How to Measure a Cow by Margaret Forster Page A

cows. It was the sort of arcane knowledge, utterly useless in normal life, which had always appealed to her. Measure from the shoulder to the second joint on the tail, she murmured to herself. But how would you get one of those hulking animals to stand still? How would she find the second joint in its tail? She wished Nancy Armstrong had demonstrated this art – or science, she wasn’t sure which – though the possibility of putting it to the test was beyond remote. She tried to see herself in the field where the cows now stood as she drove slowly back along the road. There was one standing a little apart from the others, chewing awayat the grass. But its tail was upright and below it shit poured down.
    She would never be able to measure a cow. But she would never need to.
    Nancy knew something was up. Sarah was agitated. There was something funny about her all of a sudden. She kept getting into her car, parked right in front of her front door, and just sitting there. Sometimes, she’d sit for a full half-hour without moving. Was it because the engine wouldn’t start? Nancy peered and peered from her bedroom window and didn’t think that this was the problem. Sarah wasn’t pressing any buttons and her foot didn’t seem to be in action. She was just sitting. Then, when all this sitting stopped, she got out and stood looking at the car. She walked round it, not touching it. Was she checking for flat tyres? Nancy didn’t think so. She, Nancy, had had a squint when Sarah went to work. The tyres were fine. She looked in the car windows too and everything looked neat and tidy. What was going on? Why all this sitting in a trance in a car?
    Nancy knew about trances. They were not good news. They meant something was up. Her father used to have trances, after he came back to the farm from the war. Long after he came back from the war, years after. ‘Don’t make a sound,’ her mother would tell her, ‘your dad’s having a trance, don’t go near.’ But Nancy did go near. She crept into the room where her father was sitting and she stared at him. He looked all right. It was just that he was very still, hands on his knees, looking straight ahead. A trance didn’t seem such a bad thing to be having. It was what followed that wasalarming. He would shake his head at the end of it and then give a great sigh and tears would run down his cheeks, tears he made no attempt to mop up. Sometimes he would tremble, and then her mother would come in and say, quite sharply, Nancy thought, ‘Enough, John, enough. You’re here, you’re safe. Now come on, there’s work to do.’ She didn’t hug him or comfort him, so Nancy felt she should try, but at her touch, a mere pat of her little hand, her father would flinch, and say ‘Now then’ and shake her off.
    Of course, years later Nancy heard all about the battle of Loos and what had happened to her father’s regiment and how lucky he had been to survive, apparently unscathed. Except for these trances, when he saw things, things he never talked about, or at least not to Nancy. But she picked up, from newspapers and films, that trances, or what she’d been told by her mother were trances, even if that wasn’t the proper name for them, were to do with ‘emotional disturbance’. She pondered this phrase, when she came across it, for a long time. Her father, such a big, strong man, was never emotional, never, except for the tears and trembling when he came out of a trance. Was that the point, then? Was this him leaking emotion because he was disturbed? It made a sort of sense to her.
    Sarah Scott, though. Her trances made no sense. Nancy worried about them. There was no sign, so far as she could tell when she was looking out of a window some distance from the car Sarah sat in, of any emotion. No tears flowed. She could discern no trembling. But there was no doubting the sitting, absolutely still, in a trance-like state. Something was wrong. Nancy, witnessing this peculiar