The Finkler Question (2 page)

There were cranes up around the building, as high and unsteady as the moon. That would be a shapely fate, he thought: as in my beginning, so in my end – a BBC crane dashing my brains out. The
shitheap.
He could hear the tearing of his skull, like the earth’s skin opening in a disaster movie. But then life was a disaster movie in which lovely women died, one after another. He quickened his pace. A tree reared up at him. Swerving, he almost walked into a fallen road mender’s sign. DANGER. His shins ached with the imagined collision. Tonight even his soul shook with apprehension.

It’s never where you look for it, he told himself. It always comes from somewhere else. Whereupon a dark shadow materialised from a doorway into an assailant, took him by the neck, pushed him face first against a shop window, told him not to shout or struggle, and relieved him of his watch, his wallet, his fountain pen and his mobile phone.

It was only when he had stopped shaking and was able to check his pockets and find them emptied that he could be certain that what had happened had happened in reality.

No wallet, no mobile phone.

In his jacket pocket no fountain pen.

On his wrist no watch.

And in himself no fight, no instinct for preservation, no
amour de soi
, no whatever the word is for the glue that holds a man together and teaches him to live in the present.

But then when had he ever had that?

He’d been a modular, bits-and-pieces man at university, not studying anything recognisable as a subject but fitting components of different arts-related disciplines, not to say indisciplines, together like Lego pieces. Archaeology, Concrete Poetry, Media and Communications, Festival and Theatre Administration, Comparative Religion, Stage Set and Design, the Russian Short Story, Politics and Gender. On finishing his studies – and it was never entirely clear when and whether he
had
finished his studies, on account of no one at the university being certain how many modules made a totality – Treslove found himself with a degree so unspecific that all he could do with it was accept a graduate traineeship at the BBC. For its part –
her
part – all the BBC could do with Treslove when she got him was shunt him into producing late-night arts programmes for Radio 3.

He felt himself to be a stunted shrub in a rainforest of towering trees. All around him other trainees rose to startling eminence within weeks of their arriving. They shot up, because there was no other direction you could go but up, unless you were Treslove who stayed where he was because no one knew he was there. They became programme controllers, heads of stations, acquisitors, multi-platform executives, director generals even. No one ever left. No one was ever fired. The Corporation looked after its own with more fierce loyalty than a family of mafiosi. As a consequence everyone knew one another intimately – except Treslove who knew no one – and spoke the same language – except Treslove, who spoke a language of loss and sorrow nobody understood.

‘Cheer up,’ people would say to him in the canteen. But all that did was make him want to cry. Such a sad expression, ‘Cheer up’. Not only did it concede the improbability that he ever would cheer up, it accepted that there could be nothing much to cheer up for if cheering up was all there was to look forward to.

He was reprimanded on an official letterhead by someone from the Creative Board – he didn’t recognise the complainant’s name – for addressing too many morbid issues and playing too much mournful music on his programme. ‘That’s the province of Radio 3,’ the letter concluded. He wrote back saying his programme
was
on Radio 3. He received no reply.

After more than a dozen years roaming the ghostly corridors of Broadcasting House in the dead of night, knowing that no one was listening to anything he produced – for who, at three o’clock in the morning, wanted to hear live poets discussing dead poets, who might just as well have been dead poets discussing live poets? – he resigned. ‘Would anyone notice if my programmes weren’t aired?’ he wrote in his letter of resignation. ‘Would anyone be aware of my absence if I just stopped turning up?’ Again he received no reply.

Auntie wasn’t listening either.

He answered an advertisement in a newspaper for an assistant director of a newly launched arts festival on the south coast. ‘Newly launched’ meant a school library which had no books in it, only computers, three visiting speakers and no audience. It reminded him of the BBC. The actual director rewrote all his letters in simpler English and did the same with his conversation. They fell out over the wording of a brochure.

‘Why say exhilarating when you can say sexy?’ she asked him.

‘Because an arts festival isn’t sexy.’

‘And you want to know why that is? Because you insist on using words like exhilarating.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘It’s indirect language.’

‘There’s nothing indirect about exhilaration.’

‘There is the way you say it.’

‘Could we try for a compromise with exuberance?’ he asked, without any.

‘Could we try for a compromise with you getting another job?’

They had been sleeping together. There was nothing else to do. They coupled on the gymnasium floor when no one turned up to their festival. She wore Birkenstocks even during lovemaking. He only realised he loved her when she sacked him.

Her name was Julie and he only noticed that when she sacked him, too.

Hulie.

Thereafter he gave up on a career in the arts and filled a succession of unsuitable vacancies and equally unsuitable women, falling in love whenever he took up a new job, and falling out of love – or more correctly being fallen out of love with – every time he moved on. He drove a removal van, falling in love with the first woman whose house he emptied, delivered milk in an electric float, falling in love with the cashier who paid him every Friday night, worked as an assistant to an Italian carpenter who replaced sash windows in Victorian houses and replaced Julian Treslove in the affections of the cashier, managed a shoe department in a famous London store, falling in love with the woman who managed soft furnishings on the floor above, finally finding semi-permanent and ill-paid occupation with a theatrical agency specialising in providing doubles of famous people for parties, conferences and corporate events. Treslove didn’t look like anybody famous in particular, but looked like many famous people in general, and so was in demand if not by virtue of verisimilitude, at least by virtue of versatility.

And the soft-furnishings woman? She left him when he became the double of no one in particular. ‘I don’t like not knowing who you’re meant to be,’ she told him. ‘It reflects badly on us both.’

‘You choose,’ he said.

‘I don’t want to choose. I want to know. I crave certainty. I need to know you’re going to be there through thick and thin. I work with fluff all day. When I come home I want something solid. It’s a rock I need, not a chameleon.’

She had red hair and angry skin. She heated up so quickly Treslove had always been frightened to get too near to her.

‘I am a rock,’ he insisted, from a distance. ‘I will be with you to the end.’

‘Well, you’re right about that at least,’ she told him. ‘This
is
the end. I’m leaving you.’

‘Just because I’m in demand?’

‘Because you’re not in demand with me.’

‘Please don’t leave. If I wasn’t a rock before, I’ll be a rock from now on.’

‘You won’t. It isn’t in your nature.’

‘Don’t I look after you when you’re ill?’

‘You do. You’re marvellous to me when I’m ill. It’s when I’m well that you’re no use.’

He begged her not to go. Took his chance and threw his arms around her, weeping into her neck.

‘Some rock,’ she said.

Her name was June.

Demand is a relative concept. He wasn’t so much in demand as a lookalike for everybody and nobody that there weren’t many vacant hours in which to think about all that had befallen him, or rather all that hadn’t, about women and the sadness he felt for them, about his loneliness, and about that absence in him for which he didn’t have the word. His incompletion, his untogetherness, his beginning waiting for an end, or was it his end waiting for a beginning, his story waiting for a plot.

It was exactly 11.30 p.m. when the attack occurred. Treslove knew that because  something had made him look at his watch the moment before. Maybe the foreknowledge that he would never look at it again. But with the brightness of the street lamps and the number of commercial properties lit up – a hairdresser’s was still open and a dim sum restaurant and a newsagent’s having a refit – it could have been afternoon. The streets were not deserted. At least a dozen people might have come to Treslove’s rescue, but none did. Perhaps the effrontery of the assault – just a hundred yards from Regent Street, almost within cursing distance of the BBC – perplexed whoever saw it. Perhaps they thought the participants were playing or had become embroiled in a domestic row on the way home from a restaurant or the theatre. They could – there was the strange part – have been taken for a couple.

That was what Treslove found most galling. Not the interruption to one of his luxuriating, vicariously widowed reveries. Not the shocking suddenness of the attack, a hand seizing him by the back of his neck and shoving him so hard into the window of Guivier’s violin shop that the instruments twanged and vibrated behind the shattering pane, unless the music he heard was the sound of his nose breaking. And not even the theft of his watch, his wallet, his fountain pen and his mobile phone, sentimental as his attachment to the first of those was, and inconvenient as would be the loss of the second, third and fourth. No, what upset him beyond all these was the fact that the person who had robbed, assaulted and, yes, terrified him – a person against whom he put up not a whisper of a struggle – was . . . a woman.

3

Until the assault, Treslove’s evening had been sweetly painful but not depressing. Though they complained of being without compass or purpose on their own, the three men – the two widowers and Treslove, who counted as an honorary third – enjoyed one another’s company, argued about the economy and world affairs, remembered jokes and anecdotes from the past, and almost managed to convince themselves they’d gone back to a time before they had wives to lose. It was a dream, briefly, their falling in love, the children they’d fathered – Treslove had inadvertently fathered two that he knew of – and the separations that had devastated them. No one they loved had left them because they had loved no one yet. Loss was a thing of the future.

Then again, who were they fooling?

After dinner, Libor Sevcik, at whose apartment between Broadcasting House and Regent’s Park they dined, sat at the piano and played the Schubert Impromptus Opus 90 his wife Malkie had loved to play. Treslove thought he would die with grief for his friend. He didn’t know how Libor had survived Malkie’s death. They had been married for more than half a century. Libor was now approaching his ninetieth year. What could there be left for him to live for?

Malkie’s music, maybe. Libor had never once sat at the piano while she was alive – the piano stool was sacred to her, he would as soon sit on it as burst in on her in the lavatory – but many a time he had stood behind her while she played, in the early days accompanying her on the fiddle, but later, at her quiet insistence (‘Tempo, Libor, tempo!’), standing behind her without his fiddle, marvelling at her expertise, at the smell of aloes and frankincense (all the perfumes of Arabia) that rose from her hair, and at the beauty of her neck. A neck more graceful, he had told her the day they had met, than a swan’s. Because of his accent, Malkie had thought he had said her neck was more graceful than a svontz, which had reminded her of a Yiddish word her father often used, meaning penis. Could Libor really have meant that her neck was more graceful than a penis?

Had she not married Libor, or so the family mythology had it, Malkie Hofmannsthal would in all likelihood have gone on to be a successful concert pianist. Horowitz heard her play Schubert in a drawing room in Chelsea and commended her. She played the pieces as they should be played, he said, as though Schubert were inventing as he went along – emotional improvisations with a bracing undernote of intellectuality. Her family regretted her marriage for many reasons, not the least of them being Libor’s lack of intellectuality and breeding, his low journalistic tone, and the company he kept, but mostly they regretted it on account of the musical future she threw away.