How to Measure a Cow Read online

  Nancy was pleased with this deduction. She felt it fitted Sarah Scott. She was a frightened cat and Nancy knew how to gain her confidence. But she also reminded herself: cats have claws.

  V

  THEY MET THE week before, at Claire’s insistence.

  ‘We need a plan,’ she told Molly and Liz, ‘we need to be prepared.’

  ‘For what?’ asked Liz, annoyed, as ever, by Claire’s self-importance.

  ‘For everything,’ Claire said, and outlined all the possibilities she’d thought of as to how the reunion with Tara might go.

  Molly and Liz stayed silent, enduring Claire’s taste for melodrama as patiently as they could. It was all slightly ridiculous. Tara would not come. But they let Claire ramble on, until she started to produce newspaper cuttings.

  The first was the one they knew well. They had kept it themselves, though unlike Claire they would not have been able to lay their hands on it. Claire had stuck hers in a scrapbook. Typical. It had hardly faded at all. There they all were, beaming, at the child’s bedside, with the mother looking at them, her hands clasped together. Only the fact that the child was yawning slightly spoiled the highly posed picture. Tara stood out. No doubt about it. She wasn’t in the centre of the photograph – Claire was – but she stood out because of her great mane of unruly red curly hair. The rest of them had short hair, neatly shaped. Liz had a tidy fringe.

  Neither of the other two had cut out and kept Claire’s other cuttings. There they were, in another scrapbook. Significantly, it had a black cover whereas the one in which the old rescue cutting was stuck had a brightly patterned flowery cover.

  ‘You kept them,’ Liz said, knowing she sounded disapproving.

  ‘Why not?’ said Claire.

  Liz shrugged.

  Claire knew perfectly well why not. It was sick, surely, keeping such dreadful reports of what their friend had allegedly (no, not ‘allegedly’, she admitted it) done. They were unpleasant cuttings, taken from the lowest of the tabloids.

  ‘How come,’ Liz said, noticing this, ‘that you got those newspapers?’ She knew there was an edge to her voice.

  ‘I went out and bought them,’ Claire said, quite composed. ‘I wanted to know what the worst was and I knew they’d have it.’

  ‘Heavens,’ said Liz.

  ‘Well,’ said Claire, ‘I wanted to be properly informed.’

  ‘Properly informed,’ echoed Molly, ‘by the tabloids?’

  This black-covered scrapbook lay before them. Claire flicked through it, drawing their attention to one report of the trial which had mentioned how still Tara sat. The reporter commented on the accused’s ‘serene’ expression and her lack of any agitation when certain upsetting details were read out. It wasn’t the Tara they had known, they all agreed. She was never serene. She was hyper and volatile, and yet there she was, a different personality entirely.

  ‘We should have been in court,’ Claire said, as she had said many times before.

  Liz kept quiet.

  ‘Not again,’ said Molly. ‘We know why none of us could be there.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Claire, ‘but that’s what is going to come up if Tara comes – why were we not there, supporting her? We have to have our answers ready.’

  ‘Excuses,’ said Liz, ‘excuses, not just answers.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous,’ said Molly. ‘You really imagine that if Tara comes she is going to sit there and say why were none of you at my trial for murder? She won’t want it mentioned, not a word. She’ll want to start afresh. If she comes, which she will not.’

  Claire closed the scrapbook, stood up, and walked away with it. They heard a drawer being opened and then shut. Molly and Liz made faces at each other. Claire was offended and they’d have to placate her.

  ‘Well,’ said Liz, when Claire returned, ‘all I know is that I never believed it.’

  Molly sighed. ‘But Liz, she said she did it. She was quite clear about how she got the drugs, how she administered them, how—’

  ‘Yes,’ said Liz, ‘I know. I believe her but I don’t believe her. And I would never ask her about it. There’s no point.’

  ‘Unless Tara herself wants to confide in us,’ said Claire.

  The other two laughed, not at what she’d said but at the solemn, almost virtuous, expression on her face.

  ‘You may laugh,’ said Claire, ‘but I was the one she used to confide in, remember?’

  ‘No,’ said Molly and Liz, in unison.

  ‘Well, she did,’ said Claire, ‘but it was confidential and I couldn’t tell you.’

  Neither of the other two challenged her, either to doubt her again or to compete, though Tara had told each of them, at different times, things she said they were not to tell Claire about or ‘she’ll never let it go’. In Molly’s case, Tara had told her about falsifying her A-level exam results on an application form.

  ‘Can you imagine what Claire would say?’ Tara had laughed. ‘She’d shop me, even now. Anyway, I should’ve got A in chemistry, the B was probably a mismarking. What did it matter? They never checked – it was their own fault.’

  Molly, at the time, which was long after Tara graduated, years after upgrading herself, didn’t think the lie very important. Tara should indeed have got an A. She was good enough. It was all, by then, trivial, who had got what years before in an exam. But Tara was right: Claire wouldn’t have thought it trivial. Nothing she would have been able to do about it, but she would have held it over Tara in all sorts of sly ways.

  Both Molly and Liz wondered what on earth Tara had confided in Claire, considering how judgemental they knew Tara thought Claire was, but neither of them was prepared to indulge her by asking. Let her keep it secret, as they had each kept Tara’s mildly disturbing confidences. But this confiding had had consequences; Tara herself was not confided in. She was simply not trustworthy. Molly and Liz had discussed this often, as long ago as the period straight after the famous rescue of the child, when they all started being friends. They’d noticed, and Claire had too, that Tara embroidered ordinary events so that in her accounts they became colourful and dramatic when really there’d been no drama. Everyone indulged in a certain amount of this kind of exaggeration for effect but Tara did so more than most.

  The other three often protested – ‘Oh, come off it, Tara, it wasn’t like that, I saw it,’ one of them would say when she got carried away and described a minor incident like a fullscale opera.

  Sometimes, even more peculiar, she painted herself as a cheat when they knew she had not cheated. This was what baffled them. Why had she done it? Why would anyone confess to cheating when they had not? What did she hope to gain from this weird behaviour? Their conclusion, then, had been that she was just odd. Odd. Nothing more.

  ‘Well,’ said Claire, ‘we haven’t decided anything. The whole point of this meeting was to plan for every eventuality and we haven’t planned anything. We’ll all just be caught on the hop.’

  ‘We always would be,’ said Liz, ‘no planning could avoid that.’

  ‘But it doesn’t matter,’ said Molly, and repeated yet again that Tara would not turn up.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Claire, ‘we’ll have a nice lunch, and remember her.’

  A case went into the green car, on to the back seat, not the boot. Then Sarah came out carrying a raincoat, which also went on to the back seat. After that, there was a lull in activity, and Nancy got tired of slowly watering the plants she had on the windowsill in front of the net curtain. Surely, Sarah would tell her she was going away? She wouldn’t just go without a word? An eye needed to be kept on her house, for a start. Surely, she would want to be certain of that? Anyone normal would.

  But Sarah didn’t come to tell Nancy that she was going away. Instead, a note was put through her letter box very early one June morning. Nancy, who was always awake by 5 a.m. these days, heard the flap shut. It was one of the new-fangled flaps which meant nobody could put their hand through to try to open the door. Nancy had
read about these clever flaps in a newspaper and had had one fitted immediately. It made her feel secure, though the disadvantage was that anything coming through the letter box made a noise. When she heard it that morning, Nancy got up and peered out of her bedroom window. Sarah was already in the green car. So sly! Nancy was furious – what a way to behave, sneaking off like this – and was determined not to go immediately to find out whatever it was Sarah had put through her door. If she was not important enough to be told face to face where Sarah was going, and for how long, and maybe exactly why, then her note or card, or whatever it was, was not important enough to be read at once. It could lie there, on the mat, until the proper time for Nancy to get up, which was at 7 a.m. precisely.

  It was hard, staying in bed until 7 a.m., but it had to be done. Rules were rules, made for a good reason. Nancy struggled slightly to recall what these rules were, and why they’d been made, and whether she’d made them herself or they’d been handed on to her by her mother. Routine, it was about having a routine, essential on a farm, which got you through the day. In bad times especially, it was essential to Get Through the Day. That was it. Times were not bad for Nancy any more, but if she let her routine go to pot then she’d never reclaim it if bad times returned. Rise at 7 a.m. Essential.

  Even then, Nancy ignored the white envelope on the mat. She felt quite triumphant walking down the stairs, seeing the envelope, turning at the foot of the staircase to go into the kitchen without picking it up. Never be too eager, that was another rule. It led invariably to disappointment. She made tea, sipped a little of it, and then, ever so leisurely, she went and picked up the envelope. It was not sealed, and of course had no stamp on it. This rather pleased Nancy. It was a good envelope which could be used for something. Even better was the fact that ‘Mrs Armstrong’ was written in pencil. It could be rubbed out, leaving the envelope pristine. Not quite as cross as she had been, owing to now possessing a potentially perfect envelope, Nancy took out the piece of paper inside.

  There was no ‘Dear Mrs Armstrong’ or ‘Dear Nancy’, but the date was written in the top right-hand corner. The message said, ‘Just to let you know that I will be away for the next week. Yours, Sarah.’ Nancy read it umpteen times, decoding every single word, beginning with ‘Just’. Just! What kind of beginning was that? Just? It implied something offhand, something trivial, something the writer of the word could hardly be bothered to communicate. It took Nancy a long time to get past this ‘just’ and even longer to interpret the whole message properly.

  The most wounding thing was that she had not been asked to keep an eye on Sarah’s house, and yet surely that had been the point of informing her of Sarah’s absence. Why else would she have written this unsatisfactory note? And then there was the other annoying thing: no mention of where Sarah had gone. She was being secretive. She was concealing her destination, not trusting Nancy. Why? What would have been more natural than to say where she was going for this holiday? Even if she’d said, in general terms, that she was going to the seaside, or to stay with a friend, or even to London, maybe.

  Something was going on, and Nancy was perturbed.

  The further south she travelled, the more unreal the house she’d left behind became. Tara tried to see it in her mind’s eye, and couldn’t even conjure up the street convincingly. Had she really been living there for months? It was like driving out of fog, all murky and dim, into clear air – the relief! She felt herself become more alert with every mile she drove, and found she didn’t need to stop and rest as often as she’d envisaged she might have to. South of Preston, she pulled into a motorway service station and after she’d filled up with petrol she went to the lavatory and undid the band tying back her hair and the clips drawing it severely back from her ears. She brushed her hair and fluffed it out so that it surrounded her face. There. She looked, already, more like Tara than the woebegone Sarah. She smiled at her reflection. She could come back again, she knew she could.

  Tara was not quite established again as herself by the time she arrived at the small hotel on the river where she’d booked a room. She was there, pushing to come out, but Sarah held her back. Loosening her hair was one thing, but that was enough for the moment. The clothes were still Sarah’s, grey and neat; so was the manner, quiet and hesitant. Better to remain nondescript while she adjusted. But once in her room, she unpacked the dress she’d bought online for the rebirth of Tara and smiled at the sight of it, the colour thrilling her. Tara had always loved red, all the reds, scarlet and crimson and especially the red so near to purple. She’d loved satin and silk materials too, not the real thing but synthetic versions which looked and felt genuine. This dress was silk, light and pretty, and it came with a little jacket of a thicker, but still silky material, an outfit for a summer’s day, worn with a silver necklace which sat beautifully above the neckline of the dress. Really, it was too good for a lunch with old friends. She would be overdressed, but then that was Tara.

  Still in her grey trousers and her paler grey sweater, she went out for a walk. Her legs felt stiff after the long drive and her head ached slightly, but once she got on to the towpath she began to feel better. The river was high and fast flowing with bits of branches being swept along. There must have been a storm recently, as there had been that other June week. Today, there were no children about. She passed a couple of women walking dogs but that was all. Sitting on a stile which led into a field, she thought about the course her life had taken since the rescue of the child. So unpredictable, all the rushing along, heedless of where she was going, always wanting to be different, to stand out, never stopping to consider what this told her about herself. She saw it all clearly now, the restlessness, the impetuous approach to events. She had never given anyone but Tom a chance (and look what he’d done with it); she swept them away with her enthusiasm for whatever it was she had wanted to do. Maybe it had amounted to bullying, but she hadn’t seen it like that. She’d had time even before she became Sarah, during all those years of reflection, to realise she had always been a dangerous person. It was not entirely impossible, after all, for her to have done what she had done.

  Walking slowly back to the hotel, she pondered the question of whether the old Tara really could emerge again, fully formed, or whether she had gone for ever. No, she hadn’t. She wasn’t Sarah Scott, she never could be, however well she had played the part so far. Bits of Tara were mixed in there and could be retained and reactivated. The spark spluttered and could ignite but mustn’t flare up to a dangerous heat ever again. Control, that was the lesson she’d been obliged to learn. Control: over temper, over passion, over action without thought of consequences. The approaching reunion was a test case. Control over her desire to accuse her friends of betraying the very essence of friendship: loyalty. They had shown no loyalty whatsoever. They had not stood by her at her time of greatest need. But did she want their excuses, their justifications, their explanations all this time afterwards? Tara did, but Sarah realised how pointless it would be to demand these now. There was no point in going to this lunch if all she was going to do was give vent to her disappointment in these friends and pour her scorn and resentment over them. Sarah would not agree to it. Sarah wanted to remain dignified, coolly curious, above any kind of ugly behaviour.

  She wanted Claire and Molly and Liz to be very surprised by her exemplary behaviour.

  It was almost twenty miles from the hotel where she was staying to where Liz used to live the last time she’d visited. When was that? She couldn’t exactly remember, but definitely at least twelve years ago. She parked two roads away, and then walked past Liz’s house (if it was still Liz’s). What she hoped to gain by this she didn’t know, but it felt mildly exciting, a feeling she hadn’t experienced for a long time. The colour of the front door was the same. Green. The front garden was the same, a flourishing hydrangea in the centre of an oblong of grass. Proved nothing. She walked on, stopping at the corner shop near the church, where three roads met, surprised to find it still exi
sted, the only evidence that what was now suburbia had once been a village. She stood and looked in the window. There was a board there with notices for various things for sale, rooms to let, gardeners and cleaners wanted. And there it was, Liz’s name and number: ‘Cleaner wanted two days a week, 9 a.m. – 12 noon. £12 an hour.’

  For reasons she couldn’t begin to understand this small bit of knowledge satisfied Tara deeply. Liz was still living here, the same sort of life, in all probability, which she’d been living when last they met, years ago. Nothing had shifted. She would know Liz, be able to link straight into her life. It gave her confidence. She decided she didn’t need to drive an extra ten miles to lurk outside Molly’s house. Molly would not have moved. She and her husband had bought their house in 1994 when they were married, and announced they’d never leave; it was just what they wanted, big enough to house Simon’s surgery, and with a lovely view of the river at the back. Molly was stability itself.

  Which left Claire’s house. She knew exactly where to park so that she could see people coming and going. She saw Claire within ten minutes of parking under a line of trees the other side of the road. Tree-lined, that was Claire’s road, broad grass verges, drives to most of the double-fronted houses. Claire looked, as she got out of her car and reached into the boot for several bags, much the same, from the distance that Tara saw her. Heavier, maybe, but still smartly, if boringly, dressed, wearing a trouser suit, the trousers a little too wide for the boxy jacket. Never scruffy, that was Claire. Always formal looking, a business look, though she’d never run a business.