Madame Sousatzka (2 page)

The audience were waiting, but Marcus felt he couldn't begin without her sanction. He looked towards her for some sign. Again she gave an almost imperceptible nod and Marcus started to play. He had chosen a Chopin waltz, mainly because it was popular and one of his mother's favourites. He found no technical difficulties with the piece, and after a while he felt he was playing automatically as if he were manipulating a pianola. He felt the woman's stare on him. He wondered whether the eyebrows were raised under the mat of hair, whether she was smiling, or nodding perhaps. He was sorely tempted to look at her. He stole a
glance at the platform, at the row of teachers. None of them were looking at him. All were staring fixedly at the back of the hall. He felt he was being done out of something and he wanted to get the piece over with. He began to hate the woman because she was stealing his limelight. He was surprised to hear that he was approaching the final phrase. The audience had begun to clap after the first of the final three chords. He wondered whether she was clapping too. He decided when he stood up to bow, that he wouldn't look at her, but he found her staring at him all the same. She wasn't clapping. She stood there immobile at the back of the hall. Marcus turned round to acknowledge the applause bursting from the platform. He turned about quickly and just caught her in the act of clapping while his back was turned. She dropped her hands to her sides guiltily and stared back at him.

Most of the audience were getting up and filtering across to the long table at the side of the hall where tea was being served. Marcus watched the woman walk down the centre aisle and towards the headmaster, who had come forward to meet her. They exchanged greetings about half-way. The headmaster looked in Marcus's direction and beckoned to him. Mrs Crominski had seen the signal. Anything that concerned Marcus concerned her, and she was at the headmaster's side before Marcus reached him.

‘This is his mother,' the headmaster said, ‘Mrs Crominski, and this,' he stretched out his arm to Marcus, ‘this is the boy you came to hear. Marcus,' he went on, ‘this lady is a great teacher. Madame Sousatzka.'

Mrs Crominski gasped. The name had a definite celebrity flavour. ‘Is wonderful, Marcus,' she said, ‘such a great lady is come to listen to you.'

Marcus resented his mother for reminding him and he silently begged Madame Sousatzka to forgive her. She smiled at her.

‘Mrs Crominski,' she said, ‘your son has much talent.' Her English was broken, Marcus noticed, but not like his mother's. His mother's English was broken all over in body and spirit. With Madame Sousatzka each separate word was a minor fracture. ‘Who is his teacher?'

‘Mr Lawrence,' Mrs Crominski said in a tone of declaration. Madame Sousatzka showed no signs of reaction. ‘L.R.A.M.,' Mrs Crominski added, as if this entitled the man to at least some sign of recognition. Madame Sousatzka was silent. ‘A.R.C.M. Diploma,' Mrs Crominski went on with some desperation. Still Madame Sousatzka waited. Mrs Crominski decided to play her last card. ‘M.A. Oxon,' she said. Mr Lawrence was obviously a man who had changed his horses mid-stream. Had Mrs Crominski known Madame Sousatzka she would have realized that the whole of the alphabet after a man's name would have made no impression on her. ‘I would like the boy for a pupil,' she said simply.

Mrs Crominski's immediate thought was money, or rather, the lack of it. Marcus hoped fervently that she wouldn't mention it. He was ashamed of their poverty when publicly exposed to a rich party, as he presumed Madame Sousatzka to be. But Mrs Crominski felt no such shame. ‘Such money, Madame Sousatzka,' she laughed, ‘we don't have.' The headmaster shrugged his shoulders at the irrelevance. ‘Madame Sousatzka,' he explained to Mrs Crominski, ‘is an old friend of mine. I have known her since she arrived in this country many years ago. Madame Sousatzka does not take anybody as a pupil. Money is quite secondary with her.'

Such a nice Jewish woman, Mrs Crominski thought, and aloud to her, ‘My son will pay you back, Madame Sousatzka, a thousand times he will pay you back. Such a profit you will have from him. You will not regret, I tell you.' Mrs Crominski had a talent for looking a gift-horse in the mouth.

Madame Sousatzka opened her bag. It hung like an extra bracelet from her wrist. She didn't remove it from her hand. She unclasped the hook and it fell open. She fumbled blindly through and drew out a white card. When she withdrew her hand, Marcus stared at the open bag. The chaos inside astonished him. It in no way corresponded to her immaculate appearance. He could distinguish by colours at least four crumpled handkerchiefs. A broken comb was caught in a metal compact, spillings of pink powder lay
on everything. An open pen had left ink smudges around the lining and some stray hair pins were caught on the inside pocket. Marcus thought of the chaos inside his mother's bag, chaos compounded of the same ingredients, dirty handkerchiefs, papers, pins and bus tickets. Had his mother's bag been open and displayed in public, he would have bolted with shame. But somehow with Madame Sousatzka, it was right and proper. He began to feel very proud of her.

‘On Friday at three o'clock,' he heard her say. ‘Here on the card is the address.'

‘Yes,' said the headmaster to Mrs Crominski in anticipation of her request. ‘Marcus can leave school at one o'clock.' He rubbed his hands together and ushered them over to the table for tea. Mrs Crominski beamed at the people around her, all staring at their little group with wonder and admiration. She put her arm round Marcus's shoulder and guided him towards the table. ‘Not here, Momma, please,' he begged. She dropped her arm slowly and Marcus felt the hurt in her. She walked on in front of him and Marcus looked at her hat and thought it was the brownest brown he had ever seen.

That night after supper, Mrs Crominski wanted to talk about Madame Sousatzka. But Marcus only wanted to think about her.

‘Such a fine woman,' Mrs Crominski said, ‘and only the best she takes, I'm told. You should be grateful. And for nothing she takes him too.'

‘Why did you have to talk about money, Momma?'

‘A lie I should tell? Don't you worry. With the piano you will make plenty of money. You will pay back. A hundred times you will pay back.'

‘Isn't she pretty, Momma?' Marcus was talking almost to himself.

‘Pretty I wouldn't say. Striking, perhaps. Very funny English she speaks. Not like us. A refugee she is of course. And they can be all their lives in England, they never speak like real English people. Yes,' she mused, ‘she's very, very foreign.'

‘Let's see her card Momma,' said Marcus, reaching for her bag. Mrs Crominski took the bag from him. ‘What's so special about a card?' she muttered, undoing the clasp. She spread the fold of the bag on the table. A brown picture of Marcus's dead father was clipped under the inside mirror. ‘He should know,' Mrs Crominski said sadly. ‘But he knows. Always, he said, you shouldn't worry, Sadie. When Marcus is big boy he'll take care of you.' Marcus was always being reminded of his father's promise on his behalf. He hardly remembered his father, who had died when Marcus was only three, but Mrs Crominski always kept him by her. ‘Your father would be proud of you,' she often said, or, ‘Thank God your father can't see you, God bless him, so ashamed he would be.'

‘What's so special about a card?' she mumbled, fumbling among the handkerchiefs and papers. She drew it out, already crumpled and stained.

‘Madame Sousatzka,'
she read, ‘
132 Vauxhall Mansions, W.2
. A long way from Stamford Hill it is,' she said, ‘near Hyde Park. Very smart.'

‘Let me have it, Momma,' Marcus said, stretching out his hand.

‘You'll lose it. Only last week, didn't you lose the housekey?'

‘I'll keep it in my room, I promise.'

‘Have it,' she said, slightly disturbed by his enthusiasm, ‘Too much you shouldn't expect. Madame Sousatzka is a fine lady, a fine refugee lady, but only a human being she is.'

Marcus was staring at the card, transfixed.

‘Like me, Marcus, she is, a human being. D'you hear?' she said, though she knew he wasn't listening to her. ‘Nothing special she is. Give me the card. I'll keep it.' She snatched it from him. ‘Go to bed now. Is late.'

Marcus left the table and went out of the room. She waited for him to reach the stairs before she shouted, ‘You forgot something, Marcus?'

‘No, Momma,' he shouted back. He'd remembered to kiss her good-night, but he'd deliberately not done so.

‘Too busy thinking about Madame Sousatzka, I suppose,'
she shouted back.

He went to his room and blew a kiss down the stairs. This was as far as he was prepared to go. He took off his counterpane and turned his pillow over. He lay in bed thinking of the card. 132 Vauxhall Mansions. He imagined a vast castle on the outskirts of the park. And inside was the mistress of the castle, Madame Sousatzka. The walls were hung with tapestries and chandeliers shivered from the ceilings. Marcus sat in a bird-cage on the piano and Madame Sousatzka was stroking his hair through the bars. At first gently, the skin of her palm caressing his forehead. And gradually her hands grew hard and she pressed them deeper and deeper into his scalp. She was hurting him, but he didn't want her to stop. He was consumed with a curiosity as to how it would all end. And suddenly the bird-cage melted around him like a ring of birthday candles, and he woke, sweating, with the strange and terrifying feeling that he had discovered what no one else in the world at any time had ever known.

He heard his mother coming up the stairs. Quickly, he turned his pillow over and pretended to be asleep. He felt his mother bending over him, stroking his hair, her rough lips on his forehead. ‘Tomorrow,' he thought, ‘tomorrow, I'll make it up to her.'

The week passed as slowly for Madame Sousatzka as it did for Marcus. When Friday came, she sat restlessly in her studio thinking of Boris. Normally at this time on a Friday, Boris would be coming for his lesson. But this was the sixth Friday that he wouldn't come. She decided she would give his hour to Marcus. Boris's music still lay in a neat pile on the piano, a few studies, scales and an album of melodies from the ‘classics'. He had had inexorably bad taste, had Boris, but among other faults, she had allowed for that one, too. And even if she thought exclusively of his shortcomings, the pain of his rejection would not leave her. Twelve weeks ago today, he had come to her for the first time. He begged her to take him as a pupil. Madame Sousatzka only took children, but in Boris's case she decided to make an exception. He was a good deal older than she was, and he'd told her he'd played the piano practically all his life.

But practice does not always make perfect, and during his first formal audition, Madame Sousatzka recognized his musical shortcomings, but she was attracted to him, and she kept him on as a pupil, for what he lacked in piano technique he compensated for in other ways. His lessons were on a Tuesday until he decided he needed more of them, so he came twice a week, on a Friday as well. Madame Sousatzka lived for these two lessons.

It was the first and last time in her life that music became of secondary importance. He was her first love, and striking her as it did when she had already reached the age of forty-five, she had a nest-egg of passion to invest in him. He would woo her over the piano, crossly shutting the lid if the keys hampered his gestures of affection. He would tell her stories of the old country and of his mother he had tearfully left behind. At this point, Madame Sousatzka would warm to him in sympathy. It never failed, the old mother bit.
Boris had used it a hundred times before. He told her vivid stories of his childhood that he'd read somewhere or other in a book. He proposed marriage, a castle in the old country, servants, droshky rides. And as an acccompaniment to his proposals, he would play the ‘Volga Boatman', a piano piece that at the time was popular in pubs and an infallible encore at amateur recitals. He could really shoot a line, could Boris. Then he suggested a week-end in the country, and when Madame Sousatzka promised many such week-ends after their marriage, he raised one bushy eyebrow and decided he was barking up the wrong tree. Then suddenly, on a Tuesday, he didn't turn up for his lesson. Nor on the Friday. Madame Sousatzka waited patiently each week, until she could no longer remember what he looked like, and all that remained was his voice that echoed from the strings of the grand piano whenever she thought of him. Which was continually.

She took away his pile of music, leaving a dust-framed square on the piano, and buried it on the bottom shelf of the music cupboard. She was excited at the thought of Marcus's coming, but the fact that his mother would come with him disturbed her a little. She had known over-ambitious mothers like Mrs Crominski. Her own mother had been the same, shamelessly pushing her daughter into the public eye. For Madame Sousatzka had not always been a teacher.

As a young girl in Germany she'd enjoyed a career as a concert pianist, well known in her own country and considered to be of great promise. But the war put an end to all that, and when she came to England as a refugee just before the outbreak, she had to shelve her career in order to make a practical living. She was twenty and alone. Her parents, along with millions of others, had sat with their backs to the engine in the one-way trains that tip-toed across Europe.

With the help of numerous committees, she managed to find a room in a boarding house run by one of her compatriots who had seen the red light a few years previously. She had begun by giving lessons to children, going to their houses, traipsing along unknown streets from recommendation to recommendation. On the side, she helped out in shops and cafes, and after a few years was
able to buy a piano. Meanwhile, she picked up her English, not from any recognized authority, but from other refugees of longer standing. Her voice was laced with a mixture of several European accents, culled from certain and varied relationships of her English apprenticeship, and mixed unsubtly and disproportionately together like a bad salad dressing. The ingredient of German was a foundation to which was added an element of French. This she had acquired from her own piano-teacher in Germany, a Monsieur Laramie, himself not genuine, so by the time it had reached Madame Sousatzka, the Gallic influence was distinctly mongrel. A soupçon of Yiddish she had borrowed from a Mr Bronstein, who ran a delicatessen shop round the corner from the boarding house, and for whom she worked between teaching.