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to be your teacher and I'm old enough to be your father - shame is a private matter. One keeps it to oneself.'
    'Ah, yes, the family argument.'
    'And what's wrong with the family argument?'
    'When a member of your family acts erroneously, Libor, is it not your duty to tell him?'
    'Tell him, yes. Boycott him, no. What man would boycott his own family?'
    And so on until the needs of men who lacked the consolations of female company - another glass of port, another unnecessary visit to the lavatory, an after dinner snooze - reclaimed them.
    Watching from the sidelines, Treslove was enviously baffled by their Finklerishness. Such confidence, such certainty of right, whether or not Libor was correct in thinking that all Finkler wanted was for non-Finklers to approve of him.
    Whatever Sam Finkler wanted, his effect on Julian Treslove was always to put him out of sorts and make him feel excluded from something. And false to a self he wasn't sure he had. It had been the same at school. Finkler made him feel like someone he wasn't. Clownish, somehow. Explain that.
    Treslove was considered good-looking in a way that was hard to describe; he resembled good-looking people. Symmetry was part of it. He had a symmetrical face. And neatness. He had neat features. And he dressed well, in the manner of who was it again? Whereas Finkler - whose father had invited customers to punch him in the belly - had allowed himself to put on weight, often let his own belly hang out of his shirt, spat at the camera, waddled slightly on his big feet when he went on one of those pointless television walks down the street where the laundry van knocked down Roland Barthes or through the field where Hobbes had an allotment, and when he sat down seemed to collapse into his own bulk like a merchant in a spice souk. And yet he, Treslove, felt the clown!
    Did philosophy have something to do with it? Every few years Treslove decided it was time he tried philosophy again. Rather than start at the beginning with Socrates or jump straight into epistemology, he would go out and buy what promised to be a clear introduction to the subject - by someone like Roger Scruton or Bryan Magee, though not, for obvious reasons, by Sam Finkler. These attempts at self-education always worked well at first. The subject wasn't after all difficult. He could follow it easily. But then, at more or less the same moment, he would encounter a concept or a line of reasoning he couldn't follow no matter how many hours he spent trying to decipher it. A phrase such as 'the idea derived from evolution that ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis' for example, not impossibly intricate in itself but somehow resistant to effort, as though it triggered something obdurate and even delinquent in his mind. Or the promise to look at an argument from three points of view, each of which had five salient features, the first of which had four distinguishable aspects. It was like discovering that a supposedly sane person with whom one had been enjoying a perfect normal conversation was in fact quite mad. Or, if not mad, sadistic.
    Did Finkler ever encounter the same resistance? Treslove asked him once. No, was the answer. To Finkler it all made perfect sense. And the people who read him found that he too made perfect sense. How else was one to account for there being so many of them?
    It was only when he waved goodbye that it occurred to Treslove that his old friend wanted company. Libor was right - Finkler was seeking love. A man without a wife can be lonely in a big black Mercedes, no matter how many readers he has.

    Treslove looked up at the moon and let his head spin. He loved these warm high evenings, solitary and excluded. He took hold of the bars as though he meant to tear the gates down, but he did nothing violent, just listened to the park breathe. Anyone watching might have taken him for an inmate of an institution, a prisoner or a madman, desperate to get out. But there was another interpretation of