How to Measure a Cow (25 page)

‘But
why
do you lie?’ Mary would wail.

And Tara would say, ‘Why does there have to be a why?’

Then there was her temper. Frightening. Tara could lose it completely. She threw things, anything to hand, breakable or not, and screamed abuse, her body shaking and quivering with rage. He would come home to find Mary white faced and tearful, the living room wrecked. They sought professional help, but it didn’t help at all. Tara played these professionals with consummate skill, giving them what they wanted. She never showed remorse. Mary never got an apology, or a promise not to behave so violently again. He tried his own methods of dealing with Tara, since Mary couldn’t cope. Physical activity, that was his way. Exhaust the girl, get rid of all that excess energy by encouraging
her to swim and run and jump and throw. To some extent, it worked. Mary was protected. But then Tara began just disappearing. For hours. Where did she go, what did she do? She wouldn’t say. They worried that she was getting into bad company but then she saved that little boy from drowning and suddenly she was in excellent company, friends with three nice, well-brought-up girls. They relaxed. It was a mistake. It was a shock, learning of what Tara was supposed to have done. His first thought was thank God Mary was spared this. His second was that his wife would have said, ‘Go to her.’ At that stage, he hadn’t seen Tara for something like four, maybe five, years, and he’d been relieved not to have done so. Her few visits, after she’d married this Tom, after Mary died, had been disturbing. She seemed to be blaming him for things of which he had no recollection. He listened, as Mary would have wanted him to, but he couldn’t think how to respond to her accusations. He never really loved her, she said. He was ‘scared of his own feelings’. What on earth did that mean? He thought, she said, that teaching her to swim and taking her running was all a father needed to do. He was distant, he’d rejected her love … On and on she ranted. It was deeply embarrassing. And why now, when she was married to this Tom? Nothing made sense. Abruptly as she’d arrived, she left, and he was relieved. He’d sat there, silent, observing her, wondering if she was in the middle of some breakdown. Well, maybe all the stability and affection she’d been given couldn’t overpower how she was made. There was something about that thought which Mary wouldn’t have liked, but he couldn’t help it passing through his mind.

But when he was contacted by the police, he kept to the facts. Tara’s upbringing was gone over and over, and then there came questions about her relationship with Tom. They were very interested in the early history of this, but he couldn’t help them much. When Tara first met him, Mary had just died, and he was so lost and furious he took no interest in this new boyfriend. Yes, he had received an invitation to Tara’s wedding, a register-office affair (which would have upset Mary) but no, he hadn’t gone to it, nor had he replied. He expected it to be understood that he was too grief-stricken, this event coming so soon after his wife’s death. The police seemed surprised that he hadn’t actually met Tom. Not at all? No, not at all. Tara never brought him home. She never brought any of her boyfriends home. In the early days, when she’d started having boyfriends, and Mary was still well, it had been suggested she could invite them for tea. Tara had laughed at the idea. She said her boyfriends were her business, not theirs. But the police persisted: hadn’t he thought he ought, as Tara’s father, to insist on meeting Tom? He said he hadn’t thought so. She was not underage. He no longer had any legal responsibility for her. He didn’t tell the police that he had, in fact, once seen Tom. Once. In their local pub. He didn’t go there often, only on a hot summer’s day, when he’d been gardening for hours and the thought of a pint drew him. He wasn’t a sociable chap, so he always sat apart from everyone else, nursing his pint in a dim corner of the long bar. A man came in who caught his attention because of the way he stood at the bar. The barman was busy, and this man banged a pound coin on the surface of the brass rim. His whole
stance was arrogant. He had no patience, calling out, ‘Service, please!’ when his banging with the coin produced no response. He might, Alex thought, be foreign, though this impression was only based on the fellow’s deep tan, if it was a tan, and his clothes. Something about his clothes … He looked somehow dishevelled, as though they had been thrown on in a hurry, and yet Alex could see they were not cheap clothes. His leather jacket looked like real leather and his shoes, though unpolished, looked like good shoes. Alex particularly noticed this because, for him, shoes had always indicated a certain status, something now lost with the arrival of the trainers he despised. Good shoes, it must mean something, worn as they were by a man he otherwise didn’t like the look of. And then Tara appeared, looking so young and lovely, all brightly dressed in red, and she slipped her arm through this man’s arm, and he drew her to him and kissed her, holding her tightly, too tightly. Alex left by the side door, beer abandoned, feeling slightly sick.

Yes, at that point he should have made himself known. He had no doubt that the man he’d seen was Tom, Tara’s husband, a man clearly old enough, by the look of him, to be her father. There was something not right, and it wasn’t only a matter of age. Tara, in that brief glimpse he’d had, seemed dominated somehow. But it was impossible. Tara did the dominating, always, of everyone. He thought about this years later, when Tara did what she did. He went to hear the court case out of a sense of duty, not to Tara but to Mary. She would have gone if she’d been alive, he had no doubt of that. Whatever Tara had done, Mary would have stood by her. So he went, every one
of the days it took, though he resented his conscience making him do so. In the dock, Tara looked as she had always looked: defiant. Her head held high, her voice clear and firm in tone. She’d changed her hair, but then she’d been in the habit of messing about with it since she was thirteen. What colour had it not been? She was a blonde now, but the roots were already showing a dark red. Someone had brushed it smooth, or else, in that respect, Tara had changed. She would never brush her hair. It drove Mary to distraction, the mess of it, tangled and rumpled when it should, in her opinion, have been tidy. She was, he noted when she stood up, still slim, very thin in fact. No matter how much Tara ate, and she ate a lot, she stayed thin.

All this he noted, while listening to the barristers arguing their case. The prosecution had an easy time of it, what with the evidence so blatantly obvious and then, of course, Tara’s plea of guilty, which more or less wrecked the defence’s case, though they had a go at mitigation, and that was when he heard Mary’s name and his own. Tara’s time in their care was gone into in detail. He’d expected this, but what he hadn’t expected was hearing that Tara had ‘trouble’ with her foster mother but ‘looked up to and respected her foster father, to whom she was greatly attached’. He found he had said ‘What?’ aloud in his amazement. ‘Greatly attached?’ It simply was not true. This could only have come from Tara herself, but why had she made it up?

That was why he went to see her in prison, something he certainly had not intended to do, however much Mary’s urging would have rung in his ears. There were limits, and he felt that by being present
during the trial he had reached them. But now he had a specific reason to visit Tara and he had to go. He marched into the prison determined to be forthright, to say what he had to say, then leave as quickly as possible. He’d been going to sit down opposite her and come straight out with, ‘What’s this nonsense about being “deeply attached” to me?’ But it didn’t work out like that. She smiled at him, and said, ‘Hello, Dad,’ in such a soft, little-girl voice, and looked at him adoringly. Part of him knew this was acting, Tara putting on an act, which she’d done all her life, but another part of him couldn’t help being touched. Maybe he’d been wrong, maybe he hadn’t recognised that she was ‘deeply attached’ to him, in which case he had surely let her down. He coughed and spluttered, and asked her how she was getting on when what he wanted to ask was something quite different. He was glad when his time was up and he could leave. He never visited her again in all the years she moved between prisons and when he knew her sentence had been served and she was free he dreaded any contact she might try to make. But nothing, for practically a whole year, to his relief. What he was frightened of he couldn’t work out, and there was no Mary to help him.

And now here she was, in his garden, standing watching him tie up his sweet peas.

‘How did it go?’ Claire asked. Her voice, on the phone, was breathy, not like her usual confident, clear tone. She’d said to Tara, when told of the approaching visit to her foster father, ‘You’ll let me know how it goes, won’t you?’ Tara agreed for the sake of peace,
but hadn’t let Claire know. Know what, anyway? She suspected Claire imagined she was going to confront the man with allegations of child sexual abuse or something scandalous, which was nonsense. If there had been any abuse, she herself had knowingly done the abusing, but, if she had, she hadn’t seen anything wrong in it. She’d flung herself at him as a child and though he’d accepted her embraces he hadn’t responded. Instead, after a moment, he’d carefully detach himself, without speaking. But she had seen the expression on his wife Mary’s face though she hadn’t worked out, then, what it told her.

‘It went fine,’ she said to Claire, ‘we sorted a lot of stuff out.’

‘Like what?’ said Claire.

‘Oh, stuff about Tom,’ Tara lied.

Claire couldn’t quite bring herself to ask what stuff. Anything to do with Tom was delicate.

‘Well then,’ she said, ‘what now?’

‘What indeed,’ Tara said gravely, and hung up.

She was a little more expansive to Molly when she rang, mainly because Molly was more hesitant than Claire and said, ‘Are you all right?’ rather than asking how the meeting had gone.

‘I’m fine,’ Tara said. ‘We talked about Tom and how he’d behaved and how my upbringing may have given him the wrong idea.’

‘Oh,’ said Molly, not following that up, ‘well, I’m glad seeing him helped.’

But Liz wasn’t going to leave such a statement unexamined. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘What has your upbringing got to do with giving Tom the wrong idea? What wrong idea?’

‘Well,’ Tara said, ‘once he knew I was fostered he deduced I had some kind of bad background, and that this made me vulnerable and needy.’

‘Vulnerable, you?’ said Liz. ‘And we’re all needy at eighteen. Come on, Tara, this is pure therapy-speak. It was a mutual physical attraction, that was all, simple.’

‘No,’ said Tara, ‘it wasn’t simple. I wasn’t even really attracted to him at first, not physically. And he was so much older. He gave me a lift, remember? I told you all about it.’

‘Yes,’ said Liz, ‘you boasted about his car, an MG sports, right?’

‘Right,’ said Tara. ‘He loved cars.’

‘And he drove like a madman,’ Liz remembered, ‘or so you said. Another boast. So it was all about power, wasn’t it? Admit it. You were attracted by the danger you sensed. Exactly what we all were afraid of, afraid for you.’

‘You were jealous,’ Tara said.

Liz laughed. ‘Jealous? Don’t be ridiculous. We were worried, but you were that horrible thing, besotted. You thought you were so daring, taking up with this older, louche man. We hoped it would fizzle out, but then you married him. We just hoped it would work out.’

‘Like hell you did,’ said Tara.

She rang off before Liz could annoy her any more.
Of course
they’d been jealous. They said they had their studies to think about and wanted no distractions – as if! Well, she had her studies too and Tom was perfectly happy that she should carry on and get her degree. She didn’t have to be a housewife, he said. Other women could be paid to clean and cook, it would be quite
easy to arrange, he could afford it. She felt indulged, even spoiled, for the first time in her life, and it made her feel secure and happy, except for a few twinges of anxiety about
how
Tom could afford the life he had, the cars, the apartment, the expensive restaurants he took her to. He bought her a diamond cluster ring, which she made him take back. Didn’t he realise she wasn’t a diamond-ring sort of girl? This amused him highly. She tried to ask him about what exactly he did, what his job was, but he just said that he was ‘in the City’ and it was too complicated to explain. Basically, he said, he shifted money about. She said her foster father would be interested in that since he was an accountant. Tom just smiled.

It hadn’t seemed odd, at the time, that he didn’t talk about his work in detail. Clever though she was, she knew she would have struggled to understand what he actually did. She didn’t have the terminology to get to grips with high finance, just as he would have floundered if she’d tried to explain the excitement of chemistry. They both rather liked the fact that neither properly understood what the other did, but that they respected how involved they each were in their respective passions. It gave another element of mystery to their relationship.

But she never took Tom home. Alex was in deep, really deep, mourning for his wife, and when she mentioned, on the phone, the idea of introducing Tom to him he’d said he wasn’t up to it at the moment. How
could
he have said that? That was what she’d gone to ask him about. How could he have refused to meet the man she was going to marry? It proved he didn’t really care for her, that he rejected her, that he
hadn’t looked out for her. What might have happened if he’d met Tom? Cross-examined him about his work? But no. Nothing. And though she sent him an invitation, he didn’t come to the wedding. It was a small affair. Tom’s parents were dead (he said) and he had no siblings (he said). The only people present at the register office were Claire, Molly, Liz, and a friend of Tom’s called Clive, who was ‘in the City’ too. Claire had quite fancied him (he was the same type as Dan, whom she married soon after, tall and blond). Tara never saw Clive again.

The last thing her father said to her, standing among his sweet peas, was, ‘Always blaming other people, always harking back to the past and claiming you were hard done by. You were lucky, my girl, you had all the care in the world and you didn’t appreciate it.’