The Finkler Question (18 page)

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 decolletage, 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 decolletage, 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 diamantes 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?'