The Finkler Question

by Howard Jacobson

  Treslove remembered her all right, and knew it was not she who had attacked him. Joia’s bones could not have carried the weight of his assailant. Nor could her voice have ever dropped so low. Besides, he would have known if she was in the vicinity. He would have heard her nerves twanging blocks away.

  And the contact would have destroyed his mind.

  Then there was the face-painting incident.

  Treslove remembered it only to forget it. He might have woken to an alien sensation of near-cheerfulness, but he wasn’t up to recalling the face-painting incident.

  After four days of lying around in a fair bit of pain he rang his doctor. He had a private doctor – one of the perks of his having no wife or similar to put a strain on his finances – which meant he was able to get an appointment that afternoon instead of the following month by which time the pain would have subsided or he would be dead. He wound a scarf around his throat, pulled his trilby down over his eyes, and scurried down the lane. Twenty years before he had been a patient of Dr Gerald Lattimore’s father, Charles Lattimore, who had keeled over in his surgery just minutes after seeing Treslove. And more than twenty years before that Dr Gerald Lattimore’s grandfather, Dr James Lattimore, had been killed in a car crash while returning from delivering Treslove. Whenever Treslove visited Dr Gerald Lattimore he remembered Dr Charles Lattimore’s and Dr James Lattimore’s deaths and imagined that Gerald Lattimore must remember them, too.

  Does he blame me? Treslove wondered. Or worse, does he dread my visits in case the same thing happens to him? Doctors read the genes the way fortune-tellers read the tea leaves; they believe in rational coincidence.

  Whatever Dr Gerald Lattimore dreaded or remembered, he always handled Treslove more roughly than Treslove believed was necessary,

  ‘How painful is that?’ he asked pinching Treslove’s nose.

  ‘Bloody painful.’

  ‘I still think nothing’s broken. Take some paracetamol. What did you do?’

  ‘Walked into a tree.’

  ‘You’d be surprised how many of my patients walk into trees.’

  ‘I’m not in the slightest bit surprised. Hampstead’s full of trees.’

  ‘This isn’t Hampstead.’

  ‘And we’re all preoccupied these days. We don’t have the mental space to notice where we’re going.’

  ‘What’s preoccupying you?’

  ‘Everything. Life. Loss. Happiness.’

  ‘Do you want to see someone about it?’

  ‘I’m seeing you.’

  ‘Happiness isn’t my field. You depressed?’

  ‘Strangely not.’ Treslove looked up at Lattimore’s ceiling fan, a rickety contraption with thin blades which rattled and wheezed as it slowly turned. One day that’s going to come off and hit a patient, Treslove thought. Or a doctor. ‘God is good to me,’ he said, as though that was who he’d been looking at in the fan, ‘all things considered.’

  ‘Take your scarf off a minute,’ Lattimore said suddenly. ‘Let me see your neck.’

  For a doctor, Lattimore was, much like his fan, insubtantially put together. Treslove remembered his father and imagined his grandfather as men of bulk and authority. The third Dr Lattimore looked too young to have completed his studies. His wrists were as narrow as a girl’s. And the skin between his fingers pink, as though the air had not got to him yet. But Treslove still did as he was told.

  ‘And did the tree also make those marks on your neck?’ the doctor asked him.

  ‘OK, a woman scratched me.’

  ‘Those don’t look like scratches.’

  ‘OK, a woman manhandled me.’

  ‘A woman manhandled you! What did you do to her?’

  ‘You mean did I manhandle her back? Of course not.’

  ‘No, what did you do to make her manhandle you?’

  Culpability.

  From before Treslove could remember, first the first Dr Lattimore, by implication, and second the second Dr Lattimore, by looks and stern words, had punished him with culpability. It didn’t matter what ailment he turned up with – tonsillitis, shortness of breath, low blood pressure, high cholesterol – it was always somehow Treslove’s fault; simply being born, Treslove’s fault. And now a suspected fractured nose. Also his fault.

  ‘I am innocent of any responsibility for this,’ he said, sitting down again and hanging his head, as though to suggest a beaten dog. ‘I was mugged. Unusual, I know, for a grown man to be beaten up and then to have his pockets emptied by a woman. But I was. I’d say it’s my age.’ He thought twice about what he said next but he said it anyway. ‘You might not know that your grandfather delivered me. I have been in the hands of Lattimores from the beginning. It might be time now for a third-generation Lattimore to recommend me sheltered accommodation.’

  ‘I don’t want to disabuse you but if you think you’ll be safe in sheltered accommodation you’re mistaken. There are women there who’d rob you as soon as look at you.’

  ‘What about an old folks’ home?’

  ‘The same, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Do I look that soft a target?’

  Lattimore looked him up and down. The answer was clearly yes. But he found a tactful way of putting it. ‘It’s not about you,’ he said, ‘it’s about the women. They’re getting stronger by the day. That’s medical progress for you. I have patients in their eighties I wouldn’t want to tangle with. I’d say you’re safer out in the world where at least you can run.’

  ‘I doubt it. The word must be out by now. And they’ll be able to smell the fear on me anyway. Every woman mugger in London. Even some who have never before given a thought to armed robbery.’

  ‘You sound cheerful about the prospect.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m just trying not to let it get me down.’

  ‘Very sensible. I hope they’ve caught this one at least.’

  ‘Who? The police? I didn’t notify the police.’

  ‘Don’t you think you should have?’

  ‘So that they can ask me what I did to provoke her? No. They’ll accuse me of propositioning or abusing her. Or they’ll warn me against going out at night on my own. Either way they’ll end up laughing. It’s thought to be amusing – a man copping a broken nose from a woman. It’s the stuff of seaside cartoons.’

  ‘It’s not broken. And I’m not laughing.’

  ‘You are. Inside you are.’

  ‘Well, I hope you are, inside, as well. Best medicine, you know.’

  And strangely, Treslove was. Laughing inside.

  But he wasn’t expecting it to last.

  And he wasn’t convinced his nose wasn’t broken.

  5

  There was something else Treslove had wanted to bring up, because he needed to bring it up with somebody, but in the laughter had thought better of it. And Lattimore, he decided, wasn’t the man for it either. Wrong type. Wrong build. Wrong persuasion.

  What the woman had said to him.

  Treslove wasn’t exactly on secure ground about this, even with himself. Maybe he had only imagined that she had called him what she’d called him. Maybe she had, after all, only asked him for his jewels, referring possibly, and in a spirit of violently affronted ribaldry, to his family jewels. I’ll have your manhood, she could have been saying. I’ll have your balls. Which indeed she had.

  Then again, why not not just leave it at her identifying him, for her own private satisfaction, as ‘You Jules?’

  Trouble was – how did she know his name? And why did she want, of all people’s balls, his balls?

  None of it made any sense.

  Unless she knew him. But he’d been through this. Other than Joia (and Joia was ruled out), and Joanna whose face he’d painted (and Joanna was ruled out because Treslove wouldn’t allow himself to think of her), what woman who knew him would want to attack him? What bodily as opposed to psychic harm had he ever done a woman?

  No matter how often often he revolved it in his mind, he came out at the same place. No to jewels,
no to jewel, no to Jules, no to Jule, and yes to Ju.

  You Ju . . .

  A solution that created more mysteries than it cleared up. For if the woman wasn’t known to him, or he to her, what was she doing making such a mistake as to his – he was damned if he knew what to call it – his ethnicity, his belief system (he would have said his faith but Finkler was a Finkler and Finkler had no faith)? His spiritual physiognomy, then.

  You Ju.

  Julian Treslove – a Ju?

  Was it simply a case, therefore, of mistaken identity? Could she, in confusion, have followed him from Libor’s, where she’d been waiting for Sam Finkler, not him? He looked nothing like Sam Finkler – indeed, Sam Finkler was one of the few people he didn’t look like – but if she was simply obeying orders or carrying out a contract, she might not have been adequately apprised of the appearance of the person she’d been hired to get.

  And in the confusion he had not had the presence of mind to say, ‘Me no Ju, Finkler he Ju.’

  But then who would be out to get Sam Finkler? Who other than Julian Treslove, that is? He was a harmless, if wealthy and voluble, philosopher. People liked him. They read his books. They watched his television programmes. He had sought and earned their love. There were some troubles with fellow-Finklers he gathered, especially of the sort who, like Libor, called Israel Isrrrae, but no fellow Finkler, let him be the most Zionistical of Zionists, would surely attack him and abuse him on the grounds of their common ancestry.

  And why a woman? Unless it was a woman Finkler had hurt personally – there were certainly a number of those – but a woman Finkler had hurt personally would surely know the difference between Finkler and Treslove up close. And she had got up very close.

  He had smelt her body odour. She must have smelt his. And he and Finkler . . . well . . .

  None of it made the slightest sense.

  And here was something else that made not the slightest sense, except that it made, if anything, only too much. What if the woman hadn’t been addressing him by his name – You or You’re Jules . . . You Jule . . . You Ju – but had been apprising him of hers – not You’re or Your Jules, but Your Juno, Your Judith, or Your June? His, in the sense that a Spanish fortune-teller with a Halesowen accent had once promised him a Juno or a Judith or a June. And warned him of danger into the bargain.

  He didn’t, of course, believe in fortune-telling. He doubted he would even have remembered the fortune-teller had he not fallen in love with her. Treslove never forgot a woman he fell in love with. He never forgot being made a fool of either, not least as the one often followed hard upon the other. And then there was Sam’s smart-arsed D’Jew know Jewno joke, designed to show him that when it came to lingusitic virtuosity a non-Finkler didn’t hold a candle to a Finkler. D’Jew know Jewno was as a scar that had never healed.

  But what he remembered aside, the only way a fortune-teller could have known the name of the woman who would mug him thirty years later was by her being the woman who would mug him thirty years later, and what likelihood was there of that? Nonsense, all of it. But the idea of something foreordained can shake the soul of the most rational of men, and Treslove was not the most rational of men.

  None of it might have had meaning, but then again all of it might have had meaning, even if it was only the meaning of extreme coincidence. She could have been calling him You Jules or You Ju or whoever and telling him that she was his Judith or whoever. Jules and Judith Treslove – Hules and Hudith Treslove – why the fuck not?

  Knocked him senseless for his credit card and phone and then used neither. Therefore knocked him senseless for himself.

  No, none of it made the slightest sense.

  But the conundrum added to his unexpected (all things considered) breeziness. Had he been more familiar with the state he might have gone further and declared himself – to use the word that had pissed off the woman who had fucked him in her Birkenstocks (for her, too, he had never forgotten) – exhilarated.

  Like a man on the edge of a discovery.

  For the same reason that he didn’t tell the police, Treslove didn’t tell either of his sons.

  In their case they would not even have bothered to ask what he had done to provoke the woman. Though the sons of different mothers they were similar in their view of him and took his provocativeness for granted. This being what you get as a father when you walk out on your children’s mothers.

  In fact, Treslove hadn’t walked out on anyone, if by ‘walking out’ some callous act of desertion was implied. He lacked the resolution, call it the independence of soul, for that. Either he drifted away, as a matter of tact – for Treslove knew when he wasn’t wanted – or women deserted him, whether on account of flies, or for another man, or simply for a life which, however lonely, was preferable to one more hour with him.

  He bored them into hating him, he knew that. Though he had promised no woman an exciting life when he met her, he gave the impression of glamour and sophistication, of being unlike other men, of being deep and curious – an arts producer, for a while, an assistant director of festivals, and even when he was merely driving a milk float or selling shoes, artistic by temperament – all of which combined to make women think they had been assured an adventure, of the mind at least. In their disappointment, they took his devotion to them to be a sort of entrapment; they talked about dolls’ houses and women’s prisons, they called him a jailer, a collector, a sentimental psychopath – well, maybe he was a sentimental psychopath, but that should have been for him to say, not them – a stifler of dreams, a suffocator of hopes, a bloodsucker.

  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.