How to Measure a Cow (7 page)

To which Mrs Armstrong replied, ‘There’s no telling.’

Her tea had only been sipped. Tara could see the cup was still almost full. Oh God, how could she carry on, trying for small talk, exhausted already with the strain. But Mrs Armstrong showed no sign of moving. She sat with her legs slightly apart, her coat buttoned up, her headscarf tightly tied under her chin, staring at Tara. It was, Tara decided, a challenging stare, daring her, but daring her to do what? Come up with another banal query? What? Then she realised that quite likely Mrs Armstrong was waiting for her to tell her something about herself. There should be some sort of exchange, surely. Something to match the revelation that Mrs Armstrong had lived in her house for forty-eight years. She wasn’t going to ask directly, but she would be wanting to know why she, Tara – no, Sarah – had come to live here, and how long she was going to stay.

Maybe there was something wrong with the tea.

‘Would you like more milk, more sugar?’ Tara asked, indicating the undrunk tea.

Mrs Armstrong shook her head. ‘You’ve put a blind up, in the bedroom,’ she said.

Did she say it accusingly? Tara wasn’t sure.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I prefer a blind. It lets in more light.’

‘They were good-quality curtains,’ Mrs Armstrong said. ‘Kept the cold out.’

‘Oh, I’m sure,’ Tara said.

This could not go on. At the rate the tea was being sipped there would be another half-hour of this torment. Then, suddenly, in a tremendous gulp, the tea vanished down Mrs Armstrong’s strong throat.

‘I’ll have to go, I can’t stop,’ she said.

Tara was on her feet instantly, full of more thank-yous, endlessly expressing her gratitude, and they were at the front door, and it was over.

She went straight to bed, curling up under the duvet, weak with the effort of trying to be friendly.

Nancy had made sure that she brought the key for Amy’s house back with her. She put it in the place she’d always kept it, inside an old box which still smelled of the talcum powder it had once held. Lovely, a lovely faint lavender smell. She put the powder puff on top of it, and then put the box in her dressing-table drawer. Safe, quite safe.

She was a queer one, that Sarah Scott. She looked peaky. Nancy had thought about telling her she looked peaky, and should think about going to a doctor’s and asking for a tonic, though probably these days tonics were out of fashion. She was a funny little thing, nothing to her, scared of her own shadow. People like that annoyed Nancy. She found their lack of spirit irritating. No confidence in themselves, always so apologetic. She liked people who looked you in the eye and had a bit of life about them. If you had two legs, two arms, two ears, two eyes, what did you have to look so miserable about? Unless you had some ailment that wasn’t obvious. She had to allow for that, she supposed.

She could have asked Sarah Scott where she worked. There would’ve been no harm in that, but
she hadn’t been able to think how to word it. She could’ve said, maybe, ‘I notice you leave the house early every weekday,’ and then waited. But she had held back from using the word ‘notice’. It suggested spying. Better to have said, ‘You’ve settled here, then,’ and waited. Something might’ve come from that. It was an opportunity missed. And the tea was awful. She would show her how to make a proper cup of tea when she came over. This would have to be arranged. Hospitality must be reciprocated, even if Sarah Scott’s hospitality had been in return for Nancy’s good deed.

She’d done a good deed. Nancy smiled to herself. Oh, she’d certainly been a Good Samaritan, saving Sarah Scott from breaking windows and all sorts of bother. It was a very nice feeling. The beginning of something promising. A proper friendship, maybe.

There was a new routine now, or rather another tiny element added to the existing one. Every morning, as Tara left her house, she saw Mrs Armstrong at her window waving her hand. She appeared to be opening her curtains wider, and this wave was nothing more than a gesture, almost royal the way it was done. Tara raised her own hand in acknowledgement. Now it had to be done every weekday morning. She suddenly remembered Liz waving in that way, the tentative way in which Mrs Armstrong had done. She’d give this little flap of her hand, which could just as well have been swatting away a fly as a wave of greeting. Tara could see her clearly in her head, Liz rushing through the crowds to meet her, giving this movement of her hand. They were both living in London then. They met sometimes at the Curzon cinema in Shaftesbury
Avenue where they had a snack before the film and brought each other up to date on what was happening in their lives. Tara never gave much away, but Liz unloaded the lot. She’d married Mike at nineteen but was having an affair with Alan, a passionate affair apparently. She left no detail out. It then emerged that she was using Tara as her cover.

‘But,’ said Tara, ‘suppose he checked your story out, and I hadn’t known you were using me as a cover.’

‘Oh,’ said Liz, ‘he’d never do that, and even if he did, I knew you’d be quick on the uptake and back me up.’

Tara had been quite startled. Would she have understood and backed Liz up?

‘Don’t tell Molly or Claire,’ Liz went on, ‘especially not Claire. God knows what she’d do – ring Mike and report me, I expect.’

Yes, Tara had agreed, it was just possible Claire might do that. Then they both laughed.

Oddly, the impulse to send a reply to Claire sprang from this memory of Liz’s confession. She found herself thinking about Claire and the letter all day, and as a consequence behaving more like Tara than Sarah Scott. She didn’t shuffle along the aisle on the bus but barged her way to the door and was first off when it stopped. On the return journey, in the afternoon, instead of listlessly trailing down the street she almost ran, so eager was she, after a whole day of thinking, in her desire to reply to Claire. She had a point to make. The point was, well, there was a point, to do with loyalty, to do with standing by people and trying to see things from their perspective. There was certainly a point to it. She settled down to write a letter. It was
exhilarating writing it until it began to turn into an accusation, full of long-suppressed resentment and bitterness. If the impulse to reply to Claire’s invitation was going to be indulged, then it could not take this form. A rant was damaging (to herself). A measured tone was needed. The things she really wanted to express could be implied but not so crudely slapped down. The art was to slip the blade of the dagger in without it being noticed till the pain registered.

Revenge, that was the ugly truth. But revenge for what exactly? There had been no dastardly deed, the sort of thing for which an act of revenge would be appropriate. All that had happened was that friendship, at a crucial time, had been found wanting. It hadn’t lived up to expectations. It hadn’t survived a true test. But Tara knew she’d got everything out of proportion. There had been a fading away of support, that was all, and she herself was perhaps to blame. She’d pleaded guilty. Did that not cancel the obligations of friendship? Who would want to go on being friends with a woman who pleaded guilty to
that
deed? And now that this friendship was on offer again, wasn’t it understandable? She’d served her time, the slate was clear. She could be a friend again. Wasn’t it, after all, impressive to be given another chance? Shouldn’t she be grateful, and accept it?

Tara struggled hard to believe this.

She passed the driving test without difficulty, and then began the search for a second-hand car she could afford. Getting the money freed and transferred to Sarah’s name and bank account was laborious, involving several meetings with the Woman and then,
less pleasantly, the Man again. But finally it was done, and she had £3,000 to spend.

She’d always thought that her money would be forfeited, part of the punishment, but no, it wasn’t. She hadn’t been convicted of fraud or any financial irregularities, and the money in the bank came from impeccable sources, so there was no problem about it. It had sat there, in a deposit account, all these years, hers to do what she liked with. Knowing this made her feel rich, but until now she’d felt she had no right to spend it. She’d bought an electric blanket, a duvet, a blind and a few other odds and ends, but that was all. What she now earned, the small wage, covered her bills and rent and food and fares, leaving very little over. But this money was there and now was the time to spend half of it. What she bought, from a garage near where she worked, was a little Fiat. Unfortunately it was green, which worried her a little. Green was relatively unusual. It made the car highly distinctive.

She knew Mrs Armstrong would see the car – how could she not? She parked right outside her house, thankful that there was no need, as yet, for a parking permit in the street. There was plenty of room. No one to the right or left of her house appeared to have a car, and on the opposite side neither did Mrs Armstrong or her immediate neighbours. The green car stood out. Coming home from work, she could see it from the end of the street where the bus dropped her off. The sight of it was like a welcome home. Her car. Hers. When for so long she’d had nothing. The significance threatened to overwhelm her. Her first car, hers, after she met Tom (his gift), had had the same effect, a sort of boost to her morale, a lifting of her spirits. The car
then had meant all the obvious things: independence, freedom, even the promise of adventure. She’d crashed it. Sarah would never do such a thing.

Sarah was much too cautious and careful. She would treat her car with respect. She wouldn’t, as Tara had done, regularly exceed the speed limit and take risks on roundabouts. She would never, never, get points on her licence. She had learned her lesson (several lessons, in fact) long ago.

‘So,’ the Woman said, at their next appointment, ‘how does it feel to have wheels?’

For a moment, Tara saw herself literally with wheels attached to the soles of her boots, a pleasing cartoon image which made her smile.

‘Good,’ she said.

‘And are you doing much driving? Getting out and about more? Seeing the countryside?’

Tara nodded, but it was a lie. She hadn’t yet driven further than the supermarket.

‘I’m going to go along the coast this weekend,’ she said.

‘And will you take a friend?’ the Woman asked, watching her keenly. ‘Have you a friend yet?’

‘Yes,’ said Tara, ‘I have. My neighbour, Mrs Armstrong.’

‘Mrs?’ queried the Woman.

‘She’s very formal,’ Tara said hurriedly. ‘She prefers to be called Mrs at the moment.’

‘Well,’ said the Woman, ‘that’s good. I hope this friendship develops. You need friends, Sarah. It isn’t good to go on being so isolated now. Friendship is important, it will do wonders for you.’

A lecture on friendship … It was too much. Tara said nothing more after that. Next, the Woman would be asking about her love life and telling her love was important and would do wonders for her. It was so insulting. Rage built up in her, a Tara-like rage, the sort that at one time threatened to rule her life. The trouble was, she’d rarely let it all out. Her habit had been to contain it so that it burned inside her stomach and filled her head with a booming noise. Little whimpers of this rage would escape her clenched lips, but that was all. Her face she knew, because people pointed it out, would flush a deep, dark red. They would ask her if she was all right, whether she suffered from high blood pressure, and she would struggle to smile and say that must be it and she must make an appointment with her GP.

She invited Mrs Armstrong to go with her for a car ride on Sunday.

Once, she and Claire and Liz and Molly had gone for car rides. They couldn’t be called anything else except ‘car rides’. There was no planned destination, no pretence that they knew where they were going. It was just the fun, the excitement of having the use of a parents’ car to drive around in. All of them eighteen and desperate to leave home. Movement was the thing – up, off, away, and who cares where.

It was rescuing that child which brought them together, then bound them, but Tara liked to think that if this incident hadn’t happened something else would have drawn them close. It seemed, once they’d become a quartet, that there was a natural affinity between them for all their various differences. What
was it? A restlessness? A sense of ambition? What was this friendship based on, what glued it together? Why did they seek each other out years later when they’d all gone their separate ways and it was difficult to meet? Why, when they had all made other friends, and had partners or husbands, why was this particular friendship so deep and special?

History. That must be it. They concluded that what gave their friendship such strength was knowing each other so thoroughly. It was the legacy of lolling around when they were young, talking and drinking the night away, that was what did it. All that
time
, all those hours and hours of droning on to each other, letting slip likes and dislikes, worries, fears, hopes. No friendship afterwards could come near this kind of intimacy. They each had a dossier of emotional confessions on each other, many of them made by mistake and regretted. These were never mentioned in subsequent years, but they were there, in the collective memory of the quartet. And so, when their meetings became much less frequent, they never worried about the time gap, there was never the feeling that they had to get to know each other again. They expected to slip effortlessly, within ten minutes, into the old familiarity.

But Tara remembered how, the last time they’d all met, something like eleven years ago, she’d felt a slight sense of distance from the other three. Maybe, she thought, it was just a matter of how she was ageing differently from them. They were all only in their early thirties but the other three looked older, already on the cusp of middle age in her opinion. Claire’s cheekbones had all but disappeared and
her hair, now in a stiff bob, made her face look even heavier. She’d taken to dressing in trouser suits which didn’t help. And Liz’s face was terribly lined for such a young woman, all doubtless due to her disastrous first marriage and the two miscarriages. Molly had put on weight in all the wrong places, but her face was still the same: chubby, cheerful, pink-cheeked. Only her clothes, apart from the new weight she carried, aged her. Fussy blouse, dreary grey skirt, and hideous brown lace-up shoes. She’d studied the three of them saying nothing, but aware that they, too, were aware of the outward difference between them. They might, she recalled thinking, even have envied her. She quite liked that feeling, that they were looking at her and listening to her and being impressed.