How to Measure a Cow (27 page)

Authors: Margaret Forster

Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Contemporary, #Literary, #Contemporary Fiction

‘I can’t see Tara as a shop assistant,’ Liz said.

‘We couldn’t see her working in a factory,’ Molly said. ‘Anyway, she’s got a job, she’s got somewhere to live. Let’s stop fretting about her. She’ll contact us again when she needs us.’

‘Exactly,’ said Liz.

She was here, in the same house they’d lived in years ago. It had changed internally, of course. Each floor was now split up into these studio flats, merely one-room apartments, with a tiny kitchen in an alcove and an even smaller shower room behind a plywood wall in a corner. The conversion had been cleverly done, though, giving the impression of space. There was no furniture, of course, which helped this impression along, and so did the new laminate floor, and all the white paint. No curtains or blinds or shutters on the windows. No need, when the top floor was so high up. The room was twenty-two paces, front to back, with a view of lots of greenery out of the rear window. She would furnish it sparsely, none of the clutter Tom had accumulated.

She knew who she’d been, here. It helped her, being here, to understand what had happened, how far she’d come since those days. Too far. But she couldn’t go back and do things differently so all she could do was go forward, take another route to the life she should have had. Standing there, in that empty room, she tried to empty herself of all the rage and hate she’d felt when Tom’s ‘business’ was exposed. She should have done this over the last decade – she’d been given enough opportunity – but she had resisted hollowing herself out. Time, now, to do it, to be Tara again (no more pretending to be Sarah Scott), to take the good parts of herself and use them to subdue the bad parts. If it could be done.

She went to the window and looked out. Tom used to do that a lot, but she never knew what he was looking at, or for, so intensely. In the early days she would come up behind him and put her arms round
his waist and lay her head on his back. He was solid and strong and she loved this. She’d given him an easy death. Nothing bloody or violent. She’d been friendly that night, suggested they eat together again. Some pills, the right pills, pills he was ignorant enough to believe were merely painkillers so kindly provided by her for his headache. Then alcohol, wine and spirits, over a good dinner. Then sleep. Then waiting several hours. Then making the phone call for the ambulance. Then the autopsy. Then herself confessing. But Tom was safely dead. Her humiliation, the humiliation of having been completely fooled by him – she, the smart, clever Tara – at an end. She’d felt no regret. Some fear, yes, but no regret. She still didn’t feel any, no remorse at all, except for wishing she’d seen through him sooner.

This, she knew, was what puzzled people most. It puzzled her, too. Again and again she trawled through those years of being with Tom, looking for signs she might have missed, trying to work out if she’d overlooked the significance of certain words, actions, even expressions on his face. But no, nothing. Her only sense of unease had been about the money rolling in. The newspapers were full of ‘people in the City’ being paid vast amounts, but even so. She commented on this, and he said, ‘Are you complaining? I work hard.’ She wondered if it was this ‘hard work’ that was making him more and more irritable. And he seemed suddenly nervous, the very opposite of how he’d always been, developing strange little tics around his mouth which he clearly wasn’t aware of. The silent treatment got worse, too – it was as though he couldn’t bear any noise.

She decided he must be ill. He’d lost weight, and looked increasingly drawn. But any suggestion that he should maybe consult a doctor was met with fury, and so was her advice to take a break. He laughed at this idea. It wasn’t a happy laugh. He wouldn’t talk to her about what was worrying him, claiming he was perfectly OK and she should stop fussing. For months, she put to the back of her mind the growing suspicion that some sort of drug use might be involved. It would explain his agitation and then the spells of seeming vague, unsure where he was. She knew that he used cannabis, and she’d long ago had to accept that it never seemed to do him any harm, and he wasn’t going to give it up. He’d tried to get her to smoke it with him but she’d refused, saying drugs were a total no-no for her, though she didn’t tell him why, didn’t confess why she was afraid of them. Maybe she should have done, but all her life it had felt too intimate a thing to tell anyone about her mother. When it came out during her trial it had caused her such intense pain that she could hardly bear it. Anyway, she’d never told Tom. Only now could she see how significant this was, what it should have told her about her relationship with him.

But if he was using something stronger than cannabis, she found no trace of it. She looked for clues, but there were no marks of syringes on his skin, no suspicious bruises. She had to dismiss drugs being the cause of his strange moods. She hoped they would pass before their marriage entirely disintegrated. Then one day, she found him crouched in a chair, weeping. It was such a relief to comfort him, to urge him to tell her, at last, what was wrong. ‘I’m in a mess,’ he
said. He told her he’d got involved with a group of men. They thought he’d cheated them, and maybe he had, just a little. He’d been too clever, got into ‘certain deals’ without realising the consequences. After he’d told her this, he wouldn’t say any more. Her questions went unanswered. She could sense the fear in him without knowing what caused it, but it seemed impossible to credit that all this terror was just about money and some negotiation that had gone wrong. It took courage to demand to be told the truth. She asked him, point blank, if these ‘certain deals’, which had apparently landed him in such trouble, were drug deals. He didn’t reply. So she knew.

She should have left him immediately. She should have sought help, and a place to stay, from Liz or Molly (not from Claire, definitely not from Claire). But she didn’t. She stayed, waiting for something to happen which would force her hand. Maybe Tom would run away. Maybe the police would arrive. Meanwhile, she hardly saw her husband. When they were both in the house, they ate separately, they slept separately. Few words passed between them. Her silence was now as deep as Tom’s, but it was of a different nature. She thought constantly of what drug dealers were responsible for and her revulsion grew. She felt all the time as though she was boiling up inside, that the pressure of her hatred would make her explode. She would not leave Tom: that, she decided, would be cowardly. It would make her guilty too. So she had a choice: either she went to the police (though she had no evidence to give them) or she dealt with Tom herself. She knew she was not thinking straight but she deliberately ignored the whisper of a sane voice within her that
told her that killing Tom was mad, mad, and wouldn’t make the slightest difference to the supply of drugs throughout the world. But still she wanted to do it. Why was that so hard for others to understand? And she gave him an easy death.

She began to unpack the few things she’d brought with her. She was not now ruined, or cowed, though she acknowledged that she shouldn’t have taken the law into her own hands. But it had seemed to her that her own hands were perfectly capable. The judge, sentencing her, had made a big thing of how cold-blooded she’d been, and she had. It hadn’t been a crime of passion. On the contrary, it had been carefully calculated. Killing was straightforward so long as it was understood what the consequence would be. She’d understood that, and she hadn’t cared. She’d thought of killing herself afterwards but felt no inclination to. Prison was not attractive – she’d had no illusions about what would await her – but she’d thought she could endure it. And then years later, she would start again.

She’d done it, too, only not the right way. She’d wasted time, trying to eradicate herself and turn into another woman when what she should have done, what she was now going to do, was be herself but a better self. All the experts she’d been seen by had worked so hard to call her past to account, and she’d gone along with this. But it was a mistake. Constantly revisiting, re-examining the past didn’t help at all. It didn’t bring her to the state of remorse they wanted. The past mustn’t be allowed to flood into the present and the future. She was determined to put a stop to all the sudden, inexplicable images which constantly
threatened to overcome her. Some were banal to the point of stupefaction, but some were frightening, from a far past she couldn’t identify. She would have to develop a trick to deal with them.

She would invite Claire, Molly and Liz to her flat – soon, but not too soon. Not all together, not the first time. She fully intended to keep in touch with them, and show them that she valued their concern. And she would make new friends. She wouldn’t cut herself off from new contacts simply because she was afraid of what the cost would be. She felt a faded version of her old self, but then, on the verge of real middle age, it was to be expected. She still, she reckoned, had time to prove herself as someone more worth caring about than a woman who had killed her husband and didn’t regret it.

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Epub ISBN: 9781473523845
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