Mr. Rosenblum's List: Or Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman (9 page)

Your humble servant,

Jack M. Rosenblum

Jack sealed up the letter and placed it carefully in his pocket. First thing tomorrow, he would take it to the post office to be weighed. He did some rough calculations in his head. Presuming that the letter went into the first airmail post tomorrow, it would still not reach Mr Jones’s publisher until a minimum of four weeks later and a delay of anything up to twelve weeks was certainly very possible. He then assessed that it would sit in a secretary’s in-tray for another week and would not be forwarded to Mr Jones, undoubtedly a very busy man, for at least another fortnight. All in all, he would consider himself fortunate if he heard back at all before Christmas. He simply could not wait that long. Whilst he would incorporate Mr Jones’s advice the instant he received it, construction must begin right away.

He stood up and brushed himself down. There was no more time to waste – he’d already lost a whole month in preparation. He must start this very instant. He went straight to the ramshackle barn at the side of the house that had been converted into a tool shed. Unable to procure any labour from the village, the previous week he had requested two caretakers from the London factory to come to the country. He agreed to pay an exorbitant bonus and Fielding, the factory manager, was very unhappy, but it had been worth it – in seven days they had plumbed a bathroom and fixed up his tool shed. He surveyed the gleaming racks of tools; he had no idea what most of them were, but they looked wonderful. They had cost a pretty penny, using up a tidy chunk of the Rosenblums’ savings account, but he was sure they were all vital to the construction of a golf course. There were five different types of hoe as well as rakes, trowels, mowers and a fearsome array of heavy rollers and, on a hook just beyond his reach, rested a steel spade with a red-painted handle. He moved an old seed crate into position to use as a step and, standing on tiptoe, unfastened the spade, but it was heavier than he thought and clattered to the ground. Retrieving it with a curse and getting a lightweight hoe for good measure, he headed for the door. He had no notion what a hoe was actually for, but felt more professional with a tool in each hand.

He hurried out to the field and stood in the biggest of the meadows with his local Ordnance Survey map, surveying his land.

‘Bugger it. I ought be wearing my new cap.’

He plunged his hands into his pockets, wishing he’d thought to write to Mr Bobby Jones earlier. Then he’d have a proper plan and real advice.

‘Never mind. Can’t be helped.’

He closed his eyes and tried to visualise Tom Morris’s plan of St Andrews. He had stared at it long enough that he could see it in his mind and, as he opened his eyes and gazed at the landscape once more, he saw it with St Andrews superimposed on top. To the north, where the sea should be, was the one part of the original that Jack recognised he could not recreate. There was a rise to the south at St Andrews but on his land there was a dew pond. He did not know how to drain a pond and he wondered briefly if there was a plug to pull like in a bath – a straw bung, perhaps, that once removed enabled the water to flow back into the centre of the earth. There was also a strange hollowed-out path cut into the side of the hill, just where he wanted it level for the first green. On the Ordnance Survey map it was labelled ‘the coffin path’. He supposed this was the route the dead were taken to the little church – the lane was too steep and so coffins had to be carried along the gentler path across the fields – and now the centuries of use with heavy, lead-lined boxes had sliced a deep gouge into the soft earth underfoot. Interesting, but no use for golf – he needed a perfectly even surface. It’d have to go. Well, then, he decided, that was a good place to begin. On balance, he considered it would be easier to fill in the path than empty the pond. He would pack it with earth and level the ground. Buoyed with enthusiasm he thrust his spade into the soil. Instantly there was a crack as metal hit rock. He bent down to inspect the damage and saw that the spade had struck a piece of flint. He hesitated for a moment, removed it carefully with his hands and tossed it aside. From his pocket he retrieved a crisp pocket-handkerchief and meticulously wiped his muddy hands.

‘There now, that’s what it’s all about. Getting one’s hands mucky.’

He thrust the spade into the earth once more and again, there was a clink as it collided with stone. He bent, plucked out the object, cleaned his fingers on the dirt-smeared pocket handkerchief and stood upright, slightly painfully this time. An hour later, there was a low pile of stones and a hole but the sunken path was no less hollow.

‘How on God’s earth am I supposed to fill these blasted holes without digging more holes for earth to fill them?’ It was a real conundrum.

He was damp with perspiration and his fingers were blistered. He sat down with a tiny sigh on a tufted molehill, the size of a well-fed snoozing sheep, and put his head in his hands, inadvertently smearing mud across his cheeks. Old grassed molehills covered nearly an acre, rising out of the ground like giant mossy pimples.

‘That’s it!’ He jumped up in excitement. ‘I will dig up the molehills and use them to fill the holes! That’ll kill two birds with one stone.’

It was genius in its simplicity. None of his tools were right for slicing off molehills, what he really needed was a giant cheese wire. He made some estimates – there were enough molehills to plug the voids and, if there were enough left over, he would use them to fill in the dew pond. ‘It’s going to be a triumph – I can sense it.’

Later that evening, Jack returned to his study and consulted his maps. Every bit of him ached with tiredness; his eyes were bloodshot, irritated by the tiny flecks of soil that had endlessly been thrown into his face as he worked. Clasping a stiff whisky in one hand, he traced over the land with a shaking finger. After ten hours of labour he had succeeded in moving three molehills. ‘Not to worry,’ he told himself, brightly, ‘tomorrow I shall be quicker. First, I had to mould my tools, and now they are made, I shall get on like a donkey, stubborn and efficient.’

The cheese-wire plan had worked. He’d found a piece of wire and managed to work it through the base of the mound. The molehills, however, proved to be extremely heavy, forcing him to construct an elaborate pulley system in order to lift them. This took several hours and many buckets of water from the pond to use as counterweights. The system was very unsteady and, if he got his measurements off, the buckets would waver and empty their loads all over his trousers. The molehills were loaded onto the pulley and then deposited in the holes, where they sat, round and grassy like cupcakes in odd-shaped cases. He was sure he had read somewhere that molehills grew in the wet, so he poured water over them in the hope that they would melt into the right space. In a few months, with a bit of luck and a little rain, they would expand to fit perfectly and his land would be smooth and level.

In blue ink, Jack circled the area on the map. When it was even, he would flatten it with the heavy rollers and cut the grass. Then, and only then, could he trim his first green and make the very first hole. He reached into his desk drawer; the rejection letters had all been disposed of, and in their place rested a small book of fabric samples. These had been sent from the factory as Fielding had wanted him to consider diversifying into curtains, but Jack needed the cash funds for the golf course – construction was going to be expensive. He kept the samples anyway to select a colour for the flags. He held the fabrics on his lap and stroked a vibrant blue and cream stripe, then a crimson check.

Moving the molehills was a gargantuan task and he made slow progress, inching around the field like a shadow on a giant sundial. He had been at work for a month now and there were bare brown circles where the molehills had been removed. The land was riddled with these round marks amid the lush grass. His pulley system was wheeled out of the barn at first light and, in the sun-soaked silence of the afternoon, the mechanism bobbed up and down as he rearranged the great piles of earth. Word spread throughout the Blackmore Vale about the Jew’s quest to construct a golf course on Bulbarrow. At first he was dismissed, but then, when his molehill contraption was glimpsed, it was decided that here was a sight worth seeing. Jack never took a day off to rest, his task was too important, and so on Sunday afternoons people came from villages all around to gaze at the unusual spectacle. They gathered with picnics on the brow of the hill, and stared happily at the peculiar little man with his giant cheese wire invention. They clapped as the pulleys lifted the tufts right off the ground and groaned when the system faltered and deposited its buckets of water over him. Binoculars were passed between family and friends to afford a better view. No one offered to help. It seemed to them that here was a man devoted to a unique and solitary calling. They considered him to be somewhere between a prophet and a lunatic. Some wondered if, like Noah or Moses, he was compelled by the voice of God. Others were convinced he was a madman, but as long as he was not dangerous, they were happy to eat egg sandwiches and ginger cake and watch the small man move piles of earth as the sunlight shone off his polished head.

Away from the crowds on top of the hill, Sadie watched her husband quizzically. She hardly recognised the darkly sunburnt figure with tiny muscles showing through the thin skin on his arms. At dusk he crossed the fields and opened the kitchen door with a bang, collapsing onto a high-backed chair.

She studied him before speaking. ‘So, you only come inside for meals now?’

He shot her a beseeching look. ‘Too tired to argue.’

Sadie hid a tight smile. It was more fun if he didn’t enjoy it. ‘You’re an old man, you work all day and for what?’

Jack only nodded.

‘We live in the same house, at the edges of each other’s lives. Nearly twenty years of marriage and it has come to this,’ said Sadie slapping the table with her palm for emphasis.

Still he said nothing. This irked Sadie; she was plaguing him and he was not fighting back. As long as he didn’t walk away – she couldn’t bear that. She fetched a loaf of bread and some cold beef from the larder, slapped it onto a plate and handed it to him. He ate hungrily. He would have to stay and listen whilst he ate.

‘Thank you,’ he said and smiled.

This was too much for his wife.

‘
Mein Gott!
Always so cheerful! It’s not natural. Why can’t you be even a little bit miserable? Then, maybe, we’d have something to talk about after all these years.’

‘Why do you have to chew over everything like a piece of gristle? The past is in the past. For pity’s sake, let it stay there.’

There was a note of anger in his voice that pleased Sadie. At last, she had got to him. ‘You are sunshine at a funeral.’

Jack gave a sharp laugh. ‘And what is wrong with that?’

‘Everyone wants good weather for a wedding, but at a funeral the sky should have the decency to be overcast. It is simple respect.’

Jack finished his bread, sent his wife a wary glance and stalked out of the kitchen. She gave a sigh of exasperation and contemplated following him into his study to torment him further, but deciding against it, she sat down, wondering if he took the trouble to remember anything at all.

Despite the usual quarrels with her husband, Sadie felt more peaceful than she had for many years and certainly since Elizabeth had left. In the mornings she was woken by the scent of roses seeping in through the open windows. The sounds of the wood pigeons in the roof no longer alarmed her. She had a pair of white doves sent down from Harrods and installed them in an old dovecot she discovered in the garden; they started to breed and the air was full with the cheeping of baby birds. Leaning against the house stood an ancient nodding lilac tree, its branches spindly and heavy with sprays of sweet-smelling blossoms. Butterflies and humming bees moved amongst the tangled flowerbeds and snails left their silver trails across the damp earth. The sky was bigger here than in the city and she lost herself for hours as she watched the branches on the ash trees, the leaves shifting in the summer wind like glass inside a kaleidoscope. Sometimes she did not get dressed, she would come downstairs in her curlers and nightdress and lie on the dew damp ground and stare at the clouds drifting across the changing sky. In the thick July heat she spent whole mornings resting on the unkempt lawn and if she felt drowsy she slept; there was no one to chide her for eccentricity. Sometimes as she lay watching the scudding clouds, she imagined Emil beside her in the long grass. It was he tickling her wrist with that strand of green. She was careful to look straight ahead at the soaring larks, so as not to spoil the game.

There was still that familiar scent in the garden, a flower that smelled of her childhood. Finally, she traced it to a rose – an unremarkable yellowing bloom with dark leaves marked with blight. Its fragrance was of endless summer holidays a long time ago. It made her melancholy and yet it reminded her of a time
before
, when she was happy. She did little to the flowerbeds except trim a space around this rose.

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.