TWO

1

‘What’s your favourite colour?’

‘Mozart.’

‘And your star sign?’

‘My eyesight?’

‘Star sign. Star.’

‘Oh, Jane Russell.’

So had begun Libor’s first date of his widowhood.

Date! That was some joke – he ninety, she not half that, maybe not a third of that. Date! But what other word was there?

She did not appear to recognise the name Jane Russell. Libor wondered where the problem lay – in the accent he had not quite lost or the hearing he had not quite kept. It was beyond his comprehension that Jane Russell could simply be forgotten.

‘R-u-s-s-e-l-l,’ he spelt out. ‘J-a-n-e. Beautiful, big . . .’ He did the thing men do, or used to do, weighing the fullness of a woman’s breasts in front of him, like a merchant dealing in sacks of flour.

The girl, the young woman, the child, looked away. She had no chest to speak of herself, Libor realised, and must therefore have been affronted by his mercantile gesture. Though if she’d had a chest she might have been more affronted still. The things you had to remember with a woman you hadn’t been married to for half a century! The feelings you had to take into account!

A great sadness overcame him. He wanted to be laughing with Malkie over it. ‘And then I . . .’

‘Libor – you didn’t!’

‘I did, I did.’

He saw her put her hand to her mouth – the rings he had bought her, the fullness of her lips, the shake of her black hair – and wanted her back or wanted it to be over. His date, his awkwardness, his sorrow, everything.

His date was called Emily. A nice name, he thought. Just a pity she worked for the World Service. In fact, the World Service was the reason friends had introduced them. Not to canoodle over the goulash and dumplings – Austro-Hungarian food was his idea: old world gluttony that would soak up any gaps in conversation – but to talk about the institution they had in common, maybe how it had changed since Libor had been there, maybe to discover she had worked with the children of whom Libor had known the parents.

‘Only if she’s not one of those smug leftists,’ Libor had said.

‘Libor!’

‘I can say it,’ he said. ‘I’m Czech. I’ve seen what leftists do. And they’re all smug leftists at the BBC. Especially the women. Jewish women the worst. It’s their preferred channel of apostasy. Half the girls Malkie grew up with disappeared into the BBC. They lost their sense of the ridiculous and she lost them.’

He could say ‘Jewish women the worst’, too. He was one of the allowed.

Fortunately, Emily wasn’t a Jewish leftist. Unfortunately she wasn’t anything else. Except depressed. Two years before, her boyfriend Hugh had killed himself. Thrown himself under a bus while she was waiting for him to collect her. At the Aldwych. That was the other reason friends had connected them – not, of course, with a view to anything romantic, but in the hope that they would briefly cheer each other up. But of the two – Emily and Hugh – Libor felt more of a connection to Hugh, dead under a bus.

‘What bands do you like?’ she asked him, after a longer dumpling-filled silence than she could bear.

Libor pondered the question.

The girl laughed, as at her own absurdity. She twirled a lifeless lock of hair around a finger that had an Elastoplast on it. ‘What bands did you used to like,’ she corrected herself, then blushed as though she knew the second question was more absurd than the first.

Libor turned his ear to her and nodded. ‘I’m not in principle keen on banning anything,’ he said.

She stared at him.

Oh, God, he remembered in time, she will want me to be against fox hunting and runways and animal experiments and electric light bulbs. But there was no point starting out – not that they were going anywhere – with a lie.

‘Four-wheel drives,’ he said. ‘Dropped aitches – mine are cultural – talk radio, socialism, trainers, Russia, but definitely not fur coats. If you’d seen Malkie in her chinchilla . . .’

She went on staring at him. He feared she was going to cry.

‘No, bands,’ she said at last. ‘Bands.’

Deciding against saying the Czech Philharmonic, Libor sighed and showed her his hands. The flesh, disfigured with liver spots, was loose enough for her to slide her fingers under. It would peel clean away, like the skin on a lightly roasted chicken. His knuckles were swollen, his fingernails yellow and bent over at the ends.

Then he ran his hands over his baldness and inclined his head. He had always been a balding man. Balding had suited him. But he was plucked clean by time now. The patina of extreme old age was on him. He wanted her to see her own reflection in his pate, measure all the time she had left in the dull mirror of his antiquity.

He could tell she couldn’t figure out what he was showing her. When he presented his bald head to Malkie she would polish it with her sleeve.

It used to excite her. Not just the head but the act of polishing it.

They had furnished their apartment in the style of Biedermeier. Libor’s taste not Malkie’s (though Malkie had Biedermeier blood in her veins), but she had humoured the aspiring European petit bourgeois in him. ‘Reminds me of our escritoire,’ she would tell him. ‘It responds in the same way to a good buffing.’

It amused him to be her furniture. ‘You can open my drawers whenever you like,’ he would say. And she would laugh and cuff him with her sleeve. At the end they had talked dirty to each other. It was their defence against pathos.

‘I’m sorry,’ he told the girl, folding his napkin. ‘This isn’t fair to you.’

He signalled to the waiter before remembering his manners. ‘You don’t want a dessert do you, Emily?’ he asked. He was pleased he could recall her name.

She shook her head.

He paid the bill.

She was as relieved as he was when they parted.

2

‘I could use the company but I can’t go through the pain of getting it,’ he told Treslove on the phone.

It was a week after they had dined together. Treslove hadn’t told Libor about the attack. Why worry him? Why make Libor afraid of his own neighbourhood?

Not that Libor was the one who needed protecting. Treslove marvelled at his courage – dressing himself up, going out on a date, making small talk. He pictured him in his David Niven outfit, fine white polo neck jumper worn under a blue blazer with faux military buttons. Most men Libor’s age wore lovat jackets, the colour of sick, and trousers that were too short for them. This had always bemused and worried Treslove. At a certain age men began to shrink, and yet it was precisely at that age that their trousers became too short for them. Explain that.

But not Libor. Or at least not Libor when he was got up to meet a friend, or a woman. He was still the Mittel European dandy. Only on the telephone did he sound his age. It was as though the telephone filtered out everything that wasn’t of the voice alone – the comedy, the bravado, the dancing hands. An old torn tissue-paper larynx was all that was left. Treslove knew to picture Libor in the flesh when he spoke to him on the phone, spruce in his polo neck, but the sound still depressed him. He heard a dead man speaking.

‘I bet it wasn’t as painful as you’re pretending,’ he said.

‘You weren’t there. On top of that it wasn’t decent.’

‘Why, what did you do?’

‘I mean proper.’

‘Why, what did you do?’

‘I mean it was wrong of me to agree to meet her. I was there under false pretences. I don’t want to be with another woman. I can’t look at another woman without making the comparison.’

When Malkie was alive Libor carried her photograph in his wallet. Now that she was gone, he had her on his mobile phone. While he rarely used his phone as a phone – he found it hard to read the keyboard – he consulted her image a hundred times a day, flipping and unflipping the lid in the middle of a conversation. A ghost that never left him, gifted by technology. Gifted by Finkler, to be precise, since he was the one who had set it up for him.

Libor had showed the screen to Treslove, Malkie not as she was at the end of her life, but as she had looked at the beginning of her time with Libor. Her eyes smiling and wicked, appreciative, adoring, and slightly blurred, as though seen through a mist – unless that was a mist clouding Treslove’s vision.

Treslove imagined Libor opening his phone and looking at Malkie under the table, even as his date asked him his star sign and his favourite band.

‘I bet the girl had a ball with you,’ Treslove said.

‘Trust me, she didn’t. I have sent her flowers to apologise.’

‘Libor, that will just make her think you want to go on.’

‘Ech, you English! You see a flower and you think you’ve been proposed to. Trust me, she won’t. I enclosed a handwritten note.’

‘You weren’t rude to her.’

‘Of course not. I just wanted her to see how shaky my handwriting was.’

‘She may have taken that as proof she excited you.’

‘She won’t have. I told her I was impotent.’

‘Did you have to be so personal?’

‘That was to stop it being personal. I didn’t say she had made me impotent.’

Treslove was embarrassed by potency talk. And not just because he’d recently been divested of his manliness by a woman. He had not been brought up, as Finkler men evidently were, to discuss matters of a sexual nature with someone with whom he was not having sex.

‘Anyway –’ he said.

But Libor didn’t detect his embarrassment. ‘I am not in fact impotent,’ he went on, ‘though I’m reminded of a time when I was. It was Malkie’s doing. Did I ever tell you she met Horowitz?’

Treslove wondered what was coming. ‘You didn’t,’ he said tentatively, not wanting to be thought to be leading Libor on.

‘Well, she did. Twice in fact. Once in London and once in New York. At Carnegie Hall. He invited her backstage. “Maestro”, she called him. “Thank you, Maestro,” she said and he kissed her hand. His own hands, she told me, were icy cold. I’ve always been jealous of that.’

‘His icy hands?’

‘No, her calling him Maestro. Do you think that’s strange?’

Treslove thought about it. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t. A man doesn’t want the woman he loves calling other men Maestro.’

‘But why not? He was a maestro. It’s funny. I wasn’t in competition with him. I’m no maestro. But for three months after I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t get it up. Couldn’t rise to the challenge.’

‘Yes, that is funny,’ Treslove said.

Sometimes even a Finkler as reverend and aged as Libor could make him feel like a Benedictine monk.

‘The power of words,’ Libor went on. ‘Maestro – she calls him Maestro and I might as well not have a pecker. But listen, do you want to go out somewhere to eat tonight?’

Twice in one week! It wasn’t that long ago that they hadn’t seen each other twice in a year. And even now that widowerhood had rebonded them they were not seeing each other twice in a month. Were things as bad as that for Libor?

‘I can’t,’ Treslove said. He was unable to tell his friend the truth: that the reason he couldn’t come out was that he had a black eye, maybe a broken nose and was still unsteady on his legs. ‘I have things I must do.’

‘What things?’ Nearing ninety, you could ask such questions.

‘Things, Libor.’

‘I know you. You never say “things” if you really have things to do. You always name them. Something’s the matter.’

‘You’re right, I don’t have things to do. And that’s what’s the matter.’

‘Then let’s go eat.’

‘Can’t face it, Libor. Sorry. I need to be alone.’

The reference was to the title of Libor’s most famous show-business book. An unofficial biography of Greta Garbo with whom Libor was once rumoured to have had an affair.

‘With Garbo?’ Libor exclaimed when Treslove once asked him whether it was true. ‘Impossible. She was gone sixty when I met her. And she looked German.’

‘So?’

‘So sixty was too old for me. Sixty is still too old for me.’

‘That’s not what I was querying. I was querying her looking German.’

‘Julian, I stared deep into her eyes. As I’m staring into yours now. Trust me – they were the eyes of a Teuton. It was like looking into the wastes of the frozen North.’

‘Libor, you come from a cold place yourself.’

‘Prague is hot. Only the pavements and the Vltava are cold.’

‘Even so, I don’t see why that should have been a problem. Come on – Greta Garbo!’

‘Only a problem had I been contemplating an affair with her. Or she with me.’

‘You absolutely could not contemplate having an affair with someone who looked German?’

‘I could contemplate it. I couldn’t do it.’

‘Not even Marlene Dietrich?’

‘Especially not her.’

‘Why not?’

Libor had hesitated, scrutinising his old pupil’s face. ‘Some things you don’t do,’ he said. ‘And besides, I was in love with Malkie.’

Treslove had made a mental note. Some things you don’t do. Would he ever get to the bottom of the things Finklers did and didn’t do? Such conversational indelicacy one moment, such scrupulousness as to the ethno-erotic niceties the next.

Over the phone, this time, Libor ignored the allusion. ‘One day you will regret needing to be alone, Julian, when you have no choice.’

‘I regret it now.’

‘Then come out and play. It’s you or someone who wants to know my star sign.’

‘Libor, I want to know your star sign. Just not tonight.’

He felt guilty. You don’t refuse the desperation of a lonely impotent old man.

But he had his own impotence to nurse.

3

Finkler, who did not dream, had a dream.

He dreamed that he was punching his father in the stomach.

His mother screamed for him to stop. But his father only laughed and shouted, ‘Harder!’

‘Los the boy allein,’ he told his wife. Which was cod Yiddish for ‘Leave the boy alone’.

In life, when his father spoke to him in cod Yiddish, Finkler turned his back on him. Why his father, English university-educated and normally softly spoken – a man of learning and unshakeable religious conviction – had to make this spectacle of himself in his shop, throwing his hands around and yelling in a peasant tongue, Finkler couldn’t understand. Other people loved his father for these shows of Jewish excitability, but Finkler didn’t. He had to walk away.

But in the dream he didn’t walk away. In the dream he summoned all his strength and threw punch after punch into his father’s stomach.

What woke him was his father’s stomach opening. When Finkler saw the cancer swimming towards him in a sea of blood he could not go on dreaming.

 

He, too, was surprised when Libor rang. Like Treslove, he found it upsetting that Libor needed company twice in the same week. But he was able to be more accommodating than his friend. Perhaps because he too needed company twice in the same week.

‘Come over,’ he said. ‘I’ll order in Chinese.’

‘You speak Chinese now?’

‘Funny guy, Libor. Be here at eight.’

‘You sure you’re up for it?’

‘I’m a philosopher, I’m not sure about anything. But come. Just don’t bring the Sanhedrin with you.’

The Sanhedrin were the judges of the ancient land of Israel. Finkler wasn’t in the mood for Israyel talk. Not with Libor.

‘Not a word, I promise,’ Libor said. ‘On condition that none of your Nazi friends will be there to steal my chicken in black bean sauce. You will remember that I like chicken in black bean sauce?’

‘I don’t have Nazi friends, Libor.’

‘Whatever you call them.’

Finkler sighed. ‘There’ll be just the two of us. Come at eight. I’ll have chicken with cashew nuts.’

‘Black bean sauce.’

‘Whatever.’

He set two places, antique horn chopsticks for each of them. One of his last gifts to his wife, hitherto unused. It was risky but he risked it.

‘These are beautiful,’ Libor noted with tenderness, widower to widower.

‘It’s either part with them, which I can’t bear to do, or use them. There’s no point in making a mausoleum of unused things. Tyler would have said use them.’

‘Harder to do with dresses,’ Libor said.

Finkler laughed a laughless laugh.

‘What is it about a dress a woman never got to wear?’ Libor asked. ‘You’d think it would be those that carry the memory of her shape and warmth, that still have her perfume on them, that you couldn’t bear to touch. But the unworn ones are harder.’

‘Well, isn’t it obvious?’ Finkler said. ‘When you look at a dress Malkie never wore you see her alive and unworn in it herself.’

Libor appeared unconvinced. ‘That feels too backward-looking to me.’

‘We’re allowed to look back.’

‘Oh, I know that. I do nothing else. Since Malkie went I feel as though my head has been put on backwards. It’s your explanation of the sadness of unused things I find too backward-looking. When I see an unworn dress, and Malkie had so many – saving them up for special occasions that never came, some with their labels still on as though she might yet take them back to the store – I see the future time that was stolen from her. I look forwards into the life she didn’t have, the Malkie she didn’t get to be, not the Malkie she was.’

Finkler listened. Malkie was eighty when she died. How much more life could Libor imagine for her? Tyler never made it to fifty. So why couldn’t he feel what Libor felt? Though convinced he was gifted with an unenvious nature – what, when all was said and done, did he have to envy? – he was envious nonetheless, not of the longer life Malkie enjoyed, but of Libor’s range of grief. He could not, as Libor did, throw his sorrow into the future. He did not miss the Tyler who never got to be, only the Tyler who was.

He measured his husbandly worth against the older man’s. With mirth, it’s true, but also meaning it, Libor had always claimed to be the perfect husband, refusing the bed of some of the most beautiful women in Hollywood. ‘Not because I’m handsome did they want me, you understand, but because I made them laugh. The more beautiful the woman, the more she needs to laugh. That’s why Jewish guys have always done so well. But for me they were easy to resist. Because I had Malkie who was more beautiful than all of them. And who made me laugh.’

Who knew the truth of it?

Libor told how Marilyn Monroe, desperate for laughter but notoriously confused by international time zones – in Libor’s stories all beautiful women never knew what time it was – would ring him in the dead of night. Malkie always took the phone. It was on her side of the bed. ‘Marilyn for you,’ she would say in a bored, sleepy voice, waking her husband. Fucking Marilyn again.

She never doubted his fidelity because she was so secure in it. So did that fidelity – a fidelity with no pains or deprivations in it, Libor insisted, a fidelity filled to the brim with sensual delight – explain Libor’s exemption from remorse? Guilt had become Finkler’s medium when he thought about his wife, and guilt existed only in the past. Guilt-free, assuming he told the truth, Libor was able to sorrow over the future he and Malkie, though aged, didn’t have. At any age there is future one doesn’t have. Never enough life when you are happy, that was the thing. Never so much bliss that you can’t take a little more. Sadness for sadness, Finkler did not know which was the more estimable, if sadness can be esteemed – feeling cheated of more of the happiness you’d enjoyed, or never having had it in the first place. But it looked better to be Libor.

And that, maybe, because it was better to have been married to Malkie. Finkler tried to dismiss this thought but could not: it takes two to create fidelity, and while he wouldn’t go so far as to say Tyler was not worthy of his, she certainly hadn’t made it easy. Was this why he didn’t feel robbed of a future life with Tyler? Because he couldn’t be sure he had one to look forward to? And whose fault was that?

‘Do you ever wonder,’ he mused as they ate, ‘whether you’re doing it all right?’

‘Grieving?’

‘No. Well, yes, but not just grieving. Everything. Do you ever wake in the morning and ask yourself if you’ve lived the best life you could have lived? Not morally. Or not only morally. Just squeezed the most out of your opportunities.’

‘I’m surprised to hear that question from you, of all people,’ Libor said. ‘I remember you as a bright pupil, right enough. But there are many bright pupils and I would never have guessed you would achieve what you have.’

‘You’re telling me I have made a little go a long way.’

‘Not at all, not at all. But to my eye you have fulfilled yourself more than most men. You’re a household name –’

Finkler, pleased, waved the compliment away. Who cared about being a household name? The flush of satisfaction in his cheeks was probably not satisfaction at all, just embarrassment. Household name – for God’s sake. Household name! How many households, he wondered, were naming him this very moment? How many households did it take to make a household name?

‘Only think of Julian,’ Libor continued, ‘and how disappointing his life must appear to him.’

Finkler did as he was told and thought about it. The two spots of colour in his cheeks, previously the size of ten-pence pieces, grew into two blazing suns.

‘Yes, Julian. But then he has always been in waiting, hasn’t he? I never waited for anything. I took. I had the Jewish thing. Like you. I had to make it quick, while there was time. But that only means that what I am capable of doing I have done, whereas Julian, well, his time might yet come.’

‘And does that scare you?’

‘Scare me how?’

‘Scare you to think he might overhaul you in the end. You were close friends, after all. Close friends don’t get over their dread of being beaten in the final straight. It’s never over till it’s over with a friend.’

‘Who are you afraid might overtake you, Libor?’

‘Ah, with me it really is over. My rivals are all long dead.’

‘Well, Julian’s not exactly breathing down my neck, is he?’

Libor surveyed him narrowly, like an old red-eyed crow watching something easy to get its beak into.

‘He’s not now likely to make it as a household name, you mean? No. But there are other yardsticks of success.’

‘God, I don’t doubt that.’ He paused to ponder Libor’s words. Other yardsticks, other yardsticks . . . But couldn’t think of any.

Libor wondered if he’d gone too far. He remembered how touchy he had been about success at Finkler’s age. He decided to change the subject, re-examining the chopsticks Finkler had bought his wife. ‘These really are lovely,’ he said.

‘She talked about collecting them, but never did. She often discussed collecting things but never got round to it. What’s the point? she’d ask. I took that as a personal affront. That our life together wasn’t worth collecting for. Could she have known what was going to happen to her, do you think? Did she want it to happen to her?’

Libor looked away. He was suddenly sorry he had come. He couldn’t take another man’s wife-sorrows on top of his own. ‘We can’t know those things,’ he said. ‘We can know only what we feel. And since we’re the ones who are left, only our feelings matter. Better we discuss Isrrrrae.’ He put a fourth ‘r’ in the word to irritate his friend out of pathos.

‘Libor, you promised.’

‘Anti-Semites, then. Did I make a promise not to discuss your friends the anti-Semites?’

The comedic Jewish intonation was meant as a further irritant to Finkler. Libor knew that Finkler hated Jewishisms. Mauscheln, he called it, the hated secret language of the Jews, the Yiddishising that drove German Jews mad in the days when they thought the Germans would love them the more for playing down their Jewishness. The lost provincial over-expressiveness of his father.

‘I don’t have friends who are anti-Semites,’ Finkler said.

Libor screwed up his face until he resembled a medieval devil. All he lacked were the horns. ‘Yes, you do. The Jewish ones.’

‘Oh, here we go, here we go. Any Jew who isn’t your kind of Jew is an anti-Semite. It’s a nonsense, Libor, to talk of Jewish anti-Semites. It’s more than a nonsense, it’s a wickedness.’

‘Don’t get kochedik with me for speaking the truth. How can it be a nonsense when we invented anti-Semitism?’

‘I know how this goes, Libor. Out of our own self-hatred . . .’

‘You think there’s no such thing? What do you say to St Paul, itching with a Jewishness he couldn’t scratch away until he’d turned half the world against it?’

‘I say thank you, Paul, for widening the argument.’

‘You call that widening? Strait is the gate, remember.’

‘That’s Jesus, not Paul.’

‘That’s Jesus as reported by Jews already systematically Paulised. He couldn’t take us on in the flesh so he extolled the spirit. You’re doing the same in your own way. You’re ashamed of your Jewish flesh. Have rachmones on yourself. Just because you’re a Jew doesn’t mean you’re a monster.’

‘I don’t think I’m a monster. I don’t even think you’re a monster. I’m ashamed of Jewish, no, Israyeli actions–’

‘There you are then.’

‘It’s not peculiar to Jews to dislike what some Jews do.’

‘No, but it’s peculiar to Jews to be ashamed of it. It’s our shtick. Nobody does it better. We know the weak spots. We’ve been doing it so long we know exactly where to stick the sword.’

‘You admit then there are weak spots?’

And they were away.

 

After Libor left, Finkler went into the bedroom and opened his late wife’s wardrobe. He had not removed her clothes. There they hung, rail after rail of them, the narrative of their life together, her lean and hungry social sharpness, his pride in her appearance, the heads that turned when they entered a room, she like a weapon at his side.

He tried for sadness. Was there something she hadn’t worn, that would break his heart for the life she had not lived? He couldn’t find a thing. When Tyler bought a dress she wore it. Everything was for now. If she bought three dresses in a day she contrived to wear three dresses in a day. To garden in, if she had to. What was there to wait for?

He breathed in her aroma, then closed the wardrobe doors, lay down on her side of the bed and wept.

But the tears were not as he wanted them to be. They were not Libor’s tears. He couldn’t forget himself in them.

After ten minutes he rose, went to his computer and logged on to online poker. In poker he could do what he couldn’t do in grief – he could forget himself.

In winning he could forget himself even more.

4

In Treslove’s dream a young girl is running towards him. She bends, in her running, barely slowing down, to take off her shoes. She is a schoolgirl in school uniform, a pleated skirt, a white blouse, a blue jumper, an untied tie. Her shoes impede her. She bends in her running to take them off so that she can run faster, freer, in her grey school socks.

It is an analytic dream. In it, Treslove questions its meaning. The dream’s meaning and the reason he is dreaming it, but also the meaning of the thing itself. Why does the girl affect him as she does? Is it the girl’s vulnerability, or the very opposite, her strength and resolution? Does he worry for her feet, shoeless on the hard pavement? Is he curious about the reason for her hurry? Jealous perhaps because she is heedless of him and running to someone else? Does he want to be the object of her hurry?

He has dreamed this dream all his life and no longer knows if it has its origins in something he once saw. But it is as real to him as reality and he welcomes its recurrence, though he does not summon it before he goes to sleep and does not always remember it with clarity when he wakes. The debate as to its status takes place entirely within the dream. Sometimes, though, when he sees a schoolgirl running, or bending to tie or untie a shoelace, he has a dim recollection of knowing her from somewhere else.

It is possible he dreamed this dream the night he was mugged. His sleep was deep enough for him to have dreamed it twice.

 

He was a man who ordinarily woke to a sense of loss. He could not remember a single morning of his life when he had woken to a sense of possession. When there was nothing palpable he could reproach himself for having lost, he found the futility he needed in world affairs or sport. A plane had crashed – it didn’t matter where. An eminent and worthy person had been disgraced – it didn’t matter how. The English cricket team had been trounced – it didn’t matter by whom. Since he didn’t follow or give a fig for sport, it was nothing short of extraordinary that his abiding sense of underachievement should have found a way to associate itself with the national cricket team’s. He did the same with tennis, with footballers, with boxers, with snooker players even. When a fly and twitchy south Londoner called Jimmy White went into the final session of the World Snooker Championship seven frames ahead with eight to play and still managed to end the night a loser, Treslove retired to his bed a beaten man and woke broken-hearted. Did he care about snooker? No. Did he admire Jimmy White and want him to win? No. Yet in White’s humiliating capitulation to the gods of failure Treslove was somehow able to locate his own. Not impossibly, White himself passed the day following his immeasurable loss laughing and joking with friends, buying everyone he knew drinks, in far better spirits than Treslove did.

Strange, then, that the morning after his humiliating mugging Treslove had woken to an alien sensation of near-cheerfulness. Was this what had all along been missing from his life – a palpable loss to justify his hitherto groundless sensation of it, the theft of actual possessions as opposed to the constantly nagging consciousness of something having gone missing? An objective correlative, as T. S. Eliot called it in a stupid essay on Hamlet (Treslove had earned a B- upgraded to an A++ for his essay on T. S. Eliot’s), as though all Hamlet had ever needed to explain his feeling like a rogue and peasant slave was someone to divest him of his valuables.

He and Finkler had quoted Hamlet endlessly to each other at school. It was the only work of literature they had both liked at the same time. Finkler was not a literary man. Literature was insufficiently susceptible to rationality for his taste. And lacked practical application. But Hamlet worked for him. Not knowing that Finkler wanted to kill his father, Treslove hadn’t understood why. He liked it himself, not because he wanted to kill his mother, but on account of Ophelia, the patron saint of watery women. Whatever their separate motivation, they entwined the play around their friendship. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Samuel, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ Treslove used to say when Finkler wouldn’t go to a party with him because he didn’t believe in getting pissed. ‘Come on, it’ll be a laugh.’ But Finkler, of course, was bound to tell him that he had of late, wherefore he knew not, lost all his mirth.

After which he usually changed his mind and went to the party.

Speaking for himself, all these years later, Treslove wasn’t sure he had any native mirth to regain. He hadn’t been amused for a long time. And he wasn’t exactly amused now. But without doubt he felt more purposeful this minute than he had in years. How this could be, he didn’t know. He would have expected himself to want to stay in bed and never rise again. Mugged by a woman! For a man whose life had been one absurd disgrace after another, this surely was the crowning ignominy. And yet it wasn’t.

And this despite the unpleasant physical after-effects of the attack. His knees and elbows smarted. There was nasty bruising around his eyes. It pained him to breathe through his nostrils. But there was air out there and he was eager to breathe it.

He got up and opened his curtains and then closed them again. There was nothing to see. He lived in a small flat in an area of London which people who couldn’t afford to live in Hampstead called Hampstead, but as it wasn’t Hampstead he had no view of the Heath. Finkler had Heath. Heath from every window. He – Finkler – had not the slightest interest in Heath but he had bought a house with a view of it from every window, just because he could. Treslove checked this near re-descent into consciousness of loss. A view of the Heath wasn’t everything. Tyler Finkler had enjoyed a different view of the Heath from every window and what good had any of them done her?

During breakfast there was a light nosebleed. He normally liked to take an early walk to the shops but he couldn’t risk being seen by someone he knew. Nosebleeding – like grief, as Treslove recalled Libor saying – is something you do in the privacy of your own home.

He remembered what, in his humiliation and exhaustion, he had forgotten the night before – to cancel his credit cards and report his mobile phone lost. If the woman who had robbed him had been on his phone all night to Buenos Aires, or had flown to Buenos Aries on one of his cards and been on the phone all morning from there to London, he would already be insolvent. But strangely, nothing had been spent. Perhaps she was still deciding where to go. Unless theft was not her motive.

Had she wanted simply to complicate his life she couldn’t have chosen a more efficient method. He was on his house phone for the rest of the morning, waiting for real people who spoke a language he could understand to answer, having to prove he was who he said he was though why he would have been worrying about the loss of his cards if he wasn’t who he said he was he didn’t know. The loss of his mobile was more serious; it seemed he would have to have a new number just when he had finally got round to memorising the old one. Or maybe not. It depended on the plan he was on. He hadn’t known he was on a plan.

Yet not once did he turn tetchy or ask to speak to a supervisor. If further proof was needed that actual as opposed to imaginary loss had done wonders for his temper, this was it. Not once did he ask for someone’s name or threaten to get them sacked. Not once did he mention the ombudsman.

There was no mail for him. Though he had the emotional strength to open envelopes, as was not always the case with him in the morning, there was relief in there being nothing to open today. No mail meant no engagements, for he accepted engagements by no other means, no matter that they came directly from his agents. Agree by phone to show up God knows where looking like God knows whom and there was a fair chance it would be a wild goose chase. Only actual mail meant actual business. And about actual business he was conscientiously professional, never refusing a gig on the superstitious assumption that the first gig he refused would be his last. There were plenty of lookalikes out there clamouring for work. London was choked with other people’s doubles. Everyone looked like someone else. Fall out of sight and you’d soon be out of mind. As at the BBC. But he’d have had to refuse today given how he looked. Unless he was asked to turn up to someone’s party as Robert De Niro in Raging Bull.

Besides, he had things he needed some mental space to think about. Such as why he had been attacked. Not only to what end, if neither his credit cards nor his mobile phone had been used, but why him? There was an existential form this question could take: Why me, O Lord? And there was a practical one: Why me rather than somebody else?

Was it because he looked an easy victim? An inadequately put-together man with a modular degree who was sure to offer no resistance? A nobody in particular who just happened to be at the window of J. P. Guivier when the woman – deranged, drunk or drugged – just happened to be passing? A lookalike for a man against whom she had a grievance, whoever she was?

Or did she know him for himself and wreak a vengeance she had long been planning? Was there a woman out there who hated him that much?

Mentally, he went through the list. The disappointees, the wronged (he didn’t know how he had wronged them, only that they looked and felt and sounded wronged), the upset, the insulted, the abused (he didn’t know how he had abused them etc.), the discontented, the never satisfied or appeased, the unhappy. But then they had all been unhappy. Unhappy when he found them and unhappier when they left. So many unhappy women out there. Such a sea of female misery.

But none of it his doing, for Christ’s sake.

Had he ever raised a hand to a woman to explain why a woman should want to raise a hand to him? No. Not ever.

Well, once . . . nearly.

 

The fly incident.

They’d been away for a long romantic weekend, he and Joia – Joia whose voice had the quality of organza tearing and whose nervous system was visible through her skin, a tracery of fine blue lines like rivers on an atlas – three fretful days in Paris during which they hadn’t been able to find a single place to eat. In Paris! They’d passed and looked into restaurants, of course, on some occasions even taken a seat, but whichever he fancied, she didn’t – on nutritional or dietetic or humanitarian or simply feel-wrong grounds – and whichever she did, he didn’t, either because he couldn’t afford it or the waiter had insulted him or the menu made greater demands of his French than he could bear Joia – Hoia – to witness. For three days they walked the length and breadth of the greatest eating city on earth, squabbling, ashamed and famished, and then when they returned to Treslove’s flat in sullen silence they found upwards of ten thousand flies in their death throes – mouchoirs, no, mouches: how come he remembered that word alone of all the French he knew; what a pity mouches had not been on a single menu – a mass suicide of flies in its final stages, flies dying on the bed, on the windows and the windowsills, in the dressing-table drawers, in Joia’s shoes even. She had screamed in horror. It was possible he had screamed in horror too. But if he did, he stopped. And Joia, whose organza screams would have harrowed hell, did not. Treslove had seen enough films in which a man slapped a hysterical woman to bring her to her senses to know that that was how you brought a hysterical woman to her senses. But he only made as if to slap her.

The making as if to slap her – the frozen gesture of a slap – was as bad, though, as if he’d slapped her in earnest, and maybe even worse since it signalled intentionality rather than temporary loss of sanity of which hunger was a contributory cause.

He didn’t deny, to himself at least, that the sight of all those flies dying like . . . well, like flies – tombant commes des mouches – had a no less deranging effect on him than it had on Joia, and that his almost-slap was as much to calm his nerves as hers. But it is expected of a man to know what to do when the unforeseen happens, and his not knowing what to do counted as much against him as the almost-slap.

‘Hit the flies if you must hit someone,’ Joia cried, her voice quavering as though on a high wire of silk, ‘but don’t you ever, ever, ever, ever think of hitting me.’

For a moment it occurred to Treslove that there were more evers multiplying in his bedroom than there were flies dying.

He closed his eyes against the pain and when he opened them Joia was gone. He shut the door of his bedroom and went to sleep on his couch. The following day the flies were dead. Not a one twitched. He swept them up and filled the bin with them. No sooner had he finished than Joia’s brother came around to collect her things. ‘But not the shoes with the flies in,’ he told Treslove, as though Treslove was a man who out of malice put flies in women’s shoes. ‘Those my sister says you can keep to remember her by.’

Treslove remembered her all right, and knew it was not she who had attacked him. Joia’s bones could not have carried the weight of his assailant. Nor could her voice have ever dropped so low. Besides, he would have known if she was in the vicinity. He would have heard her nerves twanging blocks away.

And the contact would have destroyed his mind.

 

Then there was the face-painting incident.

Treslove remembered it only to forget it. He might have woken to an alien sensation of near-cheerfulness, but he wasn’t up to recalling the face-painting incident.

 

After four days of lying around in a fair bit of pain he rang his doctor. He had a private doctor – one of the perks of his having no wife or similar to put a strain on his finances – which meant he was able to get an appointment that afternoon instead of the following month by which time the pain would have subsided or he would be dead. He wound a scarf around his throat, pulled his trilby down over his eyes, and scurried down the lane. Twenty years before he had been a patient of Dr Gerald Lattimore’s father, Charles Lattimore, who had keeled over in his surgery just minutes after seeing Treslove. And more than twenty years before that Dr Gerald Lattimore’s grandfather, Dr James Lattimore, had been killed in a car crash while returning from delivering Treslove. Whenever Treslove visited Dr Gerald Lattimore he remembered Dr Charles Lattimore’s and Dr James Lattimore’s deaths and imagined that Gerald Lattimore must remember them, too.

Does he blame me? Treslove wondered. Or worse, does he dread my visits in case the same thing happens to him? Doctors read the genes the way fortune-tellers read the tea leaves; they believe in rational coincidence.

Whatever Dr Gerald Lattimore dreaded or remembered, he always handled Treslove more roughly than Treslove believed was necessary,

‘How painful is that?’ he asked pinching Treslove’s nose.

‘Bloody painful.’

‘I still think nothing’s broken. Take some paracetamol. What did you do?’

‘Walked into a tree.’

‘You’d be surprised how many of my patients walk into trees.’

‘I’m not in the slightest bit surprised. Hampstead’s full of trees.’

‘This isn’t Hampstead.’

‘And we’re all preoccupied these days. We don’t have the mental space to notice where we’re going.’

‘What’s preoccupying you?’

‘Everything. Life. Loss. Happiness.’

‘Do you want to see someone about it?’

‘I’m seeing you.’

‘Happiness isn’t my field. You depressed?’

‘Strangely not.’ Treslove looked up at Lattimore’s ceiling fan, a rickety contraption with thin blades which rattled and wheezed as it slowly turned. One day that’s going to come off and hit a patient, Treslove thought. Or a doctor. ‘God is good to me,’ he said, as though that was who he’d been looking at in the fan, ‘all things considered.’

‘Take your scarf off a minute,’ Lattimore said suddenly. ‘Let me see your neck.’

For a doctor, Lattimore was, much like his fan, insubtantially put together. Treslove remembered his father and imagined his grandfather as men of bulk and authority. The third Dr Lattimore looked too young to have completed his studies. His wrists were as narrow as a girl’s. And the skin between his fingers pink, as though the air had not got to him yet. But Treslove still did as he was told.

‘And did the tree also make those marks on your neck?’ the doctor asked him.

‘OK, a woman scratched me.’

‘Those don’t look like scratches.’

‘OK, a woman manhandled me.’

‘A woman manhandled you! What did you do to her?’

‘You mean did I manhandle her back? Of course not.’

‘No, what did you do to make her manhandle you?’

Culpability.

From before Treslove could remember, first the first Dr Lattimore, by implication, and second the second Dr Lattimore, by looks and stern words, had punished him with culpability. It didn’t matter what ailment he turned up with – tonsillitis, shortness of breath, low blood pressure, high cholesterol – it was always somehow Treslove’s fault; simply being born, Treslove’s fault. And now a suspected fractured nose. Also his fault.

‘I am innocent of any responsibility for this,’ he said, sitting down again and hanging his head, as though to suggest a beaten dog. ‘I was mugged. Unusual, I know, for a grown man to be beaten up and then to have his pockets emptied by a woman. But I was. I’d say it’s my age.’ He thought twice about what he said next but he said it anyway. ‘You might not know that your grandfather delivered me. I have been in the hands of Lattimores from the beginning. It might be time now for a third-generation Lattimore to recommend me sheltered accommodation.’

‘I don’t want to disabuse you but if you think you’ll be safe in sheltered accommodation you’re mistaken. There are women there who’d rob you as soon as look at you.’

‘What about an old folks’ home?’

‘The same, I’m afraid.’

‘Do I look that soft a target?’

Lattimore looked him up and down. The answer was clearly yes. But he found a tactful way of putting it. ‘It’s not about you,’ he said, ‘it’s about the women. They’re getting stronger by the day. That’s medical progress for you. I have patients in their eighties I wouldn’t want to tangle with. I’d say you’re safer out in the world where at least you can run.’

‘I doubt it. The word must be out by now. And they’ll be able to smell the fear on me anyway. Every woman mugger in London. Even some who have never before given a thought to armed robbery.’

‘You sound cheerful about the prospect.’

‘I’m not. I’m just trying not to let it get me down.’

‘Very sensible. I hope they’ve caught this one at least.’

‘Who? The police? I didn’t notify the police.’

‘Don’t you think you should have?’

‘So that they can ask me what I did to provoke her? No. They’ll accuse me of propositioning or abusing her. Or they’ll warn me against going out at night on my own. Either way they’ll end up laughing. It’s thought to be amusing – a man copping a broken nose from a woman. It’s the stuff of seaside cartoons.’

‘It’s not broken. And I’m not laughing.’

‘You are. Inside you are.’

‘Well, I hope you are, inside, as well. Best medicine, you know.’

And strangely, Treslove was. Laughing inside.

But he wasn’t expecting it to last.

And he wasn’t convinced his nose wasn’t broken.

5

There was something else Treslove had wanted to bring up, because he needed to bring it up with somebody, but in the laughter had thought better of it. And Lattimore, he decided, wasn’t the man for it either. Wrong type. Wrong build. Wrong persuasion.

What the woman had said to him.

Treslove wasn’t exactly on secure ground about this, even with himself. Maybe he had only imagined that she had called him what she’d called him. Maybe she had, after all, only asked him for his jewels, referring possibly, and in a spirit of violently affronted ribaldry, to his family jewels. I’ll have your manhood, she could have been saying. I’ll have your balls. Which indeed she had.

Then again, why not not just leave it at her identifying him, for her own private satisfaction, as ‘You Jules?’

Trouble was – how did she know his name? And why did she want, of all people’s balls, his balls?

None of it made any sense.

Unless she knew him. But he’d been through this. Other than Joia (and Joia was ruled out), and Joanna whose face he’d painted (and Joanna was ruled out because Treslove wouldn’t allow himself to think of her), what woman who knew him would want to attack him? What bodily as opposed to psychic harm had he ever done a woman?

No matter how often often he revolved it in his mind, he came out at the same place. No to jewels, no to jewel, no to Jules, no to Jule, and yes to Ju.

You Ju . . .

A solution that created more mysteries than it cleared up. For if the woman wasn’t known to him, or he to her, what was she doing making such a mistake as to his – he was damned if he knew what to call it – his ethnicity, his belief system (he would have said his faith but Finkler was a Finkler and Finkler had no faith)? His spiritual physiognomy, then.

You Ju.

Julian Treslove – a Ju?

Was it simply a case, therefore, of mistaken identity? Could she, in confusion, have followed him from Libor’s, where she’d been waiting for Sam Finkler, not him? He looked nothing like Sam Finkler – indeed, Sam Finkler was one of the few people he didn’t look like – but if she was simply obeying orders or carrying out a contract, she might not have been adequately apprised of the appearance of the person she’d been hired to get.

And in the confusion he had not had the presence of mind to say, ‘Me no Ju, Finkler he Ju.’

But then who would be out to get Sam Finkler? Who other than Julian Treslove, that is? He was a harmless, if wealthy and voluble, philosopher. People liked him. They read his books. They watched his television programmes. He had sought and earned their love. There were some troubles with fellow-Finklers he gathered, especially of the sort who, like Libor, called Israel Isrrrae, but no fellow Finkler, let him be the most Zionistical of Zionists, would surely attack him and abuse him on the grounds of their common ancestry.

And why a woman? Unless it was a woman Finkler had hurt personally – there were certainly a number of those – but a woman Finkler had hurt personally would surely know the difference between Finkler and Treslove up close. And she had got up very close.

He had smelt her body odour. She must have smelt his. And he and Finkler . . . well . . .

None of it made the slightest sense.

And here was something else that made not the slightest sense, except that it made, if anything, only too much. What if the woman hadn’t been addressing him by his name – You or You’re Jules . . . You Jule . . . You Ju – but had been apprising him of hers – not You’re or Your Jules, but Your Juno, Your Judith, or Your June? His, in the sense that a Spanish fortune-teller with a Halesowen accent had once promised him a Juno or a Judith or a June. And warned him of danger into the bargain.

He didn’t, of course, believe in fortune-telling. He doubted he would even have remembered the fortune-teller had he not fallen in love with her. Treslove never forgot a woman he fell in love with. He never forgot being made a fool of either, not least as the one often followed hard upon the other. And then there was Sam’s smart-arsed D’Jew know Jewno joke, designed to show him that when it came to lingusitic virtuosity a non-Finkler didn’t hold a candle to a Finkler. D’Jew know Jewno was as a scar that had never healed.

But what he remembered aside, the only way a fortune-teller could have known the name of the woman who would mug him thirty years later was by her being the woman who would mug him thirty years later, and what likelihood was there of that? Nonsense, all of it. But the idea of something foreordained can shake the soul of the most rational of men, and Treslove was not the most rational of men.

None of it might have had meaning, but then again all of it might have had meaning, even if it was only the meaning of extreme coincidence. She could have been calling him You Jules or You Ju or whoever and telling him that she was his Judith or whoever. Jules and Judith Treslove – Hules and Hudith Treslove – why the fuck not?

Knocked him senseless for his credit card and phone and then used neither. Therefore knocked him senseless for himself.

No, none of it made the slightest sense.

But the conundrum added to his unexpected (all things considered) breeziness. Had he been more familiar with the state he might have gone further and declared himself – to use the word that had pissed off the woman who had fucked him in her Birkenstocks (for her, too, he had never forgotten) – exhilarated.

Like a man on the edge of a discovery.

 

For the same reason that he didn’t tell the police, Treslove didn’t tell either of his sons.

In their case they would not even have bothered to ask what he had done to provoke the woman. Though the sons of different mothers they were similar in their view of him and took his provocativeness for granted. This being what you get as a father when you walk out on your children’s mothers.

In fact, Treslove hadn’t walked out on anyone, if by ‘walking out’ some callous act of desertion was implied. He lacked the resolution, call it the independence of soul, for that. Either he drifted away, as a matter of tact – for Treslove knew when he wasn’t wanted – or women deserted him, whether on account of flies, or for another man, or simply for a life which, however lonely, was preferable to one more hour with him.

He bored them into hating him, he knew that. Though he had promised no woman an exciting life when he met her, he gave the impression of glamour and sophistication, of being unlike other men, of being deep and curious – an arts producer, for a while, an assistant director of festivals, and even when he was merely driving a milk float or selling shoes, artistic by temperament – all of which combined to make women think they had been assured an adventure, of the mind at least. In their disappointment, they took his devotion to them to be a sort of entrapment; they talked about dolls’ houses and women’s prisons, they called him a jailer, a collector, a sentimental psychopath – well, maybe he was a sentimental psychopath, but that should have been for him to say, not them – a stifler of dreams, a suffocator of hopes, a bloodsucker.

As a man who loved women to death, Treslove didn’t see how he could also be a stifler of their dreams. Prior to his leaving the BBC, Treslove had asked one of his presenters – a woman who dressed in a red beret and fishnet stockings, like a pantomime French spy – to marry him. In some corner of himself he saw it as a favour. Who else was ever going to ask Jocelyn for her hand? But he was in love with her too. A woman’s inability to be stylish no matter how hard she tried always moved Julian Treslove. Which meant that he was moved by most of the women he worked near in the BBC. Beneath their painfully frenetic striving to dress new wave or challengingly out of vogue – nouvelle vague, or ancienne vogue – he saw a grubby slip-strap spinsterliness leading into an interminable old age and then into a cold and unvisited grave. So ‘Marry me,’ he said, out of the kindness of his heart.

They were eating a late, late Indian meal after a late, late recording. They were the only people in the restaurant, the chef had gone home and the waiter was hovering.

Perhaps the hour and the surroundings gave his proposal a desper-ation – a desperation for them both – he didn’t intend. Perhaps he shouldn’t have made it sound quite so much like a favour.

‘Marry you, you old ghoul!’ Jocelyn told him, laughing under her French beret, her matching red lips twisted into a grimace. ‘I’d die in your bed.’

‘You’ll die out of it,’ Treslove said, hurt and enraged by the violence of the rejection. But meaning what he said. Where else was Jocelyn going to get a better offer?

‘There you are,’ she snorted, pointing as at some ectoplasmic manifestation of Treslove’s true nature. ‘That’s the ghoulishness I was talking about.’

Afterwards, on a late-night bus, she patted his hand and said she hadn’t meant to be unkind. She didn’t think of him in that way, that was all.

‘In what way?’ Treslove asked.

‘As anything other than a friend.’

‘Well find another friend,’ he told her. Which – yes, yes, he knew – only proved her point a second time.

So where would be the sense in looking for sympathy from his sons, both of whom were the sons of women who would have said about Treslove exactly what Jocelyn said?

And as for bringing up any of the you Ju me Judith business, he’d have died first.

They were in their early twenties and not marrying men themselves. Not marrying men by temperament, that is, whatever their age. Rodolfo, Ralph to his friends, ran a sandwich bar in the City – much in the spirit that his father had driven a milk float and replaced sash windows, Treslove surmised, and, he imagined, out of similar professional frustrations, though with added gender issues. His son had a pigtail and wore an apron to prepare the fillings. It was not discussed. What was Treslove going to say – ‘Stick to women, my son, and you’ll have the fine time I’ve had’? Good luck to him, he thought. But he understood so little of it he might have been talking about a Martian. Alfredo – Alf to his friends, though his friends were few and far between – played the piano in palm court hotels in Eastbourne, Torquay and Bath. Music had skipped a generation. What his father forbade, Treslove, from a distance, encouraged. But there was little joy for him in Alfredo’s musicality. The boy – the man now – played introvertedly, for nobody’s pleasure but his own. This made him ideally suited to playing during afternoon tea or dinner in large dining rooms where no one wanted to hear any music except occasionally for ‘Happy Birthday to You’, and not even that in places where the diners knew how sarcastically Alfredo played it.

Gender problems again? Treslove thought not. He had sired a man who could take women or leave them alone, that was all. Another Martian.

And anyway there was no history between them of Treslove talking about what concerned him. There were advantages in having sons he hadn’t brought up. He didn’t have to blame himself for what had become of them, for one. And he wasn’t the first person they came to when they were in trouble. But he sometimes missed the intimacy he imagined real fathers enjoying with their sons.

Finkler, for example, had two sons plus a daughter, all at one end or another of their university trajectories, campus kids like their father, and Treslove supposed they had got into a huddle when Tyler Finkler died and supported one another. Perhaps Finkler had been able to cry with his boys, maybe even cry into their necks. Treslove’s own father had cried into his neck, just once; the occasion was burnt into his brain, not fancifully, no, not fancifully – so hot had been his father’s tears, so desperate had been his grip on Treslove’s head, both hands clawing at his hair, so inconsolable his father’s grief, so loud the sorrow, that Treslove thought his brain would combust.

He wished no such terrible experience on his own sons. There was nowhere to go after it for Treslove and his father. They were fused from that moment and either had to go through what was left of their lives together melded in that fashion, like two drowning swimmers holding each other down in molten grief, or they had to look away and try not to share a moment of intimacy ever again. Without its ever being discussed, they chose the latter route.

But between weeping like a broken god into your children’s necks and roughly shaking them by their hands as a stranger might, there must, Treslove thought, be intermediate territory. He hadn’t found it. Rodolfo and Alfredo were his sons, they even sometimes remembered to call him Father, but any suggestion of intimacy terrified all three of them. There was some taboo on it, as on incest. Well, it was explicable and probably right. You can’t not bring your children up and then expect them to give you their shoulders to cry on.

He wasn’t sure, either, that he wanted to confide a moment of shame and weakness, let alone wild supposition and superstition, to them. Could it be that they admired him – their remote, handsome father who could be mistaken for Brad Pitt and brought home money for the privilege? He didn’t know. But on the off chance that they did, he wasn’t prepared to jeopardise that admiration by telling them he’d been rolled by a woman in the middle of town in what was, effectively, broad daylight. He didn’t have much of a grasp of family life but he guessed that a son doesn’t want to hear that about his father.

The good thing was that he only rarely spoke to them at the best of times, so they wouldn’t be attaching any significance to his silence. Whatever they knew about family life they knew that a father was someone from whom one rarely hears.

Instead, after giving himself time to mull it over – Treslove was not a precipitate man when it came to doing anything other than proposing marriage – he resolved to invite Finkler out for afternoon tea, a tradition that went back to their schooldays. Scones and jam on Haverstock Hill. Finkler owed him a show after failing to turn up the last time they’d arranged a meeting. Busy man, Finkler. Sam the man. And he owed Finkler a warning if somebody really was out to get him, preposterous as that sounded when he rehearsed saying it.

And besides, Finkler was a Finkler and Treslove was on Finkler business.

6

‘It’s possible somebody’s out to get you,’ he said, deciding to come right out with it, while pouring the tea.

For some reason he always poured when he was with Finkler. In over thirty years of taking tea together he could not remember a single occasion on which Finkler had either poured the tea or paid for it.

He didn’t mention this to Finkler. Couldn’t. Not without being accused of stereotyping him.

They were at Fortnum & Mason, which Treslove liked because it served old-fashioned rarebits and relishes, and Finkler liked because he could rely on being recognised there.

‘Out to get me? Out to get me critically? There’s nothing new in that. They’ve always all been out to get me.’

This was Finkler’s fantasy – that they’d all always been out to get him critically. In fact no one had been out to get him critically, except Treslove who didn’t count, and maybe the mugger who’d got Treslove instead. Though her motives were surely not of the artistic or philosophic sort.

‘I don’t mean out to get you in that way,’ Treslove said.

‘So in what way do you mean?’

‘Out to get you in the out to get you sense.’ He pointed an imaginary pistol at Finkler’s gingery temples. ‘You know –’

‘Out to kill me?’

‘No, not kill. Out to rough you up a bit. Out to steal your wallet and your watch. And I only said it’s possible.’

‘Oh, well, as long as you think it’s only possible. Anything’s possible, for God’s sake. What makes you think that this is?’

Treslove told him what had happened. Not the ignominious details. Just the bare bones. Strolling along in dark. Oblivious. Crack! Head into pane of Guivier’s. Wallet, watch and credit cards gone. All over before you could say –

‘Christ!’

‘Quite.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘And where do I come in?’

Self, self, self, Treslove thought. ‘And it’s possible she had followed me from Libor’s.’

‘Hang on. She? What makes you so sure it was a she?’

‘I think I know the difference between a she and a he.’

‘In the dark? With your nose up against a windowpane?’

‘Sam, you know when a woman’s assaulting you.’

‘Why? How many times has a woman assaulted you?’

‘That’s not the point. Never. But you know it when it’s happening.’

‘You felt her up?’

‘Of course I didn’t feel her up. There wasn’t time to feel her up.’

‘Otherwise you would have?’

‘I have to tell you it didn’t cross my mind. It was too shocking for desire.’

‘So she didn’t feel you up?’

‘Sam, she mugged me. She emptied my pockets.’

‘Was she armed?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Know of or knew of?’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘You could know now that she wasn’t though you thought then that she was.’

‘I don’t think that I thought then that she was. But I might have.’

‘You let an unarmed woman empty your pockets?’

‘I had no choice. I was afraid.’

‘Of a woman?’

‘Of the dark. Of the suddenness –’

‘Of a woman.’

‘OK, of a woman. But I didn’t know she was a woman at first.’

‘Did she speak?’

A waitress, bringing Finkler more hot water, interrupted Treslove’s answer. Finkler always asked for more hot water no matter how much hot water had already been brought. It was his way of asserting power, Treslove thought. No doubt Nietzsche, too, ordered more hot water than he needed.

‘That’s sweet of you,’ Finkler told the waitress, smiling up at her.

Did he want her to love him or be afraid of him? Treslove wondered. Finkler’s lazy imperiousness fascinated him. He had only ever wanted a woman to love him. Which might have been where he’d gone wrong.

‘So let me see if I’ve got this right,’ Finkler said, waiting for Treslove to pour the hot water into the teapot. ‘This woman, this unarmed woman, attacks you, and you think it was me she thought she was attacking, because it’s possible she followed you from Libor’s – who, incidentally, isn’t looking well, I thought.’

‘I thought he looked fine, all things considered. I had a sandwich with him the other day, as you were meant to. He looked fine then too. You worry me more. Are you getting out?’

‘I’ve seen him myself and he didn’t look fine to me. But what’s this “out” concept? What’s the virtue in out? Isn’t out where there are women waiting to attack me?’

‘You can’t live in your head.’

‘That’s good coming from you. I don’t live in my head. I play poker on the internet. That’s nowhere near my head.’

‘I suppose you win money.’

‘Of course. Last week I won three thousand pounds.’

‘Jesus!’

‘Yeah, Jesus. So you needn’t worry about me. But Libor is rubbing at the pain. He is holding on to Malkie so tight she’ll take him with her.’

‘That’s what he wants.’

‘Well, I know you find it touching but it’s sickly. He should get rid of that piano.’

‘And play poker on the Internet?’

‘Why not? A big win would cheer him up.’

‘What about a big loss? No one wins for ever – someone you’ve written a book about must have said that. Isn’t there a famous philosophic wager? Hume, was it?’

Finkler looked at him steadily. Don’t presume, the look seemed to say. Don’t presume on my apparent grieflessness. Just because I haven’t gone the Libor route of turning my life into a shrine doesn’t mean I’m callous. You don’t know what I feel.

Or Treslove may just have invented it.

‘I suspect you’re thinking of Pascal,’ Finkler said, finally. ‘Only he said the opposite. He said you might as well wager on God because that way, even if He doesn’t exist, you’ve nothing to lose. Whereas if you wager against God and He does exist . . .’

‘You’re in the shit.’

‘I wish I’d said that.’

‘You will, Finkler.’

Finkler smiled at the room. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘so there you are coming out of Libor’s place ever so slightly the worse for wear when this muggerette, mistaking you for me, follows you several hundred yards to where it’s actually lighter – which makes no sense – and duffs you up. What exactly about the incident links her to me? Or me to you? We don’t exactly look alike, Julian. You’re half my size, you’ve got twice as much hair –’

‘Three times as much hair.’

‘I’m in a car, you’re on foot . . . what would have led her to make that mistake?’

‘Search me . . . Because she had never seen either of us before?’

‘And saw you and thought he looks as though he’s got a fat wallet, and what happened happened. I still don’t know why you think she was after me.’

‘Maybe she knew you’d won three thousand pounds playing poker. Or maybe she was a fan. Maybe a Pascal reader. You know what fans are like.’

‘And maybe she wasn’t.’ Finkler called for more hot water.

‘Look,’ Treslove said, shifting in his chair, as though not wanting the whole of Fortnum & Mason to hear, ‘it was what she said.’

‘What did she say?’

‘Or at least what I think she said.’

Finkler opened wide his arms Finklerishly. Infinite patience beginning to run out, the gesture denoted. Finkler reminded Treslove of God when he did that. God despairing of His people from a mountain top. Treslove was envious. It was what God gave the Finklers as the mark of His covenant with them – the ability to shrug like Him. Something on which, as a non-Finkler, Treslove had missed out.

‘What she said or what you think she said – spit it out, Julian.’

So he spat it out. ‘You Jew. She said You Jew.’

‘You’ve made that up.’

‘Why would I make it up?’

‘Because you’re a bitter twisted man. I don’t know why you’d make it up. Because you were hearing your own thoughts. You’d just left me and Libor. You Jews, you were probably thinking. You fucking Jews. The sentence was in your mouth so you transferred it to hers.’

‘She didn’t say You fucking Jews. She said You Jew.’

‘You Jew?’

Now he heard it on someone else’s lips, Treslove couldn’t be sure he was sure. ‘I think.’

‘You think? What could she have said that sounded like You Jew?’

‘I’ve already been through that. You Jules, but then how would she know my name?’

‘It was on the credit cards she’d stolen from you – doh!’

‘Don’t doh me. You know I hate being dohed.’

Finkler patted his arm. ‘It was on the credit cards she’d stolen from you – no doh.’

‘My cards have my initials. J. J. Treslove. No reference to any Julian and certainly not to any Jules. Let’s call a spade a spade, Sam – she called me a Jew.’

‘And you think the only Jew in London she could have confused you for is me?’

‘We’d just been together.’

‘Coincidence. The woman is probably a serial anti-Semite. No doubt she calls everyone she robs a Jew. It’s a generic word among you Gentiles for anyone you don’t much care for. At school they called it Jewing (you probably called it Jewing yourself) – taking what’s not yours. It’s what you see when you see a Jew – a thief or a skinflint. Could be she was Jewing you back. I Jew You – could she have said that? I Jew You, in the spirit of tit for tat.’

‘She said You Jew.’

‘So she got it wrong. It was dark.’

‘It was light.’

‘You told me it was dark.’

‘I was setting the scene.’

‘Misleadingly.’

‘Poetically. It was dark in the sense of being late, and light in the sense of being lit by street lamps.’

‘Light enough for you patently not to be a Jew?’

‘As light as it is here. Do I look a Jew?’

Finkler laughed one of his big television laughs. Treslove knew for a fact that Finkler never laughed in reality – it had been one of Tyler’s complaints when she was alive that she had married a man who had no laughter in him – but on television, when he wanted to denote responsiveness, he roared. Treslove marvelled that a single one of Finkler’s however many hundreds of thousand viewers swallowed it.

‘Let’s ask the room,’ Finkler said. And for a terrible moment Treslove thought he just might. Hands up which of you think this man is, or could be mistaken for, a Jew. It would be a way of getting everyone who hadn’t already registered Finkler to notice he was there.

Treslove coloured and put his head down, thinking as he did so that it was precisely this diffidence that put the seal of non-Jewishness on him. Who had ever met a shy Jew?

‘So there you have it,’ he said when he at last found the courage to raise his head. ‘You tell me. What would Wittgenstein advise?’

‘That you get your head out of your arse. And out of mine and Libor’s. Look – you got mugged. It isn’t nice. And you were already in an emotional state. It’s probably not healthy, the three of us meeting the way we do. Not for you anyway. We have reason. We are in mourning. You aren’t. And if you are, you shouldn’t be. It’s fucking morbid, Julian. You can’t be us. You shouldn’t want to be us.’

‘I don’t want to be you.’

‘Somewhere you do. I don’t mean to be cruel but there has always been some part of us you have wanted.’

‘Us? Since when were you and Libor us?’

‘That’s an insensitive question. You know very well since when.Now that’s not enough for you. Now you want another part of us. Now you want to be a Jew.’

Treslove almost choked on his tea. ‘Who said I want to be a Jew?’

‘You did. What is all this about otherwise? Look, you’re not the only one. Lots of people want to be Jews.’

‘Well, you don’t.’

‘Don’t start that. You sound like Libor.’

‘Sam – Samuel – read my lips. I. Do. Not. Want. To. Be. A. Jew. OK? Nothing against them but I like being what I am.’

‘Do you remember saying how much you wished my father had been your father?’

‘I was fourteen at the time. And I liked the fact that he invited me to punch him in the stomach. I was frightened to touch my own father on the shoulder. But this had nothing to do with being Jewish.’

‘So what are you?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You said you like being what you are, so what are you?’

‘What am I?’ Treslove stared at the ceiling. It felt like a trick question.

‘Exactly. You don’t know what you are so you want to be a Jew. Next you’ll be wearing fringes and telling me you’ve volunteered to fly Israeli jets against Hamas. This, Julian, I repeat, is not healthy. Take a break. You should be on the town. “Out” as you call it. Get yourself a bird. Take her on holiday. Forget about the other stuff. Buy a new wallet and get on with your life. I promise you it wasn’t a woman who stole your old one, however much you wish it had been. And whoever it was still more certainly didn’t confuse you with me or call you a Jew.’

Treslove seemed almost crestfallen in the face of so much philosophic certainty.