The Finkler Question (26 page)

‘So why is it bollocks?’ Treslove asked.

‘Well look at that one. Don’t tell me that whoever you’re with you’re not going to want a piece of that.’

‘Her,’ Treslove said.

‘Yes, her.’

‘No,
her
.’

Alfredo stared at him.

‘You called her
that
. A piece of that. You should say a piece of her.’

‘Christ, Dad. I thought we were meant to be on holiday.
Her
, then. But take my point. Look at her figure. Perfect. Long legs, lean stomach, small breasts. You take a woman like that away with you and you think you’ll never look at another woman again. But now you see that –
her
. Voluptuous figure, big tits, creamy thighs, and you wonder what you ever saw in the skinny one.’

‘You’re nothing if not a philosopher,’ Treslove said. ‘Have you been dipping into Uncle Sam’s book on Descartes and Dating again?’

‘Well, you never did any better,’ Rodolfo chipped in. ‘Mum says you were never with any woman for more than a fortnight.’

‘Well that’s only what your mum says.’

‘Mine says the same,’ Alfredo said.

‘They have always thought alike on many matters,’ Treslove said, ordering another bottle of Montalcino.

He wanted to spoil the boys. Give them what they’d missed. And spoil himself too. Clear his head. That was the phrase he kept using. Clear his head.

He lay in a deckchair and read – hiding his book when he thought someone might be looking – while his sons swam and talked to women. It was pleasant. Not the view – the view down into the Ligurian Sea was spectacular. What was pleasant – no more than pleasant, but pleasant was enough – was the being here with his sons. Should he leave it at this? he wondered. Accept the role of paterfamilias, take his sons away twice a year, and forget the rest. He would be fifty soon. Time to settle. Nothing else had to happen. Who he was, he was. Julian Treslove. Bachelor of this parish. Gentile. Enough.

Enough already.

In the middle of the afternoon Rodolfo came to sit by him.

Treslove hid his book.

‘So?’ Rodolfo asked.

‘So, what?’

‘So what’s the answer to my question? How do you settle? How can you be sure? And if you aren’t sure, isn’t the decent thing to do nothing? Don’t worry, I’m not asking your advice or anything. I just want to talk about it. I want to know I’m not abnormal.’

Treslove wondered how to bring up the sandwich shop in which Rodolfo wore an apron to mix ingredients. Not a leather or a PVC apron. A floral apron.

For the holiday he wore a black velvet ribbon in his ponytail.

‘Has it occurred to you that you might be gay?’ he said at last.

Rodolfo got up out of his deckchair. ‘Are you mad?’ he said.

‘I’m just asking.’

‘Why are you asking?

‘Well, in fact I’m not asking anything. You’re the one who’s asking what’s normal. Everything is normal is my answer to that, or nothing is normal. Why do you care?’

‘Why do you think I’m gay?’

‘I don’t think you’re gay. And even if you were –’

‘I’m not. OK?’

‘OK.’

Rodolfo returned to his deckchair.

‘I like
her
,’ he said after a decent interval, nodding at the figure of a young woman climbing out of the pool. So did Treslove. What woman doesn’t look good coming up out of a pool? But over and above that – woman rising from the amniotic slime – she had the famished look that excited him. A far cry from . . . well, from what was waiting for him at home.

The bottom half of the woman’s bikini hung loose and wet on her. It was impossible not to imagine sliding a hand inside, palm flat, fingers pointing downwards, the tickle of the fur. Presumably Rodolfo, now he wasn’t gay, was imagining that very thing.

Unless he was just faking it for his father.

‘Go get her, son,’ Treslove enjoyed saying.

That evening there was dancing on the hotel terrace. Both Alfredo and Rodolfo had found women. Treslove watched them contentedly. That’s all as it should be then, he thought. Successful fathering was not as hard as people made out.

After the dancing Alfredo brought his woman to meet his father.

‘Hannah, my dad; Dad, Hannah.’

‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ Treslove said, getting up and bowing. To his daughters-in-law, presumably, a man had to be ultra-courteous.

‘You’ve got something in common,’ Alfredo said behind his sunglasses, laughing his empty restaurant pianist’s laugh.

‘What’s that?’

‘You’re both Jewish.’

‘So what was that about?’ Treslove asked before the three of them retired. The women had gone. Treslove didn’t ask his sons if they were intending to go after them.

This generation was easier about women than his had been. They didn’t go running. If the women left, they left. In Treslove’s day a woman leaving was catastrophic to your self-esteem. It presaged the end of the universe.

‘It was about fun, Dad.’

‘You know what I’m talking about. What was that about my being Jewish?’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘Would it matter to you if I were?’

‘There you go, answering a question with a question. That in itself makes you Jewish, doesn’t it?’

‘I’ll ask you again. Would it matter to you if I were?’

‘Are you asking if we’re anti-Semites?’ Rodolfo said.

‘And would it matter to you if we were?’ Alfredo added.

‘Well I’m definitely no anti-Semite,’ Rodolfo said. ‘You, Alf?’

‘Nope. You, Dad?’

‘Everyone’s an anti-Semite to a degree. Look at your Uncle Sam, and he’s Jewish.’

‘Yes, but you?’

‘What’s this about? What’s been said to you?’

‘Who by? You mean our mums?’

‘You tell me. What’s the joke?’

‘I ran into Uncle Sam a few weeks ago. He said you’d been the victim of an anti-Semitic attack. He said a few other things as well, but let’s just stick with the anti-Semitic part. I asked how you could be the victim of an anti-Semitic attack if you weren’t a Semite. He said he’d asked you the same question, and your answer was that you were.’

‘I think that’s one of my friend Finkler’s famous simplifications.’

‘Maybe, but
are
you?’

He looked from Alfredo to Rodolfo and back again, wondering if he’d ever seen them before, and if so where. ‘It doesn’t mean that
you
are,’ he said, ‘if that’s what’s concerning you. You can continue being whatever you want to be. Not that I know what that is. Your mothers never told me.’

‘Maybe you should have asked them,’ Rodolfo said. ‘Maybe they would have appreciated your taking a hand in our religious education.’

He snorted before he’d finished.

‘Let’s not get into that,’ Alfredo said. ‘You say that just because
you
are it doesn’t mean that
we
are. But it does, doesn’t it, a bit?’

‘Depends which bit you’re referring to,’ Rodolfo said, still snorting.

‘You can’t be a bit Jewish,’ Treslove said.

‘Why not? You can be a quarter Indian or one tenth Chinese. Why can’t you be part Jewish? In fact, it would make us half and half, wouldn’t it? Which is considerably more than a bit. I’d call that a lot. I have to say I quite fancy the idea, what about you, Ralph?’

Rodolfo went into an imitation of Alec Guinness being Fagin. ‘I don’t mind if I do, my dears,’ he said, rubbing his hands.

The two boys laughed.

‘Meet one of the half-chosen,’ Alfredo said, extending his hand to his brother.

‘And allow me to introduce you to the other half,’ Rodolfo said.

No, never seen them in my life before, Treslove thought. And wasn’t sure he wanted to again.

My sons the goyim.

3

Out of the blue, Libor received a letter from a woman he hadn’t seen in more than fifty years. She wanted to know if he was still writing his column.

He wrote back to her saying how nice it was to hear from her after all this time but he’d stopped writing his column in 1979.

He wondered how she’d found his address. He’d moved several times since he’d known her. She must have put herself to some trouble to find where he lived now.

He didn’t tell her his wife had died. He couldn’t be sure she even knew he’d been married. And you don’t go mentioning to women you haven’t seen in fifty years, and who have put themselves to trouble to find your address, that you’re a widower.

Hope life has been kind to you
, he wrote.
It has to me
.

After he sent the letter he worried that the melancholy tone would give her a clue.
It has to me
– there was a dying fall in that. It invited the question,
And does it go on being kind to you?
On top of which it somehow painted him as frail: a man in need of kindness.

Only afterwards did it occur to him that he hadn’t asked the reason for her enquiry.
Are you still writing your column?
Why did she want to know?

That was rude of me
, he wrote on the back of a postcard.
Did you enquire about my column with a purpose
?

After he posted the postcard – it was a Rembrandt self-portrait, the artist as an old man – he feared she would think he had chosen it to solicit her pity. So he sent her another one of King Arthur in full regalia and in the bloom of youth. No message. Just his signature. She would understand.

Oh, and nothing meant by it, his phone number.

That was how he came to be sitting in the bar of the University Women’s Club in Mayfair, clinking glasses of house champagne with the only woman other than Malkie he had ever lost his heart to. A little. Emmy Oppenstein. He had thought she’d said Oppenheimer when they first met in 1950 or thereabouts. That wasn’t the reason he had fallen for her, but without doubt it added to her attractiveness. Libor was no snob but he was a child of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and names and titles mattered to him. But by the time he’d realised his mistake they had slept together and he was interested in her for herself.

Or at least he thinks he was.

He sees nothing in her face that he remembers and of course nothing in her figure. A woman in her eighties does not have a figure. He intended no unkindness by that. To himself he said he meant no more than that at eighty a woman is entitled at last to be free of being ogled for her shape.

He could see that she had been beautiful in a Slav way, with wide apart ice-grey eyes and cheekbones on which an unwary man might cut himself going for a kiss. But it wasn’t a beauty he remembered. Would it be the same sitting with Malkie, he wondered, had he left her fifty years ago and were she living still? Had Malkie retained her beauty for him because she’d retained it for a fact, for everyone who saw her, or had he kept her beauty alive in his eyes by feasting on it every day? And if so, did that make her beauty illusory?

Emmy Oppenstein was out of the question for him. He saw that at once. He hadn’t gone to meet her with the intention of courting her again, he absolutely had not. But had he,
had
he, he would have been disappointed. As he hadn’t, he was not disappointed, how could he be, but
had
he . . .