Free Notwithstanding by Louis De Bernières Page A

room and she would glow with visible warmth – and sometimes she counted up the years of their marriage on her fingers, as if such perdurable happiness were something intrinsically incredible.
    Their sons and daughters had left home, and there remained only a maid and a cat. The maid had originally come to them as a nanny, provided gratis by the army when they were stationed in Germany, but now, even so many years after the children had grown and flown, Anna stayed on. As soon as their youngest child had reached the age of five, Perry and Leafy Barkwell had tried to encourage her to find more suitable and remunerative employment, but she had tearfully refused, accusing them in German of wishing to be rid of her, and demanding to know what she had done wrong. ‘Damned awkward,’ the Colonel had said to his wife. ‘What on earth can we do?’ she had asked. ‘Nobody has a servant these days.’
    The Colonel, fearless in the face of terrorists, bullets, burglars and high-explosive shells, was readily defeated by a woman’s tears, and so Anna stayed on, romantically and absent-mindedly caressing the ornaments with a duster, her gestures curtailed and curiously melodramatic. She was a relentless furnisher of cups of tea, made in the British Army style with condensed milk and heaps of white sugar, and she seldom spoke except to exclaim ‘
Gott im Himmel
’ or ‘Ach
, du meine Güte
’.
    Naturally she understood English perfectly, but what few words emerged were cloaked in an accent thick with years of linguistic apathy. She lived in the attic, which had been converted into an upper room, and there she played with her hair in front of a mirror and hugged her breasts to herself while singing snatches of nursery songs whose words she had muddled up over the passage of the years. The Colonel had a theory that she had been interfered with by the advancing Mongolian hordes in Berlin in 1945, and that this explained her tenuous grip on reality and the skewed angles of her psyche.
    Anna never went out, and never spent her exiguous wages. Under her bed she kept rows of jam jars full of the obsolete pre-decimal coinage of her first years with the family and in others she kept all the notes that she had ever earned, with the intention that when she died all the money they had ever paid her would revert to them. Anna, because she had been a nanny, was, of course, known to the entire family as ‘Nanna’, and she had never once expressed a wish to return to Germany, even out of curiosity.
    The cat, the final member of the household, was named Troodos because Mrs Leafy Barkwell had so much enjoyed being stationed in Cyprus, until Makarios and Grivas between them had turned their pleasant existence into a nightmare. Troodos was a genial tabby of about six years, with green eyes and an unappeasable appetite for voles. Most cats disdain them for their bitter taste, but Troodos would sit for hours in the long grass, waiting for a blade to stir. He could leap twelve feet or more, and land on the rustling object with perfect precision. He would swallow them head first, much as a snake does, bolting them down in great gulps. If he caught too many to eat he would bring them in and lay them down in rows on the carpet, much as the moleman’s cat, Sergeant Corker, did with his moles.
    It happened that one day Colonel and Mrs Barkwell were preparing a dinner party for a few friends, while Nanna polished the banister ball. She liked it to be shiny because it reminded her of the round head and glistening brown hair of the Barkwells’ youngest daughter.
    Mrs Barkwell had bought a large salmon which she was intending to poach in a steel fish kettle, and was looking over the Colonel’s shoulder as he gutted and cleaned it. ‘Whopper,’ he commented. ‘Tough one to land.’
    ‘Oh dear,’ worried Mrs Barkwell. ‘Do you think it’s all right?’
    ‘Tickety-boo,’ said the Colonel.
    ‘You know, I do think it might be a bit off. Oh Lord. What