wanted to. The puzzle was, why did she want to? She had Tom, she didn’t need these friends as once she had. They, of course, did not like Tom. They’d only met him two or three times but that, it seemed, had been enough. She was convinced class had a lot to do with it. Tom was clever, he had a better degree than any of them, and he was holding down a high-level job in finance, but he didn’t look or sound like a man who was ‘something in the City’. His Liverpool accent was thick and his appearance rough. Even in his City suit he looked dishevelled. And his manners … She had to admit he did not have the manners of a gentleman. But these things were minor compared to what her friends really held against Tom. They thought he dominated her, and despised them. They were wary, suspicious, uncomfortable in his presence.

  ‘You will look after her, won’t you?’ Liz had said to him at the wedding.

  ‘She doesn’t need looking after,’ Tom said.

  What was so wrong with that reply? She supposed it was the way he’d said it: contemptuously.

  What to wear?

  What to wear, for a car ride? On a Sunday? The problem overwhelmed Nancy, threatening to take all the pleasure from the outing. She’d have to wear one of those seat-belt things, and if she wore her coat it might prove uncomfortable. It was a thick coat. But if she just wore a jacket – she had three to choose from, all different weights – she might not be warm enough. Would there be a heater on in this car? There was no way of knowing.

  Then there was the matter of where they would be going, whether there was a destination in mind, one where she might be expected to get out of the car and walk about. In which case boots and her thicker stockings would be best. She didn’t wear trousers, never had. Everyone else did, a positive fright some of them looked, bulging out all over the place, but she never had. Skirts, dresses, that’s what she thought proper. Not always a hat, though. Once, she always wore a hat but often now she resorted to a headscarf, especially if she’d just had her hair set. They didn’t do perms any more, or the place she went to didn’t and she didn’t want to change to a place where they did. Her hair was still good. Thick, a bit of a wave in it, and it responded well to being set every six weeks.

  She was ready by ten. The note had said ‘about eleven’. She wished people wouldn’t be so vague. What on earth did ‘about’ mean? Five to eleven, five past eleven? And it hadn’t been made clear whether she should go across the road at ‘about’ eleven, or whether Sarah Scott would come and knock for her. Well, either way, she was ready by ten, sitting just to the left of her living-room window so that she could see if Sarah Scott came out of her door. The green car looked odd standing there. The other cars, at the other end of the street, were black or grey. Green stood out. It wasn’t, she thought, in very good condition. She could see a bit of rust on the back bumper, and there were one or two dents near the rear door, but maybe they didn’t matter. It was the engine that mattered. She felt quite pleased at realising this. She might never have had a car in her life, but she knew it was the engine that mattered.

  She didn’t like waiting like this, but she was always doing it, getting ready far too early, and then waiting long before it was time. Once, she’d thought this a good habit, one to be proud of having, but now she wasn’t so sure. It made time go so slowly, and it made her anxious. Often, when the clock still had twenty minutes to go, she’d be exhausted with all the waiting. She thought about going over at five to eleven, when at last clock and watch both showed that was the time, to knock on Sarah Scott’s door, but that might make her look too eager, even though she was. She wanted to seem casual. Not offhand – that would be rude, ungrateful – but casual would be fine. She was going to let Sarah Scott come and get her, and when she did she was going to pretend she had forgotten her scarf – ‘Oh, is that the time?’ she would say – and keep Sarah Scott waiting just a minute.

  Casual.

  Sarah Scott didn’t have a map. Tara would have thought nothing of this, but Sarah knew she would need one. After all, she didn’t know the area. She’d chosen it at random and the main attraction was that she didn’t know it. All she knew was the bus route to work, and the town centre which she’d walked round. The coast road, which she intended to drive along, was to the west of the town. The bus, at one point, crested a hill from which there was a brief glimpse of the sea. This always lifted her spirits, even on one of the many grey days when the sea was merely a mass of dark matter, still and sullen, not a white wave upon it. She would find that road easily, surely. And Mrs Armstrong would know the way.

  At ten-thirty she was on the verge of cancelling the whole outing. The thought of sitting beside Mrs Armstrong for any length of time in a confined space, not knowing where she was going, made her sweat with apprehension. What had got into her, suggesting such a thing? It was madness, folly. She didn’t want her neighbour as a friend yet this would be interpreted by her, understandably, as a gesture of friendship. She would be committed ever after to continuing the uneasy relationship. Mrs Armstrong would likely reciprocate, and she would find herself invited to a cup of tea, and she would have to go, and it would trundle on, this ‘friendship’, and it would all be her own fault. It would be the beginnings of a false friendship, one that would never deepen into anything more than the neighbourly connection it really was. Was she so desperate to prove that Sarah Scott could make, could have, friends, that she was prepared to throw herself at Mrs Armstrong?

  But there she was again, comparing Sarah’s making of a friend with Tara’s. Tara hadn’t had to try. Friends had just happened. Friends had been made through people gravitating towards her rather than she to them. Or else they’d been made through events, not all of them dramatic ones like the rescue of the child in the river which had brought Claire, Molly and Liz to her. The sports she played had drawn people to her who went on to become good friends. Especially men. She hadn’t met Tom, of course, through tennis – he despised all sport except football – but she’d met several others before him, and had become involved with one of them, become more than a friend.

  What was ‘more’ than a friend? Did the sex, or love, or sex and love, supersede the friend part? Did a man become less of a friend when he became ‘more’ than a friend? She thought so. Odd, hard to define why, but she thought so. The friendship part became overpowered by the sexual part. Sometimes, she’d wanted the pre-sexual friendship back, that time when she and Tom were finding out about each other, discovering similarities, accommodating differences. He never voted. That was a big difference, his disinterest in politics. It quite shocked her. She insisted he voted in the first general election after they became friends, telling him that she didn’t care who he voted for (though she did) but just that he voted. She said he couldn’t be her friend if he did not exercise his democratic right, fulfil his democratic duty, to vote. She was only half joking, though he laughed for ages at her solemn passion. All politicians, he said, were crooks.

  Sarah, of course, was older. ‘I am Sarah Scott and I am older and it is harder to make friends when one is older. I don’t play tennis, or any other game. My workplace is not conducive to making friends.’ She tried saying these things to herself but as explanations for her failure to make friends they didn’t work. No reason why she couldn’t join a tennis club in the summer, or find some other sport, or exercise, she could take up. Physically, she was fit. That was how she’d spent a lot of time in the past years, keeping fit, working out a regime of simple exercises like running on the spot, doing press-ups, avoiding the temptation just to slump. As for work, there were plenty of friendships in existence there. She’d heard women declare that it was the chat, the gossip, the camaraderie that kept them going, the way they all looked out for each other. But she, this new person Sarah, didn’t share in this. Why not?

  Why not? Because she kept herself to herself for obvious reasons. Sarah couldn’t keep herself to
herself and at the same time make friends because friendship meant giving something of yourself. Giving only a tiny bit was difficult. It led to a demand for more. And then there was the taking bit as well. You had to take as well as give for a friendship to develop and survive, and Sarah emphatically rejected the idea of involving herself in another’s life. No, she wouldn’t, couldn’t, do it. So, could she risk taking Mrs Armstrong for a ride? Too late now. It was five to eleven, and her coat was on, the car keys in her pocket, and she was crossing the street to knock on Mrs Armstrong’s door.

  Afterwards, once home, Nancy badly needed someone to listen to an account of her Trip (this was how she was already referring to it) but there was no chance of that. So she decided to describe it to herself, making a tale of it, editing and improving it as she went along. She would pretend that she was neither herself nor Sarah Scott but a narrator – that was the right term, wasn’t it? – telling a story in which she had no part. Then she could refer to herself as Nancy, or Mrs Armstrong. She loved this idea.

  She hummed hymns as she took her coat off and set about making her tea. Then she began her tale. They’d had a cup of tea while they were on the Trip but nothing to eat. It wasn’t the sort of café, or the sort of place, she would have chosen to stop at but Sarah Scott had loved it. She gave a little cry of pleasure when they drove through St Bees and she saw, from above, the beach and the cliffs. Nothing special about them that Nancy could see but then she’d been seeing them since she was a child, taken there on Sunday school outings. The beach was vast, the tide well out, and only a few dog walkers were visible marching along, throwing balls for their animals who went mad with joy at all the space. For one awful moment Nancy thought she was going to be asked to accompany Sarah Scott along the beach, and she had all her excuses ready, but no, Sarah Scott wondered if she would mind if she herself had a quick walk and then joined Nancy in the café. Nancy didn’t mind the woman having a walk on her own – on her own, thank God – but she did mind sitting in a café on her own, thank you. So she told Sarah Scott she’d just sit in the car and enjoy the view while Sarah walked, and then they could go into the café together. Otherwise she’d have finished her tea and they’d be wanting the table. This made no sense, but was accepted by Sarah who immediately left the car and ran, ran, down the steps on to the stones which separated the steps from the sand.