How to Measure a Cow (11 page)

Tara rushed out of her house and sat in the car. The car calmed her. Just sitting there, enclosed by its doors and windows, secure in the small space, she felt all these bad thoughts begin to lose their power. What she must tell herself was that a hand of friendship was being extended and if she was going to accept it she must clear away all this resentment and bitterness that she’d harboured over what had happened when this friendship was put under intolerable strain. She must go to the reunion with happy memories, untouched by what had befallen her. It was like trying to leap over a huge crack in the ground, beneath which a stream of memory raged. There was no bridge, the jump had to be made, and once made she would be safe, in new country. She saw herself running towards the edge, gathering speed, then launching herself into the air and landing easily on the other side. It could be done. All she had to do was make the effort. Did she
want to see Claire, Molly and Liz again? Truthfully? For good reasons? Not to blame them for disloyalty, but to enjoy their company once more?

Yes, she did. She got out of the car, each time, reassured. It was exhausting, going through these clouds of doubt which filled her mind but, slowly, they became less dense and her resolution hardened. She would go, she would behave well.

But first, yes, she would do a little spying.

There was talk at the pensioners’ club that Monday. Someone had heard a rumour about Nancy Armstrong’s neighbour. She was not, or so this rumour ran, what she seemed. There was a pause after this gem had been delivered in Nancy’s hearing. There was always a significant pause at this stage of repeating a rumour. Sometimes the lack of any reaction was enough to destroy it – nobody was interested enough to challenge it, so the rumour fizzled out before it had really got hold. But not this time. Several voices spoke at once, always a good sign for a rumour to have legs. Keeping oneself to oneself was respected, but not if this tendency went too far. How could it go too far? Easily. Not sharing anything at all in the way of ordinary information, harmless stuff. That was going too far. Not joining in for a cup of tea if invited was going too far. Sarah Scott, it was said, never lingered after work. She never accepted lifts from those with cars who were going her way. She preferred the bus. And she met people who, it was claimed, ‘looked like’ officials of some sort, in Morrisons café. It was upon these crucial sightings that the rumour hung. She’d been teased about having coffee with a man and the
teasing resulted in the colour leaving her face. And her face was quite pale anyway. Nancy dealt with that one scathingly. ‘Can’t a woman have a cup of coffee with a man in a place like Morrisons café without it being commented on?’ she asked.

The suspicion was that Sarah Scott might be on benefits, and the man she saw, and also the woman later on, might be checking up on her. Fraud was in the air. Members of the club were very hot on fraud. It was thought to be rampant these days. But try as they might – and they tried very hard – no one could pin anything definite on Sarah Scott. Nancy was vociferous in her defence. ‘She’s a decent young woman,’ she said, ‘and I should know. I’ve been in her house and she’s been in mine and there’s nothing wrong with her. She’s just shy, quiet, likes to mind her own business as some folk here should be doing.’ It was a good line to leave the club on, and Nancy duly left, knowing that the minute she’d gone the rumour would get going again. There was nothing she could do about it. She hadn’t seen Sarah with a man in Morrisons café. She’d never set foot in the place. Maybe it was simply a stranger who had sat down at Sarah’s table and to whom she’d been polite, that’s all. But there were eyes and ears everywhere in a place like this and Sarah somehow stood out as different, suspicious.

Nancy thought about this a lot. Sarah dressed in dull clothes, hardly wore any colour, and drew no attention to herself in that way. She walked with her head down, not seeming to pay any attention to her surroundings. Her voice was low, low enough for people to have to ask her to repeat whatever she said (as Nancy had had to do several times). But in spite of
her demeanour, there was something about her that attracted attention. What was it? Nancy pondered and pondered and came to the not-very-satisfactory conclusion that Sarah had some sort of fence around her. No, she didn’t mean fence, not a real fence obviously, but a barrier of some kind which gave off a ‘Do not approach me’ signal. Only determined people like Nancy could penetrate it, caring people. Sarah was also, she decided (though she was self-aware enough to realise she was getting carried away now) like an animal, like a timid cat, maybe, which had to be soothed and coaxed to accept a saucer of milk, a cat which had perhaps been ill treated or abandoned, and was wary of all human beings.

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.

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.