Mr. Rosenblum's List: Or Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman (5 page)

He was considering this, alongside his other more serious concerns, when he walked right into an idea. He turned left down Montague Street and saw the sign. It read in Yiddish: ‘MILCH, FRISH FUN DI KU’. He remembered hearing that years ago those living in the East End couldn’t get milk from the countryside and so had their own herd in the middle of the city. The last cow had departed long since but the sign remained, hanging haphazardly on the disused gates, to serve the purpose of providing divine, or bovine, inspiration for Jack.

‘That’s it! Milk fresh from the cow!’

The sound of birdsong echoed in his ears and for a moment he almost muttered a prayer under his breath. If you couldn’t get milk from someone else’s cow, you had to get your own. No golf course would admit him and so he must build his own.

‘And tell me,
mein Broitgeber
, since you know everything – why couldn’t we go to Israel?’ Sadie muttered at her husband as the green Jaguar wound its way along the narrow country lanes. She was younger than Jack, still in her forties, but had long since resigned herself to a premature old age. She had neat grey-blond hair and on the rare occasions when she laughed the rolls of fat around her middle wobbled ever so slightly. Now they shook with agitation. ‘You want to be like everyone else. So let us go to Israel, where everyone is like us!’

Jack said nothing, concentrating hard on not steering into the jutting hedges and gave a little sigh. He liked being called ‘
Broitgeber
’, or ‘my Lord and master’, but wished her tone was a touch more sincere. ‘Israel is a place for the young and I am old. It’s too much to build a whole new country. A golf course is enough for me.’

He had bought the cottage without telling Sadie, which in hindsight may have been a miscalculation. He knew he would have to tell her sooner or later, but wanted it to be a
fait accompli
. Sadie would have railed against it, and he knew with quiet self-assurance that this was the right thing to do. He had also taken the rather dubious decision of not telling her that their house in London was up for sale, which resulted in the first viewings being cloak-and-dagger affairs. The estate agent bundled visitors round the house while Jack watched from a window for Sadie to return with spurious items, which he’d sent her out to find, like flea powder and anchovies. So when a week later, while reading the
Jewish Chronicle
, Sadie discovered that her house was ‘under offer’ she was more than a little surprised. So surprised, in fact, that it had taken several brandies to calm her down.

‘And why could you not build this thing in London? Why this godforsaken place?’

‘London’s full. And fresh air is good for nerves.’

‘What do I care for fresh air?’ Sadie’s words came out in a sigh as she sank miserably into her seat. ‘You sell my house from under me, you take me to
alle schwartze yorne
and then you have the nerve to mention my nerves!
Du Blödmann
.’

Her litany of tribulations descended into disgruntled mutterings.

‘It will be better. You will be better away from it all,’ replied Jack, his grip on the steering wheel tightening.

‘No. I need to be
there
.
’

The Rosenblums’ lives were divided into two – a neat line severed each half. There was the old life in Germany that was
before
. Then, there was the new life in England, which was
after
. Sadie thought of her existence purely in these terms of
before
and
after
but this left no room for
right now
. Her life was a blur of other times. The car reached a straight stretch of road and Jack hit the accelerator. The engine snarled and they surged forward, forcing Sadie to clutch the scarf covering her hair. She frowned and burrowed into her seat. Most of the luggage was in the removal van but she had insisted on her box being placed carefully in the boot of the car. That box was all that was left of
before.
It contained half a dozen photographs: there was one of Sadie, aged eleven, and her brother Emil, aged three, both dressed up in sailor suits as well as pictures of each of Sadie’s parents smiling at the camera. The rest were family portraits belonging to Jack. Sadie wished that all the photographs were hers – he didn’t deserve them. He couldn’t even remember who the people were in his pictures – the bearded men in tall black hats or the round, smiling women – she would have taken better care of remembering the people who belonged to her. His behaviour was downright careless. She felt the back of her neck itch in irritation.

In the box, Sadie also had a tattered Hebrew prayer book that once belonged to her grandpa, Mutti’s recipe book and a neatly folded white linen towel. Their families had been in Germany for five hundred years and that box was the sum total of their combined histories. Jack’s great-grandfather had been a famous cantor in the synagogue, his honey voice echoing the ancient prayers each
Shabbas
. No one remembered that but Sadie – she thought of it sometimes when she listened to Jack tunefully crooning Caruso in the bath. There was no memento of the tortoises she kept as a girl, or the click of their claws as she and Emil raced them along the quarry tiles in the hall. Only she remembered how Emil used to cheat at chess, and the bishop-shaped dent in the wooden wainscot – caused when he hurled it at her when she objected. Under a loose floorboard in the maid’s room, they used to hoard their treasures as children: a shiny
Pfennig
, a piece of green glass, a lump of elephant dung stolen from the zoo, carefully dried and wrapped in a napkin. Sadie wondered if they were still there. Did Emil look at them again before they took him?

Unless she looked at the photograph, Sadie could no longer quite recall her brother’s face – it was like he was staring back at her through a bowl of water. She couldn’t remember whether his eyes were blue or grey. The only thing worse than remembering, she decided, was starting to forget.

Sadie liked the Jewish calendar because it was all about memory. She had a list of her own: remember to keep the Sabbath, remember to keep the dietary laws as they remind you that you are a Jew; at
Yom Kippur
atone for your sins and, most importantly, do not forget the dead. During life there is the birthday and afterwards
Yahrzeit
, the day of death, and she knew as she celebrated her birthday each year that there was this other anniversary waiting, like an invisible bookend. She liked the ritual of the Jewish year – it was a tightly strung washing line for her to hang her remembrances along.

Jack was humming under his breath beside her, and she pulled her scarf closer over her ears in an attempt to block out the sound. She could ask him to be quiet but then she would know he was still singing in his head, which was just as cross-making. The narrow lanes frothed with cow parsley that brushed the side of the convertible. Sadie glowered and muttered, ‘We’re lost and I hate the countryside.
Du Dumpfbeutel.
No one will come and see us, not even Elizabeth.’

 
Jack winced at the mention of Elizabeth. She was soon to start her studies at Cambridge University and the thought that she would not visit them in their self-imposed exile was terrible. ‘She will come,’ he insisted, ‘we will sip champagne and eat strawberries on the lawn and then I’ll drive her to Cambridge.’

Elizabeth had gone to Scotland with a girlfriend for the summer but had promised to come and see them before term started. It was now three weeks, ten days and seven hours since she had gone and Jack experienced a pain in his gut whenever he thought about her absence.

‘My girl will come. Of course she will.’

Sadie said nothing, satisfied that she had needled him successfully but Jack, momentarily distressed, did not notice. ‘This will be her home until she gets married and has a family of her own.’

He could not admit out loud the obvious fact that his beloved daughter had left and was now busy with her own life, preferring instead to pretend that she was merely on holiday and would return home to him soon.

‘You’re joking yourself. She’s gone,’ said his wife with a sigh.

Jack took his hands off the steering wheel and covered his ears. ‘Hush!’ A moment later he tried a conciliatory tone, ‘Sadie, doll, try to be happy.’

She frowned – after all these years, he still did not understand. ‘I don’t want to be happy.’

They reached a ramshackle set of crossroads and a blank signpost.

‘You see, silly old man, this place doesn’t even have a name.’

Jack winced with the effort of trying to remain patient.

‘Of course it does. The signs were simply painted out during the war and no one’s replaced them. Everyone in the village knows where they are. Probably aren’t enough strangers passing to warrant the effort of replacing them.’

Blue smoke from a nearby bonfire hovered, making strange patterns as the sunlight tried to penetrate. Jack felt Sadie shiver beside him and he tried to make casual conversation. ‘I read that the corpses of highwaymen were buried under crossroads.’

She was not reassured. They passed the village hall where a small group of men were hammering wooden tent pegs into the sun-baked ground. Several of the younger men had removed their shirts as they worked, the muscles beneath their skin coiling like rope. They all stared narrowly as the Jaguar passed. Jack was perturbed – it was part of his grand scheme of assimilation that they would simply seep unnoticed into village life, like rain into damp earth, and he did not like their scrutiny.

He steered the car round to the left, turned by a steep hill and then noticed a broken gate leading along a roughly hewn dirt track. ‘This is it!’ he cried, recognising this to be a great moment in their lives – in years to come when he stood at the front of the driveway and ushered in the chauffeured cars to his golf club for the Wessex Cup or the qualifying match for the British Open, he would remember the moment when he saw the place for the first time.

He steered the car up a potholed driveway lined with beech trees, which shaded them coolly as the Jaguar bounced along from one hole to the next. ‘Need to get this fixed,’ he said resolutely – a course such as his would need a proper road.

The trees grew thicker and the light through the leaves played weird patterns over the car bonnet and upon their skin. Jack noticed two black eyes watching them through the gloom, then a shape disappeared into the thicket. He remembered a green painting of a wood in the book of fairy tales he’d had as a child.

And then they were back in the daylight. He pulled the car up beside the front door of the house. It looked rather different to the picture that was sitting snugly in Jack’s breast pocket. The thatch was still there, but even with scant knowledge of thatches, he felt that they shouldn’t have bald patches. A blackbird darted out of a large hole and another picked at a loose bit of straw. The lime-washed exterior was grimy in the sunlight; the roses grew feral and obscured the boarded-up windows. The walls were made of wattle and the house gave the impression that it wished for nothing more than to slump back into the earth. Jack furrowed his brow, climbed out of the car and ripped away the rotten wood nailed to the window frames. There was a tinkle of broken glass as a pane fell out. ‘Need to fix that,’ he muttered, less resolutely than before.

Sadie hadn’t moved; she sat fixed in her seat and stared at the house curiously, breathing in deeply – there was a familiar scent, something she knew well but had not smelled for a long time. Jack plucked a rose from the wild tangle round the door and presented it to her. She ignored him, so he stuck it in her headscarf.

‘Ouch!’

The stem of the rose was covered in sharp green thorns, and she pushed him away. Unperturbed, he opened the car door for her and offered his arm, which she rejected, brushing past him to stalk across the drive to the front door.

‘The house looks sad now but with a lick of paint it will be perfect,’ he called producing a bunch of old-fashioned cast iron keys, each the size of a giant’s finger. ‘Ready?’

He slipped one into the big keyhole on the studded door and as he turned it there was a satisfying click. He heaved open the door and entered the dark hallway, Sadie close behind him. She gave a little scream. ‘
Scheiße!
Something touched me!’

Jack wedged the door so that a shaft of light illuminated wisps of a torn cobweb. ‘See, it’s nothing, doll. Nothing but us.’

Glancing up, Sadie saw the low ceiling was criss-crossed with hulking beams, stained black with soot and age. On the walls the lime plaster was beginning to flake and where the sun fell it shone upon spots of mould and creeping damp. She ducked under a low archway leading into a rudimentary kitchen – it certainly wasn’t Sadie’s idea of a kitchen. There was a filthy stove, a heap of wood to drive it, a worn oaken table with a few broken, upended chairs, and as she looked about her, she saw there was no sink. In fact, not only was there no sink, there was no tap. She tried not to dwell on the significance of this unsavoury fact nor think of her porcelain bidet abandoned to its fate in Hampstead.