THREE

1

‘Hi, Brad.’

The speaker was a strong-jawed woman in a waterfall of blonde curls and a limp Regency dress that showed her breasts off to impressive effect. This was the third time that evening that Treslove – on his first night back working as a lookalike – had been taken for Brad Pitt. In fact, he’d been hired to look like Colin Firth in the part of Mr Darcy. It was a lavish birthday party in a loft in Covent Garden for a fifty-year-old lady of means whose name really was Jane Austen, so who else could he have been hired to look like? Everyone was in costume. Treslove, in tight breeches, a white hero shirt and silk cravat, affected a sulky manner. How then he could be taken for Brad Pitt he didn’t know. Unless Brad Pitt had been in a Pride and Prejudice production he’d missed.

But then everyone was drunk and vague. And the woman who had accosted him was drunk, vague and American. Even before she opened her mouth Treslove had deduced all that from her demeanour. She looked too amazed by life to be English. Her curls were too curly. Her lips were too big. Her teeth too white and even, like one big arc of tooth with regular vertical markings. And her breasts had too much elevation and attack in them to be English. Had Jane Austen’s heroines had breasts like these they would not have worried about ending up without a husband.

‘Guess again,’ Treslove said, flushed from the encounter. She was not his kind of woman. She would too obviously outlive him to be his kind of woman, but he found her forwardness arousing. And he too was growing vague.

‘Dustin Hoffman,’ she said, inspecting his face. ‘No, I guess you’re too young for Dustin Hoffman. Adam Sandler? No, you’re too old. Oh, I know, Billy Crystal.’

He didn’t say Why would Billy Crystal be at a Jane Austen party?

She took him back to her hotel in the Haymarket. Her suggestion. She was lewd in the taxi, sliding her hand up into his hero shirt and down into his tight Mr Darcy breeches. Calling him Billy, which it occurred to her, as they swung past Eros, rhymed with willy. Strange how impure Americans could be, Treslove thought, for a people puritanical to their souls. Prim and pornographic all at once.

But he was in no position to be judgemental.

Gratitude and a sense of relief overwhelmed him. He was still in the game; he was still a player. In fact, he’d never been a player but he knew what he meant.

He slid his tongue behind her dazzling panorama of teeth, trying without success to distinguish one tooth from another. He had the same trouble with her breasts. They didn’t divide. They constituted a bosom, singular.

She was so perfect she needed only one of everything.

She was a television producer, over in London for a few days to discuss a joint venture with Channel 4. He was relieved it wasn’t the BBC. He wasn’t sure he could sleep with anyone with BBC connections. Not if he was to manage a decent erection for any length of time.

In the event he didn’t manage a decent erection for any length of time because she bounced up and down on him in a flurry of nipple and curl which embarrassed him into prematurity.

‘Wow!’ she said.

‘It’s the dress,’ he told her. ‘I shouldn’t have asked you to keep the dress on. Too many hot associations.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park.’

‘I can take it off.’

‘No. Keep it on and give me twenty minutes.’

They talked about their favourite Jane Austen characters. Kimberley – of course she was called Kimberley – liked Emma. That was who she was being. Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, rich, ‘And with her tits out,’ she laughed, putting them back in. Or, rather, Treslove thought, putting it back in.

Taking it back out again, he said he found some of Jane Austen’s heroines a touch effervescent for his taste – not Emma, of course not Emma – preferring Anne Elliot, no, loving, really loving Anne Elliot. Why? Not sure, but he thought something to do with her running out of time to be happy.

‘Drinking in the last-chance saloon,’ Kimberley said, showing she understood the nuances of Georgian England.

‘Yes, yes, something like that. It’s the idea of her faded beauty I love. Fading as you read.’

‘You love faded beauty!’

‘No, God no, not as a rule. I don’t mean in life.’

‘I should hope not.’

‘God no.’

‘I’m relieved to hear that.’

‘It’s the fairy-story quality,’ he said, pausing to graze purposefully on her breast. ‘Jane Austen waves her wand and conjures a happy ending at the eleventh hour, but in life it would have been a tragedy.’

She nodded, not listening. ‘And now time for you to wave your wand,’ she said, looking at her watch. She had given him exactly twenty minutes. She no more did approximations than she did tragedy.

‘Wow!’ she said again five minutes later.

It was the jolliest night of sex Treslove had ever had. A surprise to him because he didn’t do jolly. When he left her in the morning she handed him her card – in case he was ever in LA, but be careful to give her warning, her husband wouldn’t be that enthusiastic about finding Billy Crystal on the doorstep in his Regency breeches. She slapped his behind as he left.

Treslove felt like a prostitute.

 

So what about that prematurity? Treslove, in his street clothes, stopped for coffee in Piccadilly to think it through. Bounce had never done the business for Treslove. Bounce, if anything, had always been detrimental to business. So what, on this occasion, had? The dress undoubtedly had had something to do with it – Anne Elliot straddling him and shaking her head from side to side like a Swedish porn star. But the dress alone could not explain the alacrity of his appreciation, nor his repeating it at twenty-minute intervals, not for the entire night but for more of it than was gentlemanly to brag about. Which left only the mugging. He would not have sworn to this in a court of law but he had a feeling he’d been half thinking about the woman who had attacked him while Kimberley rose and swelled and wowed! above him. They were a similar build, he fancied. So was he thinking about her or seeing her? He couldn’t have sworn which of those either.

But there was a problem with this. The attack had certainly not stimulated him sexually at the time. Why would it have? He was not that kind of a man. A fractured nose was bloody painful, end of, as his sons said. Nor had it remotely stimulated him in the days following. And it wasn’t doing anything for him sitting thinking of it now. But something was. Recollection of the night before, naturally. It had been a night to be pleased with and proud of. It hadn’t only broken a long drought, it had been a one-night stand to rival the best of them and Treslove was not by nature a one-night-stand man. Yet still some further consciousness of excitation or erotic disturbance nagged away at him.

Then he got it. Billy Crystal. Kimberley had taken him for Brad Pitt initially, but when she’d looked more closely into his face she had seen someone else. Dustin Hoffman . . . Adam Sandler . . . Billy Crystal. He had stopped her there, but had she continued the list would in all likelihood, given where it was heading, have included David Schwimmer, Jerry Seinfeld, Jerry Springer, Ben Stiller, David Duchovny, Kevin Kline, Jeff Goldblum, Woody Allen, Groucho Fucking Marx . . . did he have to go on?

Finklers.

Fucking Finklers every one.

He had read somewhere that every actor in Hollywood was a Finkler by birth, whether or not they kept their Finkler names. And Kimberley – Kimberley for God’s sake; what was her name originally: Esther? – Kimberley had mistaken him for all of them.

By mistaken he didn’t mean – he couldn’t have meant; she couldn’t have meant – mistaken in appearance. Even to Kimberley’s blurred vision he could not have physically resembled Jerry Seinfeld or Jeff Goldblum. He was the wrong size. He was the wrong temperature. He was the wrong speed. The resemblance he bore to these men must, in that case, have been of another order. It must have been a matter of spirit and essence. Essentially he was like them. Spiritually he was like them.

He couldn’t have said whether taking him for a Finkler in essence pressed Kimberley’s button – no reason it should have done, if they were all Finklers where she came from – but what if it pressed his?

Two such misidentifications in two weeks. Never mind what Finkler himself thought. Finkler was possessive of his Finklerishness. ‘Ours is not a club you can just join,’ he had explained to Treslove in the days when he insisted on being called Samuel.

‘I wasn’t thinking of joining,’ Treslove had told him then.

‘No,’ Finkler had replied, already losing interest. ‘I never said you were.’

So Finkler was not what could be called an uninterested party.

Whereas two women without an axe to grind – two weeks, two women, two identical misidentifications!

Treslove bit his knuckles, ordered more coffee and allowed his life – his lying life, was it? – to pass before him.

2

Finkler had asked for it.

That was Tyler Finkler’s view at the time and it was Julian Treslove’s too. Sam had it coming.

Tyler Finkler had the better case. Her husband was fucking other women. Or if he wasn’t fucking other women he might as well have been fucking other women for the amount of attention he was showing her.

Treslove’s case was simply that Finkler had it coming because he was Finkler. But he also saw that a woman as beautiful as Tyler shouldn’t have to suffer.

Tyler Finkler. The late Tyler Finkler. Remembering her over a second coffee, Treslove sighed a deep sigh.

‘Sam’s on an all-consuming project,’ he had said at the time. ‘He’s an ambitious man. He was an ambitious boy.’

‘My husband was a boy!’

Treslove had smiled weakly. Finkler had not in fact been much of a boy but it didn’t feel right saying so to Finkler’s angry wife.

They were lying on Treslove’s bed in that suburb he insisted on calling Hampstead. They should not have been lying on Treslove’s bed in any suburb. They both knew that. But Finkler had asked for it.

Tyler had rung Treslove originally to enquire whether it was all right to come over and watch the first programme of her husband’s new series on Treslove’s television. ‘Of course,’ he had said, ‘but won’t you be watching it with Sam?’

‘Samuel is watching it with the crew, otherwise known as his mistress.’

Tyler was the only person who still called Sam Samuel. It gave her power over him, the power of someone who knew an important person before he became important. Sometimes she went further and called him Shmuelly to remind him of his origins when he appeared to be in danger of forgetting them.

‘Oh,’ Treslove said.

‘And the worst thing is that she isn’t even the fucking director. She’s just the production assistant.’

‘Ah,’ Treslove said, wondering if Tyler would have been watching it with Sam had Sam, more conventionally, been fucking the director. You never knew quite where you were with Finklers – men or women – when it came to matters that bore on humiliation and prestige. Non-Finklers judged all infidelities equally, but in his experience Finklers were prepared to make allowances if the third party happened to be someone important. Prince Philip, Bill Clinton, the Pope even. He hoped he wasn’t stereotyping them, thinking that.

‘Will you be bringing the children?’ Treslove asked.

‘The children? The children are away at school. They’ll soon be at university. At least  pretend to take an interest, Julian.’

‘I don’t do children,’ he explained. ‘I don’t even do my own.’

‘Well, you don’t have to worry. We won’t be doing any children ourselves. My body’s past all that.’

‘Oh,’ said Treslove.

This was the first inkling he had that he and his friend’s wife would not be watching much television that evening. ‘Ha,’ he said to himself, showering, as though he were the victim of whatever was going to happen, rather than an active partner in it. But there was never the remotest possibility that he would be able to resist Tyler, no matter that she was using him only to get her own back on her husband.

Though she wasn’t the sort of woman he normally fell for, he had fallen for her anyway the first time Sam had introduced her as his wife. He had not seen his friend for a while and did not know he was going out with anyone in particular, let alone that there had been a marriage. But that was Finkler’s way. He would lift the hem of his life infinitesimally, just enough to make Treslove feel intrigued and excluded, before lowering it again.

The newly married Mrs Finkler was not in fact beautiful, but she was as good as beautiful, dark and angular, with features on which a careless man could cut himself, and pitiless sarcastic eyes. Though there was little meat on her bones she was somehow able to suggest sumptuous occasions. Whenever Treslove met her she was dressed as for a state banquet, where she would eat little, talk with assurance, dance gracefully with whoever she had to, and win admiring glances from the whole room. She was the sort of woman a successful man needs. Competent, worldly, coolly elegant – so long as the man doesn’t forget her in his success. The word humid came to Treslove’s mind when he thought about Tyler Finkler. Which was surprising given that she was on the surface arid. But Treslove was imagining what she would be like below the surface, when he entered her dark womanly mysteriousness. She was somewhere he had never been and probably ought not to think of going. She was the eternal Finkler woman. Hence there never being the remotest possibility of his refusing her when she offered. He had to discover what it would be like to penetrate the moist dark womanly mysteriousness of a Finkleress.

They put the television on but didn’t watch a frame of Sam’s programme. ‘He’s such a liar,’ she said, stepping out of a dress she could have worn to see her husband get a knighthood. ‘Where’s his philosophy when I don’t have his dinner ready on time? Where’s his philosophy when he should be keeping his dick in his pants?’

Treslove said nothing. It was odd having his friend’s face on his television at the same time as he had his friend’s wife in his arms. Not that Tyler was ever actually in his arms. She liked to be made love to from a distance as though it wasn’t really happening. Much of the time she lay facing away from Treslove, working on his penis with her hand behind her back, as though fastening a complicated brassiere, or struggling with a jar that wouldn’t open, while she traduced her husband in running commentary. She preferred the light on and saw no sensual virtue in silence. Only when he entered her – briefly, because she told him she did not welcome extended intercourse – did Treslove find the warm dark Finkleress humidity he had anticipated. And it exceeded all his imaginings.

He lay on his back and felt the tears well in his eyes. He told her he loved her.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘You don’t even know me. That was Sam you were doing it to.’

He sat up. ‘It most certainly was not.’

‘I don’t mind. It suits me. We might even do it again. And if it turns you on to be doing your friend – doing him or doing him over, let’s not finesse here – it’s fine by me.’

Treslove propped himself up on his elbow to look at her but she was turned away from him again. He reached out to stroke her hair.

‘Don’t do that,’ she said.

‘What you don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is that this is the first time for me.’

‘The first time you’ve had sex?’ She didn’t actually sound all that surprised.

‘The first time’ – it sounded tasteless now he had to put it into words – ‘the first time . . . you know . . .’

‘The first time you’ve done the dirty on Samuel? I shouldn’t worry about that. He wouldn’t hesitate to do it to you. Probably already has. He sees it as a droit de philosophe. Being a thinker he thinks he has a right to fuck whoever takes his fancy.’

‘I didn’t mean that. I meant that you’re my first . . .’

He could hear his hesitancy irritating her. The bed chilled around her. ‘First what? Spit it out. Married woman? Mother? Wife of a television presenter? Woman without a degree?’

‘Don’t you have a degree?’

‘First what, Julian?’

He swallowed the word a couple of times but needed to hear himself say it. Saying it was almost as sweet in its unholiness as doing it. ‘Jew,’ he finally got out. But that wasn’t quite the word he was after either. ‘Jewess,’ he said, taking a long time to finish it, letting the heated hiss of all those ssss linger on his lips.

She turned round as though for the first time she needed to see what he looked like, her eyes dancing with mockery. ‘Jewess? You think I’m actually a Jewess?’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘That’s the nicest question you could have asked me. But where did you get the idea from that I’m the real deal?’

Treslove couldn’t think of what to say, there was so much. ‘Everything,’ was all he could come up with in the end. He remembered attending one of the Finkler boys’ bar mitzvahs but as he wasn’t sure which he remained silent on the subject.

‘Well, your everything is a nothing,’ she said.

He was bitterly upset. Not a Jewess, Tyler? Then what was that dark humidity he had entered?

She hung her bottom lip at him. (And that, wasn’t that Jewish?) ‘Do you honestly think,’ she went on, ‘that Samuel would have married someone Jewish?’

‘Well, I hadn’t thought he wouldn’t.’

‘Then how little you know him. It’s the Gentiles he’s out to conquer. Always has been. You must know that. He’s done Jewish. He was born Jewish. They can’t reject him. So why waste time on them? He’d have married me in a church had I asked him. He was the tiniest bit furious with me when I didn’t.’

‘So why didn’t you?’

She laughed. A dry rattle from a parched throat. ‘I’m another version of him, that’s why. We were each out to conquer the other’s universe. He wanted the goyim to love him. I wanted the Jews to love me. And I liked the idea of having Jewish children. I thought they’d do better at school. And boy, have they done better!’

(Her pride in them – wasn’t that Jewish as well?)

Treslove was perplexed. ‘Can you have Jewish children if you’re not Jewish yourself?’

‘Not in the eyes of the Orthodox. Not easily, anyway. But we had a liberal wedding. And I had to convert even for that. Two years I put in, learning how to run a Jewish home, how to be a Jewish mother. Ask me anything you need to know about Judaism and I can tell you. How to kosher a chicken, how to light the Shabbes candles, what to do in a mikva. Do you want me to tell you how a good Jewish woman knows her period is over? I am possessed of more Jewishkeit than all the echt Jewish women in Hampstead rolled together.’

Treslove absented himself, mentally rolling together all the echt Jewish women in Hampstead. But what he asked was, ‘What’s a mikva?’

‘A ritual bath. You go there to cleanse yourself for your Jewish husband who will die if he encounters a drop of your blood.’

‘Sam wanted you to do that?’

‘Not Samuel, me. Samuel couldn’t have given a monkey’s. He thought it was barbaric, worrying about menstrual blood which in point of fact he quite likes, the sicko. I went to the mikva for me. I found it calming. I’m the Jew of the two of us even if I was born a Catholic. I’m the Jewish princess you read about in the fairy stories, only I’m not Jewish. The irony being –’

‘That he’s out fucking shiksas?’

‘Too obvious. I’m still the shiksa to him. If he wants the forbidden he can get it at home. The irony is that he’s out fucking Jews. That lump of lard Ronit Kravitz, his production assistant. I wouldn’t put it past him to be converting her.’

‘I thought you said she’s already Jewish.’

‘Converting her to Christianity, you fool.’

Treslove fell silent. There was so much he didn’t understand. And so much to be upset about. He felt he’d been give a prize he had long coveted, only to have it snatched away from him again before he’d even found a place for it on his mantelpiece. Tyler Finkler, not a Finkler! Therefore the deep damp dark mysteriousness of a Finkler woman was still, strictly speaking – and this was a strict concept or it was nothing – unknown to him.

She began to dress. ‘I hope I haven’t disappointed you,’ she said.

‘Disappointed me? Hardly. Will you be coming for the second programme?’

‘You have a think about it.’

‘What’s there to think about?’

‘Oh, you know,’ she said.

She didn’t kiss him when she left.

But she popped her head back around his door. ‘A word from the wise. Just don’t let them catch you saying “Jewess”,’ she warned him, imitating the languorous snakiness he had imparted to the word. ‘They don’t like it.’

 

Always something they didn’t like.

But he did as she suggested, and had a think.

He thought about the betrayal of his friend and wondered why he wasn’t guiltier. Wondered whether following Finkler into his wife’s vagina was a pleasure in itself. Not the only pleasure, but a significant contribution to it. Wondered whether Finkler had in effect koshered his wife from the inside regardless of her origins, so that he, Treslove, could believe he had as good as had a Jewess – ess, ess, ess – (which word he mustn’t for some reason let them catch him saying) after all. Or not. And if not, did he have to go back to the very beginning of wondering what it would be like?

And was still wondering about these and similar mysteries of the religio-erotic life after Tyler Finkler’s tragic death.

3

Normally a heavy sleeper, Treslove began to lie awake night after night, revolving the attack in his mind.

What had happened? How would he tell it to the police, supposing that he was going to tell it to the police, which he wasn’t? He had spent the evening with two old friends, Libor Sevcik and Sam Finkler, both recently made widowers – no, officer, I am not myself married – discussing grief, music and the politics of the Middle East. He had left Libor’s apartment at about 11 p.m., spent a little time looking into the park, smelling foliage – do I always do that? no, only sometimes when I am upset – and then had ambled back past Broadcasting House, may its name be damned, may its foundations crumble – only joking – to a part of London where his father had owned a famous cigar shop – no, officer, I had not been drinking inordinately – when without any warning . . .

Without any warning, that was the shocking thing, without the slightest apprehension of danger or unease on his part, and he normally so finely attuned to hazard.

Unless . . .

Unless he had, after all, as he had turned into Mortimer Street, seen a figure lurking in the shadows on the opposite side of the road, seen it half emerge from a passageway, still in shadow, a large, looming, but possibly, very possibly, womanly figure . . .

In which case – the question was conditional: if he had seen him, it, her – why had he not minded himself more, why had he turned to Guivier’s window, presenting his defencelesss neck to whatever harm anyone, man or woman, might choose to do him . . .

Culpability.

Culpability again.

 

But did it matter what he’d seen or hadn’t seen?

For some reason it did. If he’d seen her and invited her to attack him – or at least permitted her to attack him – that surely explained, or part explained, what she had said. He knew it was not morally or intellectually acceptable to accuse Jews of inviting their own destruction, but was there a proneness to disaster in these people which the woman had recognised? Had he, in other words, played the Finkler?

And if he had, why had he?

One question always led to another with Treslove. Let’s say he had played the Finkler, and let’s say the woman had observed it – did that justify her attacking him?

Whatever explanation could be found for his actions, what pos-sible explanation could be found for hers? Was a man no longer free to play the Finkler when the fancy took him? Let’s say he had been standing staring into the window of J. P. Guivier looking like Horowitz, or Mahler, or Shylock, say, or Fagin, or Billy Crystal, or David Schwimmer, or Jerry Seinfeld, or Jerry Springer, or Ben Stiller, or David Duchovny, or Kevin Kline, or Jeff Goldblum, or Woody Allen, or Groucho Fucking Marx, was that any reason for her to attack him?

Was being a Finkler an open invitation to assault?

So far he had taken it personally – you do when someone calls you by your name, or something very like, and gets you to empty your pockets – but what if this was a random anti-Semitic attack that just happened to have gone wrong only in the sense that he wasn’t a Semite? How many more of these incidents were taking place? How many real Finklers were being attacked in the streets of the capital every night? Round the corner from the BBC, for Christ’s sake!

He wondered who to ask. Finkler himself was not the man to tell him. And he didn’t want to frighten Libor by asking him how many Jews got beaten up outside his door most evenings. Not expecting to find anything post-thirteenth-century Chelmno, he looked up ‘Anti-Semitic Incidents’ on the internet and was surprised to find upwards of a hundred pages. Not all of them round the corner from the BBC, it was true, but still far more in parts of the world that called themselves civilised than he would ever have imagined. One well-maintained site gave him the option to choose by country. He started from far away –

venezuela:

And read that in Caracas about 15 armed men had tied up a security guard and forced their way into a synagogue, defacing its administrative offices with anti-Semitic graffiti and throwing Torah scrolls to the ground in a rampage that lasted nearly five hours. Graffiti left at the scene included the phrases ‘Damn the Jews’, ‘Jews out’, ‘Israeli assassins’ and a picture of a devil.

The devil detail intrigued him. It meant that these fifteen men had not gone out on the razzle, found themselves outside a synagogue and forced their way in on a whim. For who goes out on a razzle with a picture of the devil in his pocket?

argentina:

And read that in Buenos Aires a crowd celebrating Israel’s anniversary was attacked by a gang of youths armed with clubs and knives. Three weeks earlier, on Holocaust Memorial Day – here we go, Holocaust, Holocaust – an ancient Jewish cemetery was defaced with swastikas.

canada:

Canada? Yes, Canada.

And read that in the course of Canada’s now annual Israeli Apartheid Week events held on campuses throughout the country security officers roughed up Jewish hecklers, one of them warning a Jewish student to ‘shut the fuck up or I’ll saw your head off ’.

Was that a home-grown Canadian deterrent, he wondered, sawing Jews’ heads off?

Then tried closer to home.

france:

And read that in Fontenay-sous-Bois a man wearing a Star of David necklace was stabbed in the head and neck.

In Nice, ‘Death to Jews’ was spray-painted on the walls of a primary school. So death to Jews of all ages.

In Bischheim, three Molotov cocktails were thrown at a synagogue.

In Creteil, two sixteen-year-old Jews were beaten in front of a kosher restaurant by a gang that shouted ‘Palestine will win, dirty Jews!’

germany:

What, they were still doing it in fucking Germany?

And didn’t bother to read what they were still doing in fucking Germany.

england:

England his England. And read that in Manchester a thirty-one-year-old Jew was beaten by several men who shouted ‘for Gaza’ as they attacked him, leaving him with a black eye and several bruises.

In Birmingham, a twelve-year-old schoolgirl fled a mob of children no older than she was chanting ‘Death to Jews’.

And in London, just around the corner from the BBC, a forty-nine-year-old blue-eyed Gentile with orderly features was robbed of his valuables and called a Ju.

He rang Finkler after all to say how nice it had been to see him and did he know that in Caracas and in Buenos Aires and in Toronto – yes, Toronto! – and in Fontenay-sous-Bois and in London, but Finkler stopped him there . . .

‘I’m not saying it makes pleasant listening,’ he said, ‘but it’s not exactly Kristallnacht, is it?’

 

An hour later, after thinking about it, Treslove rang again. ‘Kristallnacht didn’t happen out of nowhere,’ he said, though he had only a vague idea of what Kristallnacht did happen out of.

‘Ring me when a Jew gets murdered for being a Jew on Oxford Street,’ Finkler said.

4

Though it wasn’t Kristallnacht, the unprovoked attack on him for being a Jew had become in Treslove’s imagination little short of an atrocity. He admitted to himself that he was overexcited. The night with Kimberley, her misattribution of Jewish characteristics to him, as a consequence of which, he was bound to consider, he might just have had – at forty-nine! – the best sex of his life (well, at least they had both smiled during it), and the sense of history swirling around him, all made him an unreliable witness to his own life.

Did he any longer remember what actually had happened?

He decided to revisit the scene of the crime, re-run the evening’s events, not starting with dinner at Libor’s – he didn’t want to involve Libor, he had kept the whole thing from Libor, Libor had troubles enough – but at the gates to Regent’s Park. It had turned chillier in the weeks since the mugging, so he was not able to dress as he had on the night in question. Muffled up, he looked bulkier, but otherwise his assailant – Judith, as he now called her – had she too returned to the scene of the crime, would have recognised him.

He had no choice but to name her Judith. Something to do with  the Canadian security man threatening to saw the Jewish student’s head off. It was Judith who beheaded Holofernes. True, she was Jewish herself, but her action had a similiar whiff of vengeful Middle Eastern violence about it. Where Treslove came from – call it Hampstead, to save time – people left even their enemies’ heads on their shoulders.

To be on the safe side he had left his phone and his credit cards at home.

So what was he doing – inviting her to rough him up again? Come on, Judith, do your worst. Hoping she would rough him up again? (Only this time she would find him, forewarned and forearmed, a tougher proposition.) Or just wanting to confront her, the Jew-hater, eyeball to eyeball, and let fate decide the rest?

No to any one of those, but maybe yes, in an investigative way, to all of them.

Somewhere at the back of his disordered mind, too, was forming the resolution to apprehend her, if she so much as showed her face, and effect a citizen’s arrest.

He clung to the park gates and looked in, breathing the foliage. He could not be light-headed again to will, could not make himself innocent of a knowledge which now crowded out all other thoughts. But had he been innocent a fortnight earlier? Or had he been looking for trouble?

There’d been Finkler talk at Libor’s, he remembered that. He remembered the old sensation of exclusion, envying the men their animal warmth even as they’d argued routinely on the Finkler question of the hour, each of them saying ‘Oh, here we go’ every time the other spoke, as though mutual mistrust was stamped into Finklers like the name of a seaside resort into rock – Here we go, here we go – just as mutual love appeared to be. So he had their musk on him. Anyone who didn’t especially care for that particular smell would have detected it on him. He suddenly wondered whether it was a mistake not to call on Libor and share a glass of wine with him. Could he hope to reproduce the other evening without having had proximity at least to Libor first?

He doubled back on himself and rang the bell. No one answered. Libor was out, then, maybe on another date, making himself discuss star signs with a girl too young to have heard of Jane Russell. Unless he was lying up there collapsed across the Bechstein with an emptied bottle of aspirin on the keyboard and a piano-wire noose around his throat, as he, Treslove, would be, had Malkie been his wife and left him all alone in the world.

His eyes filled with tears, hearing the Schubert in his head. Why hadn’t his father let him play? What had he been afraid of in his son? Morbidity? Finkler’s word. What was so wrong with morbidity?

He trod his way gingerly past the dangers, spiritual and actual, of Broadcasting House and rounded Nash’s church again. He wasn’t sure he could remember exactly the route he had taken on the night of the assault, but knew he had dawdled among the wholesale clothes showrooms where his father’s cigar shop had been, so he tried up Riding House Street and then back down Mortimer Street towards J. P. Guivier, only he had to make sure he approached the violin shop from the right direction, which necessitated – he thought – returning the way he’d come and staying a little longer on Regent Street before cutting in again. Once off Regent Street he reminded himself to take more notice of shapes in doorways than was his customary practice. He also thought it a good idea to make himself appear more than usually vulnerable, though anyone who knew him would not have noticed any difference either in his gait or general air of agitation.

The streets were about as busy as they had been a fortnight earlier. The same hairdresser’s and dim sum restaurant were open for late business. The same newsagent’s was still undergoing renovation. But for the nip in the air the nights were identical. Treslove approached J. P. Guivier with his heart in his mouth. Foolish, he knew. The woman who attacked him must have better things to do than wait in the shadows on the off chance he’d return. And for what? She already had his only valuables.

But since none of it had added up then, there was no reason why it should add up now. What if she regretted what she had done and wanted to give him his valuables back? Or perhaps the mugging was just a taster of what she really had in store in him. A knife in his heart, maybe. A pistol at his head. A saw at his throat. Payback for some imaginary wrong he had done her. Or payback for some real wrong she had suffered at the hands of Finkler with whom she had confused him.

That possibility was truly frightening – not the being mistaken for Sam Finkler, though that was insult enough, but the being held responsible for something Finkler had done. Treslove didn’t put it past Finkler to hurt a woman and drive her to the edge of madness. He imagined dying for Finkler, lying bleeding on the pavement, unattended, for a crime he had not and could never have committed. His legs went weak under him with the bitter irony of it. An ironical end to his life was not an abstract supposition for Treslove: he apprehended it as he apprehended a looming lamp-post or a falling tree.

And saw himself kicked out of the way by passers-by, like a Jew’s dog on the streets of Caracas, or Buenos Aires, or Fontenay-sous-Bois, or Toronto.

He stood before the window of J. P. Guivier admiring the instruments in their cases and the resins, a new satisfying arrangement of which had appeared – packaged like expensive chocolates – since he’d last looked. A hand tapped him on the shoulder – ‘Judith!’ he cried in shock – and the blood left his body.