Mr. Rosenblum's List: Or Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman (27 page)

‘I don’t mind.’

Sadie kicked off her high-heeled shoes; she hadn’t worn heels for a year and they were pinching her toes.

‘There’s whisky, a twenty-five-year malt. Gin, vodka. The usual suspects. I can call down for a cocktail if you prefer.’

What she really wanted was a glass of milk and perhaps a boiled egg. She thought of her hens and of collecting the warm eggs and peeling off the downy feathers from the shells.

‘I’ll have a tonic water.’

He passed her a glass, which she didn’t drink but held against her hot cheeks and forehead. She took in the creases around Jack’s eyes, the shadow of grey stubble on his chin and the straggle of white hair. He removed his spectacles to clean them on his tie and she saw his eyes were red, laced with veins. He never used to be still – he was always moving, buzzing here and there with a scheme or a wild idea. Now, he sat with his whisky clasped on his lap, motionless as a heron watching goldfish in the pond.

This wasn’t her Jack. Sadie wanted him spilling over at the edges with chaos and enthusiasm. She sensed with his abandoning the list that now England could never be home. They would live and die in exile.

She’d always done her best to ignore his list, but now she wondered. He’d almost succeeded in finishing it, and she had an inkling that if he had, they would have belonged to Pursebury Ash.

Sadie heaved herself up and went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. With a piece of cotton wool and a dab of cold cream she removed her coral lipstick and matching blush. ‘My name is Sadie Rose,’ she said into the mirror.

The new name still tasted strange on her tongue, and though it was a little inelegant, she would prefer to be Sadie Rose-in-Bloom – now that was a good name. If they had stayed in the village, she might have tried to persuade Jack that Rose-in-Bloom was the best choice for their passports. She supposed it didn’t really matter anymore. During her life, she had many names and had lived in many places but Rosenblum belonged to another Sadie – the one who lived in Berlin all those years ago. They would never go back now – neither of them could understand the people who went back.
Before
did not exist anymore, however much one might wish it. That other world had gone and it was pointless to return and look for it.

She stared at her reflection until her vision began to cloud and her nose seemed to drift downwards towards her chin. This was not an English face, neither was it exciting or exotic – she saw a middle-aged woman fattening into old age, with a dusting of dark hairs on her top lip. She didn’t belong anywhere: she wasn’t English and she certainly wasn’t German.
Jew.
It was such a small word and caused so much trouble.
Jewess.
That sounded more enticing, sexy even – but was not a word that fitted her, a plump woman born in the suburbs. She smoothed her blouse and tried to get the creases out of her skirt. It was tighter than it was a year ago – she needed to diet. Was it really only a year? In that time she had come to love the landscape and the seasons and the sky and the ducks and the stories.

Sadie realised that she was crying. She chided herself, ‘
Du blöde Kuh.
This won’t do. Pull yourself together, silly old woman.’

She combed her hair, wincing as the brush caught on a burr. She untangled it, placing it on the corner by the sink. It was a tiny piece of the countryside and, somehow, she couldn’t quite bear to throw it away.

Jack could put it off no longer – it was time to call in at the carpet factory. He left Sadie after breakfast and drove to the East End. Even this corner of London was decorated with flags and coloured ribbons, although underneath the paraphernalia of celebration the bricks were dirty and soot stained, and there was the faint odour of rubbish decaying sweetly in the heat. The streets were teeming with stallholders selling beigels, buns, shoelaces, stinking fish, soap flakes and pickle jars, and Jack picked his way through the crowd to the narrow street leading to his factory. The gates were locked and he took a key from his pocket to let himself into the yard. He stood alone in the cobbled forecourt for a moment, listening to the low thrum of machinery.

The men working on the looms did not look up when he came onto the factory floor; they were far too busy threading and cutting to see him, and the bang of the door was lost in the clamouring din. Jack had forgotten quite how loud the great looms were – the crash and clatter of the machines vibrated through him and he felt the familiar pain at the back of his head begin to pulse. One loom was broken and silent, its metal guts spewed across the floor.

He walked to his old office, where his name still hung on a brass plaque, now coated in a layer of dust. Wiping it off with his sleeve, he went inside. There was a scurry of movement and Fielding scrambled to his feet, sending a pot of tea flying in his haste.

‘Mr Rosenblum, sir. I am sorry. Wasn’t expecting you . . . did you call?... I’ve just been here a minute. I’ll leave now.’

Jack settled into the battered chair opposite the desk and motioned for the man to sit back down. The waste bin was overflowing, a dead plant rested on the windowsill and judging by the snapshot of Fielding’s family on the desk, it was clear that he’d been here for some time. This was no longer Jack’s office. Through the background whir and clack of the great looms there was a knock at the door and a young woman barged in without waiting for a response, clutching a folder. She stopped the instant she saw Jack.

‘Please, come in,’ he said beckoning her inside.

Hesitating, she handed the file to Mr Fielding and scurried out.

‘I am sorry,’ said Fielding, ‘when you didn’t come back, it was easier for me to work in here. It has a telephone.’

‘It was the sensible thing to do.’

‘Are you coming back?’ asked Fielding, his voice betraying a note of desperation. ‘Things have gone to the dogs without you.’

‘I’m sure it’s not so bad,’ said Jack smoothly, taking the file.

He opened it and read the contents in silence. When he had finished, he closed the folder and leant back in his chair, wondering what to say. Fielding was right – it was bad, worse than bad. He took off his glasses, cleaned them as a matter of habit on his tie, put them back on and pushed them up his nose.

‘I know this is my fault. I took money out of the business to start another concern. But these figures are dreadful. We’re not even in profit.’

Fielding let out a tiny scream that sounded like a kettle giving off steam when it had boiled. ‘It’s God-awful! I wrote to you again and again and you never replied, Mr Rosenblum. I needed you to make decisions on things and you wouldn’t. We need new machines like the other carpet factories. These looms are old and break down every other day. You never even responded to my telegram.’

Jack said nothing – it was all true. He was to blame and needed to make it right but he was too tired to hustle and scheme. Carpets just did not interest him like they used to.

He chose another two shades for next season’s plush pile range: ‘Rainy Day Grey forty-two’ and ‘Spring Green sixteen’. Neither looked anything like their descriptions, he thought dismissively. ‘Spring Green sixteen’ was a lurid colour – nothing like the soft, rippling shades that were found in the garden at Chantry Orchard. The grey of a rainy day on Bulbarrow was full of drama – there the black sky billowed with the swirling patterns of raindrops, while the wind sang in the telegraph wires. The colours on the dye chart looked flat and fake.

Jack tried to find his old self by doing all the things that used to give him pleasure: he went to the pictures to watch a daft cowboy flick and took Sadie to a play, the new Noël Coward. He didn’t ask her how she found it, in case she wanted to discuss the finer points of the plot. As the greatest actors in England performed on Shaftesbury Avenue, he found himself wondering how tall the new trees had grown and whether they yet screened the bungalows from the vista at the fifth hole, and as he clapped during the curtain call, he realised that he had entirely neglected to watch the play.

They both struggled to readjust to London hours from Pursebury mean time, finding themselves yawning by nine o’clock and eating dinner unfashionably early. They walked arm in arm along the Mall, pretending to admire the flags and the gathering crowds. The trees were slender and had been gracefully pollarded, but Sadie didn’t approve of the style.

‘Look at them. Poor things, they’re old and they’ve been all chopped about. They look like their limbs have been amputated. It’s cruel.’

Jack prodded a trunk and a trace of city grime came off on his finger. He realised that all the trees lining the avenue were coated with soot and thought sadly of the clean trees in his orchard. The day they had left he saw a toad there – it sat on a log, blinked its eyes and croaked. It wasn’t a bad life that of a toad, he decided. No one would tell a toad that he was in debt and must leave his lily pad. Jack huffed – he urgently needed to contact the estate agent. Tomorrow. He would do it tomorrow.

Jack telephoned Edgar to tell him that they were moving back to town. Edgar had not been able to keep the surprise out of his voice and pushed for an explanation, but Jack could not bring himself to give one. They all met for lunch at Kensington Roof Gardens, a city garden growing on the sixth floor above a department store. Edgar and Freida were waiting for them at a table outside, in the section called the English Woodland Garden. There were a few sad-looking oak trees growing in eighteen inches of soil but there was a pleasant view across West London; Jack was able to see the pockmarked skyline stretching out towards the horizon and could make out the holes in the city – great gaps gouged out by the Nazi bombs.

The Herzfelds were baffled by their friends’ return; while it had seemed rather quiet without Jack and his various schemes, they believed them to be happy in Dorset. Edgar had been looking forward to playing a round of golf on the new course come summer, and this sudden return struck him as odd. He did his best not to mention it.

‘We thought we’d come here. The roof gardens have a good view and the woodland garden – well, it’s not like your place . . .’

Sadie said nothing. This wasn’t woodland; it was a gimmick – a garden one hundred feet above the ground was unnatural. She wondered if the trees were lonely, separated from those in the earth.

After lunch Jack and Sadie promenaded through Hyde Park, desperate for a proper expanse of green. Jack had not realised how claustrophobic he found the city; now he felt it tightening around his throat like a fist and he trampled the dusty grass in the park with relief. Wanting to prolong the afternoon, he suggested they go to a museum, but Sadie refused. Jack plunged his hands into his suit pocket, wondering what had happened to them since their return to London earlier in the week. It was almost as though the escape to the countryside had never happened; amongst the hedgerows and wooded streams they had found one another again, but here their lives started to diverge once more. Why wouldn’t she come with him? Did she not like his company? After a few months of proper companionship, he did not want to revert to the old ways.

Jack went to the Natural History Museum alone. He hadn’t been there since Elizabeth was a small girl – it was one of their Sunday afternoon treats before the days of the Lyon’s Corner Café. He walked slowly up Exhibition Row, listening to the purr of the traffic. He had swapped his hazel switch for his London ivory-capped walking cane, but it was not as comfortable; the steel-tipped base clicked irritatingly against the street and he wondered how he had never noticed before.

He climbed the stone steps of the Victorian museum, admiring the handsome building and its relief carvings in the shape of extinct animals, birds and fish. He had never liked churches or synagogues but he loved this place: it was a grand cathedral to nature – the Notre-Dame of sea anemones and forest ferns. He paid his penny entrance fee and wandered into the great hall, which echoed with the clamour of children’s chatter. It was strangely comforting, these young creatures being herded along by anxious mamas and papas, and he watched them for a few minutes, listening to their noise, before heading up the great staircase to the first floor.

The creatures in the glass display cases were all perfectly still, frozen in position for the next hundred years. Eagles hovered mid-flight, dangling from wire threads, and recorded bird song played through a crackling speaker. He gave a shiver at the taxidermy – animals should be barking and wriggling – but he found it weirdly fascinating. A fly hurled itself furiously against the inside of the glass, trapped. Its situation was hopeless; it had found a way in but would never get out, and would die there and be preserved at the bottom of the case, another tiny addition to the display.

There was an overpowering smell of camphor in this part of the museum and Jack stifled a sneeze. The specimens were old – most had been gathered during the Victorian rush for discovery of new things: machines, stars, fossils, species. The meerkats in the glass case in front of Jack were older than he was, although, he decided, they were probably not as old as Curtis. He wandered through a bat exhibit; they were tiny with razor-sharp teeth and floated against a sky of painted stars. One night last summer, he and Sadie had counted a hundred bats flying out of the roof to go hunting.

Pacing the exhibition halls, Jack realised he was in exile once more. Dorset was home. Without his ramshackle cottage and muddy fields he was rootless – he would never belong anywhere again. He stumbled upon a moth-eaten display and gave a bitter laugh. Wild boars. The largest was over two foot high and five feet long, with coarse black bristles covering his body and a pair of fearsome-looking tusks, cracked and yellowed with age. He remembered Curtis’s description of the woolly-pig, ‘
a noble beast o’ strength an’ savagery
’. Jack crouched down and stared into eyes of orange glass. This was the closest he’d ever get to a real woolly-pig.

His nose made a smear on the window of the display case and the dead creature looked back at him mournfully, as though conscious of the indignity of its fate.

Sadie longed for grassy fields, so like a bee on a quest for the finest nectar, she went in search
of the largest expanse of green in the city. She paced the well-worn paths through Hampstead Heath, inhaling the smell of mud and newly mown grass, which mingled with sooty fumes. Hobbling slightly, her feet sore in her tight, high-heeled shoes, she wished that she were barefoot in her garden. At least there were still ducks to feed. She remembered the time when she saw her mother feeding them poppy-seed cake in Hampstead Pond all those years before. Mutti might only have been a mirage, a memory flickering on the surface of the water, but at the time she had seemed so real.

It was a weekday afternoon and the park was busy with mothers and grandmothers playing with their little ones and feeding the birds. A young woman walked a swaying toddler to the water’s edge, their summer dresses billowing in the wind. Two old ladies in pleated skirts and thick beige stockings sat gossiping in Yiddish and eating sweets from a newspaper twist, while another hitched up her dress and played hopscotch on a chalked board with a delighted child, who shrieked with joy as her grandmother jumped the squares.