Notwithstanding (9 page)

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 do you think, Perry?’

The Colonel lowered a reconnoitring proboscis, and sniffed. ‘Smells of fish,’ he declared. ‘What d’you expect?’

Mrs Barkwell was still worried. ‘You don’t think it’s a bit ripe? I mean, wouldn’t it be awful if we made everyone ill?’

‘Folderol,’ said the Colonel. ‘Perfectly good fish.’

‘Nanna,’ called Mrs Barkwell, ‘do come and smell this fish; I think it might be off.’

Nanna came into the kitchen and poked the flank
of
the salmon. Then she sniffed her finger, first with one nostril, and then the other. She wiped it on her apron, and said, with a connoisseur’s air of finality, ‘
Weiss nicht. Entschuldigung
’.

‘I’ve eaten pheasant so high, maggots in it,’ declared the Colonel. ‘No harm done.’

‘Pheasant’s different, Perry dear, fish has to be fresh,’ said his wife.

‘Portugal,’ said the Colonel, ‘
bacalao
. Months old. India, Bombay duck, years old. Prehistoric.’

‘Years old, and dried and salted,’ rejoined Mrs Barkwell. ‘This is supposed to be fresh from the lochs.’

‘Cat,’ suggested the Colonel.

Mrs Barkwell raised a finger and touched him on the tip of his nose. ‘Clever boy,’ she said.

Troodos was accordingly summoned from the orchard by the vigorous rattling of his biscuit box. There had not been much action on the vole front, and he was certainly ready to try the fish. He was so fussy about his food that in the evening he would not even eat from a tin that had been opened that morning, and Perry and Leafy Barkwell placed great faith in his gastronomic expertise.

Nanna, the Colonel and Mrs Barkwell bent over and watched Troodos contentedly polishing off a lump that Leafy had cut out of the side that was to be downward on the serving dish. ‘
Er schnurrt
,’ observed Nanna, and the other two listened with satisfaction
as
Troodos accomplished the daily miracle of purring and eating at the same time.

‘Well, pussy likes it,’ said Mrs Barkwell, and the Colonel patted Troodos somewhat brusquely on the head, saying, ‘Good soldier, what? First class, first class.’

The salmon was duly poached. All the same Mrs Barkwell could not help but wonder whether or not the fish really was all right. She had sown a doubt in her own mind that was very hard to uproot, and this doubt also began to infect the Colonel, despite his implicit trust in the cat’s considered judgement. ‘Crossed fingers, what?’ he said to his wife.

Sir Edward and Lady Rawcutt had cried off, but the Rector, Polly Wantage and her artist friend, and Joan and the Major turned up at eight as planned. ‘Slight worry about the fish,’ the Colonel informed them as they sat down. ‘Hope it’s all right. Should be. In fact, damned sure it is. Tried it on the cat. Can’t fool the cat.’

‘Please leave it if you have any doubts,’ said Mrs Barkwell. ‘There’s plenty of everything else. I won’t be at all offended.’

‘All the more for puss, eh?’ said the Colonel.

‘One has to be so careful of salmonella, these days,’ said Polly Wantage’s artistic friend, oblivious to the pun. ‘And wisteria.’

The Colonel regarded her incredulously; he had
always
thought her a little ill-connected in the brain department, a typical airy-fairy artist type, in fact. ‘Wisteria is a card game,’ he told her, ‘listeria’s the one.’

‘Whist is the card game, I think you’ll find,’ offered the Reverend Godfrey Freemantle, diffidently. ‘Wisteria is a climbing plant,
floribunda, formosa, sinensis, venusta
…’ Here he caught the Colonel’s hostile eye, and added, ‘But, of course, as Perry says, it is indeed listeria that causes gippy tummy.’ Once more he smiled at the Colonel, who was notoriously irked by being corrected, and who, on account of just this very flaw, had once narrowly missed the opportunity of being made equerry to the Queen.

The guests tucked into their fish, and declared it perfect, wonderful, superb, just right, and the best they had ever had. But the sorry fact was that Colonel and Mrs Barkwell had managed all the same to insinuate doubt into their guests’ minds as well. ‘It would have been better not to have said anything at all,’ reflected Leafy Barkwell, as she surveyed the mildly worried expressions upon their faces.

The Rector had a second helping, motivated by Christian supportiveness, explicitly putting his trust in God by means of a fleeting supplication, and the Major had seconds because, as he put it, ‘In my time I’ve drunk water from a petrol can, and I’ve cooked fried eggs on the bare metal of an armoured car in the middle
of
the desert, and I’m damned if anything will ever make me ill again.’ He ate his second helping as a direct personal challenge to the fish, and to any and all bacilli that it might contain. Joan, his wife, who had heard this speech about petrol cans and fried eggs a hundred times, loyally corroborated the Major’s assertions. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘the Major’s never ill. It’s positively alarming what his stomach can put up with.’

The Colonel glanced at the Major somewhat balefully. There had been a strong undercurrent of rivalry between them ever since the Major had disclosed that he had been in the only Foot Guard regiment senior to the Coldstreams. It was indeed an unfortunate coincidence that a former Grenadier had turned up in the same village as a former Coldstreamer, especially as both of them were of titanic build and forceful temperament. In this instance it irked Perry Barkwell that a Grenadier should lay claim to a cast-iron constitution, and so he countered with: ‘Ate a boa constrictor in Belize. Damned tasty actually. Not bad at all. Ate a dog in Malaya. Emergency. Not quite so good.’

‘Oh Perry, don’t, how could you?’ demanded Leafy Barkwell. ‘How perfectly horrid.’ She had not heard this story before, and suspected that her husband was elaborating falsehoods from somewhat base motives.

The carcass of the salmon was cleared away, and in the kitchen Mrs Leafy Barkwell heaped its remains
into
Troodos’s bowl, having decided that it was probably not a good idea to keep it over for the following day. Nanna went out to rattle the biscuit box, and Troodos appeared shortly through the catflap, an anticipatory purr rattling in his throat. It was his right to eat leftovers, and he was never far away from the catflap at about eight o’clock in the evening, after which his night’s adventures could begin. The leftovers would be followed by flirtation, a little hunting, a little chromatic yeowling, and, with any luck, an exhilaratingly good battle with a farm cat. Troodos would often appear in the morning with the outer sheath of a claw embedded in the middle of his forehead like a piece of Ruritanian military regalia, and Perry Barkwell would extract it, saying, ‘Damn good soldier. Chip off the old block, what?’

Dessert was served and eaten, and then the Colonel and the Major announced their intention to waive their right to stay on at table and pass the port while the ladies withdrew.

They both felt uneasy because, naturally, the Reverend Freemantle would be remaining with them, and they would feel inhibited about coming out with the odd ‘bugger it’, or worse, and risqué anecdotes or even talk about old campaigns would be out of the question. The Rector, they suspected, was a milksop, a nice chap, but with no balls at all. Accordingly they all removed to the drawing room, and
Nanna
served coffee, returning to the kitchen to begin the washing-up, which she did with her customary fanaticism, polishing the plates until they glowed.

Polly Wantage lit her pipe, and began a long discourse about a squirrel that she had recently shot. The Colonel and the Major listened with admiration, for Polly, with her plus fours, her pipe, her legendary past in the England women’s cricket team and her monocle, was the kind of woman a chap could really rub along with; none of that damned female nonsense about headaches and manicures and hairdos.

‘And so,’ said Polly, puffing on her pipe and creating the atmosphere of a damp bonfire in autumn, ‘there he was, the little bugger,’ (here everyone glanced at the Rector, who merely smiled theologically) ‘and I gave him the right barrel. Boom.’ (Here Polly wielded an imaginary twelve-bore.) ‘And bugger me, I missed. And then the little bugger takes a leap, and, like a flash, boom, I’m after him with the other barrel, and blow me down, I got him in mid-air, and he spins over and drops, and there he is, stone dead on the pine needles. One bad shot, and one blinder. Just like life, what?’

Polly looked around with satisfaction, and the Rector observed, ‘Such a rich metaphor,’ while the Major and the Colonel responded almost in unison with ‘Jolly good, old girl. Splendid.’

Joan and Leafy exchanged glances, and the former
summoned
up her courage. ‘Polly dear, I can’t help wondering why you have this thing about squirrels.’

Polly puffed vehemently on her pipe, and then pointed the stem at Joan, stabbing the air with it for emphasis. ‘Rats,’ she said. ‘Rats with fluffy tails. Tree rats. Vermin. Full of fleas. Disgusting.’

‘Oh, I think they’re rather sweet,’ said Joan, unthinkingly.

‘It’s the songbirds,’ explained Polly. ‘You can have squirrels or songbirds, but not both. These grey squirrels eat the eggs, and they eat the heads off the chicks. Nice and crunchy, you see. I’m voting for songbirds. Bugger the squirrels. Got to get rid of them. Do you remember Eric? Before your time, I should think. Eric Parker? He was the last man to see a red squirrel in the village.’

Just then Nanna flung open the door, hurled herself into the centre of the room and exclaimed, ‘Oh
mein Gott, mein Gott, du lieber Gott, der Kater ist tot. Der arme Kater, oh oh oh
.’

The Colonel stood up abruptly, exclaiming, ‘What? What? What?’ and Nanna clutched the sides of her face with both hands, her eyes full of horror, tears running down her cheeks. She swayed like an opera singer imitating the effects of a storm, and Joan and the other women exchanged a ‘What do we do now?’ kind of glance.

‘Pull yourself together, woman,’ cried the Colonel,
grasping
Nanna’s shoulders, and for one horrible moment everyone thought that he was going to slap her, as if she were the stock hysterical woman in an old-fashioned film. Nanna looked up at him and managed to say, her voice choking with distress, ‘
Tot, tot, tot ist der Kater
.’

The guests went pale in unison, and in unison their stomachs began to feel unwell. ‘Pussy’s dead,’ said Mrs Barkwell, horrified both by the news and by what it meant. A wave of social shame swept over her, for the time being postponing the jagged grief that she would feel for her beloved pet. ‘The salmon,’ she blurted out, looking to her husband for strength. ‘Oh my God, the salmon.’

The Colonel had not spent all those years in the Coldstreams without learning the art of dealing with an emergency. ‘On the double,’ he roared, ‘quick march,’ and everybody, galvanised by this vocal explosion, jumped up out of their armchairs. ‘Into the hall,’ commanded the Colonel. He turned to his wife. ‘Start the car. Round the front!’ She seemed a little confused, but was electrified into action by his ‘Jump to it, woman, jump to it’.

The Colonel addressed his troops. ‘Stay calm. Calmness essential. No hurrying. Cool head at all times. Women first.’

‘Where are we going, old boy?’ asked the Major.

‘Hospital. Stomach pump. Bloody obvious, man.’

The Major was nettled by this last phrase, implying that he was short on understanding, and he stiffened. ‘Not for me, old boy. Cast-iron stomach. Waste of time.’

The Colonel was nettled in turn. ‘Do as you’re bloody well told,’ he said coldly. ‘My responsibility.’

The Major, deeply riled, replied coolly but with clear hostility, ‘We are not in the army here, old boy, and, even if we were, a major of the Grenadiers does not accept orders from a mere colonel of the Coldstreams.’

‘Mere?’ repeated the Colonel. ‘Mere?’ He stabbed at his chest with a forefinger, indicating his natural superiority. ‘
Nulli secundus
,’ he exclaimed, ‘second to none, second to none!’ repeating the motto of his regiment.

The Major stiffened and drew himself up to his full height. ‘Second to one, second to one.’ He struck his own chest. ‘Senior regiment. Grenadiers. Damned Coldstreams, bloody sheepshaggers.’