The Finkler Question Read online

  The women were taken aback, when they first met, by how alike not just the boys but they were.

  ‘I could understand him going for a dark woman with large breasts and rounded thighs and a fiery Latin temperament,’ Josephine said, ‘but what could he possibly have thought he was seeing in you that he hadn’t already got from me? We’re both scrawny Anglo-Saxon cows.’

  She was unamused but tried for laughter – an exhalation of sour breath, like a gasp, that frilled her narrow lips.

  ‘That’s assuming you have his defections in the right chronological order,’ Janice replied. Her lips, too, were scalloped like the hem of a lace undergarment and seemed to move sideways rather than up and down.

  Neither was sure which of them was on the scene first, and the ages of the boys didn’t help, since Treslove was not exactly a clean finisher with women and sometimes visited an old girlfriend when he was with a new. But they both agreed he was a man who needed to be given his marching orders – ‘Chop, chop,’ in Janice words – and that they were equally lucky to be rid of him.

  Treslove had met Josephine at the BBC and been sorry for her. The best-looking women at the BBC were the Jewesses but he didn’t have the courage in those days to approach a Jewess. And it was partly because Josephine had neither the coloration nor the confidence of the BBC Jewesses that he felt sorry for her – though only partly. For all that she was, as she admitted, scrawny, she had the broad legs of a much larger woman which she drew attention to by wearing spidery patterned stockings. She was fond of lacy see-through blouses through which Treslove saw that she wore the brassiere of a woman twice her breast size together with at least one slip, something he believed was called a chemise, and something he recalled his mother referring to as a liberty bodice. Sitting opposite her at an awards ceremony – she was the recipient of a Sony Radio Academy Award for a programme she had made about the male menopause – Treslove, who was not the recipient of an award for anything, counted five straps on each of her shoulders. She blushed when she accepted her award – making a brief speech about unpacking a raft of ideas, which was how people at the BBC described having a thought – just as she blushed whenever Treslove accosted her in the corridor or the canteen, her skin remaining blotchy for hours afterwards. Treslove understood the shame that went with blushing and invited her to hide herself from the world by burying her face in his shoulder.

  ‘It’s humiliation that makes us human,’ he whispered into her dead hair.

  ‘Who’s humiliated?’

  He did the decent thing. ‘I am,’ he said.

  She had his baby, aggressively, without telling him. Other than for his neat, even features, he was the last man she would have wanted for a father of her child. Why in that case she wanted his child she didn’t know. Why did she want any child? Couldn’t face the abortion was as good an explanation as any. And there were many women she knew who were bringing up children on their own. It was in the air at the time – single-mother chic. She might have tried lesbianism out of similar motives, only she could no more go the final yard of that than have an abortion.

  Spite probably explained it as much as anything. She had Treslove’s baby to punish him.

  Treslove fell for Janice in anticipation of the raging Josephine’s rejection of him, unless it was the other way round. The women were right to notice their resemblance. All Treslove’s women resembled one another a bit, soliciting his pity by their neurasthenic paleness, by their being somehow out of time, not just in the dancing sense, though they were all bad dancers, but in the language and fashion sense as well, not a one of them knowing how to use language that was current or to put together two items of clothing that matched. It wasn’t that he didn’t notice and admire robust, fluent women who dressed well, it was simply that he didn’t see how he could make life better for them.

  Or they for him, given that a robust woman held out small promise of a premature expiry.

  Janice owned one pair of boots which she wore in all seasons, repairing them with Sellotape when they threatened to fall apart. Over the boots she wore a filmy gypsy skirt of no colour that Treslove could distinguish and over that a grey-and-blue cardigan the sleeves of which she wore long, as though to protect her fingertips from the cold. In all weathers, Janice’s extremities were cold, like those of an orphan child, as Treslove imagined, in a Victorian novel. She was not in the employ of the BBC, though it seemed to Treslove that she would have fitted in remarkably well with the BBC women he knew, and might even have cut a dash among them. An art historian who had written voluminously on the spiritual void in Malevich and Rothko, she appeared regularly on the sort of unremarked and barely funded arts programmes that Treslove worked through the night to produce. Her speciality was the absence of something in male artists, an absence which she was gentler on than was the fashion at the time. Treslove felt an erotic sorrow for her well up inside him the minute she walked shivering into his studio and put headphones on. They appeared to squeeze the last of the lifeblood from her temples.

  ‘If you think I’m going to let you fuck me on our first date,’ she said, letting him fuck her on their first date, ‘you’ve got another think coming.’

  Her explanation for that later was that what they’d been on wasn’t a date.

  So he asked her out on a date. She turned up wearing long Edwardian opera gloves which she’d bought at a jumble sale, and wouldn’t let him fuck her.

  ‘Then let’s go out not on a date,’ he said.

  She told him you couldn’t plan not being on a date, because then it was a date.

  ‘Let’s neither go on a date nor not go on a date,’ he suggested. ‘Let’s just fuck.’

  She slapped his face. ‘What kind of woman do you think I am?’ she said.

  One of the pearl buttons on the opera gloves cut Treslove’s cheek. The gloves were so dirty he feared septic poisoning.

  They stopped seeing each other after that, which meant he was free to fuck her.

  ‘Give it to me,’ she told him between gasps for air, as though reading words on the ceiling.

  He pitied her to his soul.

  But that didn’t stop him giving it to her.

  And perhaps she pitied him. Of Treslove’s girlfriends of this period Janice was possibly the only one who felt anything that could be described as affection for him, though not to the extent of enjoying his company. ‘You’re not a bad man exactly,’ she told him once. ‘I don’t mean you’re not bad-looking or not bad in bed, I mean you’re not malevolent. There’s something missing from you, but it isn’t goodness. I don’t think you wish anyone harm per se. Not even women.’ So it was possible she at least had his baby because she thought it would be not a bad thing to have. Per se.

  But she told him she wanted to bring the child up on her own, which he told her was all right with him, but why.

  ‘It would be just too hard going any other way,’ she said. ‘No offence intended.’

  ‘None taken,’ Treslove told her, deeply hurt yet relieved. He would miss her chilled extremities but not a baby.

  What annoyed the two women most when they made each other’s acquaintance and met each other’s sons – in whom they separately noted Treslove’s unremarkable, not to say nondescript handsomeness – was the discovery that they had both so far capitulated to Treslove’s influence as to call their children Rodolfo and Alfredo. In those days Treslove alternated playing records of La Bohème with records of La Traviata. Without knowing that they knew either opera both women in fact knew them backwards, particularly the love duets and the heartbreaking finales when Treslove as Rodolfo or Alfredo would call out their names, ‘Mimi!’ or ‘Violetta!’, sometimes confusing the operas, but always with the desperate plaintiveness of a man who believed that without them – Mimi or Violetta – his own life was over.

  ‘He taught me to hate those bastard operas,’ Josephine told Janice, ‘and I wouldn’t mind but I wasn’t ever even going to tell him about Alfredo, so why did I call him Alfredo?
Can you explain that to me?’

  ‘Well I know why I called Rodolfo Rodolfo. Paradoxical as it may sound, it was to get Julian out of my system. It was all so deathly, I thought that if I substituted a new life for all that dying we’d be the better for it.’

  ‘Oh God, I know what you mean. Do you think he was capable of being with a living woman?’

  ‘No. Nor a living child. That’s why I kept Rodolfo from him. I was frightened he’d play operas to him in his cot and fill his little head with nerve-worn women with cold hands.’

  ‘Me the same,’ Josephine said, thinking that, as the son of Janice, Rodolfo had no choice but to have his little head filled with nerve-worn women with cold hands.

  ‘They’re always the worst, the romantics, don’t you think?’

  ‘Absolutely. You want to swat them off you. Like leeches.’

  ‘Except that you can’t just swat a leech, can you? You have to burn them off.’

  ‘Yes. Or pour alcohol on them. But you know what I mean. They’re always telling you how desperately in love with you they are while looking for the next woman.’

  ‘Yes, they always have their cases packed, mentally.’

  ‘Exactly. Though I packed first.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Christ, and those operas! When I think of all that dying on the record player . . .’

  ‘I know. “Oh God, to die so young!” I don’t just hear it, I can smell the sickbeds. Still. To this day. I sometimes think he’s exerting his consumptive influence from afar.’

  ‘Puccini?’

  ‘No, Julian. But in fact it’s Verdi. Yours is Puccini.’

  ‘How does he do it?’

  ‘Puccini?’

  ‘No, Julian.’

  ‘Frisk me.’

  So once every two or three years they would meet, using the pretext of Alf’s or Ralph’s birthday, or some other anniversary they were able to concoct, such as their leaving Treslove, and never mind who left him first. And the custom continued even when the boys had grown up and left home.

  Tonight, in line with their current practice, they had avoided all mention of Treslove who occupied more of their conversational space than he merited at the best of times, but who had in addition become something of an embarrassment to them now that he was doing what he was doing for a living. He remained Alf’s and Ralph’s father, no matter how much water had flowed under the bridge, and they would have liked to be able to say that their sons’ father had done more with his life than become a celebrity double.

  But as they were gathering their coats, Josephine took Rodolfo, Janice’s boy, aside. ‘Heard from your papa recently?’ she asked. It appeared to be a question she was unable to ask her own son.

  He shook his head.

  ‘What about you?’ Janice asked Alfredo.

  ‘Well,’ said Alfredo, ‘it’s funny you should mention him . . .’

  And they had to ask the waiter if he minded their sitting down again.

  2

  ‘So who’s Judith?’

  Had Treslove’s legs given way under him, as they threatened to do, it was unlikely Libor Sevcik would have had the strength to pull him up.

  ‘Libor!’

  ‘Did I frighten you?’

  ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘I asked the wrong question. How come I frightened you?’

  Treslove made to look at his watch before remembering he no longer had a watch to look at. ‘It’s the dead of night, Libor,’ he said, as though reading from his empty wrist.

  ‘I don’t sleep,’ Libor told him. ‘You know I don’t sleep.’

  ‘I didn’t know you walked the streets.’

  ‘Well, I don’t as rule. Only if it’s bad. Tonight was bad. Last night too was bad. But I didn’t know you walked the streets either. Why didn’t you ring my bell, we could have strolled together?’

  ‘I’m not strolling.’

  ‘Who’s Judith?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. I don’t know any Judith.’

  ‘You called her name.’

  ‘Judith? You’re mistaken. I might have said Jesus. You gave me a shock.’

  ‘If you weren’t strolling and you weren’t expecting Judith, what were you doing – choosing a cello?’

  ‘I always look in this window.’

  ‘So do I. Malkie brought me here to get my fiddle valued. It’s one of our Stations of the Cross.’

  ‘You believe in the cross?’

  ‘No, but I believe in suffering.’

  Treslove touched his friend’s shoulder. Libor looked smaller tonight than he remembered him, as though the streets diminished him. Unless it was being without Malkie that did it.

  ‘And did they give you a good valuation on your fiddle?’ he asked. It was that or weep.

  ‘Not so good that it was worth parting with. But I promised Malkie I would no longer insist on our playing duets. My fiddling was the only part of me she didn’t adore, and she didn’t want there to be any part of me she didn’t adore.’

  ‘Were you really no good?’

  ‘I thought I was very good, but I wasn’t in Malkie’s class, despite my being related to Heifetz on my mother’s side.’

  ‘You’re related to Heifetz? Jesus!’

  ‘You mean Judith!’

  ‘You never told me you were related to Heifetz.’

  ‘You never asked.’

  ‘I didn’t know Heifetz was Czech.’

  ‘He wasn’t. He was Lithuanian. My mother’s family came originally from that porous Polish–Czech border area known as Suwalki. Every country has occupied it. The Red Army gave it to the Germans so that they could kill the Jews there. Then they took it back to kill any that were left. I’m Heifetz’s fourth or fifth cousin but my mother always made out we were half-brothers. She rang me from Prague when she read that Heifetz was playing at the Albert Hall and made me solemnly promise I would go backstage to introduce myself. I tried, but this is a long time ago, I didn’t have the connections then that I had later and I hadn’t yet learned how to manage without them. His flunkeys gave me a signed photograph and ordered me to leave. “So what did he say?” my mother asked me the next day. “He sent his love,” I told her. Sometimes it does no harm to lie. “And did he look well?” Marvellous. “And his playing?” Superb. “And he remembered everybody?” By name. To you he blew a kiss.’

  And standing there outside J. P. Guivier’s at eleven o’clock on a London night he made the kiss, the lugubrious Baltic kiss that Heifetz would have blown his mother had Libor only been able to get to him.

  Jews, Treslove thought, admiringly. Jews and music. Jews and families. Jews and their loyalties. (Finkler excepted.)

  ‘But you,’ Libor said, taking Treslove’s arm, ‘what really brings you to this window if it isn’t Judith? I haven’t heard from you for days. You don’t ring, you don’t write, you don’t knock. You tell me you’re too agitated to come out. And here you are a hundred yards from my door. You have, I hope, some explanation for this uncharacteristic behaviour.’

  And suddenly Treslove, who loved it when Libor linked his arm in the street, feeling it made a clever little wizened European Jew of him, knew he had to spill the beans.

  ‘Let’s find a cafe,’ he suggested.

  ‘No, let’s go back to my place,’ Libor said.

  ‘No, let’s find a cafe. We might see her.’

  ‘Her? Who’s her? This Judith woman?’

  Rather than tell him all at once, Treslove agreed to go home with Libor.

  It was Libor’s view that Treslove was overwrought – had been for some time – and probably needed a holiday. They could go away together to somewhere warm. Rimini, maybe. Or Palermo.

  ‘That’s what Sam said.’

  ‘That you and I should go to Rimini or that you and he should go to Rimini? Why don’t we all go?’

  ‘No, that I was overwrought. In fact, he thought I needed to see less of you both, not more. Too much death, was his diagnosis. Too many w
idowers in my life. And this guy’s a philosopher, don’t forget.’

  ‘Then do as he says. I’ll miss you, but take his advice. I have friends in Hollywood I could introduce you to. Or at least the great-great-grandchildren of friends.’

  ‘Why is it so difficult for people to believe that what happened, happened?’

  ‘Because women don’t mug men, that’s why. Me a woman might have had a shot at. Me you can blow over. But you – you’re still young and strong. That’s A. B, women don’t make a practice of attacking men in the street and calling them Jew, especially, C, when they’re not Jewish. C’s good. C clinches it.’

  ‘Well, that’s what she did and that’s what she said.’

  ‘That’s what you think she said.’

  Treslove settled down into the plush discomfort of Libor’s Biedermeier sofa.

  ‘Just what if?’ he asked, taking hold of the wooden arm, anxious not to put his hands on the fabric, so exquisitely taut was it.

  ‘What if what?’

  ‘What if she was right?’

  ‘That you’re . . . ?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you’re not.’

  ‘We think I’m not.’

  ‘And did you ever before think you were?’

  ‘No . . . Well, yes. I was a musical boy. I listened to operas and wanted to play the violin.’