How to Measure a Cow (21 page)

She wished the woman, Sarah/Tara, would just go away. Quickly. Quietly. She should never have got involved with her in the first place.

‘It was such a depressing street,’ Claire told Molly. ‘Grey houses, all squashed together. I just couldn’t imagine Tara in one of them all this time. I mean, there are some lovely streets there, but she chose this dreary one near an industrial estate. What do you think it was, a penance, or something?’

‘She wanted to disappear, I expect,’ said Molly, ‘and where better to do it than the street you’ve described?’

‘But she’d stand out,’ Claire said.

‘No,’ said Molly, ‘she wouldn’t, not as this Sarah Scott. Tara’s an actress, don’t forget, she loves new parts. I bet she loved changing everything about herself, especially how she dressed. Can’t you see her, doing a little “Miss Mouse” impersonation? Who would see through it? But then, when it was too successful, the old Tara would start peeping through, don’t you think? It would have got boring. She’d want a new script, a new part.’

‘Do you suppose,’ Claire said, ‘she’s made any new friends up there? Or is she acting this “new part” as you put it, all alone?’

‘Well,’ Molly said, ‘she had a job, or so she said. She’ll be in contact with people that way. And neighbours – she’s bound to have neighbours, especially in the sort of street you describe.’

‘Not her sort,’ Molly said.

‘And men?’ Claire asked. ‘What about men? How on earth will she meet any men, in her new role?’

‘Maybe she doesn’t want to,’ Molly said. ‘Anyway, you shouldn’t worry about her, Claire. You’re not her mother, and she’s made it clear enough that she doesn’t want any of us in her new life. Accept it.’

But Claire couldn’t. Thoughts of Tara nagged at her all the time. She should have knocked on her door, or left a note saying she was nearby, just for two days. What was the point of having gone to Workington if not to see Tara? And now that she was home again, more than 300 miles away, she couldn’t recreate the feeling that had come over her in that street, the panic she’d felt. She couldn’t follow Molly’s advice. No, she wasn’t Tara’s mother but her concern felt maternal. It always had done. That had been
her
role in her old friendship with Tara. Tara didn’t have a real mother when Claire became her friend. It was a gap she filled, or tried to. It made her friendship with Tara different from her friendship with Molly and Liz.

Tara’s mother, or lack of a mother, had been a mystery. Was she dead? Nobody knew. All Tara had said was that she didn’t have a mother and no amount of prying made her say anything else. Liz guessed that she simply didn’t know anything. She had a foster mother, though; she’d had the same foster mother since she was three, she told Claire. Did she like her? Was this woman kind to her? A shrug. She was OK.
To Claire, deep in her settled, relation-rich, middle-class family, Tara’s situation was the stuff of fairy tales. Everyone else’s family background was ordinary, Tara’s mysterious. Claire, at seventeen, couldn’t understand how she could be calm about it. To the question, ‘Will you try to find your real mother?’ Tara said, ‘Why?’ as though it had never occurred to her, but surely it must have done.

Claire knew she was like her own mother, both in appearance and personality. So was Molly, the similarity to her mother even more marked. Liz, though, was nothing like her mother, which she professed to find a relief. But at least they all knew their mothers, and could see, and feel, what they’d inherited from them. Tara couldn’t. These rages she sometimes flew into: was her mother the same? The lying, the taste for dramatic outbursts: could her mother have told her that she, too, had gone through this phase and come out of it? The trouble was, Tara had no pattern to follow, or reject, when it came to her mother. And as for her father, the same applied but somehow, to Claire, this didn’t seem to matter so much. All this troubled Claire greatly, and made her excuse Tara almost anything. She was always hoping Tara’s mother would one day turn up, though as time went on this grew less and less likely.

Liz’s theory was that Tara knew she had been abandoned and would never forgive her mother (though in fact she was convinced Tara’s mother was dead). Molly thought that when Tara had children of her own she’d change her mind about not wanting to find out if her mother was still alive. But Tara never did have children. Said she didn’t want them. Tom
didn’t either. When, over the years, she came to visit Claire, Molly and Liz, all three breeding busily for a whole decade, she ignored their offspring. None of their babies was picked up and cuddled by Tara, no toddler played with. It had been quite hurtful, really. And then, when the children were older, towards the end of Tara’s regular visits, things improved a bit. Tara liked their surliness, their rudeness, the hostility some of them directed towards their mothers. It amused her. She championed them, and it was annoying. She even once told Liz’s bolshy elder daughter that if she wanted to leave home, when she became a teenager, she could come and live with her in London. Liz, who knew Tara didn’t for one minute mean this, was furious. The daughter in question might well go on to take the offer seriously, only to be met with Tara saying it had only been a joke.

Tara, Claire reckoned, had always needed her mother. She just didn’t realise it.

Nancy, when she left Tara, went to the club. It was not her regular day, but too bad. She was in a state, but she had nowhere else to go and needed some kind of distraction. It would settle her. She knew she was still red-faced – she could feel the heat in her cheeks – but walking would cool her down. She tried, as she walked, to sort out the scene she’d just been involved in. That was the right word. ‘Don’t make a scene,’ her mother had always been warning her, and as a child the word puzzled her. Scenes were in plays, they were labelled as Scene 1, Act 1 in books of plays at school. But she wasn’t in a play. She was in real life, so what did ‘scene’ mean? Later, when she absorbed the
meaning in her mother’s phrase, she liked it. ‘Making a scene’ was creating a disturbance, drawing attention to yourself in some way, doubly reprehensible if this was in public.

Tara, who had been Sarah, had made a scene. One hell of a scene. Nancy quickened her step as she went over it, checking what part she herself had played. Had she been too harsh, too unsympathetic? Well, she’d been shocked with all the carry-on, the tears, the barring of the door. Good heavens, what a scene. Thank God no one had heard or seen it. She wouldn’t tell anyone about it, of course. There was no one she could tell, in any case. Keeping yourself to yourself meant there was never anyone to whom confidences could be given. Nancy understood that very well. The relief, even the thrill, of describing scenes of the sort she’d just been part of could not be hers. She knew she would go over and over it in her own head until the memory faded.

Arriving at the club, Nancy made straight for the tea. She was so thirsty that she stood and drank a cup at the counter where it was served and then refilled it before moving to her usual seat by the window. Settled there, it helped to have something to watch. The street below was not a hive of activity but there were enough people coming and going to distract her slightly from replaying the scene at Tara’s house. Tara. She thought about the name. Fanciful. She’d never known anyone called Tara. Where did it come from? Sarah was a much better name. Down in the street she suddenly spotted a Sarah she knew, Sarah Vickers. She’d known her because she bought tomatoes from her stall when she first came to Workington. The stall had long since
gone, but when they met in the street they always said hello. She was an acquaintance, Nancy decided. Not a friend but an acquaintance, through habit. Her life, she reflected, was rich in such people. She might have no one she could truly describe as a friend since Amy died, but she had tons of acquaintances. This realisation comforted her, so she was in a happier state of mind when Mrs Curwen sat down beside her.

Mrs Curwen was always addressed as Mrs Curwen. Nobody was familiar enough to call her by her Christian name. Indeed, no one at the club seemed too sure what it was. Asked her name, Mrs Curwen said, ‘Mrs Curwen,’ and that was that. Quite what she was doing at the club nobody was certain. Had she worked at the factory or in the office? She didn’t look as if she had done either, with her posh air, but if she hadn’t then what was she doing at the club? She didn’t come often, only about once every six weeks, but when she did her entry caused a slight hiatus in conversations going on. She got stared at, and seemed to enjoy these stares, smiling and nodding like the old Queen Mother used to do. Slowly, she would circulate the room, teacup in hand, and then invariably sit by one of the windows, or, if no seat was available there, simply stand near the fireplace, leaning on the shelf above it. It was an ancient fireplace, never used, with elaborate Victorian tiles round the grate, and a set of splendid tongs and pokers resting in front of it. Mrs Curwen looked striking, leaning there, as though she might be the hostess of the gathering before her.

Nancy had never spoken to her, or been spoken to by her, but today Mrs Curwen came and sat in the spare chair next to her. ‘May I?’ she asked, but sat
down before Nancy could say a word. It was a daft question anyway – ‘May I?’ What did the woman mean? She didn’t need to ask permission to sit on an empty chair which had nobody’s handbag on it and no teacup on the little table in front of it. Nancy sniffed. Mrs Curwen raised her eyebrows and said:

‘You were keeping this chair for a friend, perhaps?’

Nancy shook her head.

‘Good. I just wanted to be sure. I’m so glad to be able to sit down. My legs are exhausted, it’s been such a tiring day. Do you know what I mean? One of those tiring, tiring days.’

Nancy stared, and sniffed again. Clearly, Mrs Curwen wanted to be asked why her day had been so tiring. She didn’t look as if she knew what a tiring day was. Some of these women in the club could have told her. When they were young, with several children, working shifts in the factory before coming home to clean and do the washing and cook – those were tiring days. Nancy knew that although she’d worked hard herself she’d had it easy compared to the common lot in her youth (‘youth’ went up to forty-five in Nancy’s opinion). She looked at Mrs Curwen’s hands. Smooth, unused to rough work. Mrs Curwen saw her looking, but said nothing. They both drank their tea, and then just as Nancy thought she would leave Mrs Curwen said:

‘You’re Mrs Armstrong, aren’t you?’

‘I am,’ Nancy said. She wanted to add, ‘So?’ but rudeness was rudeness.

‘You were Mrs Taylor’s neighbour, weren’t you?’

‘Friend,’ Nancy said sternly. ‘I wasn’t just a neighbour.’

‘Oh, quite,’ said Mrs Curwen. ‘Neighbour and friend. I’m thinking of buying her house for a granddaughter of mine. It’s for sale, you know.’

‘Yes,’ Nancy said, ‘I do know.’

‘There’s apparently been a rather odd person renting it, or so Mrs Taylor’s nephew, the owner, tells me. Something hush-hush about her, about her past, though I’ve no idea what.’

Nancy was momentarily speechless. Did Mrs Curwen know about Sarah being in prison? Automatically, she wanted to protest at the spreading of such gossip but she didn’t want to give Mrs Curwen the satisfaction. So, instead, she simply got up and walked away, taking her cup and saucer to the hatch. But now all the good that sitting quietly by the window had done her had disappeared.

She was as agitated when she left as she had been when she arrived. But she had come to a decision.

There wasn’t much to pack. The sum total of what she’d accumulated during her months in Workington didn’t even fill the boot of her car. And she hardly needed to clean anything, so sparing had she been in the use of the oven, the kitchen surfaces and so on. She hoovered all the rooms and the stairs, though there was little need to, and she hung the curtains back up in the bedroom though she didn’t take down the blind. It all looked pretty much as it had done when she arrived: colourless, tidy, worn, depressing. Exactly what she had thought she needed.

There was a knock at the front door just as Tara was zipping up the last of the bags with her clothes in. Nancy stood on the threshold when the door was opened.

‘Can I come in?’ she said, immediately stepping inside and almost brushing against Tara in her hurry to lead the way into the living room. ‘I’ve something to say,’ she said, ‘something I should’ve said long ago.’ She was huffing and puffing with embarrassment.

‘Sit down, please,’ said Tara, and sat down herself.

‘You wanted to tell me things and I wouldn’t listen,’ Nancy said. ‘I wanted to, but … but, well, I’m not used to it.’

Tara, not at all sure what it was that Nancy was not used to, kept quiet, merely smiling and nodding in encouragement.

‘Prison,’ Nancy gasped. ‘You said you’d been in prison, and I didn’t let you tell me why. I wanted to know but … I’m not used to it, it doesn’t come easy, asking questions, so I clam up.’

Tara thought she should offer tea, a calming gesture which Nancy would recognise as such and accept, but she was sick of tea. Somehow, it would belittle Nancy’s outburst, make it seem merely something to brush aside. Instead she stayed still, and said:

‘Thank you, Nancy, you’re a good friend, whatever you think.’

Nancy registered the present tense: no mention of ‘you were’ or ‘you have been’ a good friend. It was stated as a fact, this friendship, and it pleased her.

‘Well, then,’ she said, and that was all, but Tara hadn’t finished.

‘I did want to talk to you about prison, and why I was there, and why I came here, but it doesn’t matter now. Least said, soonest mended, eh?’

Nancy sighed, the tension she’d felt all day seeping away.

‘If you’re sure,’ she said.

‘You’ll come and see me in my new place, won’t you?’ Tara said. ‘Come on the bus and I’ll bring you back. Or I could pick you up too, if you like.’

‘Oh, I’ll come on the bus,’ Nancy said eagerly. She liked bus rides of that length, Workington to Cockermouth, only half an hour or so.

It was arranged before Tara departed. Nancy watched while Tara wrote down the day and time. It made the proposed visit seem official. She went home, put a red circle round the date on her kitchen calendar and wrote within it ‘Visit to Sarah’, then crossed out ‘Sarah’ and put ‘Tara’. It looked good, next to the black ticks marking club days and doctor’s appointments, and other mundane things.