The Finkler Question (9 page)

After which he usually changed his mind and went to the party.

Speaking for himself, all these years later, Treslove wasn't sure he had any native mirth to regain. He hadn't been amused for a long time. And he wasn't exactly amused now. But without doubt he felt more purposeful this minute than he had in years. How this could be, he didn't know. He would have expected himself to want to stay in bed and never rise again. Mugged by a woman! For a man whose life had been one absurd disgrace after another, this surely was the crowning ignominy. And yet it wasn't.

And this despite the unpleasant physical after-effects of the attack. His knees and elbows smarted. There was nasty bruising around his eyes. It pained him to breathe through his nostrils. But there was air out there and he was eager to breathe it.

He got up and opened his curtains and then closed them again. There was nothing to see. He lived in a small flat in an area of London which people who couldn't afford to live in Hampstead called Hampstead, but as it wasn't Hampstead he had no view of the Heath. Finkler had Heath. Heath from every window. He - Finkler - had not the slightest interest in Heath but he had bought a house with a view of it from every window, just because he could. Treslove checked this near re-descent into consciousness of loss. A view of the Heath wasn't everything. Tyler Finkler had enjoyed a different view of the Heath from every window and what good had any of them done her?

During breakfast there was a light nosebleed. He normally liked to take an early walk to the shops but he couldn't risk being seen by someone he knew. Nosebleeding - like grief, as Treslove recalled Libor saying - is something you do in the privacy of your own home.

He remembered what, in his humiliation and exhaustion, he had forgotten the night before - to cancel his credit cards and report his mobile phone lost. If the woman who had robbed him had been on his phone all night to Buenos Aires, or had flown to Buenos Aries on one of his cards and been on the phone all morning from there to London, he would already be insolvent. But strangely, nothing had been spent. Perhaps she was still deciding where to go. Unless theft was not her motive.

Had she wanted simply to complicate his life she couldn't have chosen a more efficient method. He was on his house phone for the rest of the morning, waiting for real people who spoke a language he could understand to answer, having to prove he was who he said he was though why he would have been worrying about the loss of his cards if he wasn't who he said he was he didn't know. The loss of his mobile was more serious; it seemed he would have to have a new number just when he had finally got round to memorising the old one. Or maybe not. It depended on the plan he was on. He hadn't known he was on a plan.

Yet not once did he turn tetchy or ask to speak to a supervisor. If further proof was needed that actual as opposed to imaginary loss had done wonders for his temper, this was it. Not once did he ask for someone's name or threaten to get them sacked. Not once did he mention the ombudsman.

There was no mail for him. Though he had the emotional strength to open envelopes, as was not always the case with him in the morning, there was relief in there being nothing to open today. No mail meant no engagements, for he accepted engagements by no other means, no matter that they came directly from his agents. Agree by phone to show up God knows where looking like God knows whom and there was a fair chance it would be a wild goose chase. Only actual mail meant actual business. And about actual business he was conscientiously professional, never refusing a gig on the superstitious assumption that the first gig he refused would be his last. There were plenty of lookalikes out there clamouring for work. London was choked with other people's doubles. Everyone looked like someone else. Fall out of sight and you'd soon be out of mind. As at the BBC. But he'd have had to refuse today given how he looked. Unless he was asked to turn up to someone's party as Robert De Niro in
Raging Bull
.

Besides, he had things he needed some mental space to think about. Such as why he had been attacked. Not only to what end, if neither his credit cards nor his mobile phone had been used, but why
him
? There was an existential form this question could take: Why me, O Lord? And there was a practical one: Why me rather than somebody else?

Was it because he looked an easy victim? An inadequately put-together man with a modular degree who was sure to offer no resistance? A nobody in particular who just happened to be at the window of J. P. Guivier when the woman - deranged, drunk or drugged - just happened to be passing? A lookalike for a man against whom she had a grievance, whoever she was?

Or did she know him for himself and wreak a vengeance she had long been planning? Was there a woman out there who hated him that much?

Mentally, he went through the list. The disappointees, the wronged (he didn't know how he had wronged them, only that they looked and felt and sounded wronged), the upset, the insulted, the abused (he didn't know how he had abused them etc.), the discontented, the never satisfied or appeased, the unhappy. But then they had all been unhappy. Unhappy when he found them and unhappier when they left. So many unhappy women out there. Such a sea of female misery.

But none of it his doing, for Christ's sake.

Had he ever raised a hand to a woman to explain why a woman should want to raise a hand to him? No. Not ever.

Well, once . . . nearly.

The fly incident
.

They'd been away for a long romantic weekend, he and Joia - Joia whose voice had the quality of organza tearing and whose nervous system was visible through her skin, a tracery of fine blue lines like rivers on an atlas - three fretful days in Paris during which they hadn't been able to find a single place to eat. In Paris! They'd passed and looked into restaurants, of course, on some occasions even taken a seat, but whichever he fancied, she didn't - on nutritional or dietetic or humanitarian or simply feel-wrong grounds - and whichever she did, he didn't, either because he couldn't afford it or the waiter had insulted him or the menu made greater demands of his French than he could bear Joia - Hoia - to witness. For three days they walked the length and breadth of the greatest eating city on earth, squabbling, ashamed and famished, and then when they returned to Treslove's flat in sullen silence they found upwards of ten thousand flies in their death throes -
mouchoirs
, no,
mouches
: how come he remembered that word alone of all the French he knew; what a pity
mouches
had not been on a single menu - a mass suicide of flies in its final stages, flies dying on the bed, on the windows and the windowsills, in the dressing-table drawers, in Joia's shoes even. She had screamed in horror. It was possible he had screamed in horror too. But if he did, he stopped. And Joia, whose organza screams would have harrowed hell, did not. Treslove had seen enough films in which a man slapped a hysterical woman to bring her to her senses to know that that was how you brought a hysterical woman to her senses. But he only made as if to slap her.

The making as if to slap her - the frozen gesture of a slap - was as bad, though, as if he'd slapped her in earnest, and maybe even worse since it signalled intentionality rather than temporary loss of sanity of which hunger was a contributory cause.

He didn't deny, to himself at least, that the sight of all those flies dying like . . . well, like flies -
tombant commes des mouches
- had a no less deranging effect on him than it had on Joia, and that his almost-slap was as much to calm his nerves as hers. But it is expected of a man to know what to do when the unforeseen happens, and his not knowing what to do counted as much against him as the almost-slap.

'Hit the flies if you must hit someone,' Joia cried, her voice quavering as though on a high wire of silk, 'but don't you ever, ever, ever, ever think of hitting me.'

For a moment it occurred to Treslove that there were more evers multiplying in his bedroom than there were flies dying.

He closed his eyes against the pain and when he opened them Joia was gone. He shut the door of his bedroom and went to sleep on his couch. The following day the flies were dead. Not a one twitched. He swept them up and filled the bin with them. No sooner had he finished than Joia's brother came around to collect her things. 'But not the shoes with the flies in,' he told Treslove, as though Treslove was a man who out of malice put flies in women's shoes. 'Those my sister says you can keep to remember her by.'

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?'