How to Measure a Cow (19 page)

Nancy went to the club that afternoon simply because it was Wednesday and one of her club days.
She was fuming with a rage she didn’t understand and knew there was an unpleasant scowl on her face. As usual, she took a seat near the window but she didn’t survey the room, seeing who she might pass a bit of time with. Instead, she looked fixedly out of the window, regretting already that she’d come. It was that Ivy Robinson, of course, who came up to her and plonked herself down beside Nancy. Ivy could sense distress of one sort or another. She was attracted to it like a cat to the smell of fish. There was no pussyfooting around, though.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Ivy asked. ‘You’ve got a face like thunder, it’d turn the milk sour.’

Nancy picked up her cup and drank her tea without giving Ivy the satisfaction of any sort of reply. Rude? Yes, but Ivy had been rude. Ivy wasn’t in the least put out.

‘Saw you on Friday,’ she said, ‘in the car, with that woman, what’s-her-name, the one used to work beside our Gillian and got the sack.’

‘She did not!’ said Nancy, and regretted saying anything at all. It only encouraged Ivy. Silence was the best weapon to use against her sort, a dignified silence, of course, not a sulky one. But she’d spoken and could not take her few words back.

‘That’s what they say, any road,’ Ivy said. ‘That, and more. There’s things being said about that woman I wouldn’t like to repeat.’

Nancy kept her face impassive, or so she hoped, but a little thrill went through her, like an electric shock. Ivy knew something that she was longing to divulge and whatever it was it would be unpleasant. She had that look in her eyes that Nancy knew only too well,
a look that was both triumphant and nasty. All she needed was the slightest of reactions, and out it would all pour, the gossip she’d heard, the hints, the guesses transformed, in her mind, into facts.

Nancy got up, carrying her cup and saucer over to the serving hatch. Her hand trembled slightly as she put it down, the cup faintly rattling against the saucer. Ivy had followed her, placing her own crockery down beside Nancy’s.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘if you don’t want to know I’m not telling you.’

Nancy was tempted to snap that she had no wish to listen to anything Ivy had to say, but she controlled herself.

‘Just you ask your new pal where she was before she landed here,’ Ivy said. ‘Just you ask her. You might have more in common than you know, you two.’

Ivy smiled, and asked for more tea. Nancy moved out of the way, turning her back because she knew her face was red. ‘More in common …’ The words repeated themselves in her head. ‘More in common …’ But, really, she had nothing in common with Sarah Scott, except that they lived in the same street, and soon not even that would be true. She knew she was falling victim to Ivy’s mischief but she couldn’t control the hot rush of curiosity now coursing through her. If she couldn’t ask Ivy, and she couldn’t, who else could tell her what she allegedly had in common with Sarah Scott?

Nancy went home, confused and upset. Really, it was best to keep yourself to yourself, as she’d always done since she’d stopped being a girl, when friendship had meant companionship and not much more.
And yet she acknowledged to herself that she had wanted friendship from Sarah, wanted something deeper than companionship, but all the time, these past few months, she had been wary, suspicious of yielding to this longing. Let Sarah take the lead, she’d said to herself, but when Sarah did, or tried to, when she’d made tentative moves towards confidences, Nancy knew she had drawn back. And now she had lost her chance, it seemed. Sarah was moving away, and the vague friendship they had would not survive this moving, and now Ivy had made things worse by claiming that she and Sarah had ‘something in common’.

Her house didn’t seem comforting at all when Nancy returned to it. She closed the front door and stood with her back to it. She had to
do
something before it really was too late. She had to make an effort before Sarah moved away. But she never made efforts of this sort. They were foreign to her nature.

Her nature would have to change. Quickly.

Tara tore Claire’s reference up the moment it arrived. It was not at all what she had asked for. Typical Claire, the pompous tone of it sounding unconvincing, full of weasel words which could be taken in different ways. She’d drawn a blank with the landlord, too. He simply didn’t reply.

That left only Nancy Armstrong, who hadn’t actually refused to write a reference but instead had sidestepped a decision, or that was how Tara was persuading herself to interpret Nancy’s reaction. It was familiar Nancy behaviour, always to be cautious and suspicious and never to reveal what she really
thought. Tara had noticed this behaviour, too, in the women she’d worked with. Maybe Cumbrians, as a massive generalisation, were cautious and suspicious by nature. It was just their way. So she’d set about asking Nancy much too directly. Better to have introduced the subject of perhaps giving a reference in an oblique fashion.

‘I don’t know what I can do,’ she might have said. ‘I need someone to vouch that I’m respectable and I’ve no one to ask.’ Might Nancy then have said she’d do the vouching? But this scenario didn’t ring quite true.

She could forge a reference, of course, banking on no one checking it out, but she’d promised herself she wouldn’t, in her new life, do that any more. No lying, no deceit of any kind. Instead, she would invite Nancy for a ‘last’ cup of tea, not delivering the invitation by note or telephone but by knocking on her door. It would be harder, she reckoned, for Nancy to shut the door in her face than to put the phone down or ignore the note. She practised her expression in front of the mirror before she went over the road. It must be worried/slightly distressed/pleading. Voice should be low, but not whiny. So over she went and stood in front of Nancy’s door, knocking gently with the brass knocker. She waited. The lace curtain twitched. She waited again, knowing Nancy had seen her from the living-room window. After a couple of minutes, she knocked again, longer this time, and flapped the letter box.

‘I’m busy,’ Nancy called, ‘can’t answer the door at the moment,’ and then a Hoover started up.

Tara stayed there, waiting till the sound stopped, and then she lifted the flap of the letter box and shouted:

‘Nancy, it’s me, Tara. Sorry to bother you, so sorry.’

There was a pause, and then the door was opened cautiously, not quite to its full width.

‘I’m busy,’ Nancy said.

‘Yes, I know, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I wanted to ask you if you would please, please, come round for a last cup of tea before I go?’

‘When’s that?’ Nancy asked.

Her face, Sarah thought, had softened slightly.

‘Next Friday,’ Tara said, ‘so come any other day, except Thursday when I’ll be packing?’

‘I’m busy next week,’ Nancy said, ‘but maybe Tuesday, for ten minutes.’

‘Wonderful!’ said Tara. ‘Four o’clock, then?’

Nancy nodded and closed the door.

Tara decided this vital ten minutes’ friendly chat would have to be carefully structured.

CLAIRE WAS A
great one for ‘signs’, for things being ‘meant’. Mocking her did no good, so her husband didn’t even try, though he was astonished at the ‘meaning’ she saw in his visit to Sellafield. Claire was going to come with him to see Tara. Workington was near Sellafield, and the opportunity too good to miss. The fact that Tara wanted privacy was irrelevant. Dan pointed out that Tara might be furious if Claire turned up on her doorstep, but Claire rubbished this idea. So Dan gave in. He’d be staying near Sellafield for two days while he carried out his inspection, so Claire could drive herself to and from Workington while he was working. Claire beamed.

She bought maps. She loved maps, loved plotting routes and scorned sat navs. All she lacked was a street map for Workington but she would pick one up when she got there. Workington couldn’t be like London so it should be easy to find Tara’s street, her house. She told Liz and Molly her plan on the phone. Liz said nothing, but Molly sounded anxious and said:

‘Oh, Claire, is this wise?’

As neither of them had been asked to provide a reference, she thought their disappointing reaction to her plan might be because they were jealous. Claire knew people were often jealous of her but there was nothing she could do about it. But, disappointingly, neither Liz nor Molly showed any signs of envy.

The drive to Cumbria was long, with heavy traffic all the way. Dan was a careful driver, never exceeding sixty miles an hour. Claire knew it would be foolish to complain, so she tried to concentrate on looking out of the window. The countryside surprised her. Somehow, never having been north, she’d imagined something along the lines of dark satanic mills, forgetting that the M1 and M6 would obviously avoid cities and towns. What she saw was a green and pleasant land, field after field of hay amidst others of bright yellow and sharpest emerald green. Even the verges were lush with wild flowers and hawthorn, gold and white interlaced together. And the trees – she hadn’t reckoned on the masses of trees suddenly appearing at regular intervals. Then the hills came into view and far-off mountains all grey-blue and hazy in the sun. It made Berkshire, where she’d spent nearly all her life, seem cramped and tame. Maybe, she thought, Tara had done a clever thing in choosing to come here. Maybe Workington was going to turn out to be a charming, pretty town.

It wasn’t. Driving to it was pretty – more than pretty – the views of the Solway Firth dazzling in the sun, but the town itself bewildered her. There seemed to be no centre, or none that she could find, blundering round the streets, so she parked outside Marks & Spencer’s and set off to buy a street map
and a guide book. It was absurd, but she felt she was in a foreign land, though all the shops were familiar and everyone spoke English. She’d never thought of herself as having a posh accent, but here she felt she did and was embarrassed by it. It marked her out as a stranger. But nobody seemed curious about her; nobody asked, as she sat studying the street map, if she wanted any help. She was ignored, and suddenly felt lost and strange. She tried to think of Tara arriving here, a place completely unfamiliar. She must surely have been disorientated, wandering around trying to find somewhere to live, but maybe the choice had been made for her.

Street map in hand, Claire crossed the main road opposite Marks & Spencer’s and began climbing a hill. Below, the traffic thundered along, skirting the town, and she longed to get away from it. But somehow she must have misread the map and ended up back on this noisy main road, further along. She realised that in any case Tara’s street must be the other side of the road, and a good way down it. She thought, briefly, of going back for her car but decided not to. Instead, she trudged along the road, deafened by the roar of the lorries, desperately consulting her map again and again. The wind was in her face, blowing dust from the dirty pavement straight at her. She bowed her head against it and wished herself back home. Almost at the point of giving up, she finally found Tara’s street. It shocked her. The houses were so close together, their bricks blackened, the narrow pavements either side hemming them in. It was not a cold day but smoke was coming out of some of the chimneys. She could see only two cars parked in the street, though there
were no notices restricting parking. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and absolutely silent. The main road she’d longed to escape now seemed less alarming than this dreary street. Slowly, Claire walked along it, searching for number 18. The windows of the houses, one ground-floor window each, were so close that it was an effort to be polite and not stare into them, though she noticed they were mostly shrouded in net curtains, and little could be seen.

In front of number 18 she hesitated. She’d expected some visible sign that Tara lived here, something different about this house from the others. But there was no difference. There were net curtains covering the window just as they covered the other windows. Looking around her, up and down the street, knowing she looked furtive, Claire pressed her face against the glass, searching beyond the net for some splash of colour, some painting on a wall, that would indicate Tara did live here. Nothing, except for a bit of material, red and white, over the back of a chair. Claire took a step back and looked up. There was a blind on the top window, pulled down. Was Tara in bed, at two in the afternoon? Unlikely. Though in fact, why had she come at this time? It was silly. She should’ve come in the evening.

There was no bell, only a knocker. She knocked, recoiling lightly from the dull thud it produced. Should she leave a note? No, she should do the sensible thing and either ring or text Tara and arrange a meeting. Relief at deciding this made her feel dizzy. She’d wanted to see where Tara lived, where she was hiding, and now she wished it had remained a mystery. This was too pathetic, too
not-Tara. She felt so upset that, as she set off back down the street, crossing to the other side to avoid a puddle lying greasily in a pothole in the tarmac, she almost bumped into a woman coming out of her house. Apologising, all she got in return was a glare, and then the woman walked off. She was slow, and Claire was obliged to continue walking on the road in order to pass her. She was almost running before she got to the end of the street and then she turned the wrong way and didn’t recognise the landmarks she’d carefully noted on her way to Tara’s address. She began to panic, though she knew there was no need to. All she had to do was ask the way back to Marks & Spencer’s. But when she looked around, the road she was now on was empty of people except for the woman she’d passed on Tara’s street, just turning into the main road.

‘Excuse me!’ Claire called out, but the woman carried on walking, the plastic bag she was carrying fluttering in the wind. She ran to catch her up, and said again, ‘Excuse me!’ but was ignored. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘I’m lost. I need to get to my car. I’ve left it at Marks & Spencer’s.’

The woman stopped, a strange expression on her face, half contempt, half a sort of amusement. She said nothing, merely pointed ahead, and then did an odd half-turn with her hand, to the left.