The Finkler Question (11 page)

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.’