The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

Author:Howard Jacobson [Jacobson, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw
Tags: ebook
ISBN: 9781408808870
Publisher: London: Bloomsbury
Published: 2010-08-02T05:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

1

The agreement had been that Treslove would take his sons on holiday and then see.

Heads he'd resume his previous existence, forget all the rubbish, go out looking like Brad Pitt and return home, alone, at a reasonable hour in the evening to his Hampstead flat that wasn't in Hampstead.

Tails he'd move in with Hephzibah.

'I don't want to be making room and then have you changing your mind in a fortnight,' she told him. 'I'm not saying this is for life, God help us both, but if you're going to seriously disrupt me, disrupt me because you want to, not because you're at a loose end.'

He had told her about the mugging, but she did not set much store by it. 'That's what I mean by being at a loose end,' she said. 'You go wandering around with your head in the clouds, get your phone snatched like just about everyone else at sometime or another, and think God's called you. You aren't busy enough. There's been too little going on in your head and, from the sound of it, your heart.'

'Libor's been talking.'

'Nothing to do with Libor. I can see it for myself. I saw it when I first clapped eyes on you. You were waiting for the roof to fall in.'

He went to kiss her. 'And it did,' he said with exaggerated courtliness.

She pushed him away. 'I'm the roof now!'

He thought his heart would break with love for her. She was so Jewish. I'm the roof now! And he'd thought Tyler was the business. Well, when had poor Tyler ever done what Hephzibah had just done with language? I'm the roof now!

That was what it was to be a Jewess. Never mind the moist dark womanly mysteriousness. A Jewess was a woman who made even punctuation funny.

He couldn't work out how she had done it. Was it hyperbole or was it understatement? Was it self-mockery or mockery of him? He decided it was tone. Finklers did tone. As with music, they might not have invented it, but they had mastered its range. They revealed depths in it which the inventors of tone, like the great composers themselves - for neither Verdi nor Puccini was a Finkler, Treslove knew that - could never have dreamed were there. They were interpreters of genius. They showed what could be done with sound.

I'm the roof now! God, she was wonderful!

For his part he'd been ready to jump right in. Then and there. Marry me. I'll do whatever has to be done. I'll study. I'll be circumcised. Just marry me and make Finkler jokes.

She was what he'd been promised. And the fact that she didn't look anything like the woman he thought he'd been promised - the fact that she made fools of all his expectations - only proved that something far more powerful than his inclination was in operation. Far more powerful than his dreaming inclination, even, for she was decidedly not the schoolgirl bending to fasten her shoelace in his dreams. Hephzibah could not have bent that far down.

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