Mr Rosenblum's List

by Natasha Solomons

  She smiled at him, the quick, bright smile that made dimples form in either cheek and she looked happy. Jack relaxed. ‘It’s all right,’ he thought. ‘It’s all right. I’m a klutz but love has brought her back to me.’

  Her face was rosy pink from the cold; the heating had broken down at Salisbury and the last miles inside the train were freezing so that even the car seemed warm in comparison. Eagerly she wiped away the condensation from the window and watched the English landscape unfold – the trailing rivers iced over and the frost hanging in the rushes on the riverbanks. She had never left London as a child, except for a school trip to Minehead, and now barely heard her father chattering as she stared in amazement at this new world. Smoke puffed from every chimney and the cottage doors were festooned with wreaths of holly. It was not yet four o’clock but daylight was already fading and candles began to flicker in the windows. The fields glimmered in the dusk and Elizabeth wanted to stroke them; the gathering frost looked as soft as goose down.

  Sadie was waiting anxiously at home; she’d been checking the window for signs of them at least an hour too soon. Then, in a crackling of gravel, they were there. Elizabeth flung open the heavy front door and embraced her mother, burying her face in the familiar soft cheek and neck. Sadie always smelled softly of Chanel No. 5, and there it was, but mixed in with it was the heady scent of damp earth and woodsmoke.

  ‘Mein lieber Schatz! Mein Kind,’ exclaimed Sadie, her face buried in her daughter’s hair. She covered her face with exuberant kisses, and ushered her into the kitchen. Sadie felt a tug of joy at the prospect of feeding her little one, and sat at the table to watch her eat, hiding her smile behind her hand as Elizabeth demolished half a dozen vanilla crescents. And yet, they had been apart for so long that there was a distance between them; they were two strangers who needed to become acquainted. She felt that Elizabeth was different – a young woman now, beginning her own life and exuding confidence. In contrast Sadie felt middle-aged and tired. Her clothes were faded, her hair grey and in the mirror she could see creases round her eyes and thin lines on her top lip. She remembered when she was young like Elizabeth with thick hair and smooth skin. Elizabeth looked English: she had dark Jewish hair but bright green eyes and the creamy pink complexion of the classic English rose, and now she spoke with the quiet self-assurance of a graduate of one of The Universities. No one would guess that she was conceived in a tiny apartment in a Jewish suburb of Berlin. She listened to Elizabeth chatter about new friends, the tutors she liked and the ones she didn’t, new words peppering her conversation. Sadie didn’t understand but did not like to expose her ignorance to this smart new daughter who drank tea with milk.

  Jack marched into the kitchen, a scarf wrapped around his face, his eyebrows covered in frost. Elizabeth smiled – he looked like a peasant from a storybook shetetl in his layers and woollen cap, rather than the dapper London businessman.

  ‘Come see my course.’

  Swaddled in her coat and woollen scarves, Elizabeth followed Jack outside. The winter’s moon hung low in the sky. The frost was so thick that it shone white, bathing the countryside in a ghostly light. It was a good night for stories, so Jack told his daughter all about the legend of the woolly-pig. She listened in silence as their feet crunched through ice on the iron ground. They paused at the ridge by Backhollow, the moon illuminating the weird grass ledges; at the bottom of the slope a hoar frost hung in the ash trees. It coated the spindly trunks and dangled from the branches like silver streamers, each twig coated in tiny crystals. In this strange other world of glittering white Jack could almost believe in the tale of the woolly-pig.

  ‘Perhaps there really is such a creature. It might be a wild boar. After all they still have them in France,’ conceded Elizabeth.

  Jack was delighted; he loved it when she believed his stories. He reached deep into his jacket for a flask and passed it to her.

  ‘Here, drink this – it’ll keep you warm. Don’t tell your mother.’

  His coat was purchased from Curtis. It was lined with rabbit fur and had a handy inside pocket for keeping all manner of hidden things, from a poached pheasant to a hip flask or scrap of fabric for polishing a flagpole.

  Elizabeth took the flask and unscrewed the cap with difficulty through her mittens, tilted it and had a sip. Apples burnt the back of her throat. She coughed and handed it back to her father.

  ‘God, Daddy, what is that?’

  Jack shrugged, ‘Just cider from our orchard. It’s not very good. You must taste the stuff that my friend Curtis makes.’

  He took another swig and gave a loud hiccup. He hadn’t yet made a batch that didn’t give him hiccups – it was most upsetting.

  ‘Come, you must see the first hole. I dug it all myself.’

  Sadie sat alone in the kitchen. They had been gone for two hours and she was starting to worry. There was a chicken roasting slowly in the oven as a special treat and soon it would go dry. It was pitch dark outside, the lamps kept going out and there was the uncanny howl of a fox in the distance. She felt like crying. It was always the same – they would go off and forget all about her. Every Sunday in London, Jack had taken Elizabeth to the Lyons Corner House in the high street. Not once had they thought to ask her.

  Nearly an hour later, Jack and Elizabeth flung open the kitchen door and erupted into the room in a flurry of noise, treading wet boot prints across Sadie’s clean floor. She frowned but said nothing; she didn’t want to be a scold on her daughter’s first day home.

  ‘Well, sit down. It’s all ready.’

  Sadie lit the candles on the kitchen table and the room basked in the flickering glow. She had wanted everything to be perfect tonight but she was simmering with resentment like the chicken bones in the pressure cooker. Elizabeth reached for the mashed potatoes and took a huge spoonful as Sadie watched, running a hand absent-mindedly over her own spreading middle. There was a thickening roll that never used to be there, which felt like it wasn’t really part of her. She remembered when she used to be able to eat like Elizabeth. She flung the vegetable dish on the table. For a moment rage bubbled inside her. It wasn’t fair – Elizabeth had everything: youth, the possibility of happiness, and Jack. Sadie watched as Jack gazed at his daughter, his eyes wet with love. Once, long ago, he’d looked at her like that. She slammed down the gravy jug.

  ‘The chicken’s dry. Everything’s spoilt.’

  Later that night Jack waited until his women had gone to bed, enjoying the few moments of stillness and watching the embers dying in the grate. He would like a fireplace like Sir William’s, decorated with mythical beasts, ho-ho birds and woolly-pigs. A little magic was a good thing.

  He hadn’t seen Curtis in several days. It was as though when the cold came he disappeared into hibernation, like the badgers and ferrets. Jack yawned – it was getting late. He stretched luxuriously and ambled into the kitchen to fetch a glass of milk before bed. He sloshed it into a mug, and as he wondered whether or not to warm it, he noticed Elizabeth’s exam results lying on the table and picked them up, smiling in anticipation – he presumed she had done well or she would not have left them out for him to peruse. Then he noticed the name on the envelope. This was not his Elizabeth – this was another girl. Elizabeth Margaret Rose.

  Jack placed the letter back on the table. This was what he wanted: an English daughter with an English name. Now she had the names of a queen, a princess and the most English of all flowers.

  She was not even the first to change her name – he reasoned. At nine days old she was named Ilse for her great-grandmother by the rabbi at the synagogue in Berlin. In spite of his wife’s railings Jack insisted that Ilse had her name altered to the English version, Elizabeth, when they reached the shore at Harwich. Sadie had been furious, names were important; the history of the Jews is carried forth through names: Jack son of Saul and Sadie daughter of Ruth. Jack had broken the chain. He objected; he had merely translated her name into English, in essence it remained the same. He did not
want his small daughter, so tiny and brimming with promise, to be crippled by a German-sounding name.

  Sitting in his warm kitchen fifteen years later, Jack reasoned, he had no right to be unhappy that Elizabeth had changed her own name once again. He was sad nonetheless: she no longer had his name. She was his daughter still, but not in name. Most fathers had to wait until their daughters were married to receive this blow, but for Jack it had come early and he felt it bitterly.

  He tiptoed upstairs to Elizabeth’s bedroom and pushed open the door. She was not sleeping, but curled up in her mother’s rocking chair, chewing her plaits and reading a magazine. Christmas carols played softly on the wireless. She did not hear him, and he watched the small figure, struck by the childishness of her pose. She was a girl-woman, and he felt his heart within him ache.

  ‘Well done. A good result, Elizabeth Rose.’

  He said her new name, testing it, trying it out in his mouth like a new taste. It sounded very fine. She looked at him sharply as though trying to read his thoughts.

  ‘It’s easier for other people to say, Daddy,’ she said, her green eyes appealing to him to agree, not to contradict her.

  ‘Sure, sure,’ he said nodding.

  He understood: she was tired of always being the Jew. She did not look like a Jew – only the name betrayed her and without it she was free. He remembered when she was at school. All the other girls had tall fathers who smoked cigars, understood cricket and kept a box at Covent Garden to listen to Wagner. He sighed inwardly; it was his own fault that she didn’t let him take her up to Cambridge. For a second he imagined the way she saw him: he pictured himself in a garish suit talking too loudly with the other elegant parents on neat college lawns. No wonder she forbade him from accompanying her.

  He sat down beside her and pretended to interest himself in her magazine. He had done this, he started her on this course to Englishness, and it was what he had wanted. It had driven him to write his list and made him come here, to the countryside veiled in ice to build his golf course, but for the first time in all his years in Britain, he felt a sense of loss.

  ‘I remember when we came here. We were in the East End, jumbled with all the other Jews. I thought it would be safer to have an English name so I considered calling myself Jack Rose-bloom for a while.’

  ‘Jack Rose-bloom,’ Elizabeth said the name slowly.

  ‘The thing sounds ridiculous in English.’ He took her warm hand and brushed it against his lips. ‘You’re quite right, my darling. Mr Rose does sound better. Mr Rose sounds like Mr Anyone. In fact,’ he added with a rueful smile, ‘I think it sounds rather English.’

  He flicked a stray cobweb from an oak beam.

  ‘I should add it to my list. Item one hundred and fifty-one: an Englishman must have an English name.’

  His heart filling with tears, Jack vanished into his study; it was time to write to Bobby Jones. He had not written a letter for several weeks, there had been no progress in the frost, but he missed the act of writing; it helped one get one’s thoughts in order. He opened the drawer and pulled out a piece of paper.

  Dear Mr Jones,

  The weather here has been terrible. I don’t suppose you in sunny Augusta know the bitter chill of a midwinter freeze. My bones creak, and I feel like Captain Scott, only with more tinned soup. My daughter has come home. I don’t know if you have children, Mr Jones, but they grow away from you so fast. We name the things we love. God created the world and then he named it. The world and its names appeared at the very same instant, ‘Let there be light, and there was light’ and so forth. God named us, in love, according to my wife who believes such things. A man names his child, and that moment she becomes more than a tiny crying creature, but a person. It is sad when a father is no longer allowed to give his child her name. What else have we to give?

  Your friend and humble servant,

  Jack Rose

  And with that, after hundreds of generations of Rosenblums, the name was severed, more cleanly than with a knife or axe. Jack Rose took half the name, made it English and anonymous, and another little piece of history disappeared.

  Jack tried his best not to think about the matter of the name but found that it troubled him. It haunted him even more than his money troubles or the cold weather halting progress on the golf course and he was relieved when distraction arrived a few days later in the form of Freida and Edgar Herzfeld. They were visiting second cousins in Bournemouth and decided to make a short detour to call on their good friends the Rosenblums.

  Edgar was partial to a game of golf. His fascination was not synonymous with a wish to be considered an Englishman, he merely liked the click of the ball and eagerly joined a Jewish Golf Club. He appreciated what he took to be Jack’s passion for golf, but could not understand why the man needed to build a course of his own. The Finchley Club was anti-Semitic, most certainly, the others had quotas, but why not join a Jewish club? Why go where you were not wanted? Edgar liked the Jewish Club, where they served excellent schnitzel, everyone was familiar and nothing needed to be explained.

  Jack was very fond of Edgar and was eager to extend membership to him as soon as the course officially opened. Jack would need to practise a good bit before they played together as he needed to be quite certain that he was a better golfer than Edgar, but in the meantime it was very pleasant to show his old friend his triumph. He walked him up to the fifth hole, where from the tee the entire Blackmore Vale could be glimpsed. It was damp and dark, the sky seeming to hover only a few feet above the muddy fields. Edgar was impressed. His friend had disappeared into the wilderness like Moses, and had performed a great feat.

  ‘I like it. I like it very much. How many members do you have?’

  Jack pondered this. ‘Well, there is Sir William Waegbert and Mr Henry Hoare and yourself. So three.’

  Edgar thought the position was charming, or would be in spring, but he was concerned at the steepness. He wanted to help Jack; he suspected that he was not an experienced golfer and could perhaps benefit from a little advice.

  ‘I’d dearly like to play a few holes. I think it’d be useful. Test them out.’

  Jack considered this. Trying the course sounded like it might be a good plan. If there were any changes, they could be made when work resumed. He did not want Edgar to know that, as yet, he had not played a round himself.

  ‘Yes. I should like a second opinion. But, I will walk round with you. I’d rather listen to your thoughts than be worrying about my own game.’

  Edgar was surprised, but he shrugged. ‘Well, if you really prefer. I’ll fetch my clubs.’

  Jack wanted to be the first to play, but he considered that since Edgar was only trying out a few holes and not the completed course, it did not really count at all. The sky turned black and then white as the snow fell to the earth in a silent avalanche of flakes.

  ‘Oh! This is too bad,’ exclaimed Edgar sadly returning with his clubs, ‘I’ll just have to come back in the spring.’

  Jack was perturbed. Now that Edgar had suggested the course ought to be played, he was not willing to wait. A touch of snow would not deter the man who had single-handedly built a golf course.

  ‘It’s not bad,’ said Jack, putting out his hand and looking optimistically at the sky.

  ‘Are you sure? I don’t want to damage your greens,’ said Edgar looking doubtfully at the looming clouds.

  ‘It’ll be fine but we should go right now.’

  He hoisted Edgar’s bag of clubs over his shoulder and led him back down towards the first hole. Flakes were fluttering to the ground in kaleidoscopic patterns, and landing softly on their woollen hats and scarves. Jack blinked to brush flecks of snow from his eyelashes. They traipsed to the first hole, Jack lugging the clubs through the battering wind. Edgar was losing his enthusiasm. He was very cold and a little hungry, and this no longer seemed like a good idea. They could barely see more than a few feet and the valley disappeared behind a solid bank of fog.

  ‘
Which club do you want?’ enquired Jack politely through muffled layers.

  ‘What does it matter? How the hell do I hit the ball?’

  Jack paused to consider; he was determined that Edgar should try the course. They said they were going to play a few holes and so, weather be damned, they were going to play. With the utmost care, he placed the bag on the ground and began to build up a little pile of snow. He stopped when it was a few inches high and popped the ball on the snow-tee.

  ‘Here.’

  Edgar selected his driver and got ready to take a swing. Jack admired his stance, he wasn’t Bobby Jones but he looked respectable enough as he lifted the club high above his shoulder, turning his hips, and then swung down to the ball. There was a click, and they watched the ball fly off into the mist.

  ‘Good shot,’ said Jack in awe.

  ‘How can you tell? We have no idea where it went.’

  ‘Well, we’d better look then.’

  Jack hoisted the bag back onto his shoulder and took off along the ridge. Edgar followed him, using the driver as a walking stick to stop him from slipping. The ground was now completely covered in gleaming snow and only the flags flickering through the haze indicated that this was a golf course at all.

  Bent against the wind, Jack battered through the falling flakes, pursuing the direction he thought the ball to have taken. The temperature was dropping, and his fingers were getting stiff and numb. He glanced around for Edgar, but could not see him.

  ‘Damn.’

  It was most inconvenient to lose him so close to home. He sighed; he wanted to search for the ball not the man. There was a sneeze behind him.

  ‘Ah, good, there you are. This way, Edgar.’

  Jack put out his hand and half dragged his friend down the hill towards the pond. The snow was falling quickly now, and gathered in drifts by their feet.

  ‘Come on, Jack, let’s go inside. It’s too cold. We’ll never find it. Looking for a white ball on white snow. It’s madness.’