Mr. Rosenblum's List: Or Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman

by Natasha Solomons

  The garden was thickly overgrown. There was a tumble of plants: roots, stems and leaves all entwined. She cut back a few of the unruly shrubs and trimmed the plum tree’s lower branches to open up the view from the kitchen window but the rest of the garden remained covered with a layer of brambles. She had not had a garden before; in London they had a terrace and a balcony with wrought-iron railings, and each summer she planted begonias and pansies in earthenware pots, but an actual garden was different. The grass had gone to seed and rabbits loped in the long flowers, their ears poking up above the daisies. There was an orchard at the bottom, where the grass sloped off and the hill began to run steeply downward. At the side of the house the garden reverted to scrub; the hedgerows crept forward and brambles and bright yellow gorse bushes made it impassable. The stinging nettles were five feet tall, yet butterflies landed on them effortlessly, somehow never getting stung. Sadie neither planted nor weeded; Hitler had declared the Jews weeds and plucked them out wherever he found them. She knew that a plant was only a weed if unwanted by the gardener, so she refused to move a single one, and they sprouted up wherever they wanted, between flagstones on the terrace or in a riotous mass in the unruly beds. The garden had been here for too many years for the Rosenblums to make any sudden changes.

  On rainy days Sadie turned her attention to the inside of the house. The front door had been waxed and the great iron knocker glistened. Every room was limewashed, the flagstone floors cleaned with lemon soap and the curtains rinsed and rehung. The crooked sign had been reforged and ‘Chantry Orchard’ hung proudly on the gate. The thatch had been patched; it would be redone next spring and under the eaves a twittering family of house martins were learning to fly. Early one evening, Sadie stood in her kitchen, a solitary gnat buzzing around her, while she continually swatted it away. The ancient kitchen table had been restored so the knots shone and it smelled softly of paraffin. A black enamel range with four hot plates nestled in the inglenook and threw steady heat out into the room. She was shelling peas for dinner; she liked popping them from their pods into the pot but rogues kept escaping and rolling across the floor.

  The door to the garden flew open and an unkempt Jack burst in, his few remaining strands of hair wild and coated in grass. Belatedly, he had decided to assist Sadie in a few details of refurbishing the house. Until the clubhouse could be built, they would need to offer members refreshments in the house after a round, so it needed to be properly attired. There was no use in having the best golf course in the South-West, only to be let down by poor facilities. He helped himself to a large glass of milk, then took a tape measure out of his pocket.

  ‘I just need the measurements and then you can choose the colour.’ He knelt down and calculated the dimensions of the kitchen floor. ‘Sixteen feet by eleven and a half,’ he said, writing it down on a pad.

  Sadie put down the dishcloth and studied the floor. The flagstones were a brown Marnhull stone, each one a different shape, worn and notched with the pattering of three hundred years of footsteps. The surfaces were polished smooth in the centres and covered with deep grooves at their edges. They were like the rings of a tree, displaying on their faces the history of the house and its families.

  Jack handed her a folder filled with samples of carpet in every hue. They had names like ‘Apricot and Peach Salad’ and ‘Morning Daffodil.’

  ‘I like that one,’ he said, pointing to a page with a red pile called ‘Crimson Battle’.

  Sadie held up the swatch. ‘Too dark.’

  Jack leant back on a kitchen chair. ‘Well, choose a lighter one then.’ He was growing impatient. He wanted to get back outside – there were a few more hours of light and he could move at least one more molehill.

  Sadie looked down at the flagstones.

  ‘I know we’re carpet people and we’ve bought this house with carpet money. But I don’t want carpets.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘I’m very serious. These stones and their markings – they’re like wrinkles in an old face. I’ve got an old face and I don’t want someone to come and carpet over me.’

  Jack chuckled; he liked it when she said surprising things. ‘My darling, you sound a little cuckoo-bird.’

  ‘Cuckoo?’

  ‘Yes, cuckoo-bird. Means meshugge. I heard it yesterday.’ He explained vaguely, having overheard someone describing his vision as cuckoo. ‘We don’t need to have carpets if you don’t want them. How about a tiger skin for the hearth?’

  She ignored him pointedly. ‘I am going to take a bath.’

  Until the new bathroom was fitted, Sadie had used the old system of strip washes over the sink and the pleasure of a hot, soap-filled bath had not yet lost its novelty. She climbed the stairs to her new bathroom with the same excitement Jack experienced each morning as he went to dig his golf course.

  The bathroom had an elegant claw-footed cast-iron bath, framed prints of tea roses on the walls and a polished wood floor, but the best part of the room was the low mullioned window with a view across the Stour Valley. Sadie ran the bath, the water thundering against the metal sides like an express train, and poured perfumed salts into the steam. Slowly, she unfastened her blouse and unclipped her skirt. Out of habit, she folded them and placed them in a neat pile on a rocking chair. She stood there, naked, and stared at her face in the mirror – it was the face of a woman in middle age. There were lines around the eyes and mottled marks on her cheeks and neck. She wondered when it was that she got old.

  The face didn’t feel like it was hers. It belonged to someone else; it wasn’t the face that her family had known. They wouldn’t recognise her now. She had never seen her mother as an elderly woman; soon she would be older than her mother had been when she died. She held out her own hands; they were beginning to display the thinness of an older woman’s hands and were slightly swollen around her wedding ring – she’d never be able to take it off now.

  Sadie climbed into the hot water and shut her eyes. The glass in the windowpane misted up; she wiped it with her palm and looked out across the fields. She had been about to order curtains for the bathroom but Jack poked fun at her. ‘Who’s going to spy on you? Badgers and birds?’ Now she was glad the window was bare – the landscape already looked different from when they had first arrived. It had lost its bright June sheen; the verdant fields faded to a hot brown after the grass was cut for hay and the wheat stubble turned gold. She was aware of the weekly changes in the countryside in a way she had never noticed in the city. In London there were only four seasons, and she had handbags for each. Here, summer was a thousand shades; the elderflower bushes found in every hedgerow and copse smelled sweetly in the middle of June and now, a month later, they were all brown and withered. Yet, the honeysuckle and the jasmine were in full bloom and their scent lingered in the summer air. The foxgloves had drooped and been replaced by the flowering bindweed, which climbed up the stems of the dead plants.

  The sun was low in the sky and the parched fields glowed pink in the evening light. At the edge of the garden, just beyond the orchard, she saw a deer nibbling the leaves of a hawthorn tree. It glanced up as if it sensed her staring through the window. Neither moved; the deer listening and Sadie lying naked in the warm water, watching.

  As she got out of the bath and towelled herself off, she studied the large cracks in the wall, running all the way from the heavy oak beam in the ceiling right down to the floor. They had called in a builder when she first noticed them but he found their concern entertaining and explained, ‘They is like livin’ things these old houses. The stones move. It don’t matter. Supposed to. Those newfangled houses, they is no good. These old ’uns like to move. Stretch a bit. There’s one in Okeford that moves out so much I swear he walks down the street.’

  Sadie had never thought of a house as a living thing before – it was a thing, which one filled with other things, like furniture and books. Yet the walls here were painted with limewash so that the stone could breathe and at night the house di
d feel almost alive, with its creaking and the sounds of the stream, trickling, trickling. She closed her eyes and imagined she could hear the stones of the house sigh.

  She went back down to the kitchen to find that Jack had gone. There was an almighty crash and a rumbling clatter from close by. Clad in her bath towel, her feet still bare, she followed the noise to the sitting room.

  Jack was standing on the hearth with a crowbar as black rubble and grime poured out of the chimney and onto the floor. It was as though he had opened a sluice gate. As Sadie watched in dismay, he changed colour; his hair went from white to black and his face turned grey, except for the shining whites of his eyes. A minute later the tide slowed. He took a piece of wood and poked around, causing more soot to tumble out and small clouds of smog to form in the living room.

  Sadie stared in horror. ‘I’ve just had a bath.’

  Jack did not turn around. ‘Hope you kept the water. Think perhaps I might need a wash.’

  He stuck his hand back inside and reached into the back of the chimney. ‘There’s a shelf here. And. There’s something on it.’

  He pulled out a charred object and laid it on the mat. Sadie peered at it from a safe distance and felt a little sick. It was a skeleton of some sort. Jack gave it a poke. ‘What is it?’ He dumped another item next to the skeleton.

  While Jack had been reading endless books on golf, Sadie had read the volume on ancient folklore.

  ‘It’s a cat. People put mummified cats up the chimneys. Thought it kept out evil,’ she said.

  Looking closely at the bones, Jack could make out the shreds of bandages.

  ‘And there should be a Bible. The cat keeps away witches. The Bible is for Him.’ Sadie gestured to the ceiling.

  Jack was intrigued and he picked up the other object, which was indeed a book. He murmured a Brocha to humour his wife and opened it with reverence. The print was small and divided up into tiny chapters – it looked like a goyische bible. He read a line to Sadie.

  ‘“Asylum: a place of refuge; a place of protection. Atheist: one who disbelieves in the existence of God.”’ He paused, rubbing his nose and leaving another black smear on his spectacles. ‘The Christian Bible is more different from the Torah than I had thought.’

  Sadie took it from him, flipping to the front page and read, ‘“Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language. To which are added an Alphabetical Account of the Heathen Deities. Published 1775.” Yes, hmm. Funny sort of bible.’

  Jack gave a short laugh. ‘I’ll bet you the hole in my beigel, that whoever put it up there thought it was a bible.’

  Sadie smiled. ‘The words are the same, just in a different order. I am sure He can rearrange them.’

  Jack chuckled and Sadie turned, laughing with him. She looked pretty, he decided, with her wet hair curling around her face and in this light her eyes were quite green. In these brief interludes Jack could almost remember the woman his wife had once been. He recalled the first days of their courtship when, half in love, they were still shy with one another. In a fit of boldness he’d confessed that he liked Christmas carols and secretly always wanted to go to the service on Christmas Eve in the Berliner Dom, and listen to the singing – Christians had all the best tunes. Sadie laughed and goosed him, challenging, ‘Well? Why don’t we?’ They’d snuck in and sat in the very back pew, their thighs brushing, as the congregation bellowed the refrains of ‘O Tannenbaum’. Somewhere between the third and fourth verse, Jack realised that a small, gloved hand was sliding into his. He clasped it, his heart beating like butterfly wings. Afterwards, exhilarated by their daring, Jack kissed Sadie for the first time. They stood beneath the Christmas tree in the Gendarmenmarkt, cheeks flushed with excitement and cold, and Jack leant towards her, wondering if he ought to remove his spectacles.

  Jack chewed thoughtfully on his lip. In half an hour he would return to the field and she would sink back into her silent gloom but, for an instant, they were in the same place – like travellers from opposite ends of the world happening upon the same village, and he did not want the feeling to pass, not just yet. ‘Let’s put up the mezuzah,’ he said.

  Ordinarily, Jack despised the trappings of religion. They only served to show up one’s differences. He was willing, however, to humour his wife in order to maintain this fragile equilibrium. Besides, he reasoned, a mezuzah was only a small brown box by the front door – another Jew would recognise it while an Englishman wouldn’t notice it at all.

  Sadie looked at him, surprised and pleased. Clutching her towel, she went into the kitchen and fetched a carved wooden box, a few inches long and with a space at the top for a nail. She held it up and shook it so that the parchment inside rattled.

  ‘What are the words on the paper in the mezuzah? Do you even know?’ Jack enquired, hoping that he was not jeopardising the peace.

  ‘No. But they’re supposed to ward off evil and bring good fortune to the household.’

  ‘With a cat, a dictionary and a mystery prayer I believe we are very well prepared for all eventualities.’

  He placed a handkerchief on his head as a makeshift yarmulke and Sadie handed him a prayer book. It was evening now and the house martins zoomed under the eaves to their twittering young. Jack’s voice mingled with the birds as he sang a Hebrew prayer. His song was ancient; it sang of Israel and a desert land of milk and honey. The village of Pursebury Ash had never heard such a song before but the woodlarks continued their own choruses and the wind played gently in the long grass. Jack hammered the mezuzah to the doorframe in a single movement, his arm rising like Abraham’s, ready with the knife.

  Jack worked as the long ears of corn turned golden and the days became slowly shorter. He laboured in the fields by the light of the high summer moon, the badgers watching him silently as he heaved piles of earth. As July slid into August, he finished moving the molehills. He retired his pulley system to the barn, fetched his mowing contraptions and for the first time in years the grass was cut. He left it long around the edges so that the rough remained strewn with frog orchids, goosegrass and bright pink ragged-robin. He read about the different kinds of grasses for the greens, the advantages of seed versus turf and ordered long hoses to keep everything watered. The dew pond would not be drained; it was filled by a spring whispered to have magical properties. The cold water seeped out from the depths of the earth, emerging from between the stones at the bottom. He could not tell how deep the pool really was, as the surface was covered with giant buttercup lilies. Sometimes, he glimpsed the silver shadows of fish and wisps of pondweed swaying in invisible currents but he did not like water, never having learned to swim. He poked a tall branch into the dark water, where it sank and was swallowed, never touching the bottom. It was good that he did not know the true depth of the pond: it was said to be so deep that it flowed for miles beneath the earth. One afternoon, he watched a duck bobbing on the surface – it dived under water and he waited for it to come up quacking, a fish in its beak. He waited and waited but the duck never reappeared. A few minutes later, a small boy throwing sticks in the pond many miles away at Ashbourne, was surprised to see a duck surface, certain he had not seen it dive.

  By the beginning of September, the first hole was nearly finished. In the moonlight, Jack carried a large watering can from the pond to his green and poured it over the young grass. He had planted the finest seed he could find, ordered specially from Switzerland. He knelt down, tenderly stroking the soft stems, now three inches high and ready for their first cut. He went to the barn and fetched the mower, a hand-pushed roller with hundreds of tiny blades and, with the utmost care, slid it across the precious surface. Every few yards he had to stop, remove the basket and empty the cuttings. At midnight, he had finished mowing and the green was smooth, like a shot of silk in the darkness. It remained sparse but cutting would help it grow and put down good roots. He filled another watering can, mixed in a spoonful of fertiliser and sprinkled the grass once more.

  He was so tired that his musc
les trembled. ‘Must carry on … must carry on,’ he chanted over and over, clenching his fists in determination. Elizabeth would be here in a week or two, and he was resolved on having the hole finished.

  He felt a flicker of excitement in his belly – finally, he was ready to cut the first hole. He had purchased a special tool for this: a long metal tube with a serrated top that lay in readiness by the pond, the new metal glinting coldly in the light of the moon. He ran his finger along the sharp edge, cutting himself foolishly, and a drop of blood fell to the ground. He licked his finger and carefully removed his torch and the map of Bulbarrow from his jacket. Trying to avoid smearing it with blood, he spread the map along the ground, weighted it with rocks and with a pencil marked with an X the spot where the hole was to go. It corresponded to the first hole on Tom Morris’s plan of St Andrews; Jack had laboured mightily to get the land to match, and the stream trickling down from the dew pond haphazardly mirrored the Swilcan Burn running in front of the first hole on the Old Course. He wished that Tom Morris’s greens were a little smaller – after two hours of mowing and trimming with scissors he was exhausted.

  There were other drawbacks; the Bulbarrow stream ran at a different angle to the Swilcan Burn and instead of skirting the green it simply cut it in two. Try as he might, he simply could not get the green level and although he removed the molehills, the incline remained sharp – a ball placed at the top rolled straight down into the pond at the bottom. Similarly, the fairway remained bumpy as, despite all his watering and a hefty dose of summer rain, the molehills did not grow. They remained, grassy lumps, wedged into the furrows and dips of the land. These minor impediments aside, he was thrilled by his miraculous progress.

  Clutching his map in one hand and a brass compass in the other, he walked carefully across the new grass to mark the position of the hole. He gazed learnedly at the compass and searched for the North Star. He wasn’t absolutely sure how to use a compass but the cowboys in the pictures always looked at the stars, unless it was daylight when, well, he didn’t know what they did then.