How to Measure a Cow by Margaret Forster Read Free Book Online Page B

her foster mother in the way they all complained about their mothers, but she didn’t ever say, or hint, that she hated her, any more than they did (except in odd moments of fury). And she loved her foster father, John, always going on about his sporting prowess. He was the one who taught her to swim when she was still tiny, and coached her to become the school champion. They swam in the Thames together and entered races which Tara always won.
    ‘I wonder,’ Molly suddenly said, ‘if she’s thought about us at all. Maybe we just faded from her mind the last ten years.’
    ‘Unlikely,’ Liz said. ‘She might be full of resentment about us not rallying round when she needed us – and even before that, once she’d moved to London, wedidn’t make the effort to go to her, just expected her to come to us.’
    ‘But that was natural, surely,’ said Claire. ‘We all live within twenty miles of each other.’
    ‘Still,’ said Liz.
    It was a quiet lunch, that time. They were all a bit depressed. They’d gone over and over the good times they’d had with Tara and then they’d had to face what had happened all over again. They didn’t, now, expect Tara to turn up. But Claire noticed that neither Molly nor Liz was as upset about this as she was.
    Snow at the end of January, snow well into February, and then constant rain the whole of March. The house was freezing the entire time. Coming home each day, Tara kept her coat and scarf and boots on right up to the moment when she went to bed. Only then was she ever warm and that was due to the electric blanket she’d bought. Once in bed, only her nose was still cold, and as the night wore on, and the blanket was switched off, she pulled the duvet over her head.
    But she slept, and without sleeping pills. She had no nightmares any more either, or even proper dreams, the sort of dreams she’d been used to having. Something was changing, then. Peace of mind would come eventually, they’d said. In time. A new rhythm would establish itself and sweep away the old order. This will be slow, they’d said, and you have to do your bit, give yourself to your new life. So she must be giving herself more successfully than she had estimated. How had she done it? By not struggling against Sarah Scott, she supposed. Sarah was so dull, so obedient, so entirely without any spark. She ate, she worked, sheslept, and that was about it. She didn’t seem to notice anything, react to anything. She tottered through each day keeping her head down, doing what she had to do, never making any complaint. But she didn’t have nightmares, she was calm. There was no pain any more. That, she told herself, made being Sarah Scott worthwhile.
    She’d always known there were people like that in the world, those fortunate few who drifted placidly through their lives, untroubled by rages or depressions or ambition, but she hadn’t known how they did it, what the trick was. Now, as Sarah Scott, she should know, but she still didn’t quite grasp the essential secret to such harmony. Sticking to a rigid, and easy, routine was, she could see, part of it. If you had a routine, there was no need to think, and it was thinking, especially wild random thinking of the sort that Tara had indulged in, which caused havoc. But following a routine couldn’t, she felt, explain everything. There was an element in this woman Sarah Scott which was about self-abasement, which was not commendable. It made the price too high. She thought she couldn’t go on being so terribly humble and feeble without starting to hate herself. Hate Sarah Scott. Surely, somewhere in this creature she could find a flash of individuality to make her existence worthwhile? It might be dangerous for her to attempt to deviate from what she had allowed to become the new norm but a little risk was what Sarah needed to take or she would drown in her own dreariness.
    She couldn’t explain any of this to the Woman when she met her (a woman this time,