How to Measure a Cow

by Margaret Forster

  ‘How will you manage in the meantime?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, I’ll manage,’ Sarah said, ‘don’t you worry.’

  She put her head on one side, looking at Nancy as though sizing her up.

  ‘I used to be …’ she said, very slowly, pausing. And then, ‘What do you think I used to be, Nancy? Guess.’

  Nancy did not approve of guessing, or rather in confessing to guessing.

  ‘I’m sure you could have been anything,’ she said. ‘You’ve got the brains.’

  ‘Have I?’ said Tara. ‘How do you know?’

  Nancy was silent. How did she know Sarah had brains? She had no satisfactory answer. She didn’t even know why she’d said Sarah had brains.

  ‘I’d better be going,’ she said. ‘The window cleaner is coming.’

  ‘Oh, now, Nancy,’ Tara said, ‘I’ve offended you. I’m sorry. I just really wanted to know why you would think I was clever when you can’t have seen any signs of it. You’ve only seen me being stupid, a little dullard trotting off to a monotonous job, hiding in her dreary little house when not at work, speaking to no one unless she had to – what was clever about all that, Nancy?’

  Nancy was lost. Something was going on, and it alarmed her. She was being played with, she was sure she was. But why? All kinds of explanations were running through her mind, some of them frightening. Best to get out.

  ‘Well, I’m glad you like the cake,’ she said. ‘I’ll be seeing you,’ and she got up and walked towards the door, but Sarah was on her feet too, and rushed ahead, barring the way.

  ‘Don’t go, Nancy,’ she said.

  ‘I have to,’ Nancy said. ‘The window cleaner is coming. It’s nearly twelve weeks since he came, the windows are a disgrace, I can’t manage them myself, see.’

  She lunged at the front door, grabbing the handle before Sarah got to it, and pulled it forward so that the door sprang open. Once in the fresh air, Nancy felt better, but she was aware of Sarah close behind her and stepped quickly out on to the pavement. Only then did she turn round.

  ‘Sorry,’ Tara said, ‘sorry, Nancy.’

  ‘Nothing to be sorry for,’ said Nancy, but she was pleased. Sarah’s behaviour, and her change in appearance, was odd. That’s all there was to it. But all the same, she was glad an apology was offered even if she had no idea exactly what it was for.

  The Woman was right. There were few jobs available in Workington that Tara could apply for with any hope of the work being interesting. She would have been happy to go back to being a lowly laboratory assistant, but there were no laboratories anywhere near. She thought Sellafield might be a possibility. She was a scientist, she had a degree in chemistry, surely that qualified her for some sort of job there, but the posts available all seemed to be administrative. And of course should she get an interview her CV had a big gap, and any checking up would instantly reveal her record.

  Money was not yet a problem. She didn’t worry about it too much. She wasn’t greedy, she wasn’t materialistic, and she knew how to budget. There were no shops in Workington which tempted her to buy new clothes, except for the dress she’d worn for the reunion, though she would have liked some. What she did was haunt the charity shops where she bought things she could put together or alter, mixing different styles and colours. She liked sewing, though it was frustrating that she had no sewing machine so everything had to be done by hand. She was finishing the armholes of a jacket from which she had just cut the sleeves, to make a waistcoat, when her landlord arrived without any warning. She stared at him, not knowing who he was, and he had to introduce himself. She saw Nancy’s curtain twitch as she invited him in and closed the door.

  ‘I thought I’d come in person,’ he said, ‘to explain.’

  The explanation was simple and could easily have been made in two minutes, but he droned on until Tara wanted to jab the scissors she’d been using into his hand. She could see herself doing it, see the cut appear, the blood leak. She could hear his ‘My God!’ and his rage. He’d yell at her, and she’d just sit still and smile.

  ‘Fine,’ she said, when at last he seemed to have got to the end of his explanation. ‘I understand.’

  He seemed relieved, and relaxed in his chair.

  ‘How have you been getting on?’ he asked. ‘No problems? No unpleasantness?’

  She stared at him. It would amuse her, she decided, to push him to define ‘problems’ and ‘unpleasantness’.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said, eyes conveying, she hoped, indignation.

  ‘Well, I just meant … Well, they keep themselves to themselves up here, but they find things out somehow.’

  Her eyes really wouldn’t go any wider or her eyebrows higher.

  ‘Things?’ she repeated. But he was on his feet, not willing to play the game which he knew he would lose.

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘so you’ve got six weeks left. Good luck with finding somewhere.’

  She gave him a big smile as he left. What a ridiculous man. He was welcome to his horrid little house, and his insinuations.

  VII

  NANCY SAW THE nephew arriving, and leaving. She timed him: eleven minutes inside. Come to inspect the house again, see how Sarah Scott was keeping it? Unlikely. He’d already been, already knew. Could he be going to sell it? Quite likely. So, if he did, where would Sarah go?

  ‘None of your business,’ Nancy said, aloud. She was quite shocked at herself. Sarah was now a friend, or well on the way to becoming one. Shouldn’t a friend be offered temporary shelter? ‘Certainly not. Don’t get ideas,’ Nancy heard herself say, and was instantly ashamed at her own vehemence. Friends should offer help when it was needed. They stood by you, through thick and thin. Nancy nodded her head in tribute to this saying. There crept into her mind the memory of an occasion when she had been grateful for the support of friends. It was all a misunderstanding but it hadn’t seemed so to the shop’s manageress. Nancy had had to appear in court, utterly mortified. She’d looked up at Martin, sitting there, winking at her, and when the case was dismissed he stuck his thumb up. It had taken her weeks and weeks to get over the whole shocking business. People were funny with her. Nobody said anything, but they’d undoubtedly read the small paragraph in the local paper. She felt their suspicion, the ‘no smoke without fire’ reaction, in spite of the magistrate’s decision. But two friends had spoken up for her. The awful thing was that she now couldn’t remember their names. She had married Martin soon afterwards and they moved to Workington, and she never saw these friends again. Now whose fault was that?

  Nancy banged the kitchen door closed. Stop rambling, she scolded herself, stop all this muttering. Do something, if you’re so bothered. Don’t be so damned hesitant, don’t let yourself off by claiming you don’t want to be nosy. You do want to be nosy. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to know what is happening to a friend. She could just cross the street and knock on Sarah’s door and say how are you? Simple. Friendly. No need for excuses like offering half a cake. But it would be such a huge break with a lifetime of reticence that Nancy couldn’t quite manage it, and so, when, agitated by all these indecisions, she stood at her front window and saw Sarah Scott crossing the road to her she felt quite faint with relief.

  She had the front door open before Sarah could knock.

  ‘I saw him,’ Nancy said. ‘The nephew. Bringing trouble, was he? Come in, you look worried.’

  But Sarah wouldn’t come in. She stood on the doorstep, saying that no, she wasn’t worried, she was excited.

  ‘Excited?’ Nancy queried.

  She didn’t like the sound of this. Excitement was not good. Then Sarah told her why she was excited.

  ‘He’s selling my house,’ she said, ‘and I’ll have to move, so I’ve been ringing estate agents and I’ve got a whole list of houses to look at, but I don’t know any of the places they’re in, so will you help me? There’s a good-sounding one in Cleator Moor, but where’s Cleator Moor?’

  ‘A place yo
u don’t want to bother with,’ Nancy said firmly. ‘Are you off there now?’

  Yes, Sarah was proposing to set off house hunting immediately, if Nancy would accompany her and act as her guide. It was one of the afternoons she went to the club, but Nancy didn’t hesitate.

  ‘I’ll get my coat,’ she said.

  They met at Molly’s house. Nothing from Tara. They’d all sent text messages over the last month but there’d been no response.

  ‘She just wants to disappear again,’ Claire said to Liz and Molly.

  ‘It’s obvious. You would have thought old friends reunited would count for something, but no, apparently not.’

  ‘Reunited?’ said Liz. ‘Don’t be silly, Claire. We met for one lunch. That’s not reunited.’

  She didn’t mention her own later meeting with Tara. Claire would be jealous, Molly disappointed, that neither of them had had a tête-à-tête with Tara.

  ‘Anyway,’ Liz said, ‘I don’t know why it upsets you so much. If Tara wants privacy, that’s her affair.’

  ‘But I care about her,’ Claire said. ‘I can’t get her face out of my mind again.’

  ‘Oh, Claire, for God’s sake!’ said Liz. ‘You’ve managed very well without any contact with Tara for the past ten years, so don’t talk rubbish. The “reunion” as you call it was a failure. It was a well-meaning gesture and it failed. Enough said.’

  ‘I don’t want to fail,’ said Claire, her voice loud. ‘I don’t like failure.’

  ‘We already failed Tara, Claire,’ said Molly. ‘That’s the explanation for why that reunion didn’t work. It was never going to. Tara will have new friends. She doesn’t need old ones, the ones who were not there when she did need them.’

  ‘But old friends, friends you’ve known since you were at school, they have to mean something.’

  ‘Why?’ said Liz.

  ‘Because they are like foundations,’ said Claire.

  Liz immediately laughed.

  ‘Foundation garments, do you mean, or foundations for a building?’ and she laughed again.

  ‘You may mock and sneer,’ Claire said. ‘You always did. But you know perfectly well what I mean.’

  ‘Really?’ said Liz. ‘And what’s that?’

  But Claire glared at her and would not reply.

  Molly was tired of them both. Claire ever self-righteous, Liz sharp and caustic. She knew how they’d all come together at such a young age, but the puzzle was how this friendship had survived. It hadn’t exactly flourished in the last decade but it was significant surely that it was still there in some shape or form, when they’d had so little in common for so long. All they talked about when they met, or on the phone, was their own history full of do-you-remembers and then often quarrelling over what was remembered. Tara obviously didn’t want that. She’d said her bit, had her moment, and as far as she was concerned, that was it. Why Claire would not accept this, Molly couldn’t understand. She herself found that she didn’t care if she never saw Tara again. What was so awful about that? But if she said it aloud, Claire would be shocked. Friends old and new were important to Claire in a way Molly knew they were not so important to her. Nice to have good friends, yes, and she had plenty, but more important, she had her children and she had Simon. But Claire rated people according to how many friends of long standing they had. To say of some woman ‘I don’t think she has many friends’ was the ultimate indictment.

  ‘Anyway,’ Claire said, ‘I don’t think Tara has many friends, from what she was saying.’

  ‘You haven’t the faintest idea if that’s true,’ said Liz, ‘and even if it is, it’s her own choice and there’s nothing wrong with that.’

  ‘Yes, there is!’ said Claire, emphatic as usual, but the other two sighed and refused to go on with the subject.

  This meeting had not been a great success. Still, there was always a sort of comfort in being together, however far apart they’d become, though they quite often bored each other with detailed accounts of their own children’s progress. It was odd, Liz had often thought, that on their rare meetings all together they never discussed current affairs. The state of the country, the state of the world, was shut out. They seemed only concerned with their own world, with their personal lives. Self-centred, Liz decided. We’re all self-centred.

  ‘I thought maybe Pica,’ Tara said. ‘There are three houses for rent there, and they’re so cheap.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Nancy. ‘Pica! Back of beyond, no shops, no transport. No wonder the rents are cheap. You’d be stuck, if you went to Pica.’

  ‘I have a car,’ protested Tara. ‘I wouldn’t be stuck.’

  ‘What about work, though?’ Nancy asked. ‘There’s no work in Pica. You’d always be travelling. No, get Pica out of your head. Dear me. What about Egremont? Now that’s a nice place, bound to be something there to suit you.’

  So Tara drove along the coast road to Egremont. Beside her Nancy was humming, thoroughly enjoying the drive. Tara thought she could risk some direct questions without offending her.

  ‘Nancy,’ she said, ‘you wear a wedding ring but you never mention your husband. Has he been dead a long time?’

  Nancy stopped humming, and fidgeted slightly in her seat.

  ‘Nearly forty-five years,’ she said.

  ‘What did he die of?’

  ‘A stroke,’ Nancy said. And then, after a pause which Tara did not like to interrupt, ‘He was a good man.’

  ‘Mine wasn’t,’ Tara said. ‘I thought he was when I married him, but he wasn’t.’

  Nancy stared ahead and tried to think this information through. What did you say when a woman told you her husband wasn’t a good man? She tried to separate what she wanted to know from what it might be cheeky to ask but got tangled up in her own confusion. She coughed, took a mint from her bag and popped it into her mouth.

  ‘Would you like one?’ she asked. Tara shook her head.

  Nancy sucked the mint for a bit, and coughed again, and then said, ‘I didn’t know you’d been married.’

  ‘No,’ said Tara, ‘I took my ring off as soon as I was free.’

  ‘Divorced?’ queried Nancy.

  ‘No.’

  ‘He passed away?’ Nancy asked.

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ Tara said, and laughed.

  Laughed! And ‘in a manner of speaking’. What did that mean? But at that point they arrived in Egremont and Sarah was expressing agreeable surprise. The main street was broad with small, attractive-looking shops lining it. Everything looked newly painted and fresh. A woman walked past the car as they parked, and smiled and nodded as she went behind to cross the street. She was carrying a basket with a gingham cover over it.

  Sarah said, ‘A basket! I thought wickerwork baskets were long gone, it’s all carrier bags now.’

  ‘Nothing like a decent basket for wear and tear,’ said Nancy, ‘but they’re heavy, mind.’

  ‘Let’s have some lunch,’ Sarah said, ‘my treat.’

  It was easy to find a café, settle themselves in comfortable, well-padded chairs at a small table covered in a startlingly clean pink cloth.

  ‘This is nice,’ Nancy said.

  She was, Tara noticed, quite flushed with pleasure. They ordered the home-made soup and rolls, and Tara thought of Liz and that other café.

  Nancy knew nothing about her. That was the beauty of being with her. And she had risked spoiling this by volunteering the news that she had been married and that her husband had not been a very nice man. Nancy, it was easy to tell, was shocked at being told Sarah’s husband had not been a good man, but she hadn’t gone on to ask why, or in what way, he hadn’t been good, or exactly how he died. It was against Nancy’s own personal code. That, Tara suddenly realised, was the attraction of Nancy for her. She wouldn’t prod and poke and drag out any history. She would listen and, on the whole, simply accept what she was told. It was such a relief realising this. Tara’s heart began to beat a little faster as a strange kind of excitement t
ook over. How far was she prepared to go? What was she going to dare to tell Nancy? Why the urge to tell her any more than she had already done? Oh, do be careful, she said to herself, don’t spoil things …

  The soup came and was delicious. Nancy was surprised. Soup in cafés was, in her limited experience, never any good. Home-made usually meant out of a tin with something added. But this was a thick broth, the vegetables clearly identifiable, carrots and potato and onion and a whole lot of others. She remarked on how good it was, but Sarah said nothing. She had a funny expression on her face, a sort of half-smile which was not a proper smile, and her lips were compressed in an uncomfortable-looking way, as though inside her mouth she was biting her tongue. She hadn’t touched her soup.

  ‘You haven’t touched your soup,’ Nancy said. ‘Go on, taste it, it’s really good. Taste it, it’ll get cold, go on. It’ll do you good.’

  Slowly, Tara dipped her spoon into the broth, but as it neared her mouth she suddenly put it down again, slightly spilling what had been on it.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ Nancy said. ‘Here, dab it with this tissue,’ and she pointed to the tiny stain on the pink tablecloth. ‘It’ll come out in the wash,’ she said. ‘Don’t fret.’

  It was as though she was speaking to a child. Nobody, Tara thought, aware that tears were coming into her eyes and only rapid blinking was stopping them from falling, has ever told me not to fret when I’ve done something wrong. Dropping a tiny bit of soup on to a tablecloth wasn’t ‘wrong’ but her foster mother would have reprimanded her sharply. She would never have said, ‘Don’t fret.’ No excuses, no comfort, only blame: that had been her foster mother, and then, eventually, Tom.

  ‘My mother,’ she began, and then stopped.

  Nancy looked uncomfortable. Tara could see that what Nancy dreaded was A Scene in a Public Place, and she, to Nancy, must be looking as though she was on the edge of causing one.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, and lowered her head, eating more of the soup and not spilling any.

  ‘There now,’ Nancy said, pleased, ‘you’ll feel better for that.’