How to Measure a Cow (13 page)

Tara’s smile weakened. ‘And so do you, Claire,’ she said. Her voice sounded throaty, and she cleared it, and repeated what she’d said.

‘I’ve put on such a lot of weight,’ Molly said. ‘Seeing you, Tara, reminds me I was once as slim as you still are.’

‘No, you weren’t,’ said Liz. ‘You were never as slim as Tara, Molly.’

An argument began, a good-natured bickering.

Tara’s face was a shock. They had all made up their faces carefully before they came, even Molly who rarely did so, and looked so unlike herself with a fiercely pink mouth. But Tara wore no make-up
except for mascara. She was pale, unnaturally pale, an underground-living look. They were reminded of how she looked years ago, when she was twenty-something and in hospital with what turned out to be a ruptured appendix. They’d all visited her, organising a rota so that she wouldn’t have more than two days without one of them at her side. The nurses had been impressed – ‘Such friends!’ they’d said. When she was better, Molly had wanted to take her back and look after her, but Tara wanted to go home to Tom. Except Tom wasn’t at home. He was abroad ‘on business’, as he so often seemed to be. But Molly’s offer was still resisted. Tara went back to her flat on her own, and they all felt bad.

But at least the red dress was like the old Tara, dramatic, close fitting, and yet looking odd with the too-white face. She’d always been the gamine type whereas they were all what they liked to think of as ‘womanly’. These days, ‘womanly’ meant fat. Not obese fat, not bulging everywhere fat, but plump fat, controllable, responding well to a discreet compression with the help of some Lycra here and there. And there was Tara, so slender, not an ounce of fat on her, and yet she didn’t look frail. They all saw a strength in her, a tension that radiated from her slim frame and made it seem somehow threatening, as though her body was prepared to spring into action if it needed to.

When Liz and Molly stopped talking, the sudden silence was uncomfortable, but they were rescued by the arrival of the food, which released another welcome stream of chatter about who used to cook and who didn’t, and what their favourite foods had
been twenty-five years ago. Not much wine was drunk. They were all being careful, and not entirely because everyone except Claire would be driving later. It was a pity, this abstemious attitude, Tara thought. Wine, more wine, would have relaxed them all, surely. They’d drunk a lot when they were young, often been hopelessly drunk in each other’s company.

Claire made the decision to have coffee in the little snug off the lounge. This area was not exactly private, but near enough. The chairs were comfortable and encouraged sitting back in them, the cushions firm behind them. It would have been easy to fall asleep, but they were all alert. Tara reckoned she had waited long enough. Who should she begin with? Not Claire. Molly, Molly was an easier target. Molly, plump and matronly, just as she’d promised to be in her youth. No surprise there, except perhaps in the hair, grey already though the face was unlined and smooth. How should she start? With some vague question, perhaps. Tara tried to frame a vague question in her head but what came out was not vague at all. It was shockingly direct.

‘Molly,’ said Tara, turning towards Molly and smiling still, ‘Molly, did you read about my trial in a newspaper?’ From her tone, she might have been asking if her friend wanted sugar in her coffee.

Molly stared at her, opened her mouth as though about to reply, then closed it again. Slowly, a blush crept up from her neck to cover her face.

‘I just wondered,’ Tara said, ‘that’s all. I wondered if you did, if any of you did. That’s all.’

With Molly apparently speechless, Claire felt she had to speak for them all. It was her role in the group,
or it had been twenty-five years ago and she hadn’t knowingly given it up. She’d been expecting some sort of challenge from Tara anyway, whereas the other two thought that Tara, if she came, would not refer in any way to the trial, or the crime, or her time in prison. They were not ready for this question whereas she was.

‘Tara,’ Claire said, ‘of course we read about what happened. We worried about you all the time.’

‘Worried?’ queried Tara, eyebrows raised.

‘Yes. We worried. We didn’t know what to think, what to do.’

‘Goodness,’ said Tara, ‘I didn’t realise it was so difficult for you all, all that worry, all that not knowing what to do.’

‘I was going to write, but …’ Liz said.

‘But?’ Tara prompted, taking care not to sound aggressive.

‘Well,’ Liz said, ‘it seemed … We hadn’t been in touch for a while and …’

‘And?’ Tara prompted again, but Claire interrupted. She had her speech ready, it had been ready for months.

‘Tara,’ she said, voice low and kind, ‘Tara, we all feel awful about not doing what we know we should have done, as friends, old friends. There are no excuses. We didn’t support you and were ashamed and we’re so glad you’ve come today so we can all say sorry and we hope we can put the lost years behind us and get back to how we were, good friends again …’

‘Christ, Claire,’ said Liz, her eyes closed, her brow tightly furrowed, ‘shut up, for God’s sake.’

Molly let out a little moan of embarrassment, and looked anxiously at Tara, who was staring at Claire with an expression on her face which was unreadable.

‘More coffee?’ Claire suggested, nervous now, taking a great gulp from her own cup.

‘I don’t think so,’ Tara said.

This had to be brought to an end. What was the point of prolonging this awkward reunion, which didn’t feel like a reunion at all? It was a meeting of strangers, any connection heavily dependent on memories of the past, though not any ‘past’ which included Tara’s years in prison. This, it was clear, was to be regarded as a blank, something that had not happened. So Tara stood up, and said she must go. She had a long way to drive. All three of the others also stood up.

‘Oh, no,’ said Claire, ‘don’t go yet, Tara, we haven’t got to know you again. Give us a chance, please.’

‘Oh, Claire …’ wailed Liz.

Molly put her hand on Tara’s arm.

‘What I want to do, Tara,’ she said, ‘what I’ve wanted to do since you walked in is just hug you and say sorry. We’ve done everything wrong.’

It was, Tara thought, becoming a comedy when really it was a tragedy. All this well-meaning concern with no attempt to tackle what lay behind it: the fear. Fear that she would accuse them of cowardice, fear that she hated them for their desertion at that critical time, fear that if they didn’t take great care she would make a scene. She’d come near to it already after Claire patronised her. But she sat down again, and so did they.

‘What I want to know,’ said Tara, ‘is why, after the court case, after I’d pleaded guilty and was
imprisoned, none of you held out a hand. You let me drop. You were no longer friends. It was as though all those years we’d had together were wiped out by what I’d done. And even now, today, you’re scared to be with me. God knows what you thought this reunion was to be about, but it’s not what I thought it would be about. And I’m beginning to wonder if I feel anything for you, for any of you. I look at you three and I can’t believe there was ever any kind of closeness between us.’

There was a silence then, a stillness. Molly thought she might cry.

‘Tara,’ said Liz, ‘what do you want us to do? We can’t go back and act differently. We can’t say sorry over and over. You don’t want us to confess our shame at how we kept away, do you? Tell us.’

‘I want,’ said Tara, ‘to be friends again, but I don’t think we can be.’

‘Of course we can!’ said Claire, far too heartily. ‘We’re friends again already, just by meeting here. It’s a beginning, isn’t it?’

‘No,’ said Tara, ‘it isn’t. It feels like an ending. I never really imagined it would work, and now I know it won’t. You aren’t friends, you’re memories, good ones for years and then one big bad one.’

‘Oh, Tara,’ said Liz softly, ‘we have memories of you, too, and they ended with one big shock. It was no good us saying you couldn’t have done it when you said you did and all the evidence was there. But you hadn’t turned to us for help, had you? While all that stuff before, with Tom, was going on, you turned us away. You didn’t return phone calls, you didn’t reply
to letters. You gave us one clear message – back off. And we did.’

Molly looked shocked, Claire bewildered. Liz, Tara thought, had always been more astute than the other two. There was truth in what she’d said. She had indeed kept her friends away once she’d decided what she was going to do. She didn’t want her resolution weakened, she didn’t want arguments, and most of all she didn’t want to involve them even in the most indirect way. But none of them had tried to bridge the gap she’d created then, or had they? She struggled to remember, but Liz already had.

‘I rang you, the week before Christmas that year, the millennium year, when I hadn’t seen you for ages. I rang you to suggest that we all meet up in the New Year, do something together. Your phone was always on answerphone and eventually I left a message. You never called back.’

Tara did remember. It was true. And Claire sent her an invitation to a New Year’s Eve party – odd, that she hadn’t rushed to mention this, or that she alone had written before the trial. It wasn’t like Claire not to show off her concern.

Tara nodded at Liz.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I remember. But that doesn’t alter the fact that when I obviously needed support you didn’t come forward.’

‘Obviously?’ said Liz. ‘There was nothing obvious about it. What were we meant to do? Say we didn’t believe for one moment that you were a murderer? Say that, when you’d admitted guilt straight away?’

‘You could have shown some interest,’ Tara said.

‘How do you know we didn’t?’ said Liz. ‘We talked about it non-stop on the phone for weeks, fretting about what the newspapers were saying, hardly able to believe it all, and yet we had to. We thought about applying for a visiting permit or whatever they call it—’

‘But you didn’t,’ Tara said. ‘That’s the point we come back to again and again, isn’t it? You did nothing.’

The waitress came to ask if they wanted more coffee, and to clear away the cups and saucers when they said no. The clatter of the crockery was welcome.

‘Tara,’ Molly said, in a whisper, ‘how are you? How has it been for you?’

‘She won’t want to talk about that, Molly,’ said Claire, quite sharply.

‘Oh, but I do,’ said Tara. ‘I’d quite like you to know how I am and how it’s been for me. I’m glad you at least, Molly, are interested.’

She settled more comfortably into her chair, but at that moment two more people came to the doorway and looked into the room, eyeing the two remaining chairs and then deciding to come and sit in them.

‘Let’s go to my room,’ Claire (who was staying that night) said. ‘It’s quite big.’

So they all got up, collected their things and followed Claire upstairs in complete silence. Her room was indeed large, with a good view over the river. There was a double bed and, in front of the window, a small sofa as well as an upright chair beside the bed. Molly took it.

‘Better for my back to sit upright,’ she said.

Liz flung herself on the bed.

‘Better for mine lying down,’ she said. ‘God, I could go to sleep in an instant.’

This left Tara and Claire to share the sofa, but Tara didn’t care for this. She sat on the floor, nicely carpeted, and leaned against the bed, closing her eyes.

Nobody said anything for a while, then Tara began to speak.

‘This is what happened,’ she began. ‘I’ll tell you that first, then I’ll tell you how it was for me and how I am now.’

It was almost dark when she drove back to where she was staying. Claire had urged her to remain, saying she was in no fit state to drive – they’d had room service later on and two bottles of wine – but Tara said she was fine and she wanted to go. There were kisses and hugs all round. Tara enjoyed them. It was a long time since she’d had that sort of physical contact with anyone and it felt comforting. They used to kiss and hug a lot when they were young. It was the time when everyone their age started behaving in this un-English way, to the embarrassment of the older generation. They were always flinging their arms round each other and saying ‘Love you’, only half mocking. But now, leaving them, she saw the difference twenty-five years had made. None of them could trill ‘Love you’ in the same way. Hugs were serious. There was no exaggerated embracing, only an uncertain, diffident pressure from body to body, a slight squeezing of the arms and then a quick release. Still, it meant something, though quite what she hadn’t yet worked out.

Alone in her hotel room, Tara found herself thinking about Nancy Armstrong. Claire, Molly, Liz … then Nancy Armstrong, oh God. Sarah Scott’s only friend,
and the friendship so pallid, so timid, so unlikely ever to flourish. It had no history, no depth to it, and never could have. Their ages were wrong, their backgrounds unfathomable to each other. Their tentative friendship rested on proximity – that was all.

Claire was on the phone as soon as she got home next morning, to first Molly, then Liz, ostensibly to check that they had got home safely, and then to plunge into the credibility of the tale Tara told them. ‘Do you believe it?’ she asked each of them. ‘All of it, I mean?’ Molly said she saw no reason not to, incredible as it seemed. She just found it sad. But Liz had some hesitation about accepting certain parts of Tara’s story.

‘There’s a gap,’ Liz said, ‘something still missing, something she hasn’t told us. I don’t quite trust it. It’s too hard to believe that she went from adoring Tom to this vicious hatred all in a flash.’

‘It wasn’t in a flash,’ Claire protested.

‘Comparatively speaking,’ Liz said wearily.

‘Personally,’ Claire went on, ‘I think she was always afraid of him but she would never admit it, she would never admit she was afraid of anything or anyone.’

‘No,’ said Liz, ‘it wasn’t just fear. There must have been something else. And in any case, why didn’t she just leave him? Why didn’t she get the hell out?’

‘Anyway,’ said Liz, ‘I’m depressed by it all. But it’s her life now that worries me. The waste,’ she said, ‘when she’s so clever. I mean, whatever was she thinking of, exiling herself like this.’