FOUR

1

At around about this time – give or take half an hour – in a restaurant close by – give or take a quarter of a mile – Treslove’s sons were settling the bill for dinner. They were in the company of their mothers. This was not the first time the two women had met, though they had known nothing of each other’s existence in the months they were carrying Ralph and Alf respectively, or indeed in the years immediately following their sons’ delivery.

Treslove was no Finkler. He could not lose his heart to more than one woman at a time. He loved too absorbedly for that. But he always knew when he was about to be thrown over and was quick to make provision, where he could, to love absorbedly again. As a consequence of which there was sometimes a brief overlap of new and old. On principle he didn’t mention this to either of the overlapping parties – neither the one who had still not quite left him, nor the one who had not quite taken her place. Women were already hurt enough, in his view; there was no reason to hurt them further. In this, again, he saw himself as different to Finkler who evidently did not bother to conceal his mistresses from his wife. Treslove envied Finkler his mistresses but accepted they were beyond him. Even wives were beyond Treslove. Girlfriends were all he had ever managed. But there was still propriety in keeping overlapping girlfriends apart.

By the same reasoning he would have kept his sons apart, too, had he not confused the day of his right to have Rodolfo (Treslove didn’t hold with anglicising their names) with the day of his right to have Alfredo. The boys were six and seven, though Treslove couldn’t be expected always to be precise in the matter of which was what. He didn’t see enough of them for that, and in their absence found it easier to conflate them. Was that so serious? They were equally objects of devotion to him. That he merged their names and ages only went to show how very much and without favouritism he loved them both.

A surprise to each other on the day they met at their father’s apartment, but infinitely preferring playing with someone roughly their own age to kicking a ball around a desolate park with Treslove – who tired easily, was always looking somewhere else, and when he did remember they were there asked too many soulful questions about the state of their mothers’ health – Alf and Ralph begged their father to confuse his visiting rights again.

The boys talked excitedly of their new half-brothers when they returned home, and soon Treslove was in receipt of unkind letters from his old girlfriends – in the case of Rodolfo’s mother, reproaching him for a retrospective infidelity she wanted it to be clear she was hurt by only in the abstract, and in the case of Alfredo’s, informing him his visiting rights were suspended until he heard otherwise from her lawyers. But eventually the wishes of the boys prevailed over the indolent malice (as Treslove called it) of their mothers, and in time the latter thought that they too might find a bristling sort of comfort in each other’s company, not to say an answer to the question of why not just one woman but two had consented to have a baby by a man they didn’t give a fig for. An inaccurate account, Treslove believed when it was relayed to him, given that consent on the one side implies request on the other, and he had never in his life requested any woman to have his baby. Why would he? The curtain always came down on Treslove’s fantasy of happiness with him crying ‘Mimi!’ or ‘Violetta!’ and kissing the cold dead lips a last goodbye that would leave him inconsolable for ever. He couldn’t have done that with a child there. A child turned a tragic opera into an opera buffa and necessitated at least another act, for which Treslove lacked both the stamina and imagination.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Who’s humiliated?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He pitied her to his soul.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Exactly. Though I packed first.’

‘Me too.’

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

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

‘Puccini?’

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

‘How does he do it?’

‘Puccini?’

‘No, Julian.’

‘Frisk me.’

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

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

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

He shook his head.

‘What about you?’ Janice asked Alfredo.

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

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

2

‘So who’s Judith?’

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

‘Libor!’

‘Did I frighten you?’

‘What does it look like?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’m not strolling.’

‘Who’s Judith?’

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

‘You called her name.’

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

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

‘I always look in this window.’

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

‘You believe in the cross?’

‘No, but I believe in suffering.’

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

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

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

‘Were you really no good?’

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

‘You’re related to Heifetz? Jesus!’

‘You mean Judith!’

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

‘You never asked.’

‘I didn’t know Heifetz was Czech.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Let’s find a cafe,’ he suggested.

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

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

‘Her? Who’s her? This Judith woman?’

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

 

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

‘That’s what Sam said.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That’s what you think she said.’

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

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

‘What if what?’

‘What if she was right?’

‘That you’re . . . ?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you’re not.’

‘We think I’m not.’

‘And did you ever before think you were?’

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

‘That doesn’t make you Jewish. Wagner listened to operas and wanted to play the violin. Hitler loved opera and wanted to play the violin. When Mussolini visited Hitler in the Alps they played the Bach double violin concerto together. “And now let’s kill some Jews,” Hitler said when they’d finished. You don’t have to be Jewish to like music.’

‘Is that true?’

‘That you don’t have to be Jewish to like music? Of course it’s true.’

‘No, about Hitler and Mussolini.’

‘Who cares if it’s true. You can’t libel a dead Fascist. Listen, if you were what this imaginary woman said you were, and you’d have wanted to play the violin, you’d have played the violin. Nothing would have stopped you.’

‘I obeyed my father. Doesn’t that prove something? I respected his wishes.’

‘Obeying your father doesn’t make you a Jew. Obeying your mother would make you more of one. While your father’s not wanting you to play the violin almost certainly makes him not a Jew. If there’s one thing all Jewish fathers agree on –’

‘Sam would say that’s stereotyping. And you leave out the possibility that my father didn’t want me to play the violin for the reason that he didn’t want me to be like him.’

‘He was a violinist?’

‘Yes. Like you. See?’

‘And why wouldn’t he have wanted you to be like him? Was he that bad a violinist?’

‘Libor, I’m trying to be serious. He might have had his reasons.’

‘I’m sorry. But in what way would he have wanted you to be different from him? Was he unhappy? Did he suffer?’

Treslove thought about it. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He took things hard. My mother’s death broke his heart. But there was something broken-hearted about him before that. As though he knew what was coming and had been preparing himself for it all his life. He could have been protecting me from deep feelings, saving me from something he feared in himself, something undesirable, dangerous even.’

‘The Jews aren’t the only broken-hearted people in the world, Julian.’

Treslove looked disappointed to hear it. He blew out his cheeks, breathing hard, and shook his head, appearing to be disagreeing with himself as much as with Libor.

‘Let me tell you something,’ he said. ‘In all the time I was growing up I didn’t once hear the word Jew. Don’t you think that’s strange? Nor, in all the time I was growing up, did I meet a Jew in my father’s company, in my father’s shop, or in my parents’ home. Every other word I heard. Every other kind of person I met. Hottentots I met in my father’s shop. Tongans I met. But never a Jew. Not until I met Sam did I even know what a Jew looked like. And when I brought him home my father told me he didn’t think he made a suitable friend. “That Finkler,” he used to ask me, “that Finkler, are you still kicking about with him?” Explain that.’

‘Easy. He was an anti-Semite.’

‘If he’d been an anti-Semite, Libor, Jew would have been the only word I heard.’

‘And your mother? If you are, then it has to be through her.’

‘Jesus Christ, Libor, I was a Gentile five minutes ago, now you’re telling me I can only be Jewish through the right channels. Will you be checking to see if I’m circumcised next? I don’t know about my mother. I can only tell you she didn’t look Jewish.’

‘Julian, you don’t look Jewish. Forgive me, I don’t mean it as an insult, but you are the least Jewish-looking person I have ever met, and I have met Swedish cowboys and Eskimo stuntmen and Prussian film directors and Polish Nazis working as set builders in Alaska. I would stake my life on it that no Jewish gene has been near the gene of a member of your family for ten thousand years and ten thousand years ago there weren’t any Jews. Be grateful. A man can live a good and happy life and not be Jewish.’ He paused. ‘Look at Sam Finkler.’

They both laughed wildly and wickedly at this.

‘Cruel,’ Treslove said, taking another drink and banging his chest. ‘But that only serves my argument. These things are not to be decided superficially. You can be called Finkler and fall short of the mark; or you can be called Treslove –’

‘Which is not exactly a Jewish name –’

‘Exactly, and yet still come up to scratch. Wouldn’t it have made sense, if my father didn’t want me to know we were Jews, or for anyone else to know we were Jews for that matter, to have changed our name to the least Jewish one he could find? Treslove, for Christ’s sake. It screams “Not Jewish” at you. I rest my case.’

‘I’ll tell how you can rest your case, Mr Perry Mason. You can rest your case by stopping these ridiculous speculations and asking somebody. Ask an uncle, ask one of your father’s friends, ask anyone who knew your family. This is a mystery that is solvable with a phone call.’

‘No one knew my family. We kept ourselves to ourselves. I have no uncles. My father had no brothers or sisters, my mother neither. It was what attracted them to each other. They told me about it. Two orphans, as good as. Two babes in the wood. You tell me what that’s a metaphor for.’

Libor shook his head and topped up their whiskies. ‘It’s a metaphor for your not wanting to know the truth because you prefer to make it up. OK, make it up. You’re Jewish. Trog es gezunterhait.’ And he raised his glass.

He sat down and crossed his little feet. He had changed into a pair of ancien régime slippers which bore his initials, woven in gold thread. A present from Malkie, Treslove surmised. Wasn’t everything a present from Malkie? In these slippers Libor looked even more wispy and transparent, fading away. And yet to Treslove he was enviably secure. At home. Himself. In love still with the only woman he had ever loved. On his mantelpiece photographs of the two of them being married by a rabbi, Malkie veiled, Libor in a skullcap. Deep rooted, ancient, knowledgeable about themselves. Musical because music spoke to the romance of their origins.

Looking again in admiration at Libor’s slippers he saw that the initials on one read LS while on the other they read ES. That was right of course; Libor had changed his own name, in his Hollywood years, from Libor Sevcik to Egon Slick. It was what Jews did, wasn’t it, what Jews had to do? So why wasn’t Libor/Egon more sympathetic to Teitelbaum/Treslove?

He swirled his whisky round in his glass. Bohemian Crystal. His father too had favoured crystal whisky glasses but they had been somehow different. More formal. Probably more expensive. Colder to the lip. That, essentially, was what the difference amounted to – temperature. Libor and Malkie – even poor Malkie dead – were somehow warmed by their submersion in a heated past. In comparison, Treslove felt that he had been brought up to play on the surface of life, like those vegetables that grow above ground, where it is chill.

Libor was smiling at him. ‘Now you’re a Jew, come to dinner,’ he said. ‘Come to dinner next week – not with Sam – and I’ll introduce you to some people who would be pleased to meet you.’

‘You make it sound sinister. Some people. Which people? Watchmen of the Jewish faith who will scrutinise my credentials? I have no credentials. And why wouldn’t they have been pleased to meet me before I was Jewish?’

‘That’s good, Julian. Getting touchy is a good sign. You can’t be Jewish if you can’t do touchy.’

‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll come if I can bring the woman who attacked me. She’s my credentials.’

Libor shrugged. ‘Bring her. Find her and bring her.’

He made the possibility sound so remote he could have been talking about Treslove finding God.

 

Something that worried Treslove ever so slightly as he lay on his bed, struggling for the thread that would wind him into sleep: Libor’s story about Heifetz at the Royal Albert Hall . . . Wasn’t it, in its – he didn’t have the word: its preciousness, its preciosity, its oh-so-Jewish cultural-vulturalness – wasn’t it a bit uncomfortably close to Libor’s story about Malkie and Horowitz at the Carnegie?

They could conceivably both be true, but then again, the echo, once one heard it, was disconcerting.

True or not true, as family mythologies went, these were enviably top-drawer. It wasn’t Elvis Presley whom Malkie had called Maestro. It was Horowitz. As Egon Slick, Libor had put in half a lifetime rubbing shoulders with the vulgarly famous, and yet when the chips were down, when it was necessary to impress, he pulled his cards, without blushing, from another deck. It wasn’t Liza Minnelli or Madonna he was claiming as his cousin – it was Heifetz. You had to place a high value on intellectual ritziness to want Horowitz and Heifetz at your party. And who did intellectually ritzy as Finklers did intellectually ritzy?

Yes, you had to hand it to them . . . they were brazen, they had cheek, but it was cheek predicated on a refined musical education.

Finding his thread, Treslove drifted into a deep sleep.

3

Although there had been little commerce between the Finklers and the Tresloves – not counting the commerce between Tyler Finkler and Julian Treslove – the Finkler boys and the Treslove boys had on occasions met, and certainly Alfredo and Rodolfo knew of Finkler well enough through his books and television to enjoy thinking of him as their famous uncle Sam. Whether Sam had any interest in thinking of them as his charming nephews Alf and Ralph was another matter. It was Treslove’s suspicion that he didn’t know either of them from Adam.

In this, as in so many other matters related and indeed unrelated to Finkler, Treslove was wrong. It was Treslove who didn’t know either of his sons from Adam.

Finkler, as it happened, was well aware of his old friend’s sons and felt warmly disposed to them, not impossibly because he was Treslove’s rival in fatherhood and unclehood as well as in everything else, and wanted to be seen to be making up to the boys for what their real father hadn’t given them. Making up to them and giving them a higher standard to judge by. Alf was the one he knew better, on account of an incident at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne – the gist of it being that Finkler had calculated on the Grand being a reliably romantic and discreet place to take a woman for a Friday night and Saturday morning – seagulls outside the windows and the other guests being too old to be able to place him or to do anything about it if they had – but he hadn’t calculated on finding Alf playing the piano during dinner.

This was two years before Tyler’s death, two years before her illness had been diagnosed even, so his misbehaviour was not of the utterly unforgivable sort. Had he only known it, Tyler was herself misbehaving at the time, with Treslove as it happened, so that too, weighing one thing against another, took fractionally from his criminality. Even so, to go over to the piano to ask the pianist to play ‘Stars Fell on Alabama’ for Ronit Kravitz and to discover he was talking to Treslove’s son Alfredo was a misfortune Finkler would rather have avoided.

He didn’t register Alfredo immediately – where you don’t expect to find people you don’t know well it is easy not to recognise them – but Alfredo, having the advantage of seeing him frequently on television, recognised Finkler at once.

‘Uncle Sam,’ he said. ‘Wow!’

Finkler thought about saying ‘Do I know you?’ but doubted he could put the words together with any conviction.

‘Ahem!’ he said instead, deciding to accept that he’d been caught red-handed and to play the naughty uncle about it. Given the incontrovertibility of Ronit Kravitz’s décolletage, there was certainly no point in saying he was in Eastbourne for a business meeting

Alfredo looked across at the table Finkler had vacated and said, ‘Auntie Tyler couldn’t be with you tonight then?’

On the spot, Finkler realised that he had never liked Alfredo. He wouldn’t have sworn that he had ever truly liked Alfredo’s father either, but school friends are school friends. Alfredo closely resembled his father, but had turned himself into an older version of him, wearing round gold-rimmed glasses which he probably didn’t need and plastering his hair into a kind of greasy cowl that gave him the air of a 1920s Berlin gigolo. Only without the sex appeal.

‘I was going to ask you to play a tune for my companion,’ Finkler said, ‘but in the circumstances –’

‘Oh, no, I’ll play it,’ Alfredo said. ‘I’m here for that. What would she like – “Happy Birthday to You”?’

For some reason Finkler was unable to ask for the song he had been sent to ask for. Had he forgotten it in the embarrassment of being found out, or was he punishing Ronit for being the cause of that embarrassment?

‘ “My Yiddishe Mama”,’ he said. ‘If you know that.’

‘Play it all the time,’ Alfredo said.

And he did, more derisively than Finkler had ever heard it played, with crude honky-tonk syncopations followed by absurdly drawn-out slow passages, almost like a fugue, as though it was a mockery of motherhood, not a celebration of it.

‘That’s not “Stars Fell on Alabama”,’ Ronit Kravitz said. Other than her décolletage, which was bigger than she was, there was little to observe on Ronit Kravitz’s person. Under the table she wore high-heeled shoes with diamantés on them, but these were not visible. And though her hair was a beautiful blue-black, catching light from the chandeliers, it too, like every eye, fell into the boundless golden chasm which she carried before her as a proud disabled person carries an infirmity. The Manawatu Gorge was how Finkler thought of it when he wasn’t in love with her, as he wasn’t in love with her now.

‘It’s his interpretation,’ he said. ‘I’ll hum it to you the way you like it later.’

It was a lesson he just seemed unable to learn: that the company of preposterously sexy women always makes a man look a fool. Too long the legs, too high the skirt, too exposed the breasts, and it’s laughter you inspire as the consort, not envy. For a moment he longed to be at home with Tyler, until he remembered that she was showing too much of everything these days as well. And she was a mother.

He didn’t once wink at Alfredo across the dining room, or take him aside at the end of the evening and slip a fifty-pound note into the top pocket of his dinner jacket with a request to, you know, keep this between them. As a practical philosopher, Finkler was hot on the etiquette of treachery and falsehood. It was not appropriate, he thought, to strike up male collusion with the child of an old friend, let alone embroil him in an older generation’s way of doing adultery, laughable or otherwise. He’d said ‘Ahem’. That would have to suffice. But they did run into each other in the men’s lavatory.

‘Another night at the Copacabana knocked on the head,’ Alfredo said, wearily zipping himself up and replastering his hair in the mirror. That done, he popped on a perky pork-pie hat which at a stroke took away all suggestion of Berlin and made Finkler think of Bermondsey.

His father’s boy, all right, Finkler thought, capable of looking like everyone and no one.

‘You don’t like your job?’

‘Like it?! You should try playing the piano to people who are here to eat. Or die. Or both. They’re too busy listening to their own stomachs to hear a note I play. They wouldn’t know if I was giving them Chopsticks or Chopin. I make background noise. Do you know what I do to entertain myself while I’m playing? I make up stories about the diners. This one’s screwing that one, that one’s screwing this one – which is hard to do in a joint like this, I can tell you, where most of them won’t have had sex since before I was born.’

Finkler didn’t point out that he was an exception to this rule. ‘You hide your discontent well,’ he lied.

‘Do I? That’s because I vanish. I’m somewhere else. In my head I’m playing at Caesar’s Palace.’

‘Well, you hide that well, too.’

‘It’s a job.’

‘We all settle for just a job,’ Finkler told him, as though to camera.

‘Is that how you see what you do?’

‘Mostly, yes.’

‘How sad for you, then, as well.’

‘As well as for you, you mean?’

‘Yes, as well as for me, but I’m young. There’s time for anything to happen to me. I might make it to Casear’s Palace yet. I meant how sad as well for Dad.’

‘Is he unhappy?’

‘What do you think? You’ve known him like for ever. Does he look a satisfied man to you?’

‘No, but he never did.’

‘Didn’t he? Never – ha! That figures. I can’t imagine him young. He’s like a man who’s always been old.’

‘Well, there you are,’ Finkler said, ‘I think of him as a man who’s always been young. All to do with when one meets a person, I guess.’

Under his pert pork-pie hat, Alfredo rolled his eyes, as though to say Don’t go deep on me, Uncle Sam.

What he actually said was, ‘We don’t hit it off especially – I think he secretly prefers my half-brother – but I’m sorry for him, doing that stupid doubling thing, especially if it all feels to him the way it all feels to me.’

‘Oh, come on, at your age the glass is half full.’

‘No, it’s at your age that the glass is half full. At my age we don’t want half a glass, full or empty. In fact we don’t want a glass, end of. We want a tankard and we want it overflowing. We are the have-everything generation, remember.’

‘No, we’re the have-everything generation.’

‘Well we’re the pissed generation then.’

Finkler smiled at him and felt a new book coming on. The Glass Half Empty: Schopenhauer for Teen Binge Drinkers.

It wasn’t a cynical calculation. Quite unexpectedly, he experienced a vicarious paternal rush for the boy. Perhaps it was a resurfacing of something he had felt for Treslove all those years ago. Perhaps it was usurpation ecstasy – the joy that comes with being a father to someone else’s children – the mirror image of the joyous role Treslove was enjoying that very hour – being a husband to someone else’s wife, even if that wife insisted on turning away from him and fiddling with his penis behind her back, as though having trouble with the fastening of a complicated brassiere.

Before they left the lavatory together Finkler handed Alfredo his card. ‘Give me a ring sometime when you’re in town,’ he said. ‘You’re not stuck down here all the time, are you?’

‘Shit no. I’d die.’

‘Then call me. We can talk about your father . . . or not.’

‘Right. Or – I do the Savoy and Claridge’s some weeks – you could always pop in and say hello . . .’

With a floozie, the little bastard means, Finkler thought. That’s how he’ll always see me. Out on the razzle with the Manawatu Gorge. And he’ll never let me forget it.

In his mind’s eye Finkler saw himself meeting Alfredo in lavatories for the next fifty years – until Alfredo was far older than he was now and he, Finkler, had become a bent old man – passing him wads of unused notes in Manila envelopes.

They shook hands and laughed. Each a little wary and a little flattered.

This boy is an opportunist, Finkler thought, but never mind.

He thinks I think there’s some advantage to me in knowing him, Alfredo thought, and maybe there is. But there’s some advantage to him in knowing me as well. He might learn how to choose himself a less tacky piece of skirt.

So began a somehow compelling but mutually irritating friendship between two men of unequal age and interests.

 

Alfredo had never discussed any of this with his mother or half-brother. He was a man who liked secrets. But here, when he sat down again after dinner with them, was a secret he couldn’t keep.

‘Dad’s been mugged. Did you know that?’

‘Everyone gets mugged,’ Rodolfo said. ‘This is London.’

‘No but this was a mugging with a difference. This was a mega-mugging.’

‘God, is he hurt?’ Janice wondered.

‘Well here’s the thing. Apparently he says no but Uncle Sam thinks yes.’

‘You’ve seen Uncle Sam?’

‘Ran into him in a bar. That’s how I know about it.’

‘Your father would make a fuss about it if he’d been hurt,’ Josephine put in. ‘He makes a fuss if he cuts his finger.’

‘It’s not that kind of hurt. Sam says it’s shaken him badly but he won’t accept it. He’s in denial, Sam reckons.’

‘He’s always been in denial,’ Josephine said. ‘He’s in denial that he’s a bastard.’

‘What does Sam think he’s in denial about?’ Janice asked.

‘Hard to say. His identity or whatever.’

Josephine snorted. ‘Tell me something new.’

‘It’s weirder than that. It seems he was mugged by a woman.’

‘A woman?’ Rodolfo couldn’t contain his amusement. ‘I knew he was a wimp, but a woman – !’

‘Sounds like some sort of wish-fulfilment,’ Janice said.

‘Yeah, mine,’ Josephine laughed. ‘I only wish I could tell you it was me that did it.’

‘Josephine!’ Janice admonished her.

‘Come off it. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t want to mug him if you saw him coming down the street looking like Leonardo DiCaprio’s grandfather and dodging the cracks or whatever he does now?’

‘Why don’t you come off the fence and tell us what you really think of Dad?’ Rodolfo said, still amused at the idea of his father cowering before a woman.

‘You mean admit I love him?’ She put her fingers down her throat.

‘Sam says it’s bollocks, anyway,’ Alfredo said. ‘His theory is that Dad’s stressed out.’

‘By what?’ Janice wanted to know.

‘By what happened to Auntie Tyler and the wife of another of his friends. Too much dying for him to handle, Uncle Sam reckons.’

‘That’s your father all over,’ Josephine said. ‘Greedy little grave robber. Why can’t he allow other men to mourn their own wives? Why must he always get in on the act?’

‘Sam said he was very fond of both women.’

‘Yeah – I’ll bet. Especially when they snuffed it.’

Ignoring this, Janice said, ‘So Sam thinks this mugger materialised from Julian’s grief . . .’

‘Grief!’

‘No, it’s an intriguing thought. Maybe this is what a ghost is – the embodiment of what’s upsetting you. But why as a mugger, I wonder? Why the violence?’

‘This conversation is getting beyond me,’ Rodolfo said. ‘Can’t we go back to Dad being bashed by some bag lady?’

‘Guilt’s my guess,’ Josephine said, ignoring him. ‘He’d probably been shafting them both. Or worse, singing Puccini arias to them.’

‘Yours were Verdi,’ Janice reminded her.

‘Anyway,’ Alfredo went on, ‘Sam suggested we send him away for a bit.’

‘To the loony bin?’

‘Arrange a holiday for him. You know how reluctant he is to make plans to go away. Frightened of trains, frightened of planes, frightened to be somewhere he doesn’t know the local word for paracetamol. It would be best, Uncle Sam said, for us actually to go with him. Anyone want to go on holiday with Dad?’

‘Not me,’ Rodolfo said.

‘Not me,’ Janice said.

‘Not if he was the last man on the planet,’ Josephine said. ‘Let Sam Finkler go with him if he thinks it’s such a good idea.’

‘So that’s a no then, is it?’ Alfredo laughed.

It was only as they were getting up to leave again, having agreed that the boys should at least give him a call and maybe take him out for lunch, that Alfredo remembered something else Uncle Sam had told him. ‘And, and . . . he’s decided he’s a Jew.’

‘Uncle Sam? Isn’t Uncle Sam already a Jew?’

‘No, Dad. Dad’s decided he’s a Jew.’

‘Dad’s decided he’s a Jew? Dad, a Jew?’

All four sat down again.

‘Yep.’

‘How do you mean decided?’ Rodolfo wanted to know. ‘You can’t just get up one morning and decide you’re a Jew – or can you?’

‘I’ve worked with a lot of people at BH who got up one morning and decided they were not a Jew,’ Josephine said.

‘But it can’t work the other way, surely?’

‘Search me,’ said Alfredo. ‘But I don’t think Dad’s planning to become a Jew. If I understood Uncle Sam he’s got this bee in his bonnet that he already is a Jew.’

‘Christ,’ Rodolfo said, ‘what does that make us?’

‘Not Jewish,’ Josephine said. ‘Don’t worry about it. Jews don’t trust their women in the sack, so you can only be Jewish through the vagina. And I don’t have a Jewish vagina.’

‘Nor me,’ Janice said. ‘Nor mine.’

Alfredo and Rodolfo exchanged vomit faces with each other.

But Rodolfo was perplexed as well as nauseated. ‘I don’t get how that works. If you can’t trust your women why would you want them to be the ones that make you Jewish?’

‘Well, you wouldn’t be a Jew at all if you relied on your father and he was a bloody big Arab with gold teeth.’

‘Do Jewish women sleep with Arabs?’

‘Darling, Jewish women sleep with anybody.’

‘Hush it,’ Janice said, signalling the waiters with a mute revolution of her head. They were, don’t forget – her eyes warned them – in a Lebanese restaurant.

‘Interesting, though,’ Rodolfo said. ‘If I discover I’m half Jewish will I suddenly become half clever?’

Janice ruffled her son’s hair. ‘You don’t need him to make you half clever,’ she said.

‘Half rich, then?’