How to Measure a Cow

by Margaret Forster

  Liz didn’t bother replying; she simply made a face and got into her car.

  Tara waved as Liz drove off. She didn’t get into her own car. Instead, she began walking along the road. She remembered a park somewhere nearby which in spring was full of white blossom, pear and plum trees lining the main pathway. It was summer now, but the trees would still be there, their leaves almost touching from tree to tree giving shade on this hot day. She, Claire, Molly and Liz had had picnics there, simple picnics, no more than sandwiches and cans of fizzy stuff. She could see herself quite clearly in a yellow dress, short skirted, sleeveless, and Liz in a none-too-clean white T-shirt and black shorts which were knee length, showing off her legs. Sweet. The image was sweet. But even then … She pulled herself up sharply, turned round, walked rapidly back to her car, got in, and drove back to her hotel. She hadn’t come here to do a memory-lane tour.

  She was Sarah Scott and she was going back to where she now belonged.

  This couldn’t be called ‘going home’. All the way up the M6, Tara was reminding Sarah that, like it or not, Workington was home. That squashed terraced house in that dreary street was home. It was unlike any other she had ever known, devoid of memories or ties of any kind: an anonymous home for an anonymous person, very fitting.

  She drove through the Lake District, the scenic route, putting off the arrival. There was at least some pleasure, once she was past the tourist traps, of thinking that Cumbria was also her home now. She was a resident of Cumbria. That felt good. She didn’t have to stay in Workington. She could move to some beauty spot, near a lake, and find other work. She felt a faint sense of excitement at this thought, but then wondered if it would be wise. It might drain her energy, make her feel faint and weak again, unable to manage life. It was too soon. She, Sarah, must stay put longer, keep the dull life she led wrapped round her. She’d been to the reunion, and that was a victory she’d never thought she would achieve. Best be content with that.

  But contentment was the last thing she felt as she pulled up outside her house. Instead, a great dread filled her. She was afraid of the emptiness inside this house, the lack of any feeling, of any connection to herself. It was hard getting out of the car when what she wanted to do was drive straight on, quite aimlessly. She clutched the key to the front door so hard it dug into the skin of her hand and the more it hurt the harder she pressed until the metal made a small tear in the skin on her palm. That helped. It forced her out of the car, helped her take the two or three steps to the door and insert the key. Once inside, back against the door, she breathed deeply, eyes closed. There was an odd smell, not unpleasant, but she couldn’t identify it. Maybe just the smell of a house shut up for a week. Steadier, she moved into the kitchen, just as there was a knock on the front door. She wanted to ignore it, to hide, to pretend she was still away, but a voice was shouting through the letter box, ‘Hello, hello,’ and she knew who it was.

  ‘I knew you’d have nothing in,’ Nancy said, ‘coming back from holiday, so I brought you some bread and milk, semi-skimmed, that’s what they say is good for us these days.’

  ‘How kind,’ murmured Tara. ‘Thank you.’

  They were still standing in the narrow hallway, Nancy proffering a plastic bag. She took it and let it hang from her wrist.

  ‘You look done in,’ said Nancy. ‘Shall I put the kettle on? Have you had a long drive? I’ll put the kettle on and make you some tea, shall I, eh?’

  The words ‘shall I’ sounded in Tara’s ears like a hiss. She didn’t reply, but Nancy needed none. She was already in the tiny kitchen filling the kettle and switching it on.

  ‘Won’t be a minute,’ she said. ‘Give me that milk, you sit down, I can manage.’

  Tara sat. The tea was produced, and Nancy was gratified.

  ‘Nothing like a cup of tea, eh?’

  Tara thought she might scream, but all that came out of her mouth was an ‘oh’ which seemed to go on for ever.

  ‘Did you have a good time?’ Nancy was asking, peering closely at her. ‘You haven’t got a tan, any road,’ she said. ‘You’re as pale as ever, looks as if you’ve never been out in all this sun we’ve been having. Mind you, these days they say it gives you cancer, so maybe it’s just as well you kept out of the sun, being so fair-skinned.’

  On and on it went, Nancy needing no response to the drone of all her banalities, quite happy merely to have Tara captive, saying nothing. She is being kind, Tara told herself, kind, but this kindness felt like a weight being lowered on to her. It had to stop.

  ‘Bed,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I have to go and lie down on my bed.’

  ‘You go then,’ Nancy said, ‘and I’ll just finish my tea and wash the cups, and I’ll pull the door behind me, you don’t need to worry. I said you looked done in, didn’t I? Off you go.’

  Tara went. Nancy hummed as she scrupulously washed the cups and set them on the draining board. She’d wondered whether she should come over when she saw Sarah pull up in her car, but she knew now that it had been the right thing. This holiday had done the poor girl no good at all. She looked worse, not better. And different. But what was different? Nancy, gently closing Sarah’s front door behind her, couldn’t decide. Was it the girl’s hair? Yes, that was it. Her hair was now loose and curly. It had always been scraped back from her face and tied tightly on the nape of her neck. But today it was loose and bounced around her face changing it entirely. Her face, Nancy realised, might still be very thin and drawn but this loose hair, this thick, good hair, made her almost pretty. How, all these months, had Sarah managed to squash her hair into that knot she compressed it into?

  Back in her own house, Nancy pondered this question. Some sort of oil, or similar, must have been used, or conditioner. Sarah must have doused her curls in it, but why? It came to Nancy that there could only be one answer: to make her look different. But no one knew her here, so why would she want to look different? Nancy became exasperated with herself, getting so obsessed with such an unimportant detail. It was what she did, get worked up over nothing. Nobody else she’d ever known did this. Her mother, her old childhood friends, even Martin had all looked at her as though she were mad when she picked on some trivial point and went on and on about it even when, quite obviously, there was no answer or no explanation to what she was seeing as a problem. Why Sarah Scott had had her hair flattened down and tied back, and then had let it free, was of no significance at all. She’d been on holiday. On holiday, she liked it to hang free. She’d worn it tied back because it was tidier for work. Simple.

  But to Nancy, it was not simple. There was some meaning there which she was failing to grasp. It bothered her so much that she was going to have to ask Sarah a direct question about her hair, to bring herself peace of mind.

  Grey again: grey trousers, grey sweater. The grey lady. There was no need for it, but Tara went back to grey the next day, when she returned to work. She slipped into her place without speaking to the women either side. They didn’t speak to her, or even appear to notice her. When her break came and she went into the canteen to have a cup of coffee from the machine there, nobody spoke to her, though a few looked up from their coffees as she came in. She took her drink over to the window and stood looking down on the huge car park. Behind her, someone gave a melodramatic sigh, and said, ‘Jesus!’ and someone else laughed. Fifteen minutes, that was what she had. Fifteen minutes to look at the car park and count the cars as she drank her coffee.

  She would give in her notice.

  It was the Woman again, thank God.

  ‘I gather, Sarah,’ she said, her voice low, ‘that you’ve given in your notice?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tara, knowing that she sounded defiant. ‘I have. It was too … the job was too … it just suddenly seemed ridiculous.’

  ‘Ridiculous?’

  ‘To be doing what I was doing when I can do other things.’

  ‘But it was what you wanted,’ the Woman said, voice still low and gentle, though there was such a hubbu
b in the café that there was no danger of anyone hearing her except for Tara.

  ‘I know it was what I wanted, what I needed, but I don’t need this, this blankness any longer. I want out of it. I want to go back into my old job.’

  The Woman sighed.

  ‘That’s going to be difficult,’ she said, ‘maybe impossible. You know why.’

  ‘But I would never do it again,’ Tara said.

  ‘That’s not the point,’ the Woman said. ‘You did do it, and you knew how to do it, and employers only have to look at the cunning you showed for them not even to think about trusting you in a laboratory. Come on, Sarah, you know that.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Tara, ‘some other work, something that means I have to use my brain.’

  The Woman studied her for a while, and then she said, ‘It was your trip down south that brought this on, wasn’t it?’

  Tara nodded.

  ‘Do you want to go back to London, then, is that it?’

  ‘No,’ said Tara, ‘not yet. It’s the job. I can’t do it any more. I’m not … I’m not blank now, I wanted to be, but I’m not. I’m coming back to my real self, I feel more normal.’

  She thought the Woman might congratulate her, say that was good, this feeling normal, but she didn’t. For a minute, Tara wondered if, instead, she might dare to say, ‘But, Sarah, Tara, you were never normal, you know that’, but she didn’t.

  ‘There are not many jobs of the sort you want up here,’ the Woman said. ‘In fact, there are not many jobs of any sort. And any possible employer would have to be fully briefed about you. You’re not going to be anyone’s first choice.’

  ‘I know that,’ Tara said, spitting the words out.

  ‘Well, then,’ said the Woman, ‘have a go yourself, and report back to me.’

  Tara stared at her.

  ‘Is that all?’ she asked. ‘Is that all you’re going to say? Is that all the help I get?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Woman, her voice rising now. ‘You’ve had a great deal of help. There have been cuts, you must know that, and our services are stretched. You’re lucky still to have our time.’

  Nancy didn’t really like going to the works pensioners’ club, but it was a habit hard to break, one she really didn’t want to break even though she didn’t enjoy keeping it any more. At least she liked the bus ride there and the feeling of going somewhere. It took her half an hour. She liked to arrive fairly early, before the seats near the windows were all taken. There was a good view from these seats, right over the whole town beyond. If she was really bored with whoever came and sat beside her, as she often was, Nancy could just look out of the window until they took the hint. Mostly, she knew all the women who came week after week, as she did, but occasionally a newly retired one would appear. A fuss was made of these newcomers, this new blood. Everyone else rushed to introduce herself and plied the new arrival with tea and biscuits. Nancy never did. She watched the new member closely, sizing her up, and waited. You could tell a lot from such scrutiny. Sometimes she knew straight away that a fresh face was not to her taste. There would be something about it she was suspicious of, and as far as Nancy was concerned, that was that.

  Two weeks after Sarah Scott returned from her mysterious holiday, a woman Nancy had never noticed arriving came and sat beside her. She didn’t speak at first, which gave her full marks in Nancy’s opinion, just drank her tea. There was a flower-arranging demonstration going on at the time, two women doing what Nancy thought were daft things with various flowers, piling them up, supported by thin wire, into animal shapes. Ridiculous. All you needed to do with flowers was stick them in a jug. Without realising it, Nancy was clicking her tongue in annoyance.

  ‘Those poor flowers,’ the woman murmured next to her.

  Nancy didn’t respond. The newcomer wasn’t directly addressing her, after all, but she then said, ‘Do they do this sort of thing often here?’ and that was a direct question.

  ‘No,’ said Nancy, ‘it’s a new thing. Won’t last.’

  ‘I don’t really know why I’ve come,’ the woman said. ‘I just thought it would be company. I’m going to miss the company at work. Not the work, mind, the company.’

  ‘You get used to it,’ Nancy said, and then, as an afterthought, ‘the tea is good.’

  ‘Yes,’ the woman said, finishing her cup, ‘it is.’

  And so a connection was formed, or so Nancy felt. Would it develop into a friendship? Only time would tell. She was enjoying this thought when another woman she knew well, and detested, came over.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to mention something to you, Nancy Armstrong,’ she said, ‘about that lass living opposite you, know who I mean?’

  Nancy frowned.

  ‘Lass?’ she repeated, as though she had no idea what a lass was.

  ‘Sarah Scott,’ this woman, Ivy Robinson, said.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Nancy said, trying to cut Ivy off from continuing, just by the tone of her voice, which she was careful to make sure betrayed no curiosity whatsoever.

  ‘Yes,’ Ivy said, ‘our Gillian has worked beside her these last few months. She says she’s a strange one.’

  Nancy did not reply, but looked pointedly out of the window.

  ‘Speaks to nobody,’ Ivy said. ‘She’s not popular, carries keeping to herself too far.’

  Again, Nancy remained silent while inwardly raging at this criticism of Sarah.

  ‘Any road,’ Ivy said, ‘she’s given notice. No loss, Gillian says.’

  ‘Given notice.’ All the way home, Nancy repeated the words to herself until they ran into each other and became a strange word she didn’t know. Why would Sarah give notice? Where was she going? Did it mean she was leaving the town? Had that nephew of Amy’s given her notice, to leave the house? She tried to answer her own questions but her answers were not satisfactory. There might be a simple explanation: Sarah was just bored with the job and wanted to have another. Simple. But Nancy was not in the habit of accepting simplicity. Her mind thrived on complications, real or imaginary. Until she’d spoken to Sarah nothing could be known for sure. Ivy Robinson could have got everything wrong.

  Nancy watched the front door of Sarah’s house the next day. She’d been watching it since fifteen minutes before Sarah usually left for work. The front door stayed shut. By 9 a.m., when it was still shut, Nancy went into action. She’d made a fruit cake the day before. Half of it was now wrapped in tinfoil, ready to give to Sarah, who had expressed a liking for it when she came for tea. Over the road Nancy went, the half-cake in one hand, her shopping bag in the other, though she’d no intention of going shopping. The bag was just part of her armour, her everyday protection from looking as though she was just wandering about. She knocked on Sarah’s door, imitating the kind of knock she’d heard the postman give, a rat-a-tat with the knocker. Silence. Well, Sarah might be in the bath. Give her time. Nancy gave her time, and then knocked again, and heard movement inside. She expected that Sarah would be in a dressing gown, since she wasn’t going to work and would surely be taking it easy. She was quite interested to see what kind of dressing gown it would be, certainly not the sort she herself had, a heavy woollen tartan affair she’d had for decades and knew was old-fashioned. But Sarah was fully dressed, and not in her usual clothes. The colours startled Nancy. A bright red sweater, long and loose, over white trousers which were not really trousers, more like tights but not tights either. Slightly unnerved, Nancy held out the half-cake.

  ‘Thought you might like some fruit cake,’ she muttered. ‘It’ll keep.’

  Was she going to be asked in? Was she going to be thanked? Was she going to be treated as a friend or merely as a nosy neighbour? Waiting to see, Nancy felt quite sick.

  Sarah smiled: a lovely, full, genuine smile which relieved Nancy enormously.

  ‘How lovely,’ she said. ‘Fruit cake! Come in.’

  There was, Nancy noticed, a positive spring in Sarah’s step as she led the way into the living room, which was looking differe
nt. Nancy saw that the few bits of furniture had been rearranged to give more feeling of space. And there was some sort of patterned cloth thrown over each of the armchairs.

  ‘Well,’ Tara said, seeing Nancy look at these throws, ‘I’m trying to brighten the place up.’

  ‘So you’re staying?’ Nancy said. ‘Only I heard some talk.’

  ‘Talk!’ repeated Tara, and laughed. ‘About me giving my notice in? Sounds very grand, that, doesn’t it? Actually, you don’t need to “give notice” to leave a job like that, do you? You just say you’re quitting.’

  Nancy cleared her throat.

  ‘Well, then,’ she said, wishing she could think of something else to say.

  But Sarah didn’t seem to mind that Nancy was so inarticulate all of a sudden. She’d made tea and brought the two mugs in and told Nancy to have a seat. Then she went back to the kitchen and reappeared with a plate and a knife and proceeded to cut the cake. She took a huge mouthful and as she ate gave little moans of pleasure. Nancy was a bit shocked. Fancy eating fruit cake at nine in the morning. Sarah was laughing again.

  ‘You look shocked, Mrs Armstrong, I mean Nancy. Don’t you ever have cake for breakfast?’

  ‘No,’ said Nancy.

  ‘Well, you should try it.’ They were sitting opposite each other, Nancy still with her coat on, regarding Sarah with fascination. It wasn’t just the clothes, it wasn’t just the smiling and laughing, it wasn’t even the eating of fruit cake for breakfast. It was that something was in the air in Amy’s house that hadn’t been there before. Nancy couldn’t define what it was and didn’t know how, or what, to ask Sarah. So she waited, sipping her tea, and feeling a little tense. She wondered if it would be all right to ask the one question she could think of, and decided it was. It was normal, if someone left a job, to ask if they had another to go to, wasn’t it? Or was it pushing friendship too far? The sort of friendship they had, that is. But Sarah saved her the trouble.

  ‘I haven’t tried to get another job yet,’ she said. ‘It’s just that I got fed up, you know?’

  Nancy nodded. She knew. But she knew, too, that even if you were fed up rent had to be paid and bills.